Posts have been a little sparse over the past couple weeks because life has been a little full, and not exactly of the photo-worthy brunch variety. Back in the day when this blog started, it was meant to be a continuation of the weekly emails I sent in college, emails to friends and family scattered about.  It’s grown a little since then, but I wanted to throw up an old fashioned update post of what we are about lately. So here, in no specific order and lacking any truly exciting details unless you actually know us, are the things filling our lives lately.

James’ March Madness bracket is already ruined. Mine is perfect, as I always interpret the whole bracket thing as “make your team win everything regardless of their season performance.” Luckily, Kentucky makes my method pretty good this year. I just declare they will win it all and ignore everything else. (James reminds me that this isn’t really how brackets work.)

This is the final stretch of my spring break and it has gone way too fast. I had lofty plans for productivity… and they have all tanked. This is a problem.  I have truly worked this break, but I think my goals were a little unrealistic. But hey, I finally got laundry folded and took out the recycling by 4 days in… so that’s a success, right?

Those goals included getting caught up on all the grading I have ignored for the past couple weeks and charging ahead on my PhD comprehensive exam reading. People, this exam is in less than a month. I have a pretty strict study schedule in place, one that proved a little over much this past week and had me sitting in bed reading a nouveau roman (read: no plot) at 1 am one night. To be honest, I’m a little stressed about how the rest of the books on this list are going to read themselves over the next couple weeks. Studying structures all of the days where I don’t go to campus, and while I actually love the studying schedule of endless cups of tea in my dayjamas, it’s crunch time.  I’m still teaching this semester, and I also took over last fall as the TA coordinator for our level level courses. Which is basically a fancy way of saying that I send a lot of emails. Power and money, that’s why I chose my profession.  And looming in the back of everything I do is the realization that after these exams, I actually have to start writing a dissertation. As in, that really long paper/book on a subject that still has not revealed itself to me. I’ll just continue ignoring that for another month, thank you very much.

Spring came! Then Winter came back and slapped it around a bit, and now we are in some sort of dirty game of tug-of-war between the two. It’s ugly.

The new job that James started in January has been a schedule adjustment to us both. From him being gone all the time last summer and fall, to home all the time in December, to working a new job with new demands, long hours, and a much longer commute, it has taken us both a little while to find our footing. But finding it we are.

Post-Whole30 we have alternated from healthy meals of wonder during the week… and gluttonous weekends of revelry. Last weekend with the wedding? Well, I’m pretty sure that Lima-a-Rita’s don’t make the cut on any healthy eating list.  But I have been having a lot of fun recipe testing for Caroline’s all-american paleo cookbook!

Now that I’m looking at this list of snippets from real life, I’m reminded that they really aren’t exciting. It’s a whole lot o’ regular life round here, with its endless to-do lists, little obligations, and daily joys.  But when I think about the people who I wish I still kept in touch with — friends from college, from high-school, from jaunts around this world — I realize it’s those regular life bits I want to know. I know the big things, like when they have babies or get married, but I want to know the little details. What fills their days. What they are eating. What they are worried about. What’s making them laugh. These are the deeply unimpressive and highly important things that make up our lives.

Happy weekend all. Make it a good one.