Overwhelmed by PINK

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Hannah

Pink is the color of spring in DC.

I suppose that pink is a common spring color, but I have never been as overwhelmed by its presence as I have this year in DC.

Obviously, everyone thinks of the pink cherry blossom trees, but as I have whined about several times, they came early and died quickly. When I got back from spring break, this was what was left: 

But I have a secret: other than in concentrated areas (like the Tidal Basin) where they draw strength in numbers, I am not that impressed by the cherry blossoms. They are pinkish, but not as brilliant as the crab apple trees that overwhelm you with their bright pink bushy flowers, looking like natural cotton candy. Or the japenese magnolias that boast stately pink leaves that lose there smell quickly, as if in punishment, if you have the audacity to pluck them from a tree.

Or these trees, the redbud tree (I think – gardener, I am not.), who are so impatient to fill the world with color that they sprout flowers the entire length of their trunks, not just at the end of their branches.

The magazine Real Simple recently had a great article about tree loving of this type. Colette (a French author whom I love) once wrote to her mother asking that she come visit, but her mother declined, explaining that her favorite tree was in bloom. Rather than being annoyed, Colette later explained that she was proud to be the daughter of the woman that wrote that letter. Looking at trees like these makes me understand both Colette and her mother. 

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The Great Apartment Search

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Hannah

“We could always grab a tent and take up with the occupiers in McPhereson Square.”

This is what I tell James when we get really discouraged about finding an apartment, THE apartment, our first apartment together. It doesn’t need to be fancy or big, as we don’t really have high expectations or lots of stuff. But it does need to not be too far from a metro, have at least one window, and not smell like rotting socks and smoke. Oh, and it needs to be cheap enough for a Hill staffer and a graduate student.

It turns out that this is asking a lot, and the past couple weeks have been consumed with disappointing leads on Craigslist that turn out to be scams, gorgeous apartments that ended up being thousands more than they were listed online, or super grungy row houses effectively slaughtering my dreams of a cozy newlywed bungalo.

One night James and took a long walk through Capital Hill, ending at the deserted steps of the Capital. We sat, bemoaning the housing situation, and talked about how we could always move out to the suburbs. This plan quickly died. Partially for practical logistic reasons, but mostly because of how much we are both coming to love the city. It was a tough road to this point, especially for me, who instinctively rejects any big city that isn’t Paris.

But little by little, despite its illogical interstate system, perpetual constriction, and obscene taxes, the city has crept into my heart. I love jogging around Lincoln Park, grabbing burgers with James throughout the city, and spending quiet nights in front of the Capital like this one. I love walking through the matrices of row houses, browsing bookstores in Eastern Market, and being reminded of the many things that Americans can be proud of at every turn. In talking about the many reasons why we wouldn’t want to move out of the city yet, I was surprised by how much I am coming to appreciate it.

Pictures on this post are by Rachel.

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Eastern Market

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Hannah

When Rachel was visiting a couple weeks ago, the weekend of the race and shower, we took Sunday evening for a long walk through Eastern Market. (And yes, I am drawing that one weekend of fun into multiple posts. It is nearing the end of the semester, and you don’t really want posts about me writing papers.)

I love Eastern Market. I love the colors, the bustling activity of yuppie people shopping for marked up produce, the venders hawking jewelry and clothing, and the flea market where you can rummage around for old treasures.  Walking through the crowded market you can’t help but feel apart of something colorful, vibrant, alive, old, new. It is that distinctly unique market community.

besties in stripes and shades

leeks and hydrangeas

the indoor market where James likes to look at all the gross fish

the counter where you can buy delicious greasy food

cannoli from the little bakery in the indoor market

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Run, run, as fast as you can

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Hannah

Confession: I am a master manipulater. I blame it on being a middle child and I learned it from my mother (also a middle child) who can have you finishing something you swore you would never do before you even remember beginning. Genius.

Anyway, remember this picture of my beautiful bridesmaids who threw me that great shower?

 Well here is how the three of us looked the next morning at 6:30 am as we trudged across the National Mall to run the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler.

 That’s right, Rachel agreed to fly across the country, bake all day for my shower, then get up insanely early the next to hike around holding a sign that had the simple slogan of “RUN!!!”  I either have the world’s best friends, or the world’s most easily persuaded friends.

The conversation to convince Suze to run the race with me went something like this, which I have pulled off her post about the whole affair:

Hannah: Suze, wanna do the Cherry Blossom Run with me?

Me: Ummm…sure!  I love me a good 5k!

Hannah: Actually it’s 10 miles!  We will run together and it will be so much fun.

Me:  Oh, no thanks.  I don’t run long distances.

Hannah:  You can totally do it!  10 miles isn’t that far!  PLUS, it’s the only way you’ll get to truly enjoy the famous cherry blossoms…the roads will be cleared for us to run below that beautiful pink canopy and you can drink it all in!  Any other time, there are so many tourists that you can’t see past the sea of cameras.  Don’t you want to see the cherry blossoms?

Me: errr…ummm…dang…yeah, I do.  Are you sure I can run 10 miles?

Hannah: Yes!  Of course!  Anyways, you have to enter a lottery to get in the race…a million people enter and only like 20,000 get drawn!  See, our chances aren’t even that high…but we should try!

Me: hmm, yeah, the chances aren’t that high.  Ok, I’ll enter with you!  (hehehe…because obviously we won’t actually get chosen)…

 But then spring came early and all the blossoms were already gone, swirling around our feet like morbid confetti as we ran. (However, this did lead to the great sign someone was holding that said “There are no more blossoms, but you all are AWESOME!”)

James on the other hand only agreed to run it because he was buying time before our engagement. I was at the point where I was dissolving in tears about every other day waiting and pining, so he felt that agreeing to run this race would buy him at least a couple days for the ring to arrive.  I should probably explain that James HATES running, and never ended up doing more than 3 miles in training. I tried explaining that if he would think about something other than how much he hates running while he runs, it might go better. James’ plan was to finish the race at the 5k mark… but someone (me) read the map wrong and James ended up doing 6 miles before just exiting the course and declaring himself done. (He still loves me though, which is a sure sign that I should marry him. )

Thus here is our gang: James, Susannah, Sarah (my marathon running roomie who needed no persuading) and me.

Somehow I got a bib with a fast starting time so Sarah and I switched.

See Rachel cheering? She’s a champ.

You know those “what I think I look like/ what I actually look like” things? Well here is the truth. Though I imagine myself a swift running gazelle, I actually look like a super power walker with goofy facial expressions. 

Our post race pic. In the second one of me and James, he is allowing his actual feelings about running to shine through. And Sarah looks that cute and composed because she had already been done for quite some time.

I am planning on convincing them to run it with me next year. Maybe Suze will forget that all the blossoms were dead…

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2 comments on Easter from those who said it well

Posted on April 8, 2012 by Hannah

“He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. This is the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history has opened.” – C.S. Lewis Miracles

************************

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

-T.S. Eliot from “East-Coker”

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Shower Power and Flower(s) and Flour

Posted on April 6, 2012 by Hannah

During college, I spent many a spring evening stuffing my face with shower food. At small private colleges the adage “ring before spring” does often prove true. And with every giggly bride there are showers. And with every shower, there are plates of impossibly delicious bite sized foods. (Let me tell you, the Ring Before Spring crowd KNOWS how to bake. There are also those games where you have to make wedding dresses out of toilet paper, at which I get super competitive, and yet never win.)

Have I mentioned that I have the best bridesmaids ever? Because I do.  A whole army of them, in fact. Why stop at four bridesmaids when you could have eight?  I like to think of them as a sports team. I might have confessed to James that I secretly wanted us to all play a pre-wedding softball game against each other wearing cool baseball jerseys with nicknames on the back. He reminded me that this little dream game would certainly end with several of our wedding party incapacitated and unable to make it down the aisle. It was also mentioned that the ladies would lose, and I happen to be kind of a sore loser, so I decided not to mar the wedding weekend.

Last weekend Susannah, (my one bridesmaid who lives out here in DC, and the master artist behind our amazing engagement photos!) threw me my very first shower. Rachel (my bridesmaid in Kentucky who is the skills behind every printed aspect of our wedding) flew out to help.  Now remember, these are the two with whom that I threw last year’s May Day party, so I had high expectations.

Which were of course met and surpassed.
That amazing cake you see is the Bakewell tart from Smitten Kitchen. You should probably go and make it NOW.

Special thanks to Susannah’s artsy circle of people for the beautiful details like the amazing custom letterpress invites and menus  from Always Will Design and the lovely flower arrangements from Sweet Root Village (of which you can look at many more pictures here.) And thanks to Liz for these pictures… I was busy stuffing my face with fancy foods.

(I apologize for the excessive use of parentheses in this post. Sometimes life has lots of exciting interruptions.)

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When you love someone, you have to take up the causes they think are important…

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Hannah

… But sometimes it is really easy.

Like this year with Kentucky basketball. I actually had to teach my students the very important verb écraser (to crush) so we could adequately discuss Wildcat domination.

(James, my beloved Hoosier, would like to interject two things: first, Indiana was the only team to really push Kentucky during March Madness, and secondly, Indiana did beat Kentucky on December 10th, the day we got engaged. But I feel Kentucky still came out of that day a winner.)

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Tom and Nicole

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Hannah

Some people are just more fun than others. This is a reality we all must face at one point or another.

Living out in DC means that I get to sometimes see Tom, a friend from college who falls in the “more fun than lots of other people” category. Thus, when he proposed to Nicole (who qualifies as likewise, fantastic) I was so thrilled that they asked me for engagement photos! We spent an afternoon traipsing around Georgetown and here are some of my favorite shots.

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Registering, or, thoughts on materialism

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Hannah

Today our first wedding gift came in the mail and I can barely contain my excitement.

I mean, if you think about, registries really are like magic. You go, aim this little scanner at all the things that you have wanted to buy for yourself for a long time but felt pathetic about it like, and BAM, lots of them start miraculously arriving at your house.

Of course, registering was also really stressful, as James and I felt super guilty about burdening our guests with having to buy us stuff, so we originally registered for almost nothing. The poor Bed, Bath, and Beyond lady kept on trying to convince us that we needed dish towels, sheet sets for our guest bedroom (um hello, have you seen the price of DC apartments? Guest room? Ha!), luggage sets, and all sorts of overpriced silly kitchen stuff. But since I – having loved nesting for a long time – already have lots of random little things, we only put things on there that we really wanted. Over the course of the next couple weeks, I proceeded to take a bunch of stuff off because I decided we really didn’t need it. Then, when my mother pointed out that our guest list might cover more than the 72 items on our registry, I have been slowly adding things back.

But you worry (at least I did), what people will think of you, based on what you asked for. Will they think I am actually a violent psychopath because I asked for lots of knives? Will the judge me for my love of cake stands? Will they think we are pompous because of our taste in china? Will they be concerned that we are opening a beer garden because we registered for 36 beer steins? (Actually, that last one was because we messed up the scanner thing and somehow registered for enough beer glasses to furnish a small German pub. Don’t worry – the situation has been rectified.)

But what I hope people feel is excitement about the home that James and I are establishing, about the hospitality we will extend on those china plates, about the church bake sale cookies we will furnish with that buttercup yellow Kitchenaid mixer, about meals we will prepare for others in those new pots.  Because that is what James and I felt as we added each thing: giddy, about building a home together and filling it with stuff we like to extend hospitality to the people we love.

Ok, I’ll admit – I’m a registry stalker. I periodically call James late at night and scream things like “SOMEONE JUST BOUGHT A HAND TOWEL!!!!!!” and he wonders if I’ve gone insane. But I get excited knowing that someone else is thinking about the event that I think about 24/7. It’s like waiting for your birthday, only better. So when this first gift (the most perfect fat little white pitcher) came today, I was ecstatic. It is from my dear friend Jessie, and having it show up at my door was just a sweet reminder that James and I will be starting out our marriage with an army of people behind us, rooting us on. Not to mention the fact that we will be starting our marriage with a pitcher!

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Accidental Horse People

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Hannah

I honestly doubt that I would ever be able to transition into a job that fell outside of the academic world. To do so would mean forever sacrificing spring break, summer break, Christmas break, and random long weekends, and I am just not sure I could give it up. (Dear Readers with real jobs: You may judge me and think me spoiled with my narrow conception of that disappointing thing you call the real world. But then I invite you to look at your paycheck and remember, “At least I have this. She will never understand what joy a fine salary can bring. Let her have her spring break.”)

I came home for the week to do some wedding planning with the Mother in Chief and soak up some Kentucky. As it has been unseasonably warm this spring, we decided to get the horses out at last.  There are several types of horse people in Kentucky. There are those who were riding before they could walk, those who can rattle off every contender for the Derby as the time gets closer, and those who keep manicured stables and perfect pastures. Then there are those whose horses just kind of hang out in muddy patches behind their trailers but who actually know more about the animals than anyone else. The Stones do not fall into any of those camps. We kind of fell into horses, got a perfect starter one after years of begging, thought they would all be as easy as old Duke (may he rest in peace – cancer took his eye, but he continued on for many more years before just keeling over dead one day because he had lost all his back teeth and couldn’t eat). But we have successively acquired horses who have required extensive work to maintain their training.

Which is to say, we are accidental horse people, the kind who don’t always really know what we are doing, wimp out during the really cold or hot months, but really love those ornery animals.

We road for a while Sunday afternoon, but then just came back, unsaddled all three horses, and flopped in the grass while they grazed. My parents were chattering on about some new training techniques, the need to fill in some gopher holes near the pasture gate, where to find hay this time of year, which type of grasses had to be planted in the second field (Um… yes. Horses refuse to eat certain types of grass. Go figure. My Little Pony didn’t teach us that. ), and I was struck again by one of the things I love every time I come home: my parents kind of wish they were rednecks, the type who spend all day at Tractor and Supply discussing hay crops and driving big pick-ups around back roads.  And laying there in the grass listening to the horses chomp away on a Sunday afternoon, I don’t blame them.

**These pictures are actually from last summer, but it seemed like a lot of work to go find my camera and take new ones. Plus, the boys (The General, Weeds the Brave, and Jethro) look pretty mangy and muddy this time of year and I wish to spare the cyberworld the harsh realities of pseudo-redneck life.  The star of this particular series is Weeds the Brave, the neurotic paso fino beloved only by my mother. He has to take lots of baths because his skin allergies (to heat, bugs, dust, tall grass, mean thoughts, negative atmospheric forces, etc. ) sometimes make his hair fall off. Which makes him look even more ridiculous when he jumps away terrified from birds, fences, humans, rocks, inanimate farm equipment, brightly colored flowers, etc.  Anyone other than my mother would have turned him into a glue stick. She instead treats him and loves him as a challenge of Sisyphus-like proportions.

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