Embarassing! I just realized I haven't blogged in six months.
I have been writing and musing and journaling often instead. Since December, I am trying to nurture some memoir short stories that are trapped in my mind and I hope to take writing classes in the summer or fall to give these stories real
assignments that are
due. I vividly remember when I was 22, 26 and 31, I thought maybe someday in my mid-thirties I'd finally write more. So I'm turning 37 in March, and
yes, it feels
just right now. Finally ready to make it a priority and I hope I can shut off other distractions (facebook and twitter, I'm looking at you).
I get a lot of
how's married life? still at 6 months, and my genuine response is something I don't say out loud that often... wonderful: we are in fact
full of wonder and laughter. I still look around and pinch myself about how much my house and our little "furmaly" complement each other. José and I have a competitive-like habit of making childish jokes to crack each other up. I love hearing the semi-soap opera report of his daily grind with the postdocs at his Harvard microbiology lab. José has a rare gift for being unconditionally kind, and he always reminds me to write more.
With our pups Lucy and Buster tucked under an arm or foot in bed in the mornings, and often needing to layer-up with swishy snow pants and parkas this month, we feel like a sack of rolly polly teddy bears in my cottagey house that I like to call
Waterbell.
Last month we turned my dining room table (above) into a little fort for the dogs to sleep under, so they have a little sense of their own space and place, and they surprised us and have
completely bonded since then. Buster sometimes doesn't even want to come out and join the world - well, understandably.
Since Boston has had one of the
worst winters it can remember and frequent blizzard days of shoveling snow and scraping ice, I have had a good share of crabby moods about walking the dogs or feeling cabin feverish. I constantly wish out loud that we lived in our honeymoon village,
Tofino on Vancouver Island, although I try to tell myself
thou shalt not whine because the truth is, Greater Boston has lucked out to have no problems with power outages, really, and unlike José who relies on the bus and the T daily, my office has thankfully let me work from home for most of February. I don't know how much of a national news story it is but the MBTA subway sytem in Boston has gotten to the point where the daily update is like a multiple choice menu of bad news: Slow, Even Slower, or Slowest.
We try to make the best of the cold season with comfort food dinners and the sweet indulgence of snoozing, reading and watching TV from the velvety dark gray couch, which is magnetlike - hard to get up again, once you're on it. For the dogs, we take a lot of "Oh Boy!"
playtime breaks in the yard or give them
breakfast in a kong. They
really miss having more walks.
This morning my comfort food was granola. I am a super non-Martha Stewart personality but my one Martha gift that I was once granted (in other words, given the recipe from my godmother in Lexington) is homemade granola. I still have trouble balancing the amount of oil and the amount of time in the oven (it goes from brown to burnt so quickly)! But today's batch is pretty excellent.
And there's
nothing I love more any time of day, any time of year (which I must admit Tofino will never have!) than a bowl of yogurt from my neighbor
Sophia's mixed with Trader Joe's creamed honey, a spicy
Chinese, Vietnamese or Indonesian cinnamon, dried or fresh blueberries, and my own granola.
I'll enclose here some photos and my adapted recipe which I know a few friends have already taken to making regularly! The drops of vanilla extract make the house smell so good, too. Yum.
