Just Reston and Relaxin'...and looking ahead to '08

So far today we've been taking it easy. Matt is rediscovering beloved video games from the past via versions for Mac, and I've been tooling around with the blog(s) and various other Internet pursuits. Thanks to everybody who has voted so far regarding where to host the blog, although at this point it's a draw--so if you haven't voted yet, please do!

We've also partaken in some of our favorite pioneer-style farm chores, like making soup stock and boiling rags.

Otherwise, we're taking our time off as a chance to reflect on our priorities for the upcoming year. 2007 has been a year of immense change for us (getting married, traveling, moving twice, finishing a master's, starting law school, leaving law school, starting a total of three new jobs between the two of us), and one which has definitely brought us closer together. On the whole, we could not be happier with our lives and feel so incredibly blessed to have each other, as well as two loving families standing behind us. In that vein, a lot of what we hope for in the next year is a continuation of things we've already started. Here's the list I've compiled so far of goals for 2008:

Do 30 minutes of activity every day, and closer to 60 on the weekends. As you may know, we've already started working on this one. We were hoping to go an entire year without missing a day, starting a few weeks ago, but we did miss two days while we were out of town. So we're hoping to start fresh for the new year, and make it straight through. We find this works better than a goal like "exercise 4-5 times a week," because it's just too easy to fall into the habit of thinking that today will be the day off and we'll exercise the other 4-5 days a week. This makes it simpler: if we haven't exercised yet today, then we still need to do it.

Use the car as little as we can. This is one of the main benefits of having moved to a smaller town, and we'd like to maximize it as much as we can. It's better for us, better for our budget, and better for the environment to walk and use public transportation as much as we can. We already try to accomplish an errand or two (pick up a prescription, rent a movie) on our daily walks, and each walk to work as much as we can, so we'd like to keep this up and make it even more of a habit.

Go back to cash envelopes for the Groceries and Entertainment categories of expenditure. We did this while we were saving up to pay for our wedding and it worked remarkably well. One sticky spot in doing it here is that we still don't have a local bank from which to make fee-free ATM withdrawals--we've been so happy with US Bank (and having our sister-in-law as a personal go-to banking reference) that we've been hesitant to change. Bank of America has tons of branches and ATMs and even offers a $100 bonus for signing up, but we've heard terrible things about their customer service and about the borderline-fraudulent ways that they will strategically process withdrawals and deposits in order to hit you hard with overdraft charges. Because of that, we're considering an ING Electric Orange account, which is attractive because it's an interest-earning checking account with free online banking. (We'd also get a $25 bonus thanks to a referral from my brother.) On the other hand, they don't have physical branches or actual physical checks, which seems like it might be troublesome, say, when we're asked to provide a voided check for direct deposit at work. One of our sub-goals is to figure all of this out.

Pay off both car loans by August. The astute among you will recognize that that is loans plural when we only have one car. That's one fact that makes it compelling to get these paid off, but they are also our two smallest loans (ala the debt snowball), they coincidentally have the highest interest, and paying them off by August will drop our monthly debt payments by $300--just in time for me to go back to school, hopefully.

Learn more about investing. While Matt is passionate about the arts and I about women's health and birth, we'd be lying if we said that we didn't dread it when one of our fabulously low-key weekends winds to a close and we have to go back to work. To that end, we'd love to get to the point where we had more options regarding how and when and how much to work, especially once kids enter the picture. Opening up new income streams via investing would be a potential way to meet this goal. Since most of our income this year (and the next several) will be devoted to paying off debt, it makes it a convenient and risk-free time to learn all I can about investing so that when we are in a position to do it, we'll have a solid understanding of how it works.

Continue to make an effort to eat high-quality unprocessed foods. This kind of speaks for itself. It also speaks to our goals on health and money, as well as sparks our creativity in the kitchen (homemade Thin Mints, anybody?).

Continue to make our relationship not just a priority, but the priority. I firmly believe that this is a key to any high-functioning household, whether or not there are kids involved. I remember being relatively young and hearing my dad say "I love my kids and I'd lay down my life for them, but when they grow up and move on, you'll be glad you invested time in your relationship with your spouse." Or something to that effect. I feel like knowing my parents made each other this kind of priority helped me grow up with a sense of security in something bigger than myself, and I hope our kids grow up the same way. Even right now, the other goals we make are pretty pointless if we're not working toward them together. Because of that, we've made communication and teamwork central to the way we run our lives. While it's tempting to pound out crazy overtime and pay off our debts even faster, I believe that it's ultimately more valuable to tackle it steadily while making sure there's time for us to enjoy each other. Obviously there are times in life when this isn't an option, but hopefully those periods are brief and finite. Our goal in paying off debts and saving money is to have more time to enjoy the things in life that matter to us, not less--so we try not to be penny-wise and pound-foolish with our time.

Home Again, Home Again...

I think ours was the only flight to take off on time out of the Milwaukee Airport yesterday, but it did. The two hours passed relatively quickly for us since we were continuing the Alien marathon we'd started earlier in the week, and almost before we knew it we were touching down in Baltimore (where it was, in fact, raining, quite heavily). We got back home a little after 1am and after a stop at Taco Bell (we really should eat tacos in bed more often!) turned into bed around 2:30.

Today, we went to Costco and Aldi, where we stocked up for the month. Then we came home and made lentil soup. Now we're planning to watch Alien vs. Predator and then go for our walk.

All in all, we had a wonderful time away, and now it's great to be home.

I'm currently toying with the idea of switching MattnKatie from Blogger to Wordpress. After spending almost a week trying to tweak our current layout, I'm coming to the conclusion that Blogger is, well, kind of clunky and frustrating--surprising for a Google product. Wordpress seems like it might be a little cleaner and a little more user-friendly. We have a test-drive up and running. What do YOU think? Weigh in at left!

White Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everybody!

We've really enjoyed the past few days in Iowa, seeing people and hanging out with the family and eating lots, and we've even kept up with our daily walks--several of which have been in 8+ inches of snow, much to Matt's delight. And today we head up to Wisconsin, so it's the one day this year where we'll get to see both our families!

As you may have noticed, I've also been calling on my brother's expertise to help me make some visual tweaks to the blog, though they aren't finished yet. Feel free to let me know what you think!

Up, Up, and Away

Compared to everything else going on in the world, we just haven't had much to report this week. Except that we're getting very excited to head back to Iowa and Wisconsin on Saturday! We both have a short day of work tomorrow, after which we'll drive to Baltimore (flight reservations we made when we lived about an hour closer!) and stay the night so we can get up and make the early flight into Milwaukee.

Book Review: Pushed by Jennifer Block.

Today I finished reading Pushed by Jennifer Block. It's one of the most informative, well-written, and disturbing books I've read in a long time. However, I also found it really inspiring. It's made me wonder whether a lifetime of defying authority hasn't been intensive preparation for someday becoming a midwife, where bucking the norm seems likely to become...well...the new norm.

Here are some of what I thought were the more interesting points in the book:

The lack of choice in a "patient-choice" C-section. Block (and others, including obstetricians, she interviews for the book) poses the question of whether doctors' sanctioning elective C-sections is less about honoring an actual demand from the patients (despite the visibility of cases like Britney and Posh spice, "regular" pregnant women aren't lining up for surgery left and right) than about giving physicians the opportunity to perform them at their own convenience--"without a second opinion, or rarely even a second thought." More on this topic.

If it is a choice, is it the lesser of two evils? What does that say about maternity care in America? Block points out the irony in the fact that if obstetricians are willing to on the record as saying that elective C-sections are safer than vaginal birth (which, in her book, many are and in fact do), what they are really saying is that laboring in this country is more dangerous than major abdominal surgery. She also says that if giving birth means being induced, strapped into bed, exposed to a host of unnecessary interventions, and ultimately winding up with a semi-emergent C-section anyway--which, with a nationwide rate of over 30% (an increase of 46% in the past 10 years), is a pretty good chance for anybody giving birth in the hospital--could we blame women if they were clamoring to literally just "cut to the chase"?

The selective use and abuse of statistics. The rising C-section rate is often (probably correctly) blamed largely on on the growing litigiousness of our society. The risks of stillbirth if a baby goes past its due date, of uterine rupture during a vaginal birth after a previous Cesarean (VBAC), and hypoxic brain damage if a baby's heart rate drops during labor have all been emphasized in support of why it's "safer" just to do a C-section. Issues like the increased risk of maternal death (four times more likely in an uncomplicated elective C-section than it is in a vaginal birth) and massively dangerous complications like stillbirth, placenta previa, and placenta accreta in subsequent pregnancies, have meanwhile not been publicized. Jeffrey King, the head of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' maternal mortality special-interest group, says in the book that "More cesareans lead to more repeat cesareans, and repeat cesareans are associated with higher risk of hemorrhagic complications, including placenta accreta leading to hysterectomy. It's almost like a runaway train. In the long run, this will lead to more maternal deaths."

The nationwide war on VBAC. One thing I took for granted working at UIHC was that when we finished up a C-section, the doctor would typically give the woman some variation on the following: "Your scar is the kind that's low and horizontal, so if you want to try a vaginal delivery next time, there's no reason that it shouldn't work out." Apparently this is not the case in much of the country, where the "reason it wouldn't work out" could include doctors who abandon care of patients who want to VBAC or judges who court-order Cesareans against a patient's will. Pushed includes incredible (and not in a good way) stories like that of Laura Pemberton, who labored at home until she was 9 centimeters dilated but got to the hospital and was forced against her will to undergo a court-ordered C-section. "The judge said that my unborn baby was in the control of the state and that it was the state's responsibility to bring that baby into this world safely...[he] pointed his finger at me: 'We are going to do the C-section, and we are going to do it tonight.'" Her case is the most extreme, but there are other, similar cases as well. She also talks about smaller indignities, such as doctors who don't get consent to break someone's water or strip their membranes--acts I've witnessed (and tried to rectify) already.

Pain in labor may itself serve a physiological function. Controversial, perhaps, but worth thinking about: Block talks to various professionals about the interesting idea that pain in labor is akin to that of getting a blister on your heel--it keeps you moving around to try to alleviate it. "It is not a side effect, rather it is a central component of normal birth--not something from which mothers should be distracted. Pain communicates, and sometimes it tells us important information." Without the discomfort, a woman tends to lack the natural, restless, perpetual motion which helps settle the baby into an advantageous position for its journey down the birth canal. I'm in no position to comment here because I haven't been through labor, and so I don't want to be seen as singing the praises of pain I know to be indescribable, but I will say I've seen a huge number of malpositioned (and subsequently C-sectioned) babies in women with epidurals--especially early epidurals.

Like the old folks say: Babies come when they're ready. To breathe. According to this Danish study, "It is plausible that hormonal and physiological changes associated with labour are necessary for lung maturation in neonates and that these changes may not occur in infants delivered by elective Caesarean sections." It's thought that possibly the baby's lung maturity somehow signals the mother's body to go into labor, and that labor itself then stimulates further development. So if you schedule a C-section (as opposed to one that happens after even a "failed" labor), your baby misses out on both.

Finally, synthetic oxytocin: you can't beat the real thing. I've often wondered why, with every women's magazine trumpeting the effects of oxytocin, the "love hormone," released when you breastfeed or make love or even share a meal together, women being induced into labor aren't on an endless, feel-good lovefest. (Far from it.) As it turns out, synthetic oxytocin (Pitocin) affects the uterus (causing contractions) when it's introduced into the bloodstream, but it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier--so it can't affect mood the way the brain's own oxytocin does. Furthermore, it signals the brain to shut down its own production of oxytocin, depriving it of the effects of the massive doses that a woman's brain would normally be flooded with during and after birth to facilitate bonding and breastfeeding.

So. Much of this is controversial, but a great deal of it also seems statistically sound. All of it is food for thought. This isn't to say that women can't have normal or happy birth experiences today, but it does seem to point to the fact that doing so in the hospital is getting more and more difficult. I'm also not saying that I completely shun the technology that has saved the lives of so many mothers and babies and which people delivering babies in third-world countries would give anything for.

I am saying that I think it can be and has been misapplied to the point that we're often doing more harm than good.

Sunday Soup

Yesterday we spent much of the day "feathering our nest," as my mom would call it. Hanging up pictures and other things that had been put on the back burner while I finished finals and Matt was busy at work. We also watched Knocked Up (verdict: not nearly as funny as Superbad, though very realistic in how many doctors react to a patient who wants to be an active participant in her own labor) and I improvised some lentil soup:

What's-in-the-Fridge Lentil Soup

1 T butter
3-5 stalks of celery, chopped
3 medium carrots, chopped
1-1/2 T sage, fresh or dried
2 tsp thyme
5 cups water
1 T salt
1 can (14.5oz?) diced tomatoes
1 cup brown lentils
1-2 T balsamic vinegar

1. Saute celery in butter until soft. Add sage and thyme.
2. Add water, carrots, tomatoes, salt, and lentils. Simmer until lentils are soft, about 30 min.
3. Blend the soup in batches until desired consistency.
4. Add vinegar (and salt/pepper if desired) to taste.

Serve with parmesan cheese and crunched-up crackers.

Today was my first day of orientation at my new job. It was just basic hospital-wide orientation, lots of speakers to listen to and videos to watch, but so far, so good.

(Thin) Mint Condition

Half in the bag on mulled wine, we decided to make our own Thin Mints. A few notes on the recipe: as noted in multiple comments on the original site, the recipe as given seems to turn out very dry. (Admission: I used regular butter, powdered sugar, cocoa, and peppermint, mostly bulk from Aldi's, and I can't say I think it would make a difference to go the pricey/organic route on these.) Making half a batch as I was, I cut the flour from 3/4 of a cup to 1/2. (Making a full batch, 1 cup would probably be plenty.) Second, the cocoa flavor does wind up being a tad strong, so I made it a spare 1/2 cup of cocoa and a generous 1/2 cup of powdered sugar. I also ended up baking the cookies closer to 12 minutes and they were still just a little soft. As the author does, I improvised a double-boiler for melting the chocolate, using a nonstick pan on top of a simmering pot of water.

Ah, the chocolate: one of our favorite finds at Trader Joe's today was the broken hunks of Ghiradelli chocolate--about a half-pound hunk of pure semisweet for just over a buck. We got one for eating and two for cooking, so one of those was what we melted for dipping. We didn't have any trouble with the texture, so no need to add cream or oil as some others apparently did. The peppermint, I would recommend titrating by taste.

We also don't have cookie cutters, so we cut them out with shotglasses per yet another suggestion. It worked like a charm. Absolutely the perfect size!

Here are the chocolate cookies just out of the oven:
The melting chocolate:
And the finished product:
Start to finish, just under an hour. They were fun and really quite easy; aside from making the dough in the KitchenAid, which I wouldn't have had to, no special equipment required whatsoever. Also, besides the peppermint extract, which I think most people have on hand anyway, it was pretty much all stuff that we already had in the kitchen.

I highly recommend!

Mulling it over

Today marks one week since Matt and I committed to getting at least 30 minutes of physical exercise a day. Mostly that's consisted of brisk walking in and around Reston, which we've really enjoyed. This morning we chose, perhaps counterproductively, to combine it with a breakfast date. I got mushroom and cheese crepes and Matt got eggs, a croissant, and bacon. Bellies full, we then walked back home and proceeded to run a couple of errands by car--hitting both the Arlington and Reston libraries, cleaning out my locker at work (hurray), and also hitting up Trader Joe's for the first time. Let us just say we are big fans of that experience! We picked up some frozen fruit, bread, cheese, hot chocolate, and a couple of other things for around $30--not quite Aldi's, but cheaper than some of the other grocery stores around and almost everything was some kind of funky organic house brand. Right up our alley!

Our favorite thing by far was a couple of bottles of Gluhwein, or German mulled wine, which we'd been introduced to at the Krista Detor house concert. If anything ever tasted like happy holidays come home to roost, this is it--delicious, warming, and spicy. We heated some up on the stove right away and are planning to spend the rest of the day getting cozy with that and our new library books. This is the way to spend a winter weekend!

The Name Game

First of all, anybody who says this isn't the catchiest thing you HAVE EVER seen is lying!


Second of all, it being Christmas card season, I just wanted to say thank you to everybody who has taken the time to address a card to the two of us using the names we've chosen. I know it's not the usual way of doing things and (believe me!) I know it's a lot of letters, and to be honest, this is an issue that confuses even us at times. But it really means more than you know. So--thank you.

When the Dog Bites...Or, These Are a Few of My Favorite Links

OK, so the dog didn't actually bite, he just lunged menacingly. But regardless, this is the sight we woke up to this morning--accompanied by the sound of our frantic cats skating across everything on our desk to get down from the windowsill where this character was nosing around. I have no idea what possessed his owner, because he was on a leash, a retractable one at that, and she continued to let him lunge and bark at the window instead of directing him elsewhere where there weren't terrified cats and half-dressed people peering back out at her. We figured once she saw us, she would get the message and take her dog inside or elsewhere--but not. At one point, she backed up from the window, but continued to stand there and stare at us, like some kind of challenge. To what? It was the weirdest thing and it made me so mad! The cats have been going around with flattened ears and spiky tails ever since. If you can't feel safe sitting in your own window, where can you?!

That said, since there's not much of interest going on with us, here are some sites I've found helpful or interesting lately:

Lifehacker is where I learned about Retailmenot, a Firefox extension which automatically--yet unobtrusively!--notifies you of any coupon codes available (for free shipping, a percentage off, or what have you) at any retail sites you visit. I used to have to scour Google for them and this saves a lot of time! Just yesterday we saved $12.95 on shipping from Fannie May, and they have codes for just about anywhere else you can imagine too. I would say it's paid for itself already, but it was free!

Babycatcher is the blog of a 29-year-old nurse-midwife who currently practices in Malawi. Talk about an eye-opening look about a totally different set of problems than those currently facing maternity care in the United States. While she fights for access to basic technology, we're fighting to curtail the invasion of what is arguably too much. (I read on another birth blog the other day that natural, drug-free "physiological" childbirth is set to become the next "fight for women's right to choose"--it's become that controversial of an issue.) In both cases, caught in the crush and losing big-time are mothers, babies, and healthcare workers. Cue midwives.

Morning Coffee isn't really a site, it's another Firefox extension that lets you open any number of preselected sites with the click of a button. You can choose to add sites on a daily, weekly, or
other basis which is great if you have a number of blogs or news sites you read on a daily basis. I really love it because it's super convenient, and it also has the added functionality that when I've finished everything in my Morning Coffee, I know that then I should really get to work. (Whether I actually should have gotten to work about an hour earlier is not up for debate!) It helps limit (though does not eliminate) the "one thing leads to another" aspect of websurfing that has a tendency to get away from me.

Smitten Kitchen is a site with amazing recipes and gorgeous pictures. I believe they use the same Canon Rebel camera that is high on both my and my brother's wish lists.

101 Cookbooks is written by a blogger who has written her own cookbook and is also cooking her way through a sizable number (guess how many?) of others--which explains the high caliber of her culinary abilities. She uses a similar Canon, if not the same model, as Smitten Kitchen and achieves similarly mouth-watering results. The cookies that are up right now use her recipe for Organic Homemade Thin Mints which I am planning to make at my VERY earliest convenience.

SmartWomanRx actually has nothing to do with motorcycles, despite the sassy animation at startup. It's a site when you can buy mail-order generic birth control pills (OK, yes, I admit that sounds scary, but they're really quite legit) for as low as $13 a pack. They've been around for awhile, but until about a year ago there were usually other low-cost options available. Myself, I'm sitting at a $20/month copay on an already-generic drug, which makes me cringe when I think back to my days at the University of Iowa and their free generic drugs (Zolpidem/Ambien, anybody? At our house, we sleep better than anybody on the block and we do it for free! ...For a little while longer, anyway). While a savings of $7/month doesn't sound like a ton, it's something; and if somebody offered me a $7 coupon every month for the next five years or so, I would take it. Combined with the convenience of mail-order, it sounds like a winner to me. (Lest you worry about forgetting to order on time, you can have them overnighted for $19. While this does somewhat negate your savings, depending on what you pay now, standard shipping is free!). I also love the idea of supporting something innovative like this rather than just bending over for the pharmaceutical companies.

VistaPrint: not only do coupon codes abound for freebies like business cards, T-shirts, hats, and the like, but they are the first place I've found where I can easily fit both of our hyphenated names classily on on the top line of an address label. We paid about $4 for 240 of them, they arrived in about three days, and while what looked yellow on the screen is perhaps more of a lime-ish shade in real life, nothing compares to the thrill of seeing all 19 characters of our surname spelled out in all of its lengthy glory. In related news, you can visit the New York Times' Interactive List to see whether your last name is in the top 5,000 in the country. Neither of our family names made it, and the combination obviously didn't--but my sister-in-law's maiden name did, as did my mother-in-law's. Welcome to the road less traveled, ladies :)

So there you have it...a pretty good synopsis of what I learned in law school!

Flattered!

Who knew! Two comments within just a few minutes! I'm touched!

However...will the fellow Nickel Creek fan please stand up? Remember, these comments are anonymous, so if you don't tell me in the comment who you are, you will remain...well, you know...anonymous.

My Comment Box: As You Can See, It's Nearly Empty*

For everybody out there dying to comment on our blog but without a Gmail account, I've now enabled anonymous comments so it should no longer be a problem. Now, I'm expecting this to dramatically increase the volume I receive, so don't disappoint me!

Also, if you leave an anonymous comment, it would be great if you let us know who you are somewhere in there.

courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com

*Except for snide comments from brother. Thanks, L--you never let me down!

Superbad is Super-AWESOME!

So our television's exile to underneath the kitchen table (the only place it fit at the old apartment) is officially over. We still don't have, you know, actual television service, even network, but we do love watching movies. Especially free movies. And I thought Superbad was so good that I would even encourage you to pony up the $1 or $1.50 (though perhaps not the ridiculous $4.00 charged for a basic rental out here at Blockbuster) and PAY to see it if you have to. It was silly, of course, but that's the point, right? And hidden amongst the incredibly raunchy language (moms and brothers, consider yourself warned) was a surprisingly realistic portrait of how I remember high school. Maybe the girls didn't look quite so much like buxom supermodels (or did we?), but in general I thought that the way the boys, especially, related to each other was startlingly real. For that reason and others, there are times that it's just cringingly uncomfortable to watch (truly, nobody does awkward more painfully or endearingly than Michael Cera of Arrested Development fame), but after laughing uproariously nonstop for the entire 118 minutes, we were glad we did.

Pre-Test

Since my strategy immediately before the test is to relax instead of cram, perhaps because I know my grades don't end up in the same hyper-competitive pool as everybody else's in the room, I'm drinking hot chocolate and checking out the wealth of excellent new birth sites I've found lately. Such as: Citizens for Midwifery, Pushed Birth, and The Business of Being Born. TBOBB is something I would love to see (watch the trailer, it's very inspiring!) but which has not seen fit to come to my area when I was aware of it. Pushed is a book, written by the author of Pushed Birth above, which I need to read. Giving Birth: The Journey into the World of Mothers and Midwives is on that list as well, along with countless others.

The return to reading for pleasure like this is something I'm eagerly anticipating after law school is over. And from this point on, it all counts as career research. Awesome.

Black Snake Moan

LOVED IT!

While I was justifiably hesitant to watch another movie starring Samuel L. Jackson with the word "snakes" in the title, this one did not disappoint. And while I usually have a hard time with movies that have any degree of violence toward women, especially any degree of sexualized violence, the treatment in Black Snake Moan is not at all prolonged or gratuitous. The movie, while certainly odd at times, ends up being a very poignant take on, among other things, sexuality, love, and past abuse. Samuel L. and Christina Ricci were both fabulous and, while you may find yourself questioning why they won't let her put on a pair of pants for the first half of the movie, it all kind of ends up making sense by the end. She actually addresses "The Necessity of Being on the Set Almost Naked" here, and expresses similar thoughts to the conclusions I came to about it. She also talks in general about survivors of sexual abuse and refers to having worked with RAINN, which I found really impressive. I thought her observations were really good, and supported her strong performance in the movie.

That said, I still think she looks like she could use, as my mom (used to?) say, like she could use a bowl of thick soup. But I suppose the prospect of being "on the set almost naked" for two months would scare anybody down a size or two.

We rented this movie courtesy of Redbox, which has an abundance of free movie codes, so that you pretty much never have to pay for movie rental if there's a box near you. They seem to be more common out East, but maybe it will take off in the Midwest too.

Reston Peace

I just got home from accompanying Matt halfway to work (in 50-degree weather, no less!).

Commuting to work, DC-style:








vs Reston-style:





Needless to say, we love it here, and we feel so fortunate that everything worked out as well as it did!

Walk, Study, Sleep, Clean: An exciting life, but somebody has to live it.

Most of today has actually been comprised of studying--which is really kind of a surprise! I did hit a slump about 10:30 this morning and actually ended up taking about a 30-minute nap. I woke up still feeling so lethargic I almost went down for another one. Matt and I have set the goal of trying to do 30 minutes of some kind of physical activity every day, preferably an hour on the weekends (partly due to the desire on both our parts for more energy!) but it seems to me that any time I start any kind of exercise regimen, no matter how tame, the first week or so just absolutely drains me. Case in point: yesterday we ran for 30 minutes, today we walked for 30 minutes, and by mid-morning, my energy was totally sapped.

BUT, during the brief period I'm spending at home before I start my new job, I'm trying to set the goal that I spend most of my time doing SOMETHING productive. Realistically, it should be studying; realistically, it's not gonna be. So after indulging in the nap (which, after this week, will no longer be an option most days), instead of rolling over for another one, I decided to see what I could accomplish in the next half hour of being awake, in the hopes that I would be able to energize myself somewhat in the bargain. Here's what I did:

-Made Mexican casserole for dinner
-Did the dishes from last night
-Put away the dishes
-Did a load of laundry (though I didn't fold it...folding laundry is low on my list of favorite tasks, though luckily, Matt doesn't seem to mind it as much as he does other chores that I don't mind at all!)
-Made a game plan for today's studying

I did end up with more energy after all that was done, and so far I'm on track for accomplishing what I wanted to in the study department, too. It's a good feeling! I'm hoping to get a little bit more done before Matt gets home, spend some time with him, and hopefully do another Civ Pro practice test before we go to bed.

As predicted, I didn't get a ton done this weekend. Saturday I ended up throwing in the study-towel for a dish towel and helped Matt cook Potato and Cauliflower Masala from his new Indian cookbook, and I also made Red Lentil Soup. Personally, I thought it turned out too watery; I ended up blending in a couple of cooked potatoes to thicken it up, and it still seemed thin. It was good, though, and I think Matt especially liked it.

Sunday was the Messiah at the National Cathedral, which was very good but very crowded. We got there early enough to beat the line because we had asked for our tickets to be mailed to us, and we were concerned they'd been lost in the shuffle of the move, and had called and left messages to that effect to no avail. They ended up being at Will Call (would have been nice to have been notified that they were doing that), but when the usher went to seat us, one of the seats didn't exist. We ended up pulling up a chair from elsewhere, which we didn't actually have to use because the seat next to our existing one was empty, and somebody from the Cathedral took our name and is planning to refund us the cost of one of our tickets--which will be nice, but I haven't heard from her yet. Anyway, that pretty much summarizes the experience: the music was beautiful, but the venue somewhat chaotic, which was unfortunate.

After that, we decided that the shine of trying to parallel park in the madness of DC weekend traffic had really kind of worn off since moving to Reston, so we drove back and got a decently affordable dinner at The Silver Diner, a place we'd go again.

Round Here...

...we don't let a little thing like law school finals get in the way of a fun weekend. Yesterday was my Contracts final--harder than Torts, but I'm afraid not as hard as the Civil Procedure final will be on Tuesday. Has that stopped me from spending the better part of today gallivanting to an Indian spice store with Matt, or otherwise pleasurably frittering away the weekend? Hardly! The other night before bed, Matt asked me if I wanted to get up early and go running, something we've been talking about trying to get back in the habit of doing. I said "Oh, I don't know, I have a test tomorrow, I'm not sure if it would be good to get up so early." He looked at me kind of skeptically and then said, "Oh, I get it...you won't STUDY for it or anything, but you will go so far as to sleep in for it." Right. So what's wrong with that?

Last night we went to a house performance, hosted by a co-worker of Matt's by singer/songwriter Krista Detor. Said co-worker had raved about the performance, but being hard to please, we had prepared ourselves to be underwhelmed. We most definitely were NOT. Not only did we enjoy meeting and interacting with Krista and her husband Dave, and reuniting with Dave the sailor, but her music was in fact just breathtaking. She and Dave seemed to share our taste in music along with our affinity for homemade pesto, though they're a step ahead of us in living off the land, being that they live on five acres in Indiana and we, as you know, are currently soaking up the joys of living in the planned community in Reston. Anyway, we had a wonderful time. Matt whipped up a batch of the brownies you've heard about before, with the festive addition of a bag of peppermint chips I'd picked up at Aldi the last time I was there. Delicious!

Tomorrow, we're going to a performance of Handel's Messiah at the National Cathedral, which should be pretty amazing. That and the house concert are why today was supposed to be the big Civ Pro Study Expo, but I seem to be having a little bit of trouble getting started on that.

One-Quarter Down and Counting

My Torts final went pretty well yesterday, I think. We won't know for sure until February (!), but I felt like I had ample time and discussed it afterward with a friend who came up with similar results on hers. Torts is by far my favorite class, and I think for that and other reasons it's both objectively and subjectively the easiest class I have. We also had a midterm in that class and so we somewhat knew what to expect. Which means: it's only an uphill climb from here! The main reason I was dreading this test was because getting it over with means there are no more acceptable reasons for putting off studying for my least favorite two classes, Contracts and Civil Procedure. Huge volumes of very dry and particular rules that should probably be committed to memory, which is probably what I should be doing right now. Ugh.

Otherwise, not much has been going on around here. Work is going really well for Matt, and I'm looking forward to starting orientation at the hospital on the 17th. I'm hoping to hear about Georgetown by the end of December. We're also getting VERY excited about going home (I always feel disloyal when I say that, because really, I do feel like here is home too) to see our families in a couple of weeks. We haven't started our Christmas shopping yet, but because our families are relatively small and Christmas is a relatively simple affair at both households, we're not getting too worried. I know I should get finals behind me first. We've talked about how we hope that even if we had a bigger place or (gasp) a bigger family, we'd like to keep things such as shopping and decorating about on par with where they're at now. Easier said than done, I know, but we are blessed with families who try to keep things in perspective with reasonable expectations and a general lack of materialism, and I think that sets a good example. Now let's just hope the weather cooperates so that we can get back to the Midwest for Christmas.

On the cooking front, we made stir-fry last night, which has become an old standby favorite. I'm thinking about making Gourmet Magazine's Nacho Macaroni and Cheese (sounds gourmet, huh?) for dinner. Cold weather seems to give us just the excuse we're always looking for to whip up homey (read: cheesy) comfort foods. Not that we refrain in the summertime.

On a related note, we keep hoping to get in a routine of some kind of regular physical activity, whether that's running or walking or bike riding, although unfortunately it isn't the greatest weather for it. Not that ANY weather is a compelling substitute for lounging in bed until 8am, which is what we've been doing lately!

The Weather Outside=Frightful?

We're currently in the midst of the first snow of the season, and our first East-coast "snowstorm." In other words, a light dusting that doesn't stick to the streets but nonetheless has people panicking, cars careening into ditches, employees showing up late for work, and school officials conferring over whether to cancel finals. (Alas, no such luck.)

So far the only ill effect I've felt has been the increased difficulty of uprooting myself from our cozy apartment, where the cats and I are holed up watching the snow fall, to venture out and drive to the bus station to get on a bus to the train station to get on the subway to go take my test. (Everything in Reston is convenient to pretty much everything else in Reston, but convenient to downtown DC it is not.) My test (Torts, but not the delicious kind) doesn't start until 2pm, but because of the Weather, and even more because I know that if I don't get out of here I may be overcome with the irresistible urge to make a pan of brownies or something instead of performing some badly-needed last-minute cramming, I think I'm going to head out shortly.

Who Would Have Thought?

Our tiny Christmas tree in the corner of the living room

Looking from the kitchen into the dining room

The living room (new futon on the right)

The past couple of days I have been enjoying staying home with the cats and doing lots of cooking (AKA studying for my law school finals...which are tomorrow, Friday, Tuesday, and Thursday). For the time being, we're also enjoying rolling out of bed at a leisurely 8am as opposed to 6; though that will change when I go back to work. But it's nice while it lasts. We're pretty much just luxuriating in both the newfound space and time, which we didn't realize was such a luxury until we lived in the city and both were at such an extremely high premium. Like the things I took for granted about nursing which ultimately ended up being the defining aspects of my career aspirations, the things we took for granted about living in the midwest have become central to what we view as most important now.

On the school front, GWU was characteristically goodwilled and understanding about my decision to withdraw ("we're sorry to see you go, but you seem to know yourself and what you want"), and has left open the option to apply for a 1-year leave of absence rather than fully withdrawing. Despite the fact that I still have nothing negative to say about my professors or my experience or the chocolate fountain (yes, really) they had in the lobby the other day, I'm wondering whether I should. Because my financial aid (irreversibly) walks out the door when I do, and I can't imagine wanting to continue law school at full price when I don't want to now at a discount, I'm debating whether it's worth it to keep the option open when I don't anticipate taking it. Then again, we also didn't anticipate moving to Reston, or leaving law school, or working in accreditation, or anything else we've done this past year, either...!

Another major development which falls into that category: having kids. Which has gone from high on our "never" list to firmly rooted on our "someday" list. Despite the fact that if we'd had any kind of prenup, Matt and I would have both insisted that remaining childless be a prominent feature of our agreement, we have done a complete 180 on this issue in the short six months that we've been married. It's hard to say exactly why. Part of it has to do with the fact that I think I never wanted kids before because I didn't know anybody I'd want to duplicate, whereas let's face it-- the more people out there like Matt, the better :) And oddly enough, he seems to feel the same way about crazy old me. Yet, you'd think we would have seen that coming when we were dating or engaged or something, but we didn't. Anyway, it's nothing that's in the immediate works, but we've scaled back from "never" to "ten years" to "eight years" to where it's now on the "five and under" list.

Who would have thought?!

Settling in

We spent most of the day unpacking boxes, but we also took a walk around Reston, cooked dinner, made cookies, and trimmed our Christmas tree! We're loving having more room (especially in the kitchen, of course) and we're loving the fact that we've left our bikes on the patio two nights in a row and they're still here--which would have been unheard of back in DC. People leave tools in the back of pickup trucks and trust that they'll still be there in the morning. It's like night and day compared to where we came from!

Word is that the Midwest is buried in snow and ice, but we still have flowers on the ground and leaves on the trees, which made for a very pleasant evening stroll.

Otherwise, tomorrow is our 6-month anniversary, so we're planning to celebrate by going to the Indian buffet for lunch and then popping a bottle of champagne and finishing the unpacking!

I tried to post some pictures, but for some reason it isn't working. I'll try again tomorrow...