Oktoberfestivus

I guess I'd better back up a ways, since it's been a little while since my last post, and I've been shamefully busy since then. We've done a lot of things, like tailgating and cheering on stanford at a football game:


We were really just 2 more Stanford fans in a sea of crimson at the homecoming game...

AND we had excellent seats, even though we got separated from our friends.

Some of whom were seated in the Washington section. I got the below picture with a text that said "I am sitting literally this close to the Washington band". Hahaha!

And then I went to a pumpkin carving birthday party, in which we made some FANTASTIC pumpkins and sipped cider while we carved.

And I explored our neighbourhood some more, and discovered that almost every house gets radically into Halloween. Here's one example, and this is minus the giant inflatable spider and cat that were lurking on the sides and moving around.

Then I went to the first Halloween party solo....which inspired my black widow costume ;)

And right here, you can insert a whole bunch of pictures that I haven't uploaded yet from last night's party at our house, which was awesome and also TONS OF WORK. I'll post those later, after I sort through the hundreds of jello shots in my fridge and tear down streamers and lights and return tables. For now, this is what I look like RIGHT this second, because this is about as festive as I'm allowed to get at my job:

To make up for it, I brought some leftovers from our party the night before, and am SO happy to say that they're almost all gone. Phew. Like I needed more sugar.

More pictures to come eventually, and I'm long overdue for a thankful post!

Thankful Thursday

I have this nasty looking front lawn. Mostly because Muffin digs holes in it, buries his acorns, and then digs them up later. It's all dry and pot-holed. So I thought I'd buy a little grass seed to fill in the gaps, and make it a little softer and prettier. Turns out my mom's advice of planting the seed around the time of the first rain was correct. The stuff took off and now my lawn has nature's version of a wonky 5 o'clock shadow.

Yes, that's a tiny pumpkin stake in my lawn. Nolan said he'd pay me a dollar each to take them out and throw them away, but they only cost me $1 each, so I'd rather eat the 3 dollars and have pumpkin stakes.

Time for some thankfulness, eh?

1. I'm thankful for a relaxed schedule this week. I've had very few plans, and it's been wonderful to catch up on things like CostCo runs and cleaning.

2. I'm thankful for technology. It allows me to communicate with my husband when neither of us are home to talk in person, and it allows me to spend an hour catching up with my little brother in Israel.

3. I'm thankful for the little things. Like the delicious roasted hazelnuts on my salad and a nice warm bed to curl up in when I'm sick and my weird green grass that's thriving and reminding me that even the driest seeds can sprout when they're watered enough,

4. I'm thankful for fun memories. Nolan and I were looking at some photobooth pictures we took a few months ago (I need to eventually scan them in and post them on here), and the sheer joy and fun you can see in those pictures. I laugh every single time I see them.

5. I'm thankful for my wonderful family, and how it never ceases to amaze me. I had a conversation this week with a relative that just delighted me, because it was so surprising.

On that note, enjoy your weekends! Take your vitamin C so you don't end up like me :(

A veritable storm of media

After all of our discussions around apple products lately, apparently Nolan felt it necessary to send me this card while I was at work yesterday:

Touching.

On Saturday I had a couple short hours with Nolan once he woke up, and then after he left, I met up with the Ladds to pick out our pumpkins at a local patch. They had green ones:

And orange ones...and now between the ones I bought here and the 2 I picked up (with fake corn) at Lucky's, I have 5 pumpkins laying around. Why? No idea. It may have been the pumpkin spice lattes we had afterwards that just put me in a prolonged state of autumnal awareness.

On Sunday, we drove into the city to see our dear friends Brandon and Tiffany exchange vows. It was beautiful and perfect.

I even took a short video of it, featuring our fabulous friend Mat Park singing and playing during the processional:

Ladies, he's single.

Also there was almost our entire former small group, including Tom and Susan and their baby. Which meant dinner was a little bit of eating and a lot of pass-the-baby. He just looks super bored with Nolan pinching his little rolls. He's like, "sigh. okay, who's next. can we go home yet? sigh."

Insert same thought here. More sighing. But how cute does Ms. B look with a baby!

It's true what they say, about the only times in life when you really get to see all of your friends is at weddings and funerals. So glad this one was the former.

Later that night, at the Emergency Medicine dinner (this picture was right after the picture from Monday's post). Note the change of clothes necessary.

Our favourite Missouri couple!

Obligatory picture of Milo. Okay actually, I put it in here because it was the first real picture I took on my new phone, and it just happened to be while he was searching out the remnants of his old food bag (sadly for him, it was empty).

Hopefully tomorrow I'll wake up and:

a.) not be sick anymore

b.) there will be coffee brewed

c.) be rich and famous. or just rich. or just find out it's snowed in San Francisco and I have the day off.

Snapshot

This photo from yesterday sums up a lot of our life right now:

I feel like we spend a lot of our time waiting for what's next around the bend. Waiting for the next step in our ever-changing lives. We spend a lot of time wearing clothes that aren't normal, because our jobs require us to and because we're rarely found lounging around at home. And I spend a lot of my time savouring every moment with Nolan, waiting for him to wake up and recover from his ridiculously demanding job.

But this picture also captures something else: that moment of calm that we have, where we can rest between engagements and just close our eyes for a second or 10 minutes before we have to get up and put on our game-faces. And do you see that faint glint in my eyes? It's happiness. And hope. Because even though we're still adjusting to this phase of life, we're happy. We have everything we could ask for. We have each other. And we have hope that sometime soon we'll get more time to spend together doing whatever we want to do. Most likely sleeping in and sipping coffee slowly, or riding our bikes to frozen yogurt and coming up with clever ways to win at Carcassonne. Travelling. Kayaking. The list goes on and on.

Until we get there,there are other things to be excited about. Like awesome fall food, good times with friends, the 15 minutes I get to spend with Nolan on Wednesday mornings (the only time we get between his 1 day "off" on the weekend), and the amazing fall weather we're having! It's made our home surprisingly warm for October. Milo's generally found on the floor, trying to cool off. He's used to huddling with me in the freezing San Francisco cold.

Not to mention the holidays, which are creeping steadily closer. I've already got half of our Christmas presents taken care of, and this morning I succumbed to my Christmas playlist, which I can actually load onto my phone now that I have more storage space! Sadly, while I was unashamedly listening to the Muppet Christmas Carol soundtrack, my coworkers were too, since I later discovered that my headphones weren't plugged in. Fail.

Thankful Thursday

Tomorrow I get my new phone (if they're in stock still by the time I get there), and so this is hopefully the last day of crappy iPhone pictures before I switch to decent iPhone pictures. w00t. It's definitely time: this morning my phone reset itself to January 2011...which means I lost all phone numbers, texts, pictures, emails, etc. that I had stored on there since January of this year. Bummer.

I love that Nolan and I have serious discussions about Milo while calling him "turduckin". Technically speaking, a turduckin is a chicken stuffed in a duck stuffed in a turkey and then cooked. Nolan's been pretty specific that in this case, it refers to a chicken stuffed in a duck wrapped up in a giant TURD. To be fair, Milo lives up to the name.

I've got my fall decorations out now, and am just waiting for the weekend to fully enjoy them, bake something delicious, and sit in a bubble bath with fall-ish candles burning and my windows wide open. I love my life. One of my favourite new pieces is actually a Halloween chandelier that my mom got for me (which I'm going to re-use for Christmas and maybe every other season because I like it!), but the pumpkin candles were so pretty in it I couldn't resist dubbing it a plain old Fall decoration and showing it off:

Today I had lunch at Samovar with Jacob, who treated himself to the English Tea Service because of the nice day and the veritable garden we were sitting in. It was very colonial:

I almost left a tip in change, but Jacob talked me out of it. Like that one time I did it at a white-tablecloth place with Nolan and he was HORRIFIED and ran out of the restaurant before I finished pulling out all of my quarters. Apparently it's very insulting to tip in coins, but how was I supposed to know that? Money is money, right? It made more sense when Nolan painted the picture of the waiter picking up the checkbook and a bazillion coins flying out everywhere, and having to go around on his hands and knees picking up coins from under other customers' feet while explaining it was his tip. Sigh. Consider me chastened.

In other news: on with the post.

1. I'm thankful for my boss, who supports and encourages me. I always know there is someone "in my corner" at work. No really. She and I have cubicles together in a tiny, cold corner of our floor.
2. I'm thankful for the bible study I'm doing. It's making me be a LOT more diligent about quiet time. As in, 100% because I was FAILING at it before.
3. I'm so thankful for every single moment I have with Nolan. Sometimes I wake up a little when he comes to bed, and whatever feelings of anxiety or stress I had when I went to bed a few hours earlier by myself just melt away. I fall back asleep contented knowing he's there. I so can't wait to have more than 15 minutes with him (that's how much I got this week so far). On that note, I'm also thankful that we prepared ourselves for residency being terrible. Because as bad as it is not having any time together, it's not as bad as we thought. Maybe we're just learning how to handle it.
4. I'm thankful for the great weather! It's been gorgeous, and my grass seed has started growing!
5.I'm thankful for rest. Even when I'm worn out and mentally fatigued, a little rest goes a looooong way. And it usually means sitting on the couch watching Arrested Development reruns and eating my bowl of frozen blueberries.
6. I'm thankful Arrested Development is coming back for another season and a MOVIE!!!! Best.news.ever. (click to enlarge)

Wein

This weekend, we went up to the ranch to visit los padres, and our friends the Ladds came to visit on Saturday! It was their first time actually exploring California outside of the Bay Area, so we thought: winemaking/tasting and cows and apple hill? Done. Except now that I think about it you can probably do a lot of those things in Missouri too. They just wouldn't be as cool there.

But it was a super fun weekend, and my parents were SO gracious to let us crash their house and eat their food and drink their wine. We basically all invited ourselves over and they said SURE!

So, some pictures:

And here they thought California would be so different from Missouri. Surprise!
Nolan gettin' some lovin' from one of his bovine friends.Pressing grapes to make wine!

Our haul of grapes! The master put us to work!

Lesson learned: don't wear a dress to pick grapes in.

The only other thing that's really been exciting for me since Friday was the twisted satisfaction of reading my email from Netflix this morning, recanting their decision to split dvd's off into "Qwikster". It was something delicious, akin to the feeling I get when I say, "I told you so!". Business strategy fail.

Thankful Thursday

I've been meaning to blog all week now, about how I heard a guy on the elevator telling his colleague that he went to a show called "Menopause" with his wife and that it took all of my energy not to turn around and say "duuuuuude". Also about exciting things like the iPhone 4S coming out, Steve Jobs passing away the same week (SOB), the grass seed I planted, the secret stuff I'm making for Christmas presents this year, blah blah blah. There have been a lot of fun things. But it's also been a busy week, with 2 bible studies starting on tuesdays and wednesdays, all of our talent review work coming to a head at work, reports due on top of that since it's month-end (or was), and trying to keep up with stuff at home. I can't wait for next week, when I'll have a better grip on things. So you can imagine how grateful I was when I got home today and Nolan swooped me up and asked me mid-tango how I'd like to change into my pajamas, pop in a movie and order Thai. Hallelujah. It looked a lot less glamourous than it felt:

But it was totally awesome.

Last Friday, we had a Diabetes Walk to raise money for the fight against Diabetes, and our entire building participated. Or at least, said they would. Here are the few and the proud from floor 22. I don't know what happened, but it's like only the young short ones from our group actually showed up. Also I KNOW the picture is upside-down. It's rightside-up on my computer, just not on this blog. I don't know what to tell you.

I also managed to get a picture of my car when I was at Target last weekend, because when I came out of the store I almost walked to the wrong vehicle. Can you spot the difference (besides the spoiler) on these cars? Please ignore how ridiculously dusty my car is - I washed it after I saw this! I'll give you a hint: one belongs to us and the other belongs to the enemy.

Can't guess it? I don't blame you - the picture is really not clear enough to see. But! I can tell you that while my car flies the flag of the Oregon Ducks, the other has a sticker and a license frame supporting the OSU Beavers. John, I thought you'd appreciate that I noticed!

This weekend we're heading up the mountain again for a little weekend getaway and some visiting. Our friends Eric and Erin (read: the other doctor/liberal arts match-up at Stanford) are meeting us up there on Saturday for some exploring in the area! There will most likely be caramel apples and winetasting and hot-tubbing.

Speaking of the weekend:

1. I'm thankful for a couple days to sleep in! I've been exhausted lately and I think it's because I've been sleeping terrible, which I THINK is because Nolan's been sleeping terribly.
2. I'm thankful that I've been productive through my tiredness and have gotten through a lot of my deadlines this week.
3. I'm thankful for STILL meeting new friends! It's so fun and encouraging that I feel like I'm overflowing!
4. I'm thankful Nolan's had nights free this week and we've gotten to hang out a lot. I missed him.
5. I'm thankful iPhone 4S has been released and I'm free to upgrade! Though I might opt for the 4 -- ylehsa pointed out that why would I spend the extra money to upgrade when the 4S isn't that spectacular in comparison to the 4? Might as well save the chunk of change for the iPhone 5. My only regret is Siri...
6. I'm thankful for pretty fall weather! I've stepped out of my car each evening when I get home, and I can smell wet pavement, apple spice, and wood fires. I adore Fall.


I was going to have a quote of the week here, but I thought I'd show you a snippet of our daily lives instead, because sometimes it's equally entertaining/boring/youtellme.

A: " So remind me why you keep putting eggshells in the disposal?"
N: "Well...that's where they go!"
A: "No, they go in the garbage. Tiny, soft foodscraps that fleck off of plates go in the disposal. Maybe you're thinking of egg PARTICLES."
N: "No, I always put them in there!"
A: "And I always dig them out! Trust me, when it's disposal vs. eggshells, the eggshells always win."
N: "....fine...."



A: "Hey look, a gold dollar coin! Thanks, Dairy Queen!"
N: "Oh yeah? Whose picture is on it?"
A: "Hmm...Millard Fillmore. I forgot about that guy."
N: "Hah! Shut up! No really, who is on the coin?"
A: "I was being serious! Millard Fillmore! Our 13th president!"
N: "We never had a president with a ridiculous name like that!"

That whole conversation reminded me of when I got an IM from Mason in college that just said, "Anneliese! Did you know there is a book in the bible called Nahum?! I just found it!"

Also I noticed today a few pictures had been posted from my gramma's 90th birthday party, so I'll post a couple below:

Seriously, this woman does not look 90.
The most decent picture I could find of my aunt and uncle who were visiting.
Me, my brother Rory, and his girlfriend Summer. At the kids table. Where my dad ate with us too.



Happy Weekend!