Coming up: Rites of spring explode in near-tantric tantrums past the fourth-wall. Will our soloist prince dance to his doom or can couples on harnesses rescue him before the final sacrifice? The DINKS converge over craft-beers and food-truck fusion. Will a brawl break out? Will Andrew ever order that damned simple soda or will he imbibe the goji-guarana-lavender kool-aid and swap his soul for a remodeled kitchen and a home brewing kit? Little garbage can, big adventure. Will the (W)right receptacle ever return home? Where will the trash go if it doesn't? Waltz of the glass-ceramic menagerie on a wild weekend starts the office off oddly. Will Ernestine the tortoise lend Lucy the octopus some advil for the hangover? And big plans brew over pilates. Our (W)rights reviewed the revenues on their marriage and consider a sequel. Will they go big in the international market?
Strap on a kissing harness, hop on the bike, get out that passport, and discover the answers to these pressing mysteries in the far east (of Europe).
Pitter Patter of (Not-so) Little Pixie Toes The Mellow Yellow, Green and Gold Weekend
Despite the mad roar of a wild and crazy week, we all made it to the weekend! Andrew survived the eschatological advent of "The roller screw," a chimerical piece of equipment bruited to be "coming" since September of 2013, and which is widely believed by some hairless people in robes to be the finalizing component of Andrew's first EI(eeeeiiiiioooo) project. As it does during most Apocalypses, all hell broke loose, but apparently in enough of a contained way that (1) Andrew got to go out to lunch with his project buddies on Friday, (2) Andrew didn't have to go into work on Saturday, (3) all limbs and most of the limbic system appears intact.
I hung in through the storm accompanying mom-boss' glorious return, managed to get my Friday client in and out of the office without inundating her in a beverage baptism, and hit a slew of "by noonish" deadlines. I was pretty damned done "by noonish" emotionally.
Our garbage can, survived, survived its first pre-teen runaway adventure. Thank goodness. I went to retrieve it on Friday night to find it missing. The recycling bins were waiting meekly at the curb, totally mum, but quivering with trepidation. The garbage can hadn't even left a note. Thoroughly flummoxed I retrieved Andrew and we stood around awkwardly staring in mailboxes and under the couch, etc, before I noticed there was one a few blocks away attempting to hitch a ride to Haiti. Had our number on it, phew. We had a little chat and agreed it could stay put without any amercement. We were just glad to have it home!
Saturday was a golden DINK day. Not only did we work out together on our tandem treadmills, but we met up with friends at a brewery with handcrafted beers and trendy foods. This is "The Kulshan," a very en vogue joint that serves exclusively fancy brews and has a rotating space for food trucks. Watching Andrew continue to interrupt the tap-lady as she described to him what non-alcoholic beverages were available was fairly entertaining:
Tap Lady: Well we don't have non alcoholic beer, but we do have root beer...
A: I'll have a Sprite.
TL: We don't carry that, but I'll tell you what we have, we have Dry Lavender, Dry Cucumber, Rhubarb Banana Ginger Juice, Guarana Goji Guava...
A: How about a ginger ale?
C: No, but we do have water melon milk, desalinated pickle juice...
Eventually he got a Sierra Mist (had I been the serving lady, I would have pinned Andrew's desires for non-fussy lemon-lime sludge, and suggested the Sierra Mist earlier in the conversation, but her knowledge of abstruse soda and specialty beverage was admittedly virtuousic). He also got some kind of South East Asian themed taco from the food truck outside. I kept to my water glass and bag of post-gym snacks. With copious samples of the fries and other people's beers, of course. I'll give The Kulshan my thumbs up on stolen swills of stout, alone. Very tasty Imperial, there.
It was a fun group, though. Nate and Azita are classic power-couple DINKS. Nate genuinely dresses and moves like a living advertisement from an upscale and understated men's catalog where the handkerchiefs cost $1,000 and reek of old money. Azita has more perfectly blended accessories and touches than can be comprehended by the human eye. They spend much of their time remodeling their home, sampling hand crafted fermented beverages, bake everything from GMO-Gluten-Additive-free scratch, and lavish their attention on their two beagles (who get better care - filtered water, fish seed oil supplements, special food, etc. - than most children)
Brandy is one of Nate's best students, and one of Azita's best friends. Brandy and her husband are technically DINKs, but decidedly far from the stereotype. Brandy is a school teacher, who looks like a more modest pin up girl (I mean that in a complimentary fashion - mostly due to the understated vavoom of well coiffed tawny curls and a slightly vintage aesthetic). She's mellow and subtly humorous. With a touch of country gal in her, she decidedly prefers meat and potatoes to ahi curry burgers and garam masala rootabaga fries. Jeremy said that Mexican was a bit exotic for her at first. Jeremy works in forestry, bemoans the fact that you can't go out and get yourself into a good scrap at the bar these days (genuinely good-willed fellow, so this is not said out of hostility or anger), gave us saga stories of his little sister going out and scrapping a little less now that she's a born-again Christian mother, but still getting into it with people who cut in line... He has no filter, but nothing is ever said in malice and always with a gentle glint in his eye.
Nate's dad, Wendell, was along. Wendell was once my landlord when I lived back in Bellingham. He's a big cuddly teddy bear and I love him. Pretty much all I can say about Wendell without writing an opus.
Anyways, Andrew and I played our part in our work-out togs, our abstemious if obstreperous ordering habits and non-habits, and palver about training schedules and work nonsense. When another couple showed up, we were just on our way out so Andrew could fling himself back at a mountain and I could throw myself throw atop two days of shopping, laundry, and food prep for the coming week.
Happily, it being a golden DINK day, Andrew came back from the mountain without a scratch. And I managed to work several home appliances without starting a fire or severing a limb! Win-win-win. Which - bridging over a sleep facilitated by the white noise functions of my humidifier on high (evens out most of the sniffling and snorting and snoring of my husband in high allergy season) - brings us to ballet day! So off I go to polish up my pixie toes for proper tapping-along. In some hours anyways. I'll start with coffee and let things get crazy from there! Bring on that Sugar Plum Fairy!
Spick and Spangled Cleaner artiste hits the desk again for a creative reunion.
I like to imagine that our cleaner is acting out a long and involved melodrama (perhaps on youtube?) with her apparently haphazard biweekly reconfiguration of our office possessions. First, Lucy the paperweight octopus, and Ernestine, the office tortoise, were rent asunder; their once chummy relationship strewn to the desk edges on either side. Athena's bamboo owlie turned his gaze away in horror. No matter what efforts were taken during the interim work weeks, adversity always struck on cleaning weekends. Perhaps our girls just got rowdy on Friday evenings and wanted some time alone to sort through the olio of betrayals and dipsomaniacal slights and scares.
Whatever the past may be, in our little cleaner-approved-diorama, the gals have made up. Or are still in mid-party. Lucy seems particularly adaze, still wearing a scrunchie atop her head with lampshade applomb. But she and Ernestine are closer than two intertwined fingers. And the owl is gazing back just a bit. The glass 'n ceramic menagerie has found peace at last! Or at least some good strong advil and plenty of fluids. Sometimes I wish cleaner lady would leave a little narrative of the saga that she plays out in her head. Just so we can catch up on the action.
Post-cleaner Mondays are always special, but this one had an extra little surprise for me when I went to push the window back open (before fainting into irretrievable incalescence). As I screamed my usual imprecations (I really am not a fun of the stuffy scene such window closing creates), I heard a loud CRACK and something fell. Since it was still dark, I palped the general window area and continued with my task. Upon subsequent investigation, it appears that the little plastic knobby thing one uses slant the blind slats has decompensated. It is now laying in several pieces about the office. There's still a nub at the top, but... I can only assume that the same shenanigans that reunited the menagerie were connected to this unexpected explosion.
While I can't speak for the madness occuring at the office, that which occurred away from the office was quite pleasant. Andrew and I had our little date-afternoon in Seattle at the PNB. They're doing a repertory farrago of director's choices. Except for a thrashing solo piece to Rite of Spring (if there was a conceit or interest to the piece, it was mostly "how much physical punishment can a dancer withstand for the sake of completing a lactic lurching twenty minutes of Stravinsky??" answer: an impressive amount!), the pieces were all quite good.
The second piece, Kiss, was choreographed to incorporate arial harnesses and set to Arvo Part's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten. Although the arial component could come across as gimmicky, it never does. Instead one captures a flowing eternity of a single moment of love - a couple intermeshing, flying, dancing, and caught up between ecstasy, terror, vulnerability, and states that exceed qualifying component. The first - Take Five... More or Less - was delightfully jazzy and broadway-esque homage to the creativity of those five minute breaks between practice. The last - a world premier of Cerrudo's Memory Glow - was entrancing and brilliantly lit. For instance, there's a portion at the beginning in which the lights shift from a pas de duex to reveal the stage is entirely populated by dancers. Like magic!
Another blessing of repertory performances is that they tend to be more concentrated than the full scale ballets. You get no breathers, no ballet school children in fluffy costumes while the principles gulp gatorade backstage. Just a few intermissions to change generally sparse sets and mix in the next set of dancers. As a result, we tend to get out much earlier in the afternoon and make it home with enhanced facility. Sparing me the "what hit me" daze that Lucy has going on this morning.
I'm not gonna say I'm refreshed and ready for a brand new week of simian shenanigans, but I'm here and ready to have a stab and turning Monday into - if not FUNday, at least - getsomethingsdoneday (TM 2014)
Pilates Posse in Prague And other obtusely otiose O-lliterations
Hard to believe that it is only Tuesday. And harder to believe that this is hard to believe, given that Monday was not a particularly mad or full day. It was eventful. But the dull roar was less honed than a baby spoon compared to abutting days. The vagaries of time were gentle on me, even.
After eleven months and three weeks of marriage - give or take - Andrew and I decided that perhaps annulment was officially off the table. Given that the divorce process -, I can promise you, is long and expensive (and that it would generally interrupt our desire to continue cohabitating in a loving committed relationship with all the attendant rights and responsibilities of family yadda yadda yadda) - we figure we're really somewhat committed to this connubial construct they so lovingly call "marriage". Having officially outlasted several thousand celebrity weddings and a comfortable swathe of Vegas quickies, we felt it was time to splurge a little and celebrate properly.
Our first thought was that we had so much fun during our wedding that we should just do the whole thing over again! It would be like most sequels in that it would be twice as big, twice as full of explosions, and ten-times as totally-pointless. However, we both agree that the video of our first dance is one of the only videos of ourselves dancing that does not make us respectively cringe and feel nauseous, so we kind of don't want to jinx that with a first-anniversary follow up dance. Plus the Majestic is probably already booked up and my MIL is going to be in Japan starting on our anniversary; their dance was a highly necessary component to the whole formula (and it is way too late to recast the part!) So, in lieu of redoing the wedding party, we thought we'd just go on that honeymoon thing.
People often take honeymoons right after marriage, but we were anxious to come down from the up-in-the-air anomie of our transitional months right after tying the knot. Andrew and I spent the week after our wedding moving into our new place, and then Andrew started his new job. We also wanted to have some actual money to spend. So we forestalled in that way that couples who never end up taking a honeymoon do.
But oh ho ho, we've got tickets to Prague! I bought them yesterday. And a hotel. Andrew and I had tried to brainstorm where we might actually both want to go for a honeymoon several times in the past and this was what we'd come up with. Andrew's ideal travel trip would basically be cycling in the Alps for days at a time. Mine would be... not cycling in the Alps.
After several ideas were bandied about, it came out that we had both wanted to go to Prague since we were teenagers. I probably could have gleaned that from the fact that a Prague travel book is one of the two or three shelves worth of books that Andrew still carts around from home to home (and the fact that I'm pretty sure we had a conversation early in our dating life in which I queried whether the book meant he'd been to Prague because I'd always wanted to go!) There was then some waiting and calculating for Andrew's vacation time to kick in. We picked September based on (1) Andrew actually having accrued vacation time at that point, (2) a newer guide book's assertion that this is a nice time of year to go.
So perhaps, if the gods see fit, we shall avail ourselves of honey under a full moon in the Czech Republic only a year and a half after the commencement date of this fine union. Of course six months is a long ways off, and those impish deities do know how to intervene. We'll be looking both ways before crossing streets in a few more months. Though perhaps my general skepticism that my massive doses of looby-lady-hormones will manage to produce ultimately fertile results is suddenly a positive in travel assurance.
I celebrated this marital milestone by dragging my mother and Azita to a pilates class. Azita and I had done pilates before with her sister-in-law. But then the SIL (a great teacher) rescheduled her class to 9:30 a.m. and (having to work to earn the dual part of that DINK formula) we've been pilatesless for about a year. My mom doesn't do pilates. She doesn't really do yoga either, but my sister (marinating in her sexy yoga mom juices now that her youngest can go to pre-school) took her to "power yoga". I like to think you call on various hindu gods to attain super powers in power yoga - like downward dog lets you leap into the air several feet, and warrior pose gives you air-bending abilities. My mom had started looking into the yoga around town and finding that yoga is often scheduled at inconvenient times for working stiffs. During her search, I noticed there was a four o'clock pilates at the YMCA. Azita and I are members, so it's free for us, and we both finish work early on our shifted early schedule, making 4 the perfect time. My mom can't always make 4 p.m., but Mondays are usually good days for that sort of thing. Tada! My mom survived her first pilates class and - despite reporting an overwhelming ague after finishing - seems to be committed to doing it again. She thinks it will be "fun" after the tormenting anguish part is all handled.
Andrew celebrated by ... I don't know. Work. Which seems a little stressful right now due to the aforementioned apocalyptic coming of the roller-screw. He came home caviling about how his new carpool buddy was one of those people who left right on time, meaning Andrew had rushed to get his stuff together and forgotten his training watch.
As of last night, Andrew purportedly hates people who are right on time for everything. It is an essential betrayal of human decency. From what I could glean, being tardy for things is a universal ethic that communicates an acceptance of human imperfection, and timeliness may be one of the most judgmental of all acts. I may be paraphrasing. I was initially concerned for our marriage, until I remembered that I'm actually insanely early for everything instead of punctiliously punctual, so I'm sure that's totally different! And of course I do understand what he means. I hate that feeling of fluster when somebody is waiting for me. One of the reasons I'm obsequiously early to everything is that the idea of making others wait for me is supremely stressful, in fact. But back to my more humane-husband. He decided that - training watch or no - he didn't know if he'd have another shot at a training ride this week and by golly he'd be going out. So he went out. I didn't. I watch episodes of Hannibal, and then started reading Bolano's The Savage Detectives.
We saw a bit of each other in passing over leftovers. And I am pretty sure that was him in my bed last night. Not positive, but definitely this morning! I made sure to wake him up just a minute later than my perfectly punctual morning routine, making his wake up exactly on time (whoops). Because that's what love is about. Meeting halfway with your temporal temperatures. And going to Prague. Maybe more so, going to Prague! Did I mention we get to do that??
And so here we are on Tuesday feeling like a lot happened on Monday, and totally confused that today is "gym day" despite having gone "to the gym" yesterday. But my socks are blue! Must be #bluesday ! So that helps.
Happy happy late March into spring showers!
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