Technically Maryland is the beginning of the South as it’s under the Mason-Dixon Line. However, in so many ways, it feels like the DC, Northern Virginia and Maryland area have a lot more in common with our neighbors to the north. I even take a little bit of offense to people calling me a Southerner (I just don’t like being lumped in with that group). However, as soon as white stuff starts falling from the sky, it’s apparent that part of this area’s soul is still very much Southern.

Last night DC got hammered with heavy, wet snow. Many of us got out of work early. And many of us in this area forget how to drive when there’s snow on the ground in general. (As an aside, I’m eternally thankful that my parents are original Coloradans and taught my sisters and I how to drive in the snow.) I had a co-worker who works 7 miles away from work and it took her 3.5 hours to get home because traffic was such a disaster. She finally ended up parking a few miles away from her house in a parking lot and just walking home. There were tons of stories about people simply abandoning their cars on the interstate and trying to walk home.

The Architect and I had a meeting with a trainer at the Y and it was still open so we trudged over there after work. Traffic in the city was at a standstill and the intersections looked like the drivers were trying to play tic-tac-toe instead of drive. It was pretty darn miserable. We had our session and then went back outside to walk to the Metro, which is maybe 4 blocks away. The snow was so wet that it would melt on us as soon as it touched us. It wasn’t long until our jackets and pants were soaked through. It was so bad that we were trying to look for a cab to just take us all the way home but there were no cabs to be seen.

Luckily a Metrobus heading in the direction that we were trying to go stopped right then. I’m not a big fan of the city buses because the drivers always seem to drive dangerously but the Architect and I agreed that it would do in a pinch. It was crazy crowded with people that were doing the same thing as us. Luckily we were able to get home without any major event as the bus driver decided to stick to the main roads. It was so crazy. It still took us about 30-45 minutes to get home (a mile and a half away).

This morning, things are still kind of a mess but it’s 40 degrees and sunny here so hopefully all this icky snow will melt. I’m ready for Spring!

How many of you have snow right now? Are you a snow lover or a snow hater?

I wrote something on Facebook last night about watching the State of the Union. One of my good college friends, who is a fervent Republican (but I love him anyway), commented, “How can you stand to watch that terrible man?” I replied something along the lines of “I want to see what’s going to happen.”  I definitely haven’t been happy with politics as of late but I do believe that it’s still important to watch the State of the Union, whether I agree or disagree with the person speaking. As the Architect can tell you, I have a tendency to yell at the tv whenever I don’t like what’s being said and I did do a lot of yelling, but I still watched. Besides, how else am I going to get to make fun of all the goofy Congressmen???

To me, the State of the Union acts as what the President sees as the ideal path forward. As many of us are aware, hardly anything is ideal in the political realm so chances are, we may not see a lot of the ideas in the SotU come to fruition. However, I do believe that it’s important for every single American to know the path that we’re about to go down (we do, in fact, have voices to use if we don’t like what’s happening). I just wonder why one wouldn’t want to know what’s going on.

My Impression of the Speech: 

The President spoke about a lot of big ideas but not a whole lot of specifics. It sounds great to say that we need another “Sputnik moment” and innovation (gosh, how many times did he mention innovation) but it doesn’t get you all that far. I would have liked to see more concrete ideas.

The POTUS also mentioned two things that I will believe ‘em when I see ‘em:

1.  A domestic spending freeze for 5 years (how is he going to ensure that???)

2.  He will veto any bill that comes to him with earmarks.

Nice thoughts but do they have teeth?

I know that I’ll be watching to see what happens.

Here’s a great article from Foreign Policy on last night’s speech.

What did you think about the speech?

Up now

So this weekend, we had a surprise party for my dad for his 50^th birthday. His birthday is actually December 31^st but we wanted to throw him off a little bit so we waited until now to have the party. We had the party at one of the Mexican restaurants in my hometown.  My sisters and I plus the Architect and T (B’s boyfriend) got there early to decorate.

We had the guests come a little bit early so that everyone would be there when my parents arrived. We had invited about 20 people so dinner was nice and intimate. My dad’s mom came in from Colorado to surprise him so there was that as well.

 My mom had told Dad that they were going out for dinner with another couple for the husband’s birthday. That couple drove my parents to the restaurant. When they arrived, first my mom and the other wife came in and then my dad. We yelled “Surprise” when my dad came in but he still thought that it was a birthday party for the other guy so he goes back into the hall to pull the other guy inside. It was hilarious!

My dad was absolutely shocked and surprised. He couldn’t believe that we had pulled the party off. KT, my youngest sister, put together a montage of music and pictures of my dad from when he was a baby until now. It was very cool. My dad had this big, huge grin on his face the entire night. I’m so glad that we were able to pull it off!!!

I have a four day weekend ahead of me with fun plans. We’re headed up to PA to visit the Architect’s parents and to visit the infamous Farm Show. We went with my now MIL last year and had a blast. It’s basically like a county fair on steroids. Having grown up in a county where we actually got a day off to attend the fair, I appreciate that.

Last year we were just there to wander around but this year, we’re on a mission; we’ll call it Operation: Sweet Beehive and we’re looking for honey. You see, back in September when we stayed in Assisi, we were introduced to the most amazing honey that I had ever tasted. And it came from right there on the farm. It had all of these amazing crystals in it and the texture was like honey mixed with sugar. I could have eaten that honey slathered on a ciabatta roll for the rest of my life. I love just about any kind of honey but this kind was on another level.

We bought one small jar back to the States with us and I savored it and used it sparingly. I scraped every last drop of honey out of the jar and was about as close to devastated as you can get over a food item. I tried looking for something similar in some of the grocery stores (including some of the higher end ones like Whole Paycheck… er… Foods) to no avail. I found raw honey, which is also very good but it’s. Not. The. Same. Every food-type place that we go, I keep my eyes out for something that comes close. I haven’t seen anything since we’ve been back in the States. My stomach finds this unfortunate… very unfortunate.

So when I realized that we would be able to make it to the Farm Show again, I was excited as there are tons of vendors selling all sorts of things and I think I remember seeing honey there. I’m hopeful! Otherwise I may just have to start importing my own honey from Italy…

Hopefully it’ll be a great success!

Edit:

There are many reasons that I feel like I won the In Law Lottery. My in-laws are really, really great people and super thoughtful. We got to PA late Friday night and early Saturday morning at breakfast, my mother in law presented us with honey that she thought might be what we were looking for. The Architect and I tasted it and it was most definitely our honey.

Here’s the deal: it’s raw honey; unheated, unfiltered, unpasteurized. My MIL found it at a local farmers market from an Amish farmer. So now we know what to look for but my MIL has already offered to get honey whenever we wanted! Score!

I do love being able to stay connected with friends through outlets like Xanga or Facebook. The thing I don’t like about it is that it seems to make a lot of people really lazy about how they remain connected to their friends.

When the Architect and I got engaged a year and a half ago, we made sure that we told all of the important people in our life that we were engaged either in person or by phone before we updated our social networks. We didn’t want anyone to feel like we didn’t think they weren’t important enough to reach out and touch before we let our digital world in on our happy news.

I think I probably complained about this in a protected post this summer but one of my very good friends, the one that introduced the Architect and I, announced her engagement on Facebook. I was pretty hurt about it and admittedly I can be a little passive aggressive on my worse days. I didn’t know what to do so I wrote “Congratulations” on her FB wall and let it alone. I was steaming though.

She did call me almost right away with a feeble excuse about wanting to get the news all out at once but I was still pretty hurt. Especially because she apparently considers me important enough in her life to have me in her wedding (she was in my wedding party as well). I just found it strange.

Yesterday, the Architect and I had another good friend that announced their engagement on Facebook. Again, we knew that they would probably be getting married soon (they announced that they were pregnant at Christmas and wanted to be engaged before the baby comes in August). We had even talked about helping them out with wedding planning and the wedding itself so the engagement is sort of a formality I suppose.

I guess I was a little less upset about this second situation because it wasn’t a big surprise or anything but it had me wondering, is this a common practice now?

What do you think about this? Is there ever news that’s inappropriate to share on the web?

I originally posted this protected but now since it’s over, I want to tell you all the conclusion!

I’m only protecting this post because it doesn’t have a conclusion yet. I’ve been playing phone tag with La Bonne Fille (LBF), one of my dearest friends. I was able to speak to her for a few minutes last night right as we were on our way to grab Indian food (I was feeling congested and chicken vindaloo seemed like a good cure) and she told me this gem of a story. I know I’ve written a lot about her but as a refresher, she lives in a pretty small town in Alaska.

Up there a lot of people just leave their cars running (and therefore their keys in the car and car doors unlocked if they don’t have auto-start) when they run into places because it’s so bloody cold. Otherwise, it can be very difficult to get the car restarted. So LBF goes into the nail salon and does the typical Alaska thing with her car. When she comes back out, she realizes that her backpack with her laptop has been stolen and is pretty freaked out. She and her husband filed a report with the cops right away. The cops also suggested looking on Craigslist and Ebay as well as some of the pawn shops in town. The cops and the pawn shop people also made a point to tell LBF that usually what happens is that the thief will usually wait a little while before selling the stolen item so they should be sure to check in the coming weeks and months.

LBF decided to look at Craigslist in the meantime just to see if there was even a Craigslist for their area in Alaska. There is and there happened to be a listing from the day after the computer was stolen for a must-sell MacBook Pro laptop. Now, like I said, LBF is in a small town so the coincidence of her computer getting stolen and the same kind of computer appearing on Craigslist around the same time are sort of eerie.

LBF was able to get the serial number from Apple. LBF’s husband and his friend (both intimidating looking guys) put in a request to buy the computer from the seller. They’re going to meet with the buyer and compare the serial number.

If the computer turns out to be stolen, the thief wins the World’s Dumbest award… I’ll let you all know what happens.

Update:

So LBF’s husband and friend went to meet up with the seller and unfortunately the serial numbers didn’t match up meaning that it wasn’t her computer. If it had been her computer, finding it so quickly on Craigslist would have been really amazing, no? I told her to keep looking and checking but she does need a computer right now (she’s working on her Masters) so she’s getting another one. Still, it would be nice to find her old one!

I was actually able to relax this weekend with the Architect. I feel pretty refreshed for once, which is nice. We got our new bigger and more comfy mattress delivered on Saturday. Of course, the delivery guys gave us a time frame in which they would deliver the mattress (12:30 to 3:30). Perhaps unsurprisingly, they didn’t show up until about 3:15pm meaning that we had a good chunk of time to simply laze about the house. It’s kind of nice to be forced to do that (haha). Neither the Architect nor myself are very good at relaxing so it was nice to have an actual reason to just hang out at home and not do much of anything.

We caught up on a few West Wing episodes (the Architect is making me watch the series as I had never seen it when it was actually on and I love it!). I caught up on some reading. We did a little bit of organizing and cleaning around the house so we were also productive.

I love a good staycation! It was exactly what the doctor ordered. It’s nice to feel like I actually had a weekend for once.

How was your weekend?

It’s easy to feel isolated in this city. I’m not sure if it’s like this in every city but one of my major complaints about living here is that everyone is seemingly in their own little bubble and it can be very intimidating to approach people. I’ve missed having friends in this area. There isn’t a set place to make friends like there was in school. I can be pretty social but I have to be comfortable in order to do so and it’s hard to find that comfort here. I’m on that weird line between being an introvert and an extrovert so sometimes it’s hard for me to break out of my shell. Once I get comfortable around a person, I’m a total chatterbox but that takes getting through that initial wall of shyness, which I sometimes have a hard time doing.

I suppose in a way, another resolution this year is to put myself out there a little bit more. The Architect has a few activities going on so he sort of already has that built in system. I joined a book club here in town through Meet Up. The meeting isn’t until the beginning of February but I think it might be a good way to break out of my shell a little bit more. It would be nice to meet some book-minded people too; I desperately miss that. Getting signed up with the Y will also help to get us out there a little bit more too. It’s certainly a process… I’m also playing around with the idea of finding some sort of language lessons (most likely Spanish or Italian) to take.

(No, I didn’t just go to London. This is a much needed post about the last place we stopped for our honeymoon back in October. Eh, better late than never.)

When we touched down in Europe, I told the Architect that I wanted to make sure that we didn’t come back from vacation more tired than we were when we left. He agreed and we had a wonderfully relaxing vacation in Italy where we took naps everyday and spent many hours sipping on cappuccinos and eating gelato. When we got to London, our last and final stop, that went out the window. I am a total Anglophile and as I had never been to London before, I wanted to see everything! I dragged my poor, dearest husband hither and yon through the streets of London in order to attempt to cover my very long list of sights to see (I definitely need another trip back to London).

We took a tour of Westminster Abbey. It was very cool. I didn’t realize how many people were actually buried in the church.

We took a nighttime walk down the Thames in the rain. It was so cool to see Big Ben in person!

Our hotel was just down the street from Buckingham Palace. We were fortunate enough to be there on a day where they did the changing of the guard.

I believe at this point, the changing of the guard is pretty ceremonial but I couldn’t believe how long the ceremony took. It was way cool though!

I really liked Trafalgar Square! It was huge!

Of course we both had to get our pictures taken in the red phone booths.

They were also way cool.

Here’s a list of things we did that I didn’t really get pictures of:
- Saw Les Miserables in the West End
- Went to the British Museum
- Went to the Tate Modern (that building is amazing)
- Saw Saint Paul’s (where Princess Diana got married)
- Went to the Tower of London
- Ate amazing Indian food
- Decided pub food is not for me