Woods Hole, Massachusetts

I love the ocean, so visiting Cape Cod is always a welcome change from Minnesota. One great spot to visit is Woods Hole, which is a small village at the tip of the elbow of Cape Cod. It's part of Falmouth, the town where my father lives. When I was younger, I had a summer job out here at the Marine Biological Laboratory. I worked in the Embryology labs: I fed drosophila, broke a lot of lab glassware, fetched mail, and made photocopies.

Now I just go to Woods Hole for a cup of coffee and a nice walk or bike ride. On Sunday, we took a walk through town, starting, of course, with an iced latte from Coffee Obsession, my dad's coffee shop of choice in town. We walked down Water Street to a little park with access to a small beach, where we let the dogs run and swim for a bit.

There are docks here for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and my dad likes to tell me that the big boat he traveled on across the Atlantic when he was a teenager was parked at these docks.

We headed past the small aquarium where the seals are never out anymore (growing up, they were always there) and headed out to the dock where the fishing boats come in.



I've come here hundreds of times, and I've never seen a boat unloading fish before. On this day, there was a boat filled with conch and a boat filled with sea bass and scup:



After a little gift shop browsing near the drawbridge, we headed home to hit the beach. I love to find perfect spots like Woods Hole (you know my list, Terlingua, Moab...), so having one that I can come back to again and again is something I truly appreciate.

Our Honda

Thank you, Honda CRV, for all the road trips over the years! Here's to many more years together!

Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Austin, Four Corners, Big Bend, San Antonio, Guadalupe, Florida Everglades, Miami, Key West, Kansas City, Wallingford, Faribault, Twin Cities, Cape Cod, Boston, Amenia, NYC, Syracuse, Lake George, Maine, Black Hills, Mount Rushmore, St. Louis, New Orleans, Santa Fe, Moab, Denver, Nebraska, Kansas, Louisville, Savannah... not too mention just back and forth, around the corner, and down the street over and over again....

Dreading Unpacking

This is what we left behind....

Well, we did leave these two behind, too, so we can't avoid the unpacking for too long!

24 Hours in Central New York

Matt and I spent just about 24 hours in North Syracuse, New York visiting his mom this weekend. In that short amount of time, we packed in a pretty good tour of the area. We started at Angotti's for dinner, where Matt ordered the same meal he's been ordering for years: eggplant parmigiana. I had something I have been craving for months, pizza from the east coast:



Matt's family has been going to Angotti's for decades now ever since his uncle found a review of the restaurant in the newspaper. The owners and the staff seem to recognize them each time, and more than once we've run into people Matt and his family know. The hallway entrance is covered with restaurant reviews, Syracuse University memorabilia, and photos of famous people, like Tony Bennett, coming in for some Italian food. I usually resist loving things that other people gush about (e.g., the Beatles or Van Morrison), but I can't help it: I'm hooked, too.

After dinner, we headed out to Onondaga Lake, where there are miles of recreation trails. We just walked for a little while and made plans to come back the next day to ride our bikes. I was pleasantly surprised how many people were out and about both that evening and the next morning. People were rollerblading, shuffle boarding, biking, fishing, picnicking, rowing, and walking...



Hopefully, the amount of activity around the lake will help support efforts to clean it up as it remains seriously polluted.

On Saturday, we addressed another one of my food cravings. In Minnesota, I just can't seem to get a decent salami sub. In Massachusetts, I grew up with Greek pizza shops where you could get grinders piled high with provolone and Genoa salami, toasted in the pizza oven, and drizzled with olive oil. In Minnesota, we have Subway and other chains, but I can't seem to find a good grinder anywhere. In Syracuse, Matt and I turn to Wegmans (yes, the supermarket). I know it isn't a mom & pop sub shop, but I can get this:


After we had lunch, we joined some friends of Matt's mother on a boat trip up the Oneida River to Oneida Lake. I hadn't been on a powerboat in a long time, and I always forget how big the lakes in upstate New York are.



A pretty cool pause on the trip was Lock E23. I can't say I've ever been through a lock before. For those of you who might not know, a lock is a device that allows boats to pass through an area of a river or canal where there is a change in water level. After you enter the lock, the large doors close, and the water level is either lowered or raised depending on the direction you are going. The lock we passed through moved about 7 feet, and I was intrigued by the little tiny plants and the tiny, mostly dead, scorpion-looking bugs clinging to the lock walls. I don't one hundred percent understand when and where a lock is necessary, so I'll refer you to wikipedia if you need more info!



So, for someone itching to get to the ocean all the time, Syracuse turned out to be a perfect place for a break. I didn't expect to spend so much time on or near the lakes, but once again, like I said last summer, it's important to realize what perfect spots there are right where you forget to look for them.

43 Things

Matt and I have committed to reducing our possessions in three ways: by not buying unnecessary stuff, by asking our family not to buy us unnecessary stuff, and by culling our current possessions. Like most everyone, we (especially me) hold on to too many things that are really trash or could be used better by someone else. We love to collect books, and I have a soft spot for mementos. I'm holding on to closets, drawers, and bins full of clothes that I think I will wear someday. I have thousands of printed photographs, notebooks and papers from high school and college, and every letter or card I've ever received dating back to middle school.

Knowing the move was a possibility, this past spring we brought 10 kitchen-sized garbage bags of clothes to the local goodwill. Now that the move has passed, as we unpack our boxes, we decided to identify 100 things that we could give away, throw away, or sell at a yard sale. Before we left for vacation, we had only made it to 43...

1 of a pair of red lamps, with a broken glass base
1 mildewed yellow bathroom rug
1 box for our first GPS (kept box for current GPS)
1 Yankees brick door stop (decorative mouse long gone to the dogs)
1 disassembled fan with missing bolts (taken apart to be cleaned, but never reassembled)
4 disposable plastic potting pots (have too many ceramic ones)
1 chair with no cushions (cushions necessary) (formerly a dog bed for my dogs)
1 dust-vac with a chewed through cord (blame the dogs)
2 old brooms
1 yard stick
1 glass chip and dip serving tray that belonged to my grandmother and was missing a piece
1 tea set from China
1 purple vase from the florist
1 glass vase from the florist (they should give you a couple bucks back for returning them)
1 cast iron fajita skillet (regift from someone else who didn't use it)
2 candle plates (never used; didn't understand the trend)
1 orange soap or sponge holder
1 chipped oversized black coffee mug
4 Asian-inspired black coffee mugs from JC Penney
2 Asian-inspired sushi platters
1 Minnesota Gophers hoodie
1 lovingly painted but terribly constructed black bench that cost 35 dollars in 2004
1 milk bottle
1 dog themed book mark
1 orange plastic canister (the rest of the set will go whenever we find the box they are in)
1 beloved, well-worn, lime green Shattuck-St. Mary's polo (school colors: maroon and black)
1 paint-splattered team t-shirt from the 1st annual 2009 24 hour walk/run-athon
1 disappointing Diane Ackerman book
3 books, procured from a friend's pile of give away books, never read
1 red polo, too small for a woman with a 36C bra size, purchased from a store designed for teens
1 camisole
1 worn-out green bathing suit (I own 4 others)

43 down, 57 more to go....

Painting

Much better. But I feel like I can still see the orange right through this paint. This picture makes the blue look strange - it's a camera phone after all. Well, it's a start!

Next project (upon our return from vacation), repainting the pink rooms! I'm going to do this myself since it seems about time that I learned to paint a room.

Reality Sets In

Welcome Home, Courtney! (Boarding School Edition)

The bathrooms are so orange that when you turn the lights on, you risk being blinded. Strangers from hockey camp plunk their lawn chairs down in front of your front door. The toilet in the "master" bedroom doesn't work, and there are ants. The previous tenants removed three windows to put in air conditioners and took out all the screens. You can't use two utensil drawers because the stove and the fridge partially, just enough, block them. The kitchen faucet shoots water out when you use the cold water. There is a corner or three that smell like cat pee, and your dog has already christened a spot in retaliation. There are 4 pink rooms, one of which has a pink ceiling too, and there are rooms for 30 teenage boys next door!

But, the previous tenant planted beautiful flowers, and there are several big, old trees surrounding the building. You can stop using your car and walk to work every day, even on the coldest Minnesota winter day. You found the three windows and all the screens in the basement, and the first painting crew is coming on Monday. The stove and fridge are almost new, and you love making cookies for multitudes of kids. You have an office all to yourself and a whole other room for your sewing machine and quilting stuff. There's a lovely little patio out back, with a view of trees instead of buildings. And, perhaps best of all, for the first time ever since you left your parents' houses to go to Wesleyan, you'll have your own washer and dryer and they won't require quarters!

Moving

If ever there were something I didn't want to do often, it's move. My husband and I have almost completed a move .5 miles away from our apartment at the boarding school where we work into a bigger school apartment.

A bigger apartment in a dorm full of 30 teenage boys.

But more about that another day; I'm sure dorm life will provide endless fodder for blogging.

Moving sucks.

No matter how hard you try to start "early," the last day is always filled with rushed packing that consists of throwing everything left in a room in a box and labeling it "misc" (the full word is way too impossible for someone in the final hours of packing to spell correctly).

No matter how much you've worked on learning how to fight nicely with your spouse, the bitchy side of you can't seem to stay put. My poor husband has been moving boxes and furniture for days in the heat in hopes of reducing the cost of the movers, and I've felt the need to tell him to change his sweaty shirt many times. Now that's Saturday and I have a Smirnoff Ice Mango, I don't really see why I felt the need to comment on his shirt so much. But the sweet thing is, he didn't nag back at me. He just kept his sweaty shirt on and kept moving boxes.

Now that we're here, and 98% of our belongings are with us, I'm starting to feel human again.

Next project: throwing out/yard sale boxing 100 things. The list will be posted, of course. I promise I won't ditch any wedding presents, but I may ditch the leftover invitations....

Summer Travels

Well, Matt and I have been feeling kind of cranky because we don't have any exotic destinations planned for this summer. We didn't take any trips over the holidays in 2008, but we did take a big trip to Hawaii in March. That should satisfy most normal people, but I always want more adventure. Alas, there will be no super adventure this summer.

Instead, we are spending time with family and friends. I'm pretty frank with everyone: I don't believe visiting family is the same as vacation. But this year, I spent nearly a year away from the east coast, and I've missed it.

First we are DRIVING with TWO DOGS to Massachusetts and Connecticut to see my family. Driving with the pooches will surely provide some interesting tales to tell, and if it doesn't, all the creatures great and small at my mom's house (3 cats and 3 dogs with my sister and me in town) will surely inspire.

Then (after DRIVING back to Minnesota with TWO DOGS), we are flying to Walt Disney World in Orlando to see Matt's mom and family. Matt's cousin planned the trip and asked for all of us to consider joining her and her family. Now, I haven't been to Disney World since I was 12, and while I am definitely intrigued, I am always a little unsure of traveling in large groups. But, my long simmering desire to return to Journey to Imagination, the Land of Tomorrow, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and the Mexican restaurant at Epcot (as well as see family, of course) won out! I'll be stepping on that light-up floor piano and making hand shapes in that needle table before you know it. I have some Disney nostalgia, and seeing how things have or have not changed since the 80s will be fascinating, I'm sure. I'm curious if Land of Tomorrow (or Tomorrow Land?) has changed...

And finally, we are heading out to Portland to see some dear friends who have just recently had a baby! Hopefully, some of my other college compatriots will join us. I've never been to Oregon, but I am thrilled to see D.Baby and knock another state off my list.

So, the summer isn't poised to be full of exotic adventures, and we will definitely be staying state side, but as I write this out, I feel a little guilty for whining and a lot more grateful for the time we'll have to get away from school for a little while, be home, and see the people we miss so much.