26 Going on 27

This adorable girl turns 27 tomorrow.  That's right, the big 2-7

Tomorrow I turn 27. I have only one task thought on this event, and it's not particularly insightful. My only real qualm is that 27 doesn't sound as sexy as 26. Not that the grand age of 26 is all that sexy, but it really beats out the sound of "I am 27 years old".

Maybe its because 26 is an even number. Or because 26 only has 3 syllables, and 27 breaks into the 4 syllable range. Or maybe it's because you are still in your mid 20's when your 26. And 27, well 27 is basically 30. That's right folks, we are on the slow march to 30.

Or is it more of a climb?  I am a good climber

Anyways, this will be my last post at the somewhat sexy, but definitely sexier than 27, age of 26. And the only reason I had to write was simply to say that my birthday is tomorrow, that I am getting old and that I don't particularly like the sound of "I'm 27".  At least not yet. We'll see where the year takes us.

Weekend Update: To-Do List Success

This is going to be a busy week, but before we got too far along, I wanted to check in with you guys with a quick weekend update, especially after boosting about my to-do list making skills on Thursday.  So, let's start there.

Surprise of all surprises, I completed 3 of the 4 items from Thursday (and, to be honest, sadly I had a feeling in my bones that that damn vacuum cleaner was not going to get fixed).  I found a way to successfully charge my DSLR camera.  While the actually camera charging cord is still MIA, I scoured all the miscellaneous cords in our house (of which there are SO MANY) and managed to find not one, but two cords that would work!  I joyfully crossed out the first item from my list.

Next, I scoured The Baking Bible to decide what I was going to make (we all had a pretty good feeling that my major kitchen project was going to be bread).  While I pretended to consider other options, I knew all along that the fragrance I wanted emanating out of my ovens was cinnamon raisin bread.  So I got started on that.

Finished product.  Look at those homemade beauties

The great thing about making bread is that while it is an all day task, there is plenty of downtime as well.  I managed to start the dough and then hit the gym and get a new library card at the Poplar Creek Library (on a side note, what a neat library!  But, I am a dork who appreciates a good library).  After giving a little more love to my bread, I managed to cut out the pattern for my pajama pants.

And this is where I stumbled (granted, I didn't realize it until Sunday).  I spent a considerable amount of time lining up the very cute stripes of my very cute fabric to make my pj pants as very cute (and professional) looking as I could.  There was much manipulating and studying of the fabric.  So much so, that I managed to completely overlook the very simple fact of how I folded the fabric.  So, as I was showing off my handiwork on Skype the next day to my mom and sister I realized that I could out one half of my pajamas upside down.  So, while the adorable stripes will line up front to back, left to right they will flip 180 degrees.  I have decided that this will be a cute quirk of my pants and will forge on.  Final pictures of this adorable mistake to come.

This was a heartbreaking realization on Sunday.  But at least the fabric is cute, right?

Besides ricking my to-do list, Ben and I also went to the movies on Saturday night.  We went to see Gone Girl, but decided to switch movies when the only 2 seats together where in the second row from the front.  So, we changed our tickets to Big Hero 6, which was much funnier and more enjoyable than I thought it was going to be.  On Sunday, we had a classic Target shopping trip.  Our list had 3 items to pick up at Target, and when we left there $150 later, only one of the items on our list had actually been purchased.  But we did pick up an awesomely large clock and several strings of Christmas lights.  I will be the first to admit that our weekends need a little more excitement to them.

Anyways, this week will be busy.  My 27th birthday is on Thursday, although it doesn't seem like it is late enough in the year for it, but the calendar doesn't lie.  I am at Northwestern Medical Center most of the week watching a SPECT/CT camera get installed and Ben has class on Friday, so I don't think there will be much celebrating anyways.  And that is about it.  I'll try to think of something more excited to check in with but it might be a few days.  Hope your Monday included much less Chicago traffic than mine did!

One more shot, because that swirl of cinnamon is a work of culinary art

Holding Me To It

I have a barrage of thoughts all vying for top blog billing this week. It’s been a few days since last writing, so I am anxious to get back to it (I feel like I get out of a groove whenever I stop for a few days), but have been struggling with what I should write about.

This week has consisted mostly of: work, food, complaining about the fact that it’s getting cold, and cuddling with dog (in no particular order), so idea for blogging material has been lacking. The three top ideas were as follows: 

• The fact that my 27th birthday is a week from today (ekk - and yet, I have nothing of any actual value to add to the I'm turning 27! conversation.  But I'm pretty sure Buzzfeed has a least one "27 things to do before your 27" list).
• Neighbors (I have them.  They interact with us.  It's new and weird.  I still may eventually write this post).
• Things I am planning on doing this weekend.

List and a cup of a coffee.  It was a hopeful Saturday morning

And even though it sounds like the least interesting in that list of 3, I am going with the last bullet point.  Last weekend, Ben and I made an extensive weekend to-do list. Surprising both of us, we made a very large dent in it. While there is a few items still left (fix vacuum. Ben’s haircut), I was proud of what we accomplished.  So, obviously I figured I should keep the to-do list thing going, to accomplish even more things.  And then I thought it was a good idea to proclaim it to the internet in hopes that you guys would hold me to it.  Total blog-worthy topic.

I love drawing lines through things

Last Weekend of Being 26 To-Do List:
(which is totally (sadly)  not what one may expect...)

• I made Ben cozy pajama pants last year for Christmas. I finally got around to completing them a few weeks ago (it was the hemming, I was strangely adverse to completing this one small step that would complete the total project). Back when I bought the fabric in November of 2013, I also bought myself some fabric to make myself pj pants. It’s sitting uncut in my office. I’d love to get to that.
• Figure out how to bring my nice DSL camera back to life. I lost the cord that connects the charger to the wall and my battery has been dead since, oh I don’t know, we got back from our honeymoon 9 8 months ago. And, the icing on the cake is that my camera phone is pitiful (in case you hadn’t figured that one out already…). This really needs to be rectified. Life pictures should be taken.
• Tackle a project in the kitchen. It’s Thursday night and I still haven’t decided what it should be, but I want to make something involved. Maybe a lasagna, or another pot pie to win favor with the husband. Or maybe I will bake some bread. I haven’t made bread in a while, and it makes a house feel so warm and smell so comforting. So, maybe I have decided what I will make. I will scour recipes tonight to finalize. (Side note, Martha Stewart’s lentil soup? Amazing. Easy. Give into the cold and make it, preferably a double batch. Maybe eat with homemade bread?)
• Fix that damn vacuum cleaner. I am out of excuses to avoid it. Boo. 

Alright, there it is.  Let's see how I do.

Who wouldn't want to cook from this beautiful tome?

Weekend Update: Introducting Mr. Bernoulli Fritsch

The big news this weekend (for those of you not paying attention), is that we finally brought home a little puppy, 3 months old and so far, seeming to be like his "forever home". We have named him Bernoulli (this is the sad sort of thing that happens when 2 engineers marry each other) and we both already love him to pieces.

In our defense, how do you not love this face?

I will admit that the first night was a rough one.  We had only known each other about 4 hours before we penned him up in our bathroom with a baby gate and attempted to sleep.  It was a night of whining and yips and 4 bathroom trips outside that I begrudgingly allowed.  There was no sleep for me that night, laying awake and wondering if this really was the best idea.  The next day was a little tough as well, with Ben having to be at school all day, me in a lack-of-any-real-sleep haze and Bernoulli simply being a non-house trained puppy.  The next two nights were much better, we planned the bathroom breaks and Bernoulli slept peacefully in his crate (in the living room).  Even though one of us has to be on diligent puppy watch anytime he is not confined to his crate to prevent any accidents (of which there have been too many in my opinion...), it was a fun weekend.  A fun weekend in which not much else got accomplished, but that was to be expected.

Major cuddles

Bernoulli is a cuddler, which I am absolutely loving.  He will climb right into your nap and settle in, usually sticking his snout tight in between your arm and torso.  And he is deadly adorable when he is sleeping.  He somewhat knows how to play "Go Get It", which is what Ben has decided to call the game of fetch.  And he gives lots of kisses, which sort of lose their appeal when you know that 15 minutes earlier you were forcing him to drop the poop from some other dog so he wouldn't eat it.  Even so, we are pretty much completely smitten (and can't wait to send out the family Christmas cards to prove it).

The least blurry picture I could get of crazy on our ride home

The rescue shelter where we got him was calling him a lab mix.  In person, at least to Ben and myself, he doesn't look lab at all.  Our most educated guess (i.e Google image searches...) is that he is mostly black mouth cur, with maybe some boxer in him.  We are thinking about getting him tested to find out what he is for sure.  He's a deep, red-tan color, with one white (and lucky) paw and some white at the tip of his tail and on his chest.  What you n really need to know is that he is completely adorable.

In other weekend news, not much else happened.  Saturday was completely shot, since I was a single-puppy-mom, sleep-deprived zombie.  But after better sleep Saturday night and a helping hand on Sunday, I did manage to clean the kitchen, do some grocery shopping, put away the Halloween decorations and clean both bathrooms (what can I say, I lead a wild and crazy life).  Although our precious Bernoulli easily takes home the prize of most exciting thing to happen this weekend, I am also pretty excited about finally hanging up the new shower curtain we bought some time ago.  It was a small change, but these small changes continue to make the house feel more home.  And it makes me smile every time I see our bathroom, so that's worth something, right? 

This shower curtain makes me smile without fail.  It is just so happy

Well, there you go, the first Fritsch Weekend Update of November, which just so happens to be the best month ever. Hope yours is off to a good start as well!

Nesting

Finally, tomorrow is Friday.  This whole week has just acted as a giant mud pit for me to struggle though, simply to finally get to Friday. While maybe this sounds like an exaggeration to most, to me it is very true.  I have been waiting for this particular Friday for what feels like forever.

For those of you who know me, patience is not my strong point. Actually those who know me know what a complete understatement that is. I am impatient to the point that I make children waiting to dive headfirst into a pillowcase full of Halloween candy seem calm.  So, it's amazing to realize that I have somewhat patiently been waiting for OVER FOUR YEARS now to bring a puppy into my heart and home. And, finally, at the end of this agonizingly long week, we get to bring our little puppy home. Excited doesn't even start to describe my feelings about tomorrow afternoon.

In preparation for bringing the new love of my life home, for the last few weeks, I have been nesting. That is a thing for a new puppy, right?

A personalized Lord of the Strings puppy bed, plus the cutest little elephant toy ever

We have bought a kennel for our puppy to use as their own little space.  I made a little puppy bed out of an old pillow and hubby's old high school band shirt (side note: they called themselves Lord of the Strings… and were a LOTR cover band. My husband was a mighty cool kid). We've been buying treats like they are going out of style. The restraint I have shown whenever I end up in the dog toy aisle in Target (which has been a surprisingly high number of times in the last few weeks) is almost saintly.  She still has plenty of toys and I am sure will get many more in the coming months.  We've puppy-proofed to the best of our knowledge and gone through lists and lists of adorable girl puppy names (we are waiting to finally meet her before officially naming her).  Some many hours, conversations and Amazon purchases have been geared towards this moment, when we finally get to bring her home.  I don't think I could wait another minute.

Our latest haul of treats.  She is going to be spoiled...

But I have to.  Cause it's still Thursday.  And we don't get to take her home until FRIDAY.  I will get about as much sleep as kids on Christmas Eve.  In other words, none.

This is going to be one loved puppy:

She is so DAMN CUTE.  I cannot stand it

Tuesday Moanings

Sad, but true

I woke up this morning hoping against all hope that it was later in the week than just Tuesday. I pulled my tired butt out of bed and discovered, as it turns out, it was only just Tuesday. I started my weekday morning routine. And then, as I was getting breakfast ready, I dropped two of our bowls on the floor where they exploded like ceramic fireworks. I spent the next eleven minutes giving our floor an incredibly thorough sweeping. Let me tell you, it was a fun, curse-word-free morning.

Is it karma that I want to use the internet for the sole sake of complain mere days after I wrote a post delineating just how happy I was? Probably. So, I will resist the urge. As well as the urge to make a list of "Things I am Excited for", in the hopes of turning around this drab Tuesday afternoon mood. Besides, I only came up with two things anyways…

In conclusion, may your week be progressing a little faster, and with less broken dishes, than mine.

Because I'm...

I am very sorry if this gets that damn "Because I'm Happy..." song stuck in your head.  That is the worst!
via

I've been noticing something over the past few days and it is this: I am happy. The sad thing about that sentence is that it really was something that I gradually noticed over the past few days and I feel like happiness is not something that it should take you any longer than a few minutes (not days!) to acknowledge. The good news is that it is a true, hard fact, inside and out. I am happy.

I don't know if it is cliché or not to attribute this seismic shift in attitude to a change in jobs, but it is what it boils down to: leaving one bad, stagnant environment for another that will push me to grow and development.

While this is funny now, there was a point where this quote almost made me cry with honesty
via

I love this quote from Parks and Rec. Mostly, I loved it when there was period of months upon months where it so concisely explained is how I constantly felt. Now a days, although I will admit that I still wake up tired like any normal human being, my day to day routine does not leave me mentally and physically exhausted.  Things once again get me excited.  Stuff matters.  Bed times have been less strictly enforced!  And I am attributing this all back to a slight shift in moods.  I am happy.

All that being said, I will admit to also being a little bummed because I think that for a chunk of time that Ben and I were supposed to be experiencing that "newly wed bliss", I was anything but blissful. Work honestly had me that down in the dumps. It was a bad situation all around and I'm not going to waste any of my new happy energy getting into it. Being out of that environment has made a world of difference. I am now one of those ridiculous "the sky is blue and the sun is shining and birds are singing!" happy people now. I am sad for losing those few months in between, where the stress and anger often made me unhappy. I wish we could have started out our married life as it is now. I also wish those sad months had not taken over all of my summer. Now, the days are shorter and colder and my happy dances are confined to enclosed, heated areas. What I am trying to say is this: it sucks to have lost such a chunk of time to being unhappy.  It is a very good thing that I got out of that situation.  And I am happy now and that is what I need to be focused on.  And not to worry, this is still plenty of the newly wed bliss to go around.

Currently, here the things I am very happy about:

1. Today I wore a skirt to work, for the first time ever. I loved every minute of it, even having to wear tights. I never was able to wear them before, skirts don't really go well with machine shop floors and steel-toed boots. So yay for office job with only occasional floor duties!
2. My husband built me a kitchen island. And it is beautiful. And when the sun comes streaming in through our 4 large sliding glass doors, everything in my kitchen suddenly gets a halo. Talk about a happy place.
3. I made my new favorite recipe last Sunday. And for 3 blissful days, we got to bring in the leftovers for lunch. Although it's all gone now, I am excited simply at the thought of making it again. And stuffing myself silly. And more leftovers, even after a dinner of stuffing ourselves silly. 
4. There is a hot water spigot about 12 feet from my desk. My tea consumption has increased ten-fold. Now that I think about it, maybe that is why I feel awake all the time… My new favorite tea is Tazo's Green Ginger, by the way.  
5. I've lost some weight. Ok, it's only like 2 pounds, but I didn't do anything to lose it. I didn't amp up my workout routine and, to be complete honest, that recipe I was talking about above had 2 sticks of butter in it…so... Happiness, the new fad diet! 
6. We live in a house, on a street, in a neighborhood with kids. THIS MEANS TRICK OR TREATERS ON HALLOWEEN. Since graduating, I have desperately wanted trick or treaters on Halloween. I have romanticized the idea to the fullest extent. The closest I ever got was my first Halloween, in McAllen, four years ago. Three teenage boys came around to my apartment and I gave them candy. They came around again, and since I hadn't had any one else come, I gave them more. And then they came around a 3rd time and called me names when I refused to give them any more candy. Needless to say, this was not the Halloween experience I had been idealizing. But I have a feeling that this year is going to be what I always hoped it would be! Accordingly, I have bought enough candy to not be the house that runs out of candy.

See, I told you I was an annoyingly, cup-half-full kind of person these days. I'm almost cheerful enough to get on my own nerves.. But, I do think the whole happy thing looks rather good on me.

What are you happy about these days?