He Is...

Happy Anniversary to my Hubs. Today is our wedding anniversary and our together anniversary as well. After being together for the better part of a decade, we didn't think that introducing a new anniversary date would work out too well. Lucky number 13 would pull through again for us(me) and allow our wedding day to fall on our anniversary. In honor of this special occasion, I dedicate this post to him and why I am lucky to call him my Hubs.

He is the calm to my storm. He may be the ginger in this relationship, but I am definitely the one with the fiery temper. One statement taken the wrong way can usually lead to cacophony of slammed cupboard doors as I stomp around the kitchen cleaning, and a pout that can last for the better part of an afternoon/evening. It's become a running joke, that whenever he wants me to clean, all he has to do is piss me off, and the house will be spotless. Side note, I can't clean anything now without being asked what I'm mad about and is it his fault. Fortunately, 11 years has provided him with some insight as to how to deal with my rages. He can deal with me calmly and effectively without aggravating the beast even more. I'm sure he is ready to put a fence around me with a Beware of Irate Wife sign and go hunker down in the underground bunker.

He is the eldest to my youngest. If any of you have read anything about child psychology and birth order, then you would know that eldests and youngests is one of the better matched pairs. Partners who are the eldest naturally tend to take the lead and like to be the "boss" while youngests are used to having things done for them and are willing to follow. I think you can see why these types of people would make good matches. We are a textbook example, especially when we travel. Hubs is on the ball researching EVERYTHING. If I tell him what I want to do and when I want to do it, he's on the internet for hours with how we're going to get there, how long it's going to take to get there, etc etc. You get the idea. Hell, he even figured out the subway system in Prague. And while I am perfectly capable of doing this myself, if he's willing to do it, why would I deny him? But to be clear, he's not some chest-banging caveman that drags me by my hair expecting me to follow blindly. He's very perfectly willing to let me be in the driver's seat when I want or to consider any alternatives that I point out. But he's so good at what he does; I think I'll just continue to let him drive.

He is the comedy to my drama. He makes me laugh. Plain and simple. He makes me laugh when I don't want to laugh and that's usually when I need to the most. When I am particularly feeling low, a well timed, off-colored joke from him is all it takes to clear the gray and get me smiling again.

He is the love to my hate. Hate is a strong word, but I'm working with a theme here. Hubs and I are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. We do have our disagreements. Sometimes those disagreements are loud. Sometimes those disagreements can be silent....for a few days. But what he has never failed to do was say I love you to me, and then make me say it back. This has got to be, hands down, one of the most important and hardest things that I have learned from him. You always say it back because you never know what can happen. Oh, how I resisted though. The last thing I wanted to do was tell him, "I love you", when what I really wanted to do was hurl the nearest frying pan at his head (see that temper?), so usually he had to settle for a grunted, "you too", in response. It's still a work in progress, but I've managed to go from grunting to saying the whole damn phrase with as much civility as possible, AND, without gritting my teeth. Progress, people, progress. That's what's important.

I could go on and on, but for the sake of brevity, I will cut myself off here. All in all, my hubs is a rockstar. He is a supergenius, gentle souled, not hard-to-look at rockstar. Does he have his faults, sure. Who doesn't? Do I wish that he wouldn't turn every room of the house into his personal hamper? Of course. Do I wish that he would learn to put dirty dishes into the sink and not on the counter catty corner to the sink? You betcha. But at the end of the day, they are faults that I am willing to live with, because to live without them, would be to live without him, and I just don't believe that I would want to or could do that. Hopefully, he feels the same way about me and mine. Or else he's in for a long 50+ years.

Okay, the cliches are done. Promise.

So, here's to my Hubs.
Happy Anniversary!
I love you so very much!

Onward Paleo!

I have to admit. Eating paleo for a majority of the time isn't that bad. You just have to plan. I think I have stumbled onto a few things that I will keep in the rotation.

Breakfast:

A sweet potato frittata with veggies. This is so versatile. You just change up the veggies, or even add meat, when you feel like a change. I started with asparagus/onions/garlic/mushrooms. This week, peas and mushrooms. I had this in my previous post about paleo eating, but it's served me well for the last couple of weeks.

Snack:

Fruit and nuts. Again, versatile enough to where you can switch up the fruit and nuts when you get bored. Before I leave for work, I pour in coconut milk. A sweet little treat mid-morning. Would probably work well as a dessert too. To give credit where it's due, I totally stole the idea from the website LeanMachineNYC.

Lunch:

Sweet potato chowder with chicken, corn, and mushrooms. Boil the sweet potatoes, throw into a crockpot with two cans of coconut milk and blend until smooth. Throw in the chicken, mushrooms, onion, garlic, corn, and any spices you want, and let her rip on low for 6-8 hours. It was sooo good! It had a taste of coconut soup that you can get from Thai restaurants, but so much heartier with everything else thrown in. A great fall soup. And can I just say that the new immersion hand blender that I just got is now one of my favorite kitchen tools.

All in all, for about a week and half worth of food, took me about 2 hours total from prep to closing the lid on the crockpot. Not bad.

I haven't been as great about preparing dinner as sometimes, I honestly just don't have an appetite for dinner so I will munch on some nuts or veggies. My attempt at zucchini spaghetti last week was a disaster because I'm not talented enough to "julienne" with just a knife. I have now bought myself a julienne peeler and will be attempting again to make the zucchinis my bitches later this week.

Apologies for the crappy photo quality. The lighting in my kitchen isn't great.

Stay tuned to see what I come up with next week! I think I like doing these posts better than the weekend in review collages. Let's face it, I'm a boring old suburbanite that has no weekend life outside of sitting on my behind catching up on the dvr, and food is just much more fun.

On the Cusp

Finally, it is October. Do you ever have those months that you can never seem to get out of? For me, getting out of the month of August has always been just tortuous. As a native Georgian, by the time August rolls around, I am so freakin' tired of the triple digit temps and extreme humidity. I am ready for summer to be done and fall to roll in with the pretty colors, the fall festivals, and being able to go outside and not be drenched in sweat two seconds out. Summers are just slow and getting out of August usually marks that whatever I am waiting for to happen will happen so much faster.

This year, life bucked tradition, and August was upstaged by September. As busy as hubs and I were during this month, it is amazing how September seemed to never end! And I know exactly why. Hubs and I are on the cusp of finally being able to figure out the rest of our lives. Okay, well maybe not the rest of our lives, but at least for the foreseeable future. What can I say, I have a flair for the dramatics.

I shall explain.

Hubs is currently in the final stages of his PhD in finance. He has been working towards this for about 5 years. And for those 5 years, we've been forced to dance to the tune of "if this happens, then we'll do this" because we literally had no idea what would happen when it would be time for him to finish. Would it be a bad job market, and he would have to stay for another year? Would we have to move to another continent altogether? Would we be able to stay here with our families and friends close by? The possibilities were endless, and it made planning for ANYTHING impossible.

And because we enjoy having a roof over our heads, and we also really enjoy that pesky habit of eating even more, I've kept myself chained to my alarm clock and cubicle in an endless cycle of Office Space meets Groundhogs' Day. As a result, we've had to put starting a family on hold. His program is so demanding, and that makes his schedule, while flexible, so unstable, that it would have seemed as though I were a single-working mother, and I just plain didn't want to do that. When I have children, I want to be able to devote my full energy and attention on him/her/them with the option of being able to do anything else I want to when I so choose. I won't lie. I don't need to juggle a job and a family to feel fulfilled. I couldn't juggle in gym class at school, not going to attempt it now at the expense of my children. I am probably a disappointment to the women's lib movement, but hey, it's all about choice, right? Fortunately, we will be in a position for us to have this choice that a lot of families don't have. But I digress. Now that we are finally so close to figuring out what our next move is going to be, we can start to plan more concretely for when this baby thing can happen. Thank jeebus, too. With all the pregnancies and newborn babies that I am surrounded with, I was starting to channel Marisa Tomei, in My Cousin Vinny, stomping her foot on the wooden porch trying to explain to Joe Pesci that her biological clock is not just ticking, but pounding.

So hopefully, we should know fo' sho' where we are going by February. If everything works out like we hope it will work out, we might even know by November. For now, we will sit and wait for the phone calls for interviews to come. At least the if-then game has settled down a little bit, and we've had a chance to focus on some specific areas. What was now a chance to move between 50 states and two continents, has now been whittled down to about 20 states and this continent. We will fly out to Denver later this month for the first round of interviews.

Let the games end begin.