Throwback Thursday

Sisters, 2005

There I Was. There We Were.

Every surface of the room was littered with the tools of the bridal trade. Ten cans of hairspray, diffusers and flat irons, pots of eye-shadow and lipsticks in thirty different shades of pink were scattered across the tables in a jumbled celebration of femininity and behind two chairs stood two women whose job it was to match the right tool to the right girl.

Hair and make-up done and wedding dress on, I stood to the side, wondering if I could risk sitting down or if the dress would wrinkle, something I had received dire warnings about along with the potential for red wine stains, people stepping on my train and ripping the delicate fabric, and the bustle falling down during dancing. I suddenly felt like I was wearing a time bomb instead of a dress. I decided to stand.

For the first time that weekend, everyone was preoccupied with something other than me. It was a quiet moment in a startlingly unquiet succession of days that allowed me to really think for the first time since my wedding weekend started.

I was nervous. Really nervous.

I wasn't nervous about getting married. About that, I felt absolutely sure and utterly serene.

Instead, I was nervous about the day. About all the people who were gathering downstairs to look at me and watch me and take pictures of me and comment on my dress and my hair and whether I should have gone with the pearl earrings instead of the old-fashioned diamond huggies that had been my grandmother's, and whether it was a mistake to take off the veil after the ceremony. About making sure I absorbed every moment of the day since everyone told me that it would go by so fast and that I had to make an actual effort to remember it all, as if my wedding day was somehow something forgettable.

I peered into the mirror, hoping to remind myself that I was still me despite all the makeup and fifty pounds of ivory lace, but with sweaty palms and a pounding heart, I felt more like a zoo animal, kept in an enclosure to entertain the visiting masses.

*****************************

It was after midnight by the time we got to our hotel room.

I headed straight for the bathroom, unzipping my dress along the way and leaving it pooled on the floor. While I yanked pins out of my hair and scrubbed off layers of make-up, David perused the room service menu since we hadn't eaten anything since morning and were positively famished.

Half an hour later, showered, changed, and considerably more comfortable than either of us had been all day, we sat cross-legged on the massive bed sharing caesar salad and mini bags of potato chips

As we talked and laughed about the events of the day and looked at some pictures that my aunt had just sent over I caught a glimpse of us in the mirrored closet door and finally saw what I had been trying so hard to see since morning.

There I was.

There we were.

Same as always.

Home Alone...

Where I spend my days (and some nights) when I'm home alone

When I lived in an apartment in Manhattan, I never thought too much about being home alone. Occasionally David would go away for work and I would just carry on like everything was normal. I would miss him of course, but I went about my regular routine, ate the same way, slept the same way, and lived in my apartment just like I do every day.

Now that we live in a house, being home alone is an entirely different experience.

Luckily David doesn't have a job that requires much traveling, but for one week every March he goes to Austin, Texas to run a booth for his company at the South by Southwest trade show. It is a massively important week for his business - both for the exposure and the contacts that he makes where he is down there, and requires him to go down a day or two early to set up, and stay a day after to break down the booth and pack everything away for the trip home.

This week is South by Southwest week.

Friday morning he boarded a plane bound for Austin and Friday afternoon I got home and got down to the business of being home alone.

It occurred to me as I locked the front door - both bolt lock and handle thank you very much - just how damn big my house felt. Normally the perfect size for the two of us, the prospect of being alone in it for six days made the house feel like Buckingham Palace. Suddenly there were far more dark corners and doorways where ax murderers could be hiding and the walk up the stairs and down the hall to my bedroom felt as long as a marathon.

And the noises. Don't get me started on the noises. Do you know how often a one hundred year old house settles? Neither did I, until I was the only one in said house without a single person to talk to to drown out the creaking. Between the creaking, the incessant running of my sump pump due to melting snow, and a boiler that cycles on an off every time I so much as turn on a hot water tap, by late Friday night I was two minutes away from abandoning my lovely and quiet suburban neighborhood and heading straight back to the never-ending cacophony that is Manhattan at night.

So I thought I would give myself and break and just go to sleep, figuring that if I was sleeping I wouldn't be worrying about whether that bang was just the ice machine or - far more likely - someone trying to break in through the back door. The thing is, I can still hear all the noises from my bedroom. It's just that instead of being in the living room with the lights on, I was in my bedroom in the dark.

Needless to say, it was a long night.

I spent most of the weekend in the living room on the couch, eating snacks instead of meals and venturing to the second floor just to sleep. Don't think I didn't almost cave to the pressure and sleep right there on the living room couch. But I'm a grown woman, so I forced myself upstairs and to my regular bed and then gave myself a hearty pat on the back for being so mature about the whole thing.

Seriously, how do you people with houses do it?

It's three more days that I'll be home alone, and I'm hoping that it'll get a little easier every day. And just in case it doesn't, my good friends Ben and Jerry and some of their brand new cores flavors are waiting in my freezer to keep me company.

I think I'll probably just have them for dinner.

Throwback Thursday

Best friends.

First year in NYC.

Drinks at the W.

Because we thought we were just that cool.

Double Trouble

So I'm sitting on the couch, watching TV, minding my own business, when I hear a noise.

Now, having only lived in my 100 year old house a little over a year, as I have, I am not quite used to all the random noises that it makes. And, having been plagued with plumbing issues as we have, a noise is never just the house settling or the furnace humming to life. It is much more likely to be a pipe bursting, a major leak, or some other household disaster that I am ill equipped to fix.

Turns out, it was none of those.

As I looked around wildly to figure out what it could be and then decided that whatever it was could wait until David came home - since he is the best homeowner to ever walk the planet, and then solution to all of my home repair and improvement needs - the source of the noise rolled towards me.

It seems that David had bought himself a robot a la The Good Wife to take to his trade shows so that he could have one of his employees helping him man the booth while not actually being physically present at the show.

He calls it his Double, and while its primary use is for his upcoming trade show in Texas, until that day arrives he is using it to scare the hell out of me as frequently as possible.

Witness the picture above.

While my attention was focused elsewhere, he rolled himself (and his dad, who who he was visiting) over to the side of the couch and waited patiently for me to notice him - and jump three feet in sheer terror once I did. And he and his dad laughed and laughed.

This Friday the Double will be taking a trip to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, but until then he is gracing the corner of my living room keeping R2-D2 company. 

Because who wouldn't want a living room filled with robots, of all shapes and sizes? Now if I could only teach one of them to do the laundry. Then we would be talking.

A Spin Class And An Obsessive Personality

I've pretty much come to terms with the fact that I have an obsessive personality.

When I first discovered running, I immediately started training for a half marathon. When I find a particular food I like, I have to eat it all the time. I can't just read books, I have to own them and they have to live on my shelves in a particular order according to an organizational system that I devised myself and honed with a religious zeal.

I come by this phenomenon naturally. My mom has it, and so do both of my sisters, so whenever any of us get into an obsessive cycle, we just give into it and laugh it off and wait for the crazy to pass. 

So it came as no surprise to me that once I went to my first spin class and loved it, I desperately needed to go to a million more, like, yesterday. For a few minutes I even considered a regular Soulcycle habit, but with the $34 per class price-tag and the knowledge that the more I went the more I would want to go, my better angels prevailed and I started hunting around for a cheaper option.

I found it in the New York Sports Club near my house where there are at least 4 spin classes a day, every day, and as long as you pay your relatively reasonable monthly membership fee you can go to as many as you want.

I was never someone who particularly loved to exercise. I viewed it as mostly drudgery; something you do because you have to, kind of like brushing your teeth or taking out the garbage. But when I discovered running I started to understand why people actually like getting up at the crack of dawn and moving their bodies in strange and unnatural ways. And now that I have discovered spin, exercise has taken on an entirely new meaning.

Sitting in a dark, crowded and stiflingly hot room with music blasting while an instructor yells at you doesn't seem like it would make for a very good time, but it really, really does. I never really thought of myself as a gym person, but it turns out that there really is something to exercising while surrounded by hundreds of like-minded people.

Or maybe it doesn't and there isn't, and I'm just a glutton for punishment, in an obsessive way of course.

But this is one obsession that shows no signs of abating any time soon. I know this because during the Academy Awards this past Sunday night Pharrell got up and performed his song Happy from Despicable Me 2. And while I loved that the performance was so great and I really loved him getting the likes of Lupita, Meryl and Amy Adams shimmying, what I really loved was the fact that Happy is the warm up song in my Sunday morning spin class and when he started singing I could actually feel my feet pedaling, as if I was sitting in the class.

So call me crazy, or call me obsessive. It's ok. I'll be the first one to tell you that I'm both.

But while I tell you, I'll probably be spinning.