what do you get when nerds marry?

two people who take the day off work to celebrate their 50th mensiversary.
(mensi=latin root for month)

we figured it will be a really, really, really long time before we celebrate our 50th anniversary, so we might as well take our 50s where we can get them! mostly it was an excuse to take a nice day off work together.

we did romantic stuff like shoe shopping and chemistry homework!

we managed to find time between studying for a drive up the gorge, resplendent in all its fall glory. we were stuck behind a van from a retirement home, which provided the double joy of allowing us to go 7mph on the columbia river gorge highway without feeling guilty, and driving in the van's wake of whirling leaves, which made me feel like a fairy.

the drive was officially over when, to get the exact angle on this photo, i had to crouch in a snowmelt creek in my non-waterproof clothing. joel bustled me back into the car, preaching on the various horrible diseases one can contract from wet feet. he knows these things now that he's had half a term of anatomy. ;)

celebrate: "to praise, to make widely known with rejoicing"

when i posted maternity photos of the thomas family, i called them waiting for new life.
heidi suggested this series could appropriately be called celebrating new life...

tim, heidi, and 10 week old kairis.

more here

the newest addition to our household

see that lovely vase? it was painted by joel's talented mom karen - isn't it beautiful???

(the handsome model was also made by joel's talented mom.)

thank you karen! :)

d(>_<)b ... i did it!

in other news, joel is taking intelligence to a whole new level* after finishing 3 midterms this week! that means that as a social unit, we are reentering the world of the living for approximately a fortnight, until he has to study for his next big tests.

so ... i have a question for you: are you listening to christmas music yet?

*i may be overstating slightly.

my second job is a fiendish baby-eater in a cable horror show called "scary blondes with bangs down to here"

...so you would think from this extraordinarily flattering series of photos of me interacting with my favorite two month old, courtesy of tim thomas (the photos and the two month old).
she really does smile for me. i promise.
one of us seriously needs a haircut.

lots and lots and LOTS of corn!

friday night was the first whole evening we spent together since joel started class.
we spent it lost, muddy, and cold.

it other words, we had the time of our lives...

originally we were going to spend some quality time cooking together! cooking (get this) a rachael ray recipe!! talk about friday night excitement! at about 4pm, joel decided (wisely) that he would prefer spending time with a wife who wasn't driven to distraction and had easy access to knives.
somehow, he's never in the house when i'm cooking.

so instead, we headed to the sauvie island corn ma"i"ze! (the largest in the portland area)

(joel thinks he looks like someone who would eat little children in this pic. i think he's cute.)

we were at the ma"i"ze right at sunset - so pretty. a little frightening though. seriously, it was like the scene in harry potter 4 where harry walks out of the singing and revelry into the "maze of death" ...
i never knew corn could be that creepy.

we survived, with only about 70% of our bodies covered in mud.
so we went out for coffee (at coffee romance) afterward. i'm sure they appreciated our mucky presence in their reputable establishment.

our portland story

"tour by bicycle"
"unleash your bliss"
"been missing voices of feminist culture makers?"
"our portland story"

taken in the cafe at powell's books, a cathedral for indie self-proclaimed intellectuals.

our portland story ... the glass walls that separate us.
when did the bohemians become the bourgeois?

taboo

this post is dedicated to heidi thomas
and also to the liberated female employees of the hawthorne buffalo exchange
who creatively display their liberation to their clientele
even though bra-burning went out with the 70's.

i cleaned out my closet on saturday.
i have not gone through my closet since my age began with a one.
my haul included:
-approximately 7 pairs of high-heeled, strappy, toe-baring, and in all ways much too cute shoes for a post-crush injury foot.
-a box of my high school clothes - saved and moved 4 times in desperate hopes that i will fit in them again. the height of late 90's fashion.
-brightly flowered skirts.
-a hawaiian shirt (that i actually wore before i realized that people could see me).
-a besparkled, stylishly frayed denim halter tankini.

heidi and i decided that it would be fun to take these relics of our poor judgment (i won the poor judgment contest) to a semi-trendy area of portland and allow chicly dressed, braless teenagers the opportunity to look at us like we have just exposed them to an agent of chemical warfare*. doesn't that sound like fun???

apparently we were smoking crack.

the 2 of us hauled our 5 bags of clothes and 1 box of shoes 2 blocks from our 15min parking space to the 30min line at hawthorne buffalo exchange. the braless wonders spent approximently .05 seconds of quality time with each clothing item.
we left the hawthorne buffalo exchange with 5 bags of clothes and 1 box of shoes.

on a fanciful whim, we decided to haul our treasures across the street to a new store: "recycled fashion" ... concluding that our clothes at least fulfilled the "recycled" part ... if not the "fashion" part.

at this point, the atmosphere decided that we'd had enough fun for the day. we survived the deluge, and attempted to pawn off wet used shoes on yet another impossibly chic automaton.

down to 4 bags of clothes and 1 box of shoes, we considered our progress fleeting and decided not to press our luck. we left "recycled fashion" with only one minor driving mishap (pedestrians, schmedestrians), came home, and played taboo.


*such as mustard gas

express lane torture

(please excuse the bad photoshop job. making this was therapy.)

what i have learned in the kitchen so far this week:

~rachael ray covertly calls grocery stores, keeps a database inventory of their stock, then creates as many meals as possible from everything else (preferably items with names that sound like frightening diseases such as "vermicelli").

~combining two perfectly good, separate meals (from entirely different continents) to create a 3rd meal with a name that is not even worthy of a wiggles song is apparently chic. (is this the same "chic" that deems bug-eye sunglasses ok for anyone of post-wiggles age?)

~the broiler is only a good substitute for a toaster if supervised closely. (putting on makeup in the bathroom with the door shut does not constitute proper broiler supervision.)

~an english-muffin-broiler fire can be extinguished with repeated blows from a wine-and-grape patterned potholder when baking soda is not readily accessible and your husband isn't answering his phone to tell you where the baking soda is because he's in the bathroom (of all the dumb reasons not to answer your phone when 6 inch flames are shooting out of your oven and your wife is panicking out of her mind and has no clue where the stupid baking soda is...).

~it was an ugly potholder anyway.

~rachael's idea of a joke is to hide her "fresh herb" requirements in an obscure part of the recipe, forcing the cook to venture into her spider infested herb garden after dark to retrieve about 20 liters of weeds for a "pizza-dilla". (where are the wiggles when i really need them?)

~my neighbor's idea of a joke is to rev his motercycle engine really, really loud right outside my herb forest, sending me toppling head first into the spider infested basil plant that rachael has demanded i collect exactly 367.82 individual leaves from to sacrifice as an offering to the spiteful kitchen deities.

~she didn't realize i already sacrificed my english muffin.

announcing...

ciel blu photo