Yearly Archives: 2011

Last night we booked some of the last pieces of the honeymoon puzzle!

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We carefully researched, selected, scheduled, then dropped a truly exorbitant amount of money on our airfare and hotel. To celebrate this monumental occasion, the staggering and painful decline in our honeymoon savings account (seriously, who comes up with these outrageous prices and why are they allowed to get away with it?), and the great relief and freedom of finally having nearly everything that we’ll need securely booked, we took ourselves out for a free (thank you rewards coupons!) dish of cold, creamy ice cream from our favorite local ice cream parlor of awesomeness, Graeter’s, which we savored on a bench outside in the perfect, warm afternoon breeze. It was a great day for ice cream, as evidenced by the appearance of at least 3/4 of the population of Cincinnati in our little parlor, an incredibly welcome change from the swirling storm clouds of doom that have been threatening the Midwest lately.

The plans for this vacation are all coming together and it feels so good to be done with most of the planning! Only a couple more things to book, a few purchases to be made, and a handful of other rudimentary and obligatory preparations to be taken care of and then it should be smooth sailing ahead. Though, as we all well know, smooth sailing is entirely out of our hands and the best laid plans often turn into unexpected adventures. And boy, am I ready for some good hearty adventure! – but preferably the kind that involves awesome sights, surprising detours for the marvelous nature, and great fun rather than, say, the delay of flights, accidents, foul weather or troubling mishaps.

More details to come at a later date. This weekend we’re anticipating the arrival of my sister and her family for a Memorial Day long-weekend visit. We’re so excited to have visitors coming to see us in Cincinnati! We’ll venture down to Kentucky to the derby race grounds, stables and museums. We’ll visit with some retired race horses, tour a bit of the Kentucky countryside, get some tasty eats at the Taste of Cincinnati festival, enjoy the company, cookout, and relax. It should be a grand weekend and I’m hoping this is the last of the nasty weather.

Hope your mid-week is sunny and safe.

Who rejoices when her husband suggests jumping in the truck to drive 25 miles each way to a Bass Pro Shop at 9 p.m. on a Monday night?

The person with a Bass Pro Shop gift-card who does not ever again want to be caught without an emergency weather radio while huddled under a couch cushion and snuggled up against a sturdy road case in the cold, dark basement the next time the tornado sirens go off, the wind picks up, and the power craps out leaving her home alone with shoddy cell service and no access to a Doppler radar.

That’s who.

Well played Cincinnati.

One new emergency weather radio with 7 channels of NOAA and S.A.M.E technology and a pack of D batteries = immediately acquired.

P.S. – I did, however, find an excellent use for all those beautiful mason jar candles leftover from our wedding. They make fantastic emergency lighting for our home. On the surprising upside, we also were able to enjoy a romantic hot meal by candlelight together even without power since earlier that day I’d randomly decided to cook our dinner in the slow cooker and it was still hot when Ted finally got home to save me from my exhausting fear and misery.

We supposedly have two more days of this tornado crap coming our way. I am not in the least excited for this, but at least this time we’ll know just how doomed we are instead of being forced to succumb to the unwanted element of surprise. Weather radio, I love you.

If this weekend was any indication of how the rest of this summer is going to be, then bring it on!

After finishing up his road cases yesterday afternoon, Ted mowed the backyard (which looks SO nice, by the way) and then we cooked out, grilling fresh green beans and roasted garlic mozzarella sausages on the grill and topping it off with a fresh baby seedless watermelon. Our first cookout and first watermelon of the year in our first place together! It was glorious. Grilled food is always fantastic and our dinner and evening was no exception.

We ended the night watching the pilot episode of Big Bang Theory and this season’s finale of the show. If you haven’t been watching Big Bang Theory, you’ve really been missing out.

This morning we went to church and then Ted mowed the rest of the lawn – it’s a two day job for him because the grass is so tall that he needs to go over it twice. It’s great to no longer have the most embarrassing lawn on the block – our neighbors are all retired, have plenty of time on their hands, and are supremely proud owners of their favorite expensive toy – the riding lawn mower. Every single one of our neighbors mows at least once a week. We have the time to mow our lawn maybe twice a month, if we’re lucky. They must be humiliated. But now it’s so soft and green and nice looking! Our yard reminds me of The secret Garden. Perfect for bonfires, lawn games, cartwheeling, and bird/bunny/chipmunk/squirrel/coyote watching, it is one of the things we love the most about this house. I can’t wait until the fireflies come out and fill our yard in the evenings!

In the afternoon we loaded the bikes into the truck and drove to the Bass Island bike trail that stretches the 50+ miles from Columbus to Cincinnati and along the path of the Little Miami River. The trail used to be a railroad but when it was no longer needed they took out the tracks and turned it into a paved, two-lane path for joggers, walkers, bikers and roller bladers. The path itself is absolutely great – very scenic with beautiful views of rolling meadows, the river, and lined with tons of lush trees with equal parts of sun and shade throughout and plenty of bikers and pedestrians enjoying their time in the great outdoors. We had a great time and biked a little over seven miles. The weather was in the low 80s and we had a nice cool breeze the whole way. We also saw our first snake in Ohio – a long black and gray fellow slithering across the paved trail. One day, perhaps in the autumn when the weather is getting cool and the leaves are all changing colors, we’d love to bike the whole trail – from Cincinnati to Columbus – then stay in a hotel in Columbus for the evening and bike back the next day. We’d have to work to build up our stamina though!

After our bike ride we stopped at Eastgate Adventures for a few laps around the go kart track, a quick game of mini golf, and two rounds of air hockey. Since we were in the area we tried out a little hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant we’ve been wanting to try for months now to fill our hungry bellies and dodge an afternoon rain shower, and it was really good! The place had authentic tortilla chips, totally authentic Mexican cheese, and fantastic steak fajitas. It is in my top 2 list of Mexican restaurants in Cincinnati! Leftovers for tomorrow? I think so! Tonight we’re taking it easy – throwing in a DVD and relaxing before it’s back to the daily grind tomorrow. By the way, here are Ted’s road cases. He does such an excellent job! Can you believe he made these from scratch? Every piece of laminate and foam cut, every latch, every handle, every wheel, every pop rivet, every hole drilled. Count me proud. He custom creates all kind of cases for cables, tools, and lighting and audio equipment. Below is the logo he’s having designed and produced to put on all his cases so we can hopefully drum up more business! What a dream it would be to own our own successful company that we could subsist on as our only source of income except for freelance gigs. We’d make a great team! With Ted’s lighting and set designs, equipment rentals and construction, production, budgeting and managing experience and my acting, directing, teaching, education, and artistic management experience, we’d be unstoppable. Anyone want to fund us as a start-up company?

Dear Gas:

Hey, thanks! From where I’m sitting $3.79/gallon sure beats the $4.16/gallon I paid two weeks ago. :-) Keep up the good work.

Sincerely, Lara.

Dear Construction Season:

Bllllluuuuuggghhhh!!!!!!

Sincerely, Lara.

Dear Nordstrom Rack:

Please go out of business. Or at least start carrying more hideous merchandise. You are too tempting to me although you top my self-prescribed list of places I am not allowed to enter until we A) make more money and B) live in a less expensive house to rent. Although I beg of you to offer a bit of adorable and affordable honeymoon gear for the husband and I, I also wish you would not exist. It’s a complicated world we live in.

Sincerely, Lara.

Dear Anderson Township Public Swimming Pool:

Where the hell are you!?

Sincerely, Lara.

Dear Mama Spider:

Today I noticed that you are missing from the little spot where you and your nest reside on the inner hinge of our storm door. I’ve grown accustomed to your presence and to looking up at least four times a day to see if you are still there every single time I enter and exit. And you have been for at least two weeks….until today. Where did you go? This may sound quite contradictory considering I have an intense fear of your species, but I’ve grown rather fond of you and your little nook because at least I know exactly where you are. Please come back so I can continue to live in peace knowing exactly where you are and exactly where you are not (read: my bed).

Sincerely, Lara.

Dear Printers:

What. Gives. Do you not like us anymore? We’ve lost two of you in the past two weeks. Sure the office is hotter than blazes because we’re too cheap to turn on the a.c., but is crapping out on us the only way to work this through? We regularly maintenance you with fresh ink, we give you a safe home, we don’t overwork you, and when you do malfunction I’ve learned to harness my anger and not beat you senseless until you work again. I thought we had an agreement – and just because we had five of you doesn’t mean you all weren’t very special to us in your own way. In conclusion, please stop dropping like flies because printerless is a very inconvenient thing to be.

Sincerely, Lara.

P.S. You may be wondering why on earth a two-person family needs five printers. An excellent question. I had a printer and Ted had a printer and then we got married and we had two printers – it’s all very Brady Bunch of us. That’s pretty normal, right? Well, Ted also does a lot of high quality photo printing for theatre-related jobs, so while he was in grad school at MSU, in came the large-format photo printer for his company TOR Ventures. And when BoarsHead Theatre closed and the city was going to tear down the building, a perfectly functional ink jet desk printer and an extra large-scale plotter for printing light plots were left orphaned. Enter printers 4 and 5. Would you turn down a free plotter? No, I didn’t think so. So, we still have the plotter and the photo printer and my printer/copier/scanner, but I’d say the loss of two printers in two weeks is a little mysterious.

Anyway, Happy Friday! Today is living proof that it doesn’t rain in Cincinnati all the time. Just most of the time. Today is a lovely, hot, sunny day. In fact, I have a batch of peach tea brewing on the front porch right now. With any luck it will be tasty and spider-free when I go to retrieve it, just how I like it.

Guess what’s officially booked?

A HONEYMOON.

That’s right. A honeymoon/Ted’s birthday/Lara’s birthday vacation extravaganza.

Is there a better way to spend your belated yet much-anticipated honeymoon than far far away from work and on a rad vacation during your joint birthday week? No. No, there is not.

In other seemingly less exciting news given the current circumstances, I made my first Pad Thai dish for dinner tonight…although I did do it the weenie way because I used a pre-made sauce instead of making my own. But the rest of it was made from scratch and it was absolutely delicious. Those will be some tasty leftovers for lunch tomorrow. Come visit and I’ll make it for you :-)

Because Duke Energy gets such a kick out of charging a near fortune for basic heating and cooling needs, we tend to leave our unit set to “off.” Lately, this means that when we arrive home after work the main level of the house is between 78 and 80 degrees while upstairs is nearing 90. We retreat to the basement where it is in the 60s or low 70s. Using the stove and oven to cook dinner heats the kitchen to a muggy 85+ degrees. The last thing we want to do is sit down to a hot meal. Since one can only handle so many varieties of salads and sub sandwiches a week, and I don’t specialize in gourmet chilled soups (um, yet), I’ve been at a loss for cold dishes worthy of a suppertime meal. I have a few new cold recipes up my sleeve that I’ve bookmarked, and hopefully some are keepers. But there is one cool recipe that Ted and I both really like. I make a mean chicken salad and it is so good! There’s one special ingredient that I think really makes this recipe stand out.

In my chicken salad I toss random and totally unmeasured amounts of freshly cooked chopped chicken, cut up red or green grapes, thinly sliced celery and onion, fresh parsley from my herb garden, some dried cherries or dried cranberries, a small amount of low fat mayonnaise, some lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper to flavor, and – for that special touch – a hearty teaspoonful of ground ginger (the thick paste in a little glass jar found in the produce aisle). I serve the chicken salad cold, spooned atop a bed of fresh romaine lettuce leaves and sometimes sprinkled with almonds slivers. Use the lettuce leaves as a wrap – works great! If you want to jazz it up or really turn it into a feast, serve with a croissant and fresh red apple slices.

It seems really simple, and it is. You have to try it and don’t you dare leave out the ginger!! I’m convinced that’s what makes it so yummy. It’s so unexpected and refreshing that I actively seek out recipes that call for ginger.

Enjoy! :-)

P.S. – How perfectly ironic. Thank you to the genius who put two and two together. This. is. beautiful.

Oh, I’m sorry, did you want a closer look at those monstrosities?

Now those, my friends, are two ugly hats. Am I right or am I right?

Sometimes you just have to laugh at yourself.

I’m a tidy, detail-oriented person – almost to a fault, but my great organizational lapse of 2011 takes the cake. Yesterday HR called to inform me that I had an outstanding paycheck from March that hadn’t been cashed yet.

Um, what? I apparently forgot to cash an entire paycheck you say? Oh, look at that. I sure did. There it is, all signed and ready to go, but somehow left un-cashed in my “old pay stubs” file. Yeah, no wonder our March finances seemed so tight and it felt like we had no money that month. How the actual cashing of this paycheck so we could…you know…eat, pay bills, and live got past me, I have no idea.

But what a pleasant surprise it is to get paid twice this week and suddenly have money to contribute to our budget that we definitely weren’t expecting. It’s like finding a neglected and forlorn twenty in your back pocket from three weeks ago, but 20 times better. A welcome treat indeed!

Maybe I should lose my mind more often.