How lovely are your branches

First, by way of apology, the only reason I haven't been blogging is because I haven't been doing anything besides playing 'hot lava hot lava' with Nuni

 

 

 

 To make it up to Nuni, we got her a Christmas tree. Nuni likes Christmas trees because a) she thinks she's a present and b) she prefers pine-flavored water to nothing-flavored water.

 

 

We take great care in choosing our Christmas tree. Typically we like tall ones that have grinch-head type tops that hit our ceiling (see 2009)

This year, we switched it up and went with a shorter, but dumpier fuller tree. Like our minds and our home, our tree ornaments are a horrifying disaster charming motley collection. Here is a catalog of my favorites

On the top of our tree is, of course, the crowning glory

Ducky finger puppet!!!!! My explanation? At the boston bazaar bizarre a few years back I was in search of my first Christmas ornaments to put on my own first Christmas tree. I didn't see any sick ornaments that I loved but you bet your hole I loved these wonky-eyed animal finger puppets. Luckily, tree branches are shaped like fingers. Finger puppets courtesy of soto softies

How could I stop at just one? I couldn't.

Lion gets sad if you don't put him on the right branch

 

A more traditional favorite is my favorite scene from How the Grinch Stole Christmas

 

If you look closely you can see my star of david ornament in the background. This is because we don't celebrate Christmas, we celebrate family.  

Jealous?

 

Another classy feature of our tree are the three types of lights

Mini

 

Large bubble

LED

Thankfully, Nuni doesn't really disrupt the tree except for drinking the potentially poisonous water. And watches over the other ornaments while we're gone

Well, that's a course of a different color!

Obviously, we are constantly seeking ways to attain our mini golf fix in the cold winter months. As soon as I realized the existence of Glow Golf, located in the mall down the street, we had to go.

As I predicted, Glow Golf was amusing, a little ghetto and staffed by stoned teenagers. For a whopping $9 a person you get "54 holes" of golf. What this really means is that you get to go around 3 times, if you can tolerate such repetition. I cannot. We did 18 holes for $9.

The stoned teenager at the front wasn't a "good explainer", so it wasn't until halfway through that we understood what these were for

 

It makes your ball glow; which is convenient since the room is...dark. These pink flash boxes were scattered throughout the course. The more you flash the ball, the brighter it glows!  

All of the course equipment and the walls were painted with black light sensitive paint which made for some sweet ambience and met my expectations for what Glow Golf should be.

 

The black-light-sensitive-painted walls were just paper murals that looked like paint-by-numbers that I do in my spare time. 

 

While it was probably the best possible decor for me; I still wonder why they went with a jungle theme. I had expected that it would have been more "cyber" or "spacey" or "hackers"-like. 

The course itself was a modern twist on an old classic! Not really, but at least there was a windmill

All the other holes were made to be extra challenging by inconveniently-placed starfish

 

The result was a lot of bounced-back balls and taking the maximum allotted amount of strokes (7). After all was said and done, my score was abysmal and way beyond normal limits.

The final hole was this monstrosity

 

If your ball makes it down through the pegs into the hole you get a prize. Otherwise, it just goes into the larger catch-all at the bottom. Being an extra special winner, Adam's ball did this

What do we get for that, stoned teenager? Nothing? Thanks for a great time!

Between a Notch and a Mountain

We spent this weekend in the white mountains; specifically, Lincoln, New Hampshire off of the Kancamagus highway. The Kancamagus is 34 miles from Conway to Lincoln, NH and has dozens of trails of varying difficulty all the way along it. This is great because you could stop at any trail head and have a great hike, but it also makes it hard to remember which ones you've done and which ones you've liked. I was looking for a specific one that I recall doing many years ago with my family. I remember it being way more difficult than others that we had done, with more of an incline and more potential for death AND an amazing view when you reach the top. My Dad said, "Just look for the one that has the sign at the trail head that says "Do not proceed if you value your life". He told me that it might be called "East Pond", but after googling that one, I decided he must be wrong.

Based on a rough guess, a little research on the interweb and purposefully rejecting my Dad's suggestion, I settled on "Hancock Notch Trail". When we began hiking, I immediately knew this was not the hike I had done in the past, but ultimately didn't really care. It turned out to be less strenuous overall, but with some points of steeper inclines, muddy/bumpy/challenging terrain, and kept us on our toes.

 

 

The hike was 2.4 miles (x 2, to get back) and we were in the wilderness for about three hours.  Throughout our adventure, we I kept wondering, "Is it going to end with something?". As in, I was totally not transcending time and space and embracing the nature around me. Instead, I was thinking about what I was going to win at the end of the trail. A mountain view? A cliff? A bobcat? A big sign that says Hancock Notch? Also WTF is a notch. Well, we would soon find out.

 

 

 

Oh right, we also had to cross some rivers and lots of mushy mud piles. I only had about 5 shoe-in-mud fails. Pretty good for Messy Jessie.

Around mile 2 or 2.2 ish, the sound of rushing water was totally gone, it felt significantly cooler with less sun, and everything I said (I say a lot of things) was echoing really loudly. Now, we had essentially been covered by trees with the occasional stream on our left, but now a large mountain which had been pretty much hidden by trees was now sitting directly on our right. This is difficult to explain because the trail literally stopped; that is, became untraversable, covered in brush and puddles so we couldn't go any closer to this giant mountain... but it looked as if it were just 30 feet away from us.

In part, it was sort of weird that the trail completely ended but on the other hand it ended with us running face first into a mountain. Which is exciting.





According to Wikipedia,


A mountain pass (also gap, notch, col, saddle, hause, bwlch, brennig or bealach) is a route through a mountain range or over a ridge. If following the lowest possible route, a pass is locally the highest point on that route. Since many of the world's mountain ranges have presented formidable barriers to travel, passes have been important since before recorded history, and have played a key role in trade, war, and migration.

So, it turns out, I should have expected that we'd run face first into a mountain given that we were following a bealach (notch, gap) this whole time. I just thought 'notch' was a word I could throw around to mean mountain, cliff, nature path, Astro-Crag, etc.

Indeed, our hike was "daunting and terrible", but you know what they say: Totes worth the 3 dollars!

Halloween: A love story

 
Sometimes Halloween feels like a struggle because it is FAVORITE HOLIDAY EVER and most people, including my husband, feel that Halloween is Just Okay. When my level of excitement isn't matched, I feel angry and destructive. However, my husband has always been an incredibly good sport, willing to collaborate and compromise on costume choices. Through the writing of this blog entry, it has become very clear to me how much time and thought he actually has put in to perfecting our costumes over the years. I usually request that we do something coupley, but not like, Sexy Bunny and Hugh Hef/Sexy Policeman and Sexy Puppy coupley. The  criterion that the couple's costumes have to meet are: awesomeness, off-beatness, affordability and creativity.

And now, the costumes of Halloween past

2007

 

Beatrix Kiddo and a Crazy Eight from Kill Bill


2008

Marge and Homer from The Simpsons




2009
 
2009 went terribly wrong? Slightly awry? I skipped out on the frustration of trying to make think of a good couples costume and decided to be THE Bird of Paradise from the BBC series Planet Earth.

Adam went to the season Halloween store and bought all the dusty 80 cent masks from the 1970's and dubbed himself, "Jessie's Nightmares"

 

...though we are the most endearing failures I've ever seen.

2010

This year we had a few other costume ideas in the running before we settled on our final choice. 

One idea was Leela and Fry from Futurama

 

First of all, I don't love Futurama, but being a purple-haired cyclops was appealing to me. Being Fry, however would have been a little bit boring for Adam because he already looks like Fry. Of course, he could've been Dr. Zoidberg instead of Fry

But, Zoidberg looks suspiciously similar to Jessie's Nightmares...

The next choice which was almost a winner was Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, book or movie version

Adam elected me to be the one to dress up as Zaphod Beeblebrox which requires being a rockstart-esq man with two heads and three arms. In contrast, he would be Arthur Dent, a man with a bathrobe and a book.

I had agreed because it met most of the criteria but still I was ambivalent. Ambivalent because I had to be a hideous man and wasn't going to look fun and sassy.Only moments after my official veto, Adam emailed me with his greatest suggestion in Halloween history:

I thought of another costume and I think it's pretty good. It hits all the major criteria. You get to be a pretty lady and it is a couply thing. You could be a damsel in distress tied to railroad tracks and I could be the evil villian. I see it as a cartoony type costume. It wouldn't be too hard. We can make some railroad tracks out of cardboard and foam or something and get some rope. I could wear the mustache we saw yesterday and have the gun that says "bang" as well and dress all in black. I was also thinking we could find a way to attach a speech bubble on your shoulder saying "HELP!" to play on the cartoony aspect. Thoughts? I think this is a good one by the way. 

Literally he thought of the entire thing and added some incredible features such as the cartoon-inspired speech bubble and bang gun. What a guy!

For my costume we went to the hardware store and bought house siding, plank wood and nails to make the railroad tracks that were to be tied to my back

  

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Adam just needed a cape, a top hat, a moustache, a BANG gun and his suit. Affordable and easy to find at the Halloween store.

We totally knocked this one out of the park.

Downsides: don't even think about sitting down or going to the bathroom with train tracks on your back. Also I severed lots of people's heads at dance clubs as a result of my HELP bubble.