Life in the Slow Lane

Where have all of the apple cider mixes gone? I can't find them anywhere and this is a BIG, DEEP tragedy. Many years ago a friend's mother asked me, as she shopped her way through Costco for her college-aged child, "If you had an unlimited shopping trip to Costco, what would you ask for?" Apple Cider. Of course. Once I had my very own Costco card, I made certain to get a giant box of apple cider every time I was running low, and I have enjoyed every packet that I bought in the winters since. For a staff Christmas party, I volunteered to bring hot apple cider, imagining a quick trip to Costco and then tearing open a bunch of pouches. Since I knew I would be replenishing my supply soon, I extravagantly used up the last of my carefully guarded stash. But Costco doesn't have them. Nor my favorite grocery store. Nor my not-so-favorite grocery store. What has this world come to? I am lost in a world of no Alpine spiced cider!

S.O.S. surprised me with a cabinet he made and effectively quadrupled my kitchen counter space. How did we manage a surprise in our home others have called a well equipped closet? All day long we kept the curtain closed leading out to our patio. I was inside wondering in curiosity to the sounds outside of drilling and sawing and the words of a preoccupied man talking to himself. And I returned from a trip to the grocery store, and... WOW! 664 square inches of counter space. I don't know if you have ever had this happen to you... the quadrupling of kitchen counter space in the span of one Saturday, but I tell you it can be a heady thing. It can make you believe that cooking a meal for 25 people is no great problem. (Someone else volunteered to provide the dining room.) Hey, who knows? When my other new counter goes in, maybe S.O.S. and I will open a cooking school!

I met a neighbor in the hallway as I tried to wrestle my laundry basket in the door. Of course, you can see the entire place from the doorway and she helpfully remarked "My husband and I made the choice to not have any furniture so we could move around." Living a simple life we are not.

Buzz words drive me batty. In my informal survey of how a word becomes a buzz word, I have mapped out the approximate path below: 1) Find a word most people don't know the meaning of 2) Make sure the meaning has obscurities and shades of meaning which makes it difficult to translate and impossible to explain to second-language learners. 3) Assign some very important value to the word 4) Use it every time you possibly can to convey the utmost importance to your communications

When we bought our cozy little condo, there was a definite color scheme in place. From the door frame at the front door, through the kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom, anything that could be painted was painted either black or dingy beige. Anything and everything: hinges, electric outlet covers, circuit breaker box (painted shut), phone jacks (painted over), ceilings, cupboard doors and drawer faces. Well, maybe not everything , as the shutters weren't painted shut like they were in the unit across the hall we briefly considered. But needless to say, paint was a top priority as soon as we signed the papers. Now truth be told, you already know the rest of the story because chances are you have at least six stories just like it about choosing paint colors. And I could insert here any obvious statement about paint chips not being entirely reliable and this blog post would be nudged along in the direction I intend it to go. With names like Sparkling Cider , Air of Mint, and Spiced Nect...

I look up from my place at the computer to see my husband squatting in front of two stools, carefully separating out egg yokes into a series of bowls perched on the bar stools. Good thing we registered for the mixing bowls with anti-slip bottoms. He asks where he might find a measuring cup, and since I can't readily direct him, he pulls out the stack of paper cups we are using, notes they are nine ounce cups and calculates how full he needs to fill it in order to arrive at the proper measurement. The microwave beeps over by where it is plugged in, smack-dab in front of our only door. At least we still have a box long enough and wide enough to rest it on. Very much longer and we may decide to add wheels to the box. Speaking of resting on boxes, S.O.S. and I have been doing that for some time. 15 uniform boxes set side-by-side makes an excellent bed frame for an air mattress. And when it comes time to add spices, we know where they are by what position they held in the boxes gri...

My dear S.O.S. remarked recently that he has moved more times in the four months of our marriage than ever before in his life. Poor man. But he may prove just as influential on me as I have proved to be on him: we bought a house. Maybe the term "house" is too generous, but it is a domicile we intend on occupying for as long, if not longer, than any place I have previously lived. One of the best things about our little condo is that because of the mirror which fills the largest wall in our home, I can eat a meal sitting next to my sweetie and across from him at the same time . Here is a picture illustrating this (don't you hate it when the photographer gets you with your mouth full?) When we make enough room for a third person to sit on the carpet next to us, maybe you can come over for dinner.

The staycation is all the rage these days, but here in the Slowlane we've mixed it up a bit. Instead of staying home and doing all the things you would do on a vacation, we are spending a couple of nights in several beautiful locations, traveling from place to place, all the while going to our jobs. It is kind of the opposite of the staycation. For our purposes we'll call it the workadayroadtrip. Similarly to a vacation, packing is critical. During our workadayroadtrip we will be staying in four or five guest bedrooms, one hotel room, tent camping, traveling by plane, car, and possibly bus, attend a beach wedding and at least one baby shower (where to stow gifts?), and show up smiling and professional looking for the nearly normal work schedule (iron mysteriously not included). Try packing for that workadayroadtrip. Before you credit me with super-human packing skills, let me tell you that I trusted summer stupor to keep people from noticing that I wore the same outfit three ...

A teenage friend of mine called me at work the other day, super excited about the new Bible he got in the mail. Of course, it was only the first half of the Bible. That is all that would fit in the shipment: ten thick volumes in Braille. He asked me if he could read to me from it and ever so slowly he read me a verse from Genesis, feeling out the words as only a new reader does. The old story of God speaking light into the darkness... it matters.

What a moon to end it on, eh?

Do you know how many times I have tried to retire the "Nomad" series on my blog? But here I am, at it again. This weekend finds me patriotically packing my things and who knows when I will be able to unpack them? Of course, I've gained quite a few things since I last packed all of my belongings and headed out to who-knows-where. The list of things I have acquired bears a remarkable resemblance to my wedding registries. Toss in a few miscellaneous items of furniture for good measure, the belongings S.O.S. brought to our marriage, and the MEGA-GRILL that suddenly has become the "make-it or break-it" determining factor in what housing situation will work for us... and you can well understand why I had hoped the word "nomad" would not be required. But the time has come to say goodbye to our Cataluna house and I'm back to the life of a nomad. This world is not my home, I'm just a passin' through... but in the mean while, I've got quite the...

The Cataluna House, where SOS and I have honeymooned since our return to the mainland from Catalina, has a back lawn. This lawn, at its widest point, is approximately twice the width of our lawn mower. On the other side of our back fence is a golf course which stretches for acres. The first Saturday that I pulled out the mower to make two back and forth passes over the lawn, I fantasized about picking up the green postage stamp masquerading as a back yard, and throw it over the fence so the custodial staff at the golf course would cut it as they dreamily drove on their riding mowers. Surely they wouldn't even notice such a small addition, and I'd pull the lawn back over to my side of the fence before they even woke up. But in Southern California, a patch of green grass, no matter how small, is a precious priority, and so SOS and I have carefully mowed, and weeded, and watered... anticipating that day when we are told to move out and must leave a showplace of Southern Californ...

I'm spoiled. I haven't had to pay to do my laundry since I graduated from college. (Actually, chances are I didn't do laundry for at least two weeks before I graduated. You know, finals... papers... social obligations...) Even for the first three weeks of married life, when, for the first time in five years I didn't have a washer and dryer down the hall, I got to do my laundry for free thanks to two hospitable friends. And if it weren't for the fact that my dear SOS has a uniform for work and it gets smellier than... well, it gets smelly... I think I might still have avoided a trip to the dreaded laundromat. I mean, one of the first things I demanded of my husband was that he buy more underwear. He didn't even have enough to put off doing laundry for more than a week and a half! (And believe me, I didn't want to suggest the eco-friendly option suggested here .) Not to mention, poor dear, that as soon as we were married I became obsessive about collecting...

Oh, and yes, we did get married. For anyone who hasn't seen the collection of photos yet, there are hundreds over on our facebook pages.

A visitor who very much wished it was breakfast for three.

This was our view the next morning: breakfast for two on a private balcony overlooking the harbor.

My post count has been way down in recent months. I thought since pictures are worth a thousand words, if I stuck a few photos in here, I might almost get back to where I should be. This is the view from our doorway at dusk one of the evenings we were on Catalina.

Today I completed three years at my place of employment. In those same three years many of my peers (and parents, congratulations, Dad!) have worked on adding letters behind their name. All my letters end with my name... I average maybe 125 letters a month. That amounts to 4500 letters. Just some random trivia for my readers.

In the frozen food aisle, I was wishing I had thought to measure the dimensions of my freezer before heading out to shop. Like I mentioned before, SOS and I are living in a four bedroom house where the walk-in closet is larger than some rooms I've called home and the master bedroom suite is only slightly smaller than the entire square footage of the condo we hope to buy in the near future. Needless to say, this house has more space than SOS and I know what to do with. Everywhere, that is, but the fridge. We have a mini-fridge, one of those kinds that has an itty-bitty cupboard of a freezer inside. And so that is why I stood with a box of ice cream in my hand, trying to guess whether it was equal or greater than the height of the box. I succumbed. I bought it, I brought it home, I opened the fridge door and the freezer flap, and thunk! it didn't fit. But what sort of home can a house be if it doesn't have ice cream in the freezer? So I carefully folded the cardboard ridge a...

There is that famous section of Jane Eyre where on the eve of her first (unsuccessful) wedding, she reminisces about the name written on her luggage tags and her inability to affix them to her luggage as the name does not yet belong to her. While, many pages later, the name Mrs. Rochester does come to belong to her, it should be noted that the name of the book wherein the story is told does not change. I say all this to justify why the title of this blog shall continue to be "Life in the Slow Lane" even though I am now sharing the car pool lane with my beloved S.O.S. (whose name is now mine). And maybe one of these days I will even get around to speaking of the other things I now share with my S.O.S., including the four bedroom, three and a half bathroom, two story house. (There are sixteen stairs leading from the bottom floor to the top which means there are sixteen places to sit in the house, not including the four porcelain ones.)

I received an email which included the following sentence: I am making kind request to you my friends, relatives, aliens and all well wishers. It has a very nice ring to it. Maybe that is how I should have prefaced my wedding invitations.

Most of the gifts I am writing thank you notes are things that either SOS or I chose to put on our registry. But interspersed among them all are the occasional "I thought of you when I saw this because it just looked like something you would like." And friends, that is a very, very, very disturbing thought at times. No further comment.

(The official word is that this is me writing a thank you note. I would appreciate all of your vows of secrecy.) But when you have just been through the third bridal shower in as many days, and with two additional showers in recent memory, there comes a time when you must stop and blog about it, regardless of exactly how many thank you notes are waiting to be written. And, for the sake of all of my dear loyal readers who have survived far too long without a post of some sort, I write. First, I would like to enter a new malady into the great big book of syndromes: Shower Thumbs. This is what happens when you tear open the wrapping on packages. It is akin to multiple paper cuts, but easier to survive because of the fun of tearing into brightly wrapped gifts. Second, I would like to mention some of the most interesting gifts SOS and I received. Of course, the gift that takes the "weirdest-what-on-earth-are-we-going-to-do-with-it?" prize is the XXXXXL (yes, that is 5XL) T-shirt...

The email I received the other day started like this: Now that the dust has settled from your shower on Sunday, I was wondering if... I think I may have burst out into hysterical laughter, but I don't remember. I'm not sure how someone can be under the impression that the bride will have more time after her first shower. This morning I woke up from a nightmare where two people were chasing me down to kill me and I was running from place to place asking everyone if they could tell me when and where my next shower was because I didn't want to miss it. Because, of course, making it to your own bridal shower on time is just that important. I think I've reached that point where I'm misplacing important information in some corner or another of my mind and room. Both are equally cluttered at this stage. I'm not even sure I can find the surface the dust was supposedly to have settled on, but if I do find some, I have more showers approaching to take care of it.

Please do allow us to the outset of this letter, our most sincerely apology for the quite unforgivable presumption of writing to in this manner. However, we do hope that our letter is not too disruptive on your busy schedule of numerous commitment and obligation or worse an effrontery on good sense. These words were penned by two people imprisoned for espionage in a far away country. Maybe I just bumped into a novel in the making.

I've been working on a special tone of voice to respond to emergencies at work. The receptionist may have just told me that the particular caller is horribly upset and talking about suicide, but the caller doesn't know I've already been told that and I answer the phone speaking as if I were taking a lovely stroll in the park with an iced lemonade. I practice this tone of voice not only with callers but with my co-workers. When they call me from their desk "I need you!" I've learned to recognize their panic in the very way they same my name and then I know to switch to "the tone". The tone could be used to say "That's interesting, usually the Titanic sinks on Wednesdays not Thursday mornings." Other times it more closely resembles "Yes, the Titanic always sinks when you run into that iceberg, but let's find the life boats." After such an episode this morning, my co-worker pleaded... "You can't go on a honeymoon. ...

My landlady told me two weeks ago that David and I should save time and just handout our wedding invitations as people arrive at the ceremony. Two days ago she said that we could just include the wedding invitation when we send the thank you notes. I don't remember seeing anything about that in the etiquette books.

Sometimes the diverseness of life springs up to surprise me, even on a normal work day like Friday. In the school year 1954-55, a junior higher took his year book down to the railroad where President Truman and his wife had briefly stopped. Truman signed it, scrawling his name across most of the front cover. And Friday I held that same yearbook in my hands as it's owner explained how he found it sorting through his attic. He flips open to the page that bears his picture, and I imagine what the scene looked like 54 years ago when the skinny boy with great big glasses met Harry Truman. Later my phone rings and I am asked to come downstairs to talk with a couple who has just walked in off the street. They've never heard of us before, but by the time they leave, they want everything we have to offer and some time in the chapel, too. I can't even pronounce their names, but I suspect I just met two people who are real somebodies in the country they came from. I run out to my car...

I am issuing a general apology to everyone to whom I have previously said "Well, just remember that the important thing is that at the end of all of this crazy wedding planning, you will be married." The reason I am issuing a general apology is that I am earnestly doing my best to suppress all memories of any specific instances where I said such an absurd thing. Of course, the important thing is that I will be married to SOS, but there seem to be a great many other "the important things". Such as inviting people. Or finding a place to live. Or not forgetting to add oil to my car. Or paying my taxes. I have heard this phrase a lot recently, and my mind conjures up the final scene in Walt Disney's version of Robin Hood where he and Maid Marian ride off in their carriage with everything Happily Ever After The End. I somehow suspect that the closing credits would not roll with such a sense of good will and happiness toward all if you could have seen Maid Marian stu...

Yesterday I received an email with an attached document and the request that I translate it and return it. From the start, I could tell there was some weird vocabulary going on, especially as it dealt with a religious order founded during the Crusades. I hop-skipped-and-jumped my way through the text, translating what I could and trusting that what I could get was sufficient information for their purposes. And then I gave up and went to Google. I thought surely I could get some information somewhere that would help fill in my knowledge enough to make sense of what I was translating, and I did. Wikipedia had a lengthy entry on the subject and I began to read through it until it sounded eerily familiar. On a hunch, I visited the Spanish version of Wikipedia and found almost word-for-word the document I was translating. I work with someone who has become well-known for her answer "Let me tell you about this new thing on the web... it is called Google. Everything is google-able....

And I say that will all humility. We've been registering for home items, SOS and I. And sometime during the course of "is it permissible to register for things like cheese cloth and bathroom soap" it was suggested that maybe we really ought to register for at least SOME tools, as every household needs a hammer and the like. So yesterday found us in Sears with a scanner and aisle upon aisle of tools. Of course, they all look the same to me (except for the new brand that comes with lime green accessories) but SOS actually knew that each tool has a different purpose... and he knew the purpose!! And since he knew what each tool is for, I let him decide what to scan. Along about the third "theetbabeep" of the scanner, I began to revisit the question of what exactly wedding guests would and would not be willing to count as "necessary for starting a home." And then I had a brilliant stroke of epiphany: If not a single item was purchased off this list, I woul...

I'm getting married to an amazing guy.

Today the count-down brought us to 89 days and I thought I would share with you what this particular day looked like for Slowlane the Bride-to-be. 5:55 Slowlane opens her eyes, sees what time it is and closes her eyes. 6:30 Slowlane's alarm clock goes off and in reaching to turn it off, she finds the thermometer. 6:32 Through a highly scientific method evaluating her temperature, how many times she had to open her mouth to breathe during the temperature taking process, and the number and productivity of coughs and the number of kleenexes needed before 6:30, she decides she is well enough to go to work. 6:55 Slowlane sorts through her recent pay stubs trying to find the most recent ones for verification of her income for the meeting later in the day. 7:40 Slowlane remembers why it was she was going to get up early when she gets to the kitchen to eat breakfast and sees a sink full of dirty dishes. 8:06 Slowlane finally leaves for work and sees she missed a phone call from S.O.S. She ...

Friends, countrymen, and far-flung family... Today it is my privilege to publish for you, in traditional slowlane fashion, resolutions for your new year. I realize that this is now the fourth of January and you have four fewer days to fulfill these resolutions (does it make you feel better or worse that I started this list several days before the turn of the year?) but I have endeavored to make them achievable so that you will all come back next year (and I promise that next year won't have the same recurring theme). 1. Using your knowledge of architectural design, draft a blueprint for how you could comfortably install a tropical cruise into your cubicle. 2. Wear a hole in the toe of your sock, and wear it proudly! (Okay, the proudly part isn't necessary.) 3. Plan a weekend with no plans (and then send it in the mail to me). 4. Come up with a better wedding thank-you note generator than this one . (Try it! It is almost as fun as Mad Libs.) 5. Promise to buy a copy of the riv...