Happy monthaversary.

As of, Thursday, I have lived in Ann Arbor for one month. So last night I celebrated with a photo walk around my neighborhood. At 7:00pm.

When inspiration and the urge to move hit, I don’t ask questions. I just start strollin’.

And it turns out strollin’ was a good idea. Because now I have all these dusky pictures of my new home.

The past month has been an exercise in learning how not to feel trapped without a vehicle at my disposal. I think I’m hanging out in the B-/C+ range. A couple weekends ago, I was overcome by an intense need for yarn and size 9 knitting needles. So I looked up the nearest Michael’s on Google maps. Five miles. No problem.

At least three of those miles were ridden on my bicycle alongside this.

[source]

Oh, and it started raining on the ride home.

It’s a different life on the seat of a bicycle. But it’s a beautiful one, full of weird stories and overly-defined quads. When you love living life on the go as much as I do, it’s hard to all of a sudden find yourself confined to the space within a five-mile radius of your house. But I don’t think there’s a five-mile radius filled with more awesome stuff than mine. I’m a lucky duck.

Cheers to using the legs the Lord gave me and learning to love the short game.

Happy Saturday.

“You’ll wanna let that sit for a good while.”

I spent the afternoon working on the campus farm yesterday. I pulled a gazillion weeds, learned how brussel sprouts grow, and spent a couple hours chatting with a Swedish pharmacy student about socialism and immigration and education. The rain poured and I felt all at one with my body and the Earth in a glorious, hippy-dippy kind of way. It was a lovely way to spend an afternoon, working with my hands and playing in the dirt. And I got to harvest these lovely vegetables to take home and fill my belly. Although I won’t be eating that butternut squash for a while. Turns out I wasn’t innately gifted with the ability to perceive the ripeness of squashes.

Cheers to learning experiences and trying new things.

Happy Saturday.

Gratitude.

Today I am grateful for great schools close to home, a mom who drives across the state to spend the day with her girls, and a sister to share a new city with.

Happy Wednesday.

Baptized in a sea of maize: the redemption of football Saturdays

There were things I liked about Vanderbilt. Other things that I loved. Football Saturdays do not fall into either of these categories.

At Vanderbilt, I loathed football Saturdays. Home games meant music blaring from frat row all day, sidewalks covered in Natty Light and red Solo cups, and standing for a gazillion hours, all to watch a sport I could hardly feign enthusiasm for. I can count on one hand the number of games I went to. I’ve lost track of the number of Saturdays I spent playing with my yeasties in the lab. Stop. Geek is chic right now.

When I got an email from the Michigan athletic department offering me the privilege of purchasing season tickets to attend football games in the Big House for the low, low price of $300 more than I ever wanted to spend on football, I laughed in derision and sent it to the trash. I know what college football games are like. You’re not fooling me. Paying to spend all day on my feet and come home smelling like the floor of a bar without a pocket full of tips to show for it? I wasn’t born yesterday.

But then my mom sits my sister and I down and advises us to buy into this scheme. “It’ll be different”, she says. “These are great teams,” she says. “There won’t be another season this great while you’re a student,” she says. “It’s a culture thing, you’ve gotta try it,” she says. She got me on that last one. Curse my curious nature and insatiable appetite for new things.

So $300 and a few weeks later, I’ve got a packet of football tickets in my hand. I started the season off strong: sold the first one to a kid (who may or may not have been high) in front of Zingerman’s Deli. But the next game was the Notre Dame game. And Amy and I decided to do our first big Michigan football game together. There were two rules.

1. No one else can come.
2. We do what we want.

It turns out we wanted to buy matching t-shirts. And eat sushi and ice cream. And arrive an hour after seating started. And sit in the ninth row behind the north end zone. And wear flashing light-up bracelets on each wrist. And accept free water bottles from a well-meaning but sorely mistaken stadium employee. And wave our pompoms and sing the fight song a million times and yell our team to victory.

I concede. Football Saturdays aren’t all bad.

Go blue.

Happy Tuesday.

The Arizona adventure: a moving picture

On this trip, I experimented with the video setting on my camera for the first time. I filled up my memory cards with tiny little videos, smashed them all together, added music, and voilá: I’m a big time movie maker. I’ve concluded there’s something lovely about documenting a trip using video. The way it preserves a memory is more organic. And it’s way fun to experiment in a new medium with your best friend. Who knows, maybe it’ll become a thing.

Without further ado:

 

[Music is “Orphaned” by K.S. Rhodes.]

Happy Friday.

The Arizona adventure: all the other things

And here is where my explanation of my trip to Arizona ceases to be organized and chronological and instead becomes a splendid jumble of adventure and friendship. Those who keep up will be rewarded with a virtual high five. We’ll both believe in our hearts that it happened.

The day after our trip to the Grand Canyon, we ventured into downtown Flagstaff and spent the morning exploring the town. It was quaint in the most perfect sense of the word: whimsical boutiques, a thrift shop where I found a cutting board covered in song birds for a 75 cents and a garlic keeper for a quarter, a discount outdoor outfitter, plenty of shops with a phenomenal selection of native American jewelry, and tons of quirky eateries. Like our breakfast spot pictured above, Biff’s Bagels. Literally all the locals we talked to directed us to Biff’s. And once we got there, the reason why was obvious. They had a great selection of bagel flavors and an even greater cream cheese menu (when Nutella is a flavor option, the only logical conclusion is that this is your luckiest day). Perhaps we would have left the joint just satisfied or mildly enthused except that the walls are covered in pictures of dead dogs.
Yeah. All those are photos of customers’ deceased pets. This is actually a beloved-dog memorial masquerading as a bagel shop. And only dogs can be enshrined—the employee we talked to spoke with derision about patrons who came in asking to post pictures of their cats. Those fools. Obviously cats are only to be immortalized in biscotti bakeries. Sheesh.
Pictured here is what I’ve been told is referred to as a “pizookie”. I was skeptical despite the quality of my information source until a Google search recovered this. I found the second comment to be particularly helpful. I think this may be a Western term. Your people call it “pizookie”. My people call it a cookie with ice cream. A pile of warm cookie and creamy vanilla mush by any name is always delicious. We ate these every night of our stay in Flagstaff. Obviously it was a week of excellent decisions.
The rest of the week was spent exploring Phoenix. Per the suggestion of “The Hipster Travel Guide to Phoenix”, we stopped by The Lost Leaf for a concert and FilmBar for a movie. Approximately 50 percent of these ventures were successful: the band never showed at The Lost Leaf (so we hit up the Uptown Alley for an evening of arcade games, the spoils of which included two Tootsie Rolls and a glow stick) and we saw an excellent documentary at FilmBar about back-up singers. Seriously fantastic. I plan on buying it if it ever comes out on DVD. It made us want to listen to nothing but Motown and classic rock for the rest of the week.

We had dinner together at Bee’s very favorite Mexican restaurant, La Perla. We left with happy bellies full of chips and salsa and Mexican-style omelets. Apparently this fiesta banner is always up. Which is perfect because it’s always a fiesta when Bee and I are together.
We made a stop by the New York West Bakery for some tasty pastries that allowed us to relive that time we ate our way through Europe together. As per usual, I couldn’t make up my mind and was forced to try the raspberry cigar and the almond puff pastry. Tragically, they had sold out of their famous Danishes by the time we arrived. It was 11am. Apparently though their sign says they open at 5am, they usually open the doors at 4:30 since there’s already a line forming. With a selection like theirs, I’m not surprised. I’ve never seen anything like it in the US. Definitely worth a visit if you’re ever in the area and awake at four in the morning.

On my last day in town, Bee and I went to Lake Pleasant with some of her friends from church. We spent the day tubing and wakeboarding. If you had asked me to make a list of things I never though would happen during my trip to Arizona, this probably would have made the list. I’m a Michigan girl—I’m no stranger to lakes or boats or tubing. But tubing while watching cacti speed by? Apparently there’s a first time for everything.

Though there’s no photographic evidence of this event, it’s worth noting that one of my nights in town was spent on a date with a Mormon guy. This date included a performance of Oliver! the musical at a theater in an unmarked store front of a strip mall. Oh, unmarked except for the 8.5 x 11 sheet of printer paper taped to the window with “Don Bluth’s Front Row Theatre” written on it in permanent marker. The plot of said performance was censored, presumably to increase its family-friendliness: Nancy lives, Bill is shot, end show. Anyone familiar with the musical will understand the befuddled look on my face when the lights came up.

The evening ended with a hike up a hill at a resort in a maxi dress and sandals to get a view of the city at night. Though the three persons accompanying me on this trek were all Phoenix residents, I don’t think we ever came to a conclusion about what exactly we were looking at. I tried to be helpful and pointed out the North star. My “North star” was actually an airplane. I may never know what I saw from the top of that hill.
In conclusion, I’d like to pay tribute to dear friend I never had the pleasure of meeting while the zest of life still grew on his branches. This is the lemon tree in Bee’s backyard. For my birthday, she sent me the finest of packages which included three lemons from her very own lemon tree. I used them to make the most wonderful lemonade. I remember telling my dad I was excited to meet the tree whose fruit I had so greatly enjoyed from 2,000 miles away. Upon my arrival, I found out that the tree had died literally overnight about a week after she sent me those lemons, as if it couldn’t bear the thought of its children being that far from home. It’s bizarrely poetic. But mostly just bizarre.

Here ends my exposition of the events of the Arizona adventure. I couldn’t have dreamt up a better way to end the summer. Bee, as always, you have my heart and you da best. Can’t wait to adventure with you again. Great Lakes tour next summer?

And in the spirit of celebrating adventures, explore something new today. It’ll be exciting, I promise.

Happy Monday.

The Arizona adventure: the Grand Canyon

It’s hardly a secret I fancy myself a citizen of the world. I think I’ve envisioned my future self living life abroad since I was 14. The reasons for this have evolved over the years, beginning as a fascination with the foreign, becoming a disdain for a nation I saw as narcissistic and arrogant, and, thankfully, eventually maturing into a tensioned appreciation for the absolute gift it is to grow up in this country and the responsibility my citizenship bestows upon me. Still, the closest I come to buying into that “we’re-all-in-this-together” kind of kinship that makes people chant “U-S-A” at length is when I watch the American Olympic swim team out-touch the French in the final relay and I still cringe reflexively when I see “God bless America” bumper stickers plastered all over town. But this summer I had two of those all-American, make-sure-you-packed-a-slice-of-apple-pie experiences and it made me want to wave my flag and tie a yellow ribbon ‘round the old oak tree. The first was a visit to the World Trade Center memorial. The second was a trip to the most magnificent hole in the ground I’ve ever seen: the Grand Canyon.

We spent the day slowly walking the south rim of the canyon. We stopped at every scenic overlook. We stood on the edge. We climbed out on precipices. We absorbed the silence that emanates from the depths. We read the ubiquitous warning signs about how even marathoners die of dehydration and nervously drank copious amounts of water. We hiked a mile and a half down into the canyon and were awed by the extent of its profundity. We heard less English than we ever expected to hear in a day in America. We saw people with bags on their heads. We met a family from Michigan. We took a ridiculous number of pictures. And I somehow managed to pick 19 to show to you. Enjoy one of the seven wonders of the natural world as I saw it.

You’d look weird too if you spent the day getting hit in the face with more natural beauty and friendship than you ever deserved.

Happy Sunday.