Coffee Date

Hi friends! I didn't mean to fall off the face of the earth like that. Just stress and work and everyday life, you know?

But! A lot of that went away for a little while because last week we took a long weekend and flew back to Texas to surprise Matt's sister for her birthday! We also went to visit my grandparents, and stopped in College Station for a few hours to see a few friends. We managed to eat tacos for a lot of our meals. And got in some Blue Bell too. Ahh, food and family. This trip really cemented that Texas > Virginia in all the ways that matter. :)

Happy early birthday sister-in-law! We got beers and went bowling, and I learned that I bowl better left-handed. But still pretty badly.

What makes you and your partner laugh really, really hard? I'm not sure if it was because of the sleep deprivation or because it was really that funny, but as Matt and I were driving home from the airport at three in the morning — note to self, don't fly into an airport that's more than an hour away if it's going to land after midnight on a work night — we popped in a Taylor Swift CD and started singing all the songs in super deep old-man voices, and it cracked us up so much that it made the last half-hour of that exhausting drive fly by.

I am basically dying for a lay-around-do-nothing vacation. Did you know that Carnival has some cruises that leave from the Virginia coast, that basically just go out in the ocean for a day and then turn around and come back? They call it "the cruise to nowhere," and that makes us laugh. But we're saving up our vacation days for my sister's wedding, and hopefully we'll get to go on a real vacation next year. In the meantime, I'm hoping to get some more fun day trips in. There are so many states nearby that I haven't been to! And so many things I'd like to see in Virginia! What places are near you that you're dying to try?

I went to a wine-tasting with some friends the other week at this gourmet-cooking store, and I got really distracted by this wall that had all these beautiful canisters of tea. I've never been much of a tea drinker — my college roommate loved the stuff and believed it could cure everything, and I thought she was wrong and that tea was gross except in the cases of sore throats and so I avoided it forever for reasons I'm no longer sure of — but I'm finally feeling like I should give tea a fair shake. Or maybe the pretty wall of tea just hypnotized me into thinking this is a good idea? What's your favorite type?

Do you need a new thing to listen to while Serial is on break? May I recommend the podcast Grownups Read Stuff They Wrote As Kids? It's exactly what it sounds like: adults reading their childhood diary entries and angsty teenage poetry in front of a live audience. It. Is. Hilarious. Isn't life so much better now that we're not teenagers anymore? :)

What are your goals right now? I have a few things I want to accomplish in the next few months, but I'm thinking about letting go of some other small goals I've been working on that have lost their appeal, that I'm no longer doing to benefit myself, but still feel obligated to slog through. I read on Ali's blog that sometimes you have to let go of some things in order to make room for things you really want, and that's been resonating with me lately. I'd like to stop putting so much pressure on myself.

But enough about me. What's going on with you? What have I missed these few weeks? (I'm super behind on both writing and reading blogs. Feedly tells me I have an overwhelming number of unread posts waiting for me. I'll get to them eventually.)