strike a pose.

jared and i headed out with our total rock star photographer this past weekend for some engagement photos at storm king sculpture park.
i made a nerdy little slide show for your viewing pleasure. don't pay attention to the depressing lyrics of such an upbeat song (beck's always good for tricking you into thinking a song is happy when it is sad) we just wanted an upbeat tune to go with the upbeat photos.

hopefully the video worked...it's my first time making one of these things!

cheers to better health and crazy kittens.

ok, so here we are a mere seven months before getting hitched and i am sick. and not just flu or cold sorta sick.... i have lyme disease. and let me tell you it sucks. it sucks because i am not sick enough to stay at home and really rest and yet i have a hard time reading a long document and coming up with the right words to say in the middle of a sentence. it's really bad when you are explaining that you have a bunch of stuff that needs to be thrown out of that....that...what's the word --- oh yeah file cabinet. i mix things up and get tired really easily. last night i went to whole foods for coffee and totally forgot what i was there for -- ended up coming home with soy milk, tempeh and flowers.... and no coffee.

luckily i now have a reason why i have been so out of it and feeling so crappy. and it is definitely consoling to hear after multiple drs visits over at least the past year that i did not make up this stuff in my head. i am also lucky that wookie pushed me to find a new doctor and go in when my hands and feet were all pins and needles (read: called and made the appt for me). he takes that in sickness and in health thing very seriously!!

it's been two weeks of super duper antibiotics and all i have to show for it is a little more stamina, a lot less sleep and a growing addiction to probiotics. but i am on the mend!! one more week of antibiotics to go then a visit to the neurologist and infectious disease doc (i am that cool). i have my wookie and my little man, heathcliff (look at how cute and big he is!!) to keep me company and make sure i take my meds.

in the meantime, life goes on. work is totally picking up! i haven't been able to do much yoga but it's a good time to reflect and still teach. we also are still full steam ahead with the wedding planning. we even got to go to a sip and scan event at macy's where jared got lots of glutinous goodies while i scanned more items onto the registry. then when we were ready to leave, we got a gift of two nice wine glasses!

so.....cheers to better health.

bake fail.

the first time jared came to visit me in nj, i was waiting anxiously for him to arrive and decided to have a go at making what in my mind was a gluten free version of apple crisp. substituting quinoa for oats and wheat flour.

unfortunately, i decided that all the quinoa needed was some water and it would cook just fine. So he arrived and there was the smell of yummy apple crisp -- i looked like the perfect girlfriend who was cool and could bake!! we had awkward conversation, since this was our first time seeing each other after only meeting twice in chicago a month before and communicating with each other every single day via phone, chat, im, text and email.

i nervously checked the damn stuff about 50 times -- adding more and more water hoping for some magic change. the quinoa never popped. jared was really antsy to try it, and i thought it got sort of mushy so we ended up trying it. at first taste it was all yummy but it had a crunch that suspiciously resembled uncooked quinoa -- or in layman's terms uncooked rice -- and not in a good way.

jared brings this up whenever he says something about my cooking, as in, you always cook great stuff except for that time when i first came to visit and you made that apple stuff -- that sucked. and i laugh, because i totally agree -- it sucked.

regardless, there really hasn't been another time where i had a repeat of that failed attempt, except this sunday when i had a bake fail from a box mix. it happens, people. it usually happens when you don't follow directions (note: i don't really like to follow directions).

anyway, we were out of butter so i substituted smart balance in the betty crocker gluten free chocolate chip cookies box mix (which i might add, i got at the lackawana pathmark in montclair). the damn things wouldn't come off the cookie sheet and true to gf baked good form they were crumbly. BUT -- they tasted damn good. we scraped them off the sheets and ate the cookie crumble out of a plastic baggie.

my review -- follow the directions and you can be reminded of why chocolate chip cookies taste so good. it was easy and i am sure they will work with real butter. i did put some in a small loaf pan and they came out fine.

the domestication of jared.

i knew back when i would visit jared in chicago that he wasn't much of a cook. he and his brother were roommates and basically, adam is a kick-ass cook and baker which gave jared no incentive to even try. so when he first moved here, i was prepared for the learning curve that he would have with anything culinary.

the thing is that i commute and an hour and half one-way (that's three hours total) each day for work. it's no easy feat, but someone has to do it to bring home the bacon, or in our case the taylor ham. jared's commute?? 12 minutes. yes, 12 freaking minutes!!!! and, when we first started living together i would schelp home and he (having been home for at least an hour, possibly more) would be sitting like a kid at the counter waiting for dinner. i am not sure where this behavior came from, but i thought to myself, it has to stop.

from that, i started to have him help me. first it was just cutting and prepping, then it might be cooking some sides. he was all too familiar with the george forman grill, and my little mini version got a lot of use as jared used it for the first few months to 'cook dinner'. we then invested in an even bigger george forman grill and for about the last two months, we (i am also to blame) have cooked almost every aspect of our meals from potatoes to veggies, to meats. it's not that bad being that it's summer and all, but i like to cook-cook. so i started it up again, letting jared grill when he can.

so today, after a long day of meetings i just wanted to eat dinner and hit the hay. i missed my yoga class and ended up on the same train as my man. he being awesome, dropped me off at the nail salon for a mani-pedi to unwind and when home to 'cook'. we had a discussion earlier in the day about how to cook the pork that i had thawed out but i expected that i would have george forman-ed food on my plate -- instead, i got a really damn good meal. pork medallions with carmelized onions, steamed peas and mashed potatoes!!! granted the mashed potatoes were instant and the peas were microwave-steamed. but, this meal was rather dee-lish. i actually am looking forward to it tomorrow.

i guess he actually learned when i showed him how to cook stuff.

love you, baby.

Chicago!

Here's a pic of my adorable man hailing us a cab to to and catch Nick
and Norah's Infinite Playlist.

Check it out:

And yes, I actually made it here in time. It's starting to get chilly
and fall-like. Not quite 'Siberia' as my father refers to it as...but it's getting there.

cleanse, repeat.

it's been a while since my last blog. so much has happened. update: the iPhone 3G sort of sucks. I am still holding out for them to come up with some magical update that will fix it, but let's just say that i get dropped calls where i didn't before. i trust that it will work out.

other news: jared is moving to NJ!! we have been discussing this over the past few weeks and he will be moving here next spring. yes, spring is a long way off, but he needs to set things up here for his business. i am just so excited that he is coming here and that we can get a place together and that life is so good!

ok and with all that, i decided to do a juice cleanse. i have been feeling pretty shitty lately and thought why not clean things out. i signed up for the blueprint cleanse and will be doing it for the next 3 days. hopefully i can handle it. i will definitely blog about it. i chose the second level of the cleanse over a three day period bc i really wanted to restart my system. i had my first juice so far and am feeling ok. i might just make it through!

hopefully i can get over to take another iyengar class. i took one earlier this week and ended up as the only person in the class. surprisingly that is the first time in my yoga experience that i was the only student in the class. the teacher was very different from what i am used to. but basically we did a lot of poses over and over again. he pushed me a lot to engage the muscle at the top of my knee to really fire up my thigh muscles. it seemed to really sink in. earlier in the week i had a discussion with a yoga friend about the iyengar people being sort of sadistic. i get it, and maybe i just like it. i need some discipline every once in a while -- maybe we all do. i am just not sure i need the discipline of an hour and a half of parvrita parsvotonasan.

lastly, it's the 7-year anniversary of 9/11. i usually get all choked up when i think of this time, but for some reason i am feeling settled about the whole thing. yes, it was 7 years ago that we all had to witness the attack of our country, but things continue to move on. the word anniversary seems to be the thing that is most disconcerting. i am beginning to see how there is a need for rememberance. that rememberance can be as physical as me engaging the muscle at the top of my knee but it can be as broad as remembering the events of 9/11. they in essence are always there but need a specific energy focused upon them -- and from that there is a stregnth that supports. in a lot of ways the events of 9/11 served a purpose jump start a lot of action in our country. i know it changed me.

Bling Bling!

Check out the gorgeous earrings that jared got me! I'm a lucky girl.