Here I am, sitting outside with a mug of tea, wrapped in a blanket and stubbornly refusing to accept the fact that it is straight up cold outside. I showed up at 7:15 this morning for the “Dirty 30” circuit workout class, held in the parking lot outside of the trainer I occasionally visit. (Yes, it is AS FIERCE as it sounds. My muscles currently feel like jelly.) Katie—the trainer—runs small group classes, which are wicked hard combination of kettlebells and TRX and core and crossfit and medicine ball slams and sprints and more varieties of squat jumps than I realized existed. She’s been running classes outside all summer—and soon it’ll be too cold to carry on like this. Like so much else in the world, we’ll just have to see what happens next.
Read moreSOUR CREAM BANANA BREAD
Remember small talk with strangers? Cocktail parties and the attendant chit-chat you’d make as you sipped a glass of Chardonnay in someone’s living room, or nursed a too-strong gin and tonic amidst a group of friends at a bar? Dinner parties where you politely conversed with the people on either side, finding out that the man to your left is an accountant who builds wooden canoes in his spare time and that the woman to your right only likes to humble brag about her three children?
Read moreSESAME PRALINE GRAHAM CRACKERS
I tap open the weather app and see a bold red “flood warning” above the day’s hourly forecast. It’s not yet 7 AM—an hour at which the day usually hasn’t declared itself, weather-wise. I step outside into a cloudy, opaque world: fog and mist obscure the street, making the houses and trees and cars appear pale and shadowy.
(I realize I talk a lot about the weather here. Either I should consider a career as an amateur meteorologist, or it’s a reflection of the fact that when you live at the beach (and anywhere really), a sunny day versus a rainy one greatly colors your daily experience. Anyway. Roll with it, okay?)
Read moreCHERRY TOMATO JAM
If the past few months have taught me anything, it’s that I need very little in the way of stuff. I suppose that intellectually I always knew this to be true; I’ve lived at plenty of times over the years out of a backpack or a camp trunk or a suitcase—but those were always brief interludes to normal life. These days, 90% of my belongings are crammed higgledy-piggledy in a storage unit somewhere outside of Baltimore. I think (fingers crossed!) that most of my clothes and books and…well, everything I own…is still there, but for the first time ever, movers packed it up (unsupervised) so I can only hope and cross my fingers and toes.
Read morePERFECT COUSCOUS
I woke up this morning to a gray world outside. The trees outside my window were obscured by a thin veil of drizzle—it wasn't raining in earnest yet, but the skies were a dull pewter and the roses climbing our neighbor’s trellis trembled in the wind.
Instead of staying under the covers—the pintucked white duvet pulled snugly around my still-sleepy form—I got up. (See, there’s this cool new kind of real life alarm clock called a 5-month-old baby. Works like a charm, man.)
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