My friend Sophia

Loves me so much she sent me this picture of a mutant strawberry!




Thank you Sofa! It's awesome!!!

The Beauty of a Saturday

Waking up at eight, an unparalleled luxury. It is also one of those mornings where everything is at equilibrium, so you can sleep under the blankets with your arms over the top, and your body is not too warm and your arms are not too cold. The pillows are exactly right.

Then, waffles for breakfast with the last of the buttermilk (expired 5 days ago, but it's perfectly fine and also lends a certain edge to your victory over food waste) and half a box of wilty strawberries, resurrected with a little water and some sugar and turned into a perfectly good, sweet-yet-tart strawberry sauce to go over the fresh buttermilk waffles (raised with whipped egg whites for that extra fluffiness). There may or may not be chocolate chips at the insistence of your husband.

Then, after all that, some strong Vietnamese style coffee and a book while your husband goes back to bed to ward off a headache. Playing some guitar and putting the final touches on a song you wrote a couple weeks ago but forgot about and never finished. Deep conditioning your hair with a free sample you got from the salon and looking forward to leftover hot wings for lunch.

Ah, the beauty of a Saturday. Too bad you have to ruin it later with a memo that needs to be written by Monday. But for now, just listen to the dishwasher run, your husband playing classic rock acoustic style, watch the way the sunlight just barely misses entering your apartment through the sliding doors, and enjoy.

Giant food

Another footnote in our "wow we're married and grown ups" file is our BJ's membership. For those not in the know, BJ's is a wholesale club like Sam's Club or Costco, where everything you buy is gigantic. Before anyone in the universe begins to judge us too harshly, BJ's also has gas for about four cents cheaper than the regular gas station. So that was a significant factor in our decision to get a membership. Plus, it's just really fun to wander around and look at all the big stuff, like forty eight ounce tubs of cottage cheese. Because there are people in this world who can eat that much cottage cheese before it expires.

Anyway. The point of this story is that no matter how hard I try, going to BJ's always results in some kind of astronomical total at the check out (which, by the way, usually takes at least a half hour because everyone in the store buys hundreds of items at a time). If I go to a normal grocery store and buy, say, flour, eggs, cheese, veggies, some kind of meat, and fruit, my total might come to about $18. If I go to BJ's, that total is like $96. Except we're buying ten pounds of flour, two dozen eggs, two pounds of cheese, fourteen red peppers, four pounds of steak and three pounds of bananas. So I mean, it evens out...but still.

Finally, what is potentially the biggest hurdle in shopping the world of jumbo foodstuffs: fitting it all into our little apartment. Our refrigerator is a perfectly average sized refrigerator, with a perfectly average sized freezer. It was not equipped to deal with eighteen yogurts, two-carton packs of soy milk, and enough deli meat for fifteen sandwiches all at the same time. So a trip to BJ's usually means an exercise in fridge organization, wherein all items are carefully fitted into exactly-sized compartments. This requires extraordinary discipline, not to mention spatial intelligence, because as soon as you move the mustard two millimeters to the left the peanut butter is falling off the shelf and then you're sunk.

All this to say that life in suburbia is not always boring. Sure, I could be living in a pocket sized loft in the middle of a hip urban neighborhood. But then where would I fit the two gallon jug of olive oil?!