Sad Mac

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You know what they say.  Once you go Mac, you never go back.

I love my Mac.  I can’t imagine a possible scenario that would make me ever want a PC again.  The only reason I have an Android phone is because Verizon didn’t have the iPhone yet when my last cell clunked out on me.  So now I have under a year until I am 100% Mac.

So you can imagine I freaked out a little bit last week when I had a mini-Mac-meltdown. (By no fault of Apple’s.  All my own…).  My MacBook was so full that it had practically come to a stand still.  Anything I did resulted in a message telling me my hard drive was full.  Anything.  Websites, pictures for blogs, saving word documents… Anything.

Ever watched Sex and The City?  I’m sure you remember this episode.  That is how I felt.

I had a Sad Mac.

So a little background information.  Brad and I share this laptop.  And we are both musicians.  And we have over 4 years of pictures together, as well as my 4 years or so of digital pictures before that.  ALL STORED ON MY MAC.

Well that isn’t entirely accurate.  I sit here now, surrounded by three external hard drives.  I started threatening Brad about a year ago to back up the music he didn’t listen to and delete it from the laptop so we wouldn’t get into this mess.  And we have.  In fact, we have so much that two of these external hard drives are actually full.

FULL.

So when my precious laptop slowed to a halt, I went to delete some more music (Lady Gaga is way less important than new blog posts.  Besides, I have Spotify now.  Duh.) and was horrified when I had absolutely nowhere to put that “Born This Way” album.

I immediately made a Genius Bar Appointment and booked it over to the Apple Store with three hours until I had to be at job #2.  I was cursing and hyperventilating and making lists of all of the things I should have been accomplishing that day.  It was about a day and a half before we went on vacation.  There were most definitely other things I should have been doing, but Sad Mac took priority fo sho.

And then I got to Apple.

Let’s just say I didn’t even make it to my appointment (I was also like an hour and a half early).  One of the helpful blue shirt guys probably saw the crazy in my eyes and he walked me through it. Turned out I was two updates behind and had a lot of steps ahead of me to get me on the cloud.  He sent me on to another store to buy the update (they were out) where I nearly snapped a unhelpful employee’s head off, but I ended up walking out with my third and newest external hard drive.

I know, this is all thrilling stuff, right?

Moral of the story, I come from a computer savvy family and it was a blessing in disguise that I #1 had my iPad to get me through and #2 was coming home in a couple days.

This is what my computer looked like last night…

And today, I could kiss it.  My brother switched me to a much bigger hard drive, added memory, cleaned out all of the Gibson hair that had snuck down into the keyboard (gross..) and then upgraded me to Mac VIP status.  OS X Lion, baby.

Yea, that’s right, I have the newest operating system.  And the geek in me really, really likes that.

Thank you, Jonny.  For answering my ridiculously panicked texts and for whipping my laptop into shape.

And one of my all time favorite Sex and the City quotes from that fantastic episode:

“After all, computers crash, people die, relationships fall apart. The best we can do is breathe and reboot.” -Carrie Bradshaw, SATC

I’m On A Boat!

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My family, living twenty minutes from the Chesapeake Bay, have never really been water people. People assume when I tell them that I am from Maryland that I have great sailing skills, or at least played water polo once or twice or something.

We don’t really do that here in Columbia…

I take that back. My family has owned a boat as long as I can remember. But it’s a canoe. And it’s been upside down in our backyard, probably the home to many squirrels and small animals, ever since I was about ten.

My dad used to take me fishing a lot in our canoe. I’d go digging for worms in our backyard and then we would go down to the reservoir with my Disney fishing rod. According to my father’s speech at my wedding, I always caught some pretty big fish. Insert joke about brad being a big fish here. Nice work, dad.

Anyway, so last year our super close family friends decided to get a really sweet boat and named it the Live, Love, Laugh in honor of their wonderful daughter who passed away a few years ago and how she lived her life.

 

It was absolutely the best idea ever for a couple reasons. First, because it is so peaceful out there and really just gives them (and whoever they invite to ride) a great place to relax and find peace. And second, as Brad said today, the only thing better than owning a boat is having friends who own a boat.

Since Brad and I live so far away and have managed to be away most of the past two summers, we insisted on testing out our sea legs today. We left my parents house armed with sweaters, jackets, hats… It was 61 degrees and we were going boating, dammit.

 

Captain Mike even took the day off of work to indulge us (thanks Mr. Mike). Everyone was put to work, especially brad who grew up on a lake and loves boating life.

Somehow I lucked out and just curled up under the only blanket on board and just took pictures. What can I say?  I am a wimp.

 

Oh, and my brother and sister in law got us a ukulele today for our wedding present.  Of course, Brad brought it along and serenaded us while we shivered.


 

We took the boat across the river to a cute little restaurant that was absolutely empty and whose servers seemed kind of horrified that we braved the chilly weather for them. And while we ate our crab soup and crab cake sandwiches, the sun came out and warmed things up a little.

 

The sky was blue, the leaves were turning… it turned out to be a fantastic autumn day.

 

Days like this make me miss being close to home and the people I love. Thanks, Susan and Mike for loving and indulging us. Next time we come out for a ride though, I’m going to insist on having to wear less than four layers…

This little piggy

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If this picture from our wedding isn’t an indicator of the pig influence in my life, here is another.

My husband loves pigs. He works at a restaurant (Ford’s Filling Station, check it out) that is decorated with pigs. They get in 3 or 4 huge pigs every week and hold pig dinners for groups who want to try everything from pig brain and eyeballs to crispy pig tails. they specialize in using every part of the animal, from snout to tail.

When Brad first started working at Fords, he started posting pictures of his every day activities on Facebook. This included a lot of dead piggy pictures. Brad cutting up piggies, all the cuts of piggies, hanging sausages…

He started getting messages from friends back east just making sure I was safe living with and being married to such a butcher. I started pushing my social media knowledge on him and asked him to censor the pictures he displayed for everyone. Case in point, he butchered an entire pig the other day and very proudly showed me a picture of a pile of cuts of pig meat with the triumphant head sitting right on top.

“I didn’t put this one on Facebook, Kels.”

Sigh. Of. Relief.

I am extremely proud of him and his piggie loving ways. They gross me out every now and then, mostly when he makes me try eyeballs or bone marrow or yet another chicken liver invention. But the man knows pork. And I reap the benefits of all of those pictures that are not posted to Facebook.

But Brad left me here in Maryland last night so he could get up to Ithaca before this afternoon, which happens to be the only appointment he could get with his favorite tattoo artist while we were home.

He is getting a pig tattooed on his arm.

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In his own words…

Love

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Having a little trouble with the blog a day challenge. Only because yesterday I was recovering from a bit of a hangover and trying to rally for leah and dans big day.

And today I was most definitely struggling again, but the photo shoot I discovered today on my cell phone makes all of this hangover worth it… At 2 am at the Pikesville hilton, we were still rocking hard. Obviously.

Happy wedding leah and dan!!! Love you both!

espanol de columbia

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if you speak no spanish, i apologize. i don’t either and i don’t understand a word of this. thanks a lot jonny and brad.

these are the 179790709 text messages that i just checked my phone and got from my husband and my brother. Sometimes Jonny hijacks Facebook walls, last night he made me thankful I have unlimited text messages.

I think that Brad really misses all of the spanish that is spoken in Los Angeles. If you need translation (like i did) my sister provided the good ones, i think.

if not, I’ll work on it later. for now, i’m gonna pour another glass of vino…

this is how the texts went:

-taco

-taco taco

-burrito

-enchillado

-sopa

-quesadilla

-tortilla

-quest

-queso

-queso fresco

-pollo

-papa fritas

-con mustardo

-espana

-bisc ensalada

-pescado del mar

-futbol

-jugar futbol

-trabajr en el bano (ooooh yeah)

-a la izquierda

-muy caliente (this actually has a dirty meaning which is not spicy food)

-el thinko

-cuidado con mi corizon (really a ricky martin y madonna song cerca de 1998. brad thought it was ‘seniora de boobies’ aka Xtina A.)

-amigos para siempre (BFFS 4EVER)

-don’t go breaking my heart (no se rompe mi corizon. this is really bad translation but at least it’s not englis?!)

-taaaaaaaaco.

-nacho

-nacho liner (nacho libre?!)

-lav/anderia

-shampoo pronounced spaniglishly

-gatos

-taco gato (CAT TACOS WTF)

-i’m down

-biblioteca (rhymes with policiaca according to mama byls)

-los ojos

-la bomba

-sexx laws

-los zapatos de la zapateria

-the candlestick maker

-el panera

-typhoid

-beck (back to sexx laws…)

-vestido

-tomatillos

-policiaca (personally hate this one)

-frijoles negros

-jamon de sopa

-espanicas

-el ninos

-bambino

-abuelita (lil g-ma)

-el hardo de noche (o noche dificil)

-lunes

-marttes

-martes

-miercoles

-jueves

-huevos

-viernes

-sabado

-domingo

-augusto

-muy bonita

-azul

-manaza

-naranja

-banana

-uvas

-fresca

-planto de huevo (what is plant of egg?? for real)

-juego de naranja

-pio pio

-al verde

-senor al verde

-aeropuerto

-museo de historia

-inglesia (not to be confused with enrique iglesia)

-la playa

-splish splosh (spanish elvis)

-limpiar

-alligators

-la nina

-bimbo pan/ pan bimbo/ pan blanco. WHITE BREAD BIAA

Soaking Addicts Anonymous

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I had my very first request for a blog post from a fan :). Thanks, Dan, for making me feel famous.

He was right though, I left you all hanging. I told you about Brad and all of his kitchen rules and then all I gave you was a story about keeping your hands clean. People have heard about wet hand, dry hand. You need the chef’s wife inside kitchen rules. The ones nobody even knows exist.

So here is kitchen rule #2.

Never Leave a Dish in the Sink with Water In It

I call this soaking. Brad calls this gross.

I think I developed this habit to justify not doing my dishes right away. You fill a used pot with water and all that food and sauce still stuck in there get to slowly dissolve so dishes are so easy to clean whenever you get to them! Genius!

Especially when it comes to bowls of oatmeal. You don’t soak that bowl with a teeny bit of oatmeal left on it? It sticks like cement. You need a Brillo Pad to get that stuff off.

Shoulda soaked that bowl.

I seriously never noticed (or thought it was a big deal) that I did this until about a year ago when I was once again making fun of Brad for how he put dishes in the dishwasher. Bowls and glasses everywhere. In every direction. We could barely fit a days worth of dishes in there and there was no way they were ever going to get clean. It was my dad in me coming out when I asked him, once again, to put the big white bowls on the bottom shelf. All facing the same way. Pretty, pretty please.

“Alright fine. I will do that if you promise not to leave pots in the sink with water in them.”

WHAT?!?!?

This, my friends, is one of the secrets to marriage, right? Compromise. I get the bowls, he gets the water in the pots. And I don’t even really leave water in pots. That’s crazy. Who does that?

One point for Kels.

“Deal.”

Except the next couple of weeks I stopped myself from filling up pots, pans, bowls and dishes like 767868755 times. Turns out, I had a serious soaking problem.

Brad realized how hard this was for me and even cut me a little slack. Apparently it is ok to leave dishes in the sink (for a short period of time), as long as there is no water in them. But it turned out he doubly won this compromise because every time I’d fill up the stupid pot with water, I would realize what I was doing and then just wash it to get it out of my sight.

Stupid Pot Soaking Addiction.

I have to tell you all, I have not completely broken the habit. I actually chose to tell you about this rule next because the night I had a request for another kitchen rule, I was making burgers for Brad who had worked another 14 hour day. As I was frying up some bacon, I caught this little guy in the sink…

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So Brad is doing much better with my kitchen rule than I am with his. But he’s a professional. I would expect nothing less from him. Brad invented the kitchen rules. I’m still a rookie in this game.