Culinary Adventures of a Southern Belle

As vowed in a previous blog, I have cooked something brand new. I spent most of my Sunday in the kitchen trying my hand at a new recipe and cooking technique.

The role of my precious beets was insignificant (The greens wilted and I had used two of three making borscht the day before). But, I must confess -- boisterously tooting my own haute horn -- that I was pretty successful venturing out of my culinary cushion of comfortable classics and into a palatable pilgrimage of -- that's right -- pulled pork.

The idea for pulled pork practically leaped off of the news page last Tuesday when The Oregonian's FOODday section featured pulled pork recipes. But, after a week of long days and longer nights (Damn Nymph), I didn't get around to implementing it until Sunday afternoon.

After walking to Safeway with Walker in the slightly drizzling June-uary morning to pick up pork shoulder and collard greens, I paid homage to my southern roots, throwing on my housewife apron (Okay I'm neither a housewife nor do I own an apron) and flopping open my Joy of Cooking cookbook to cook up a mean and manly meal of pulled pork with North Carolina-style barbecue sauce, spicy vinegar coleslaw and slow-braised collard (pronounced cawl-uhd) greens.

Now, I was pretty scared that I had bitten off more than I could chew but it turns out that slow-roasting pork and slow-braising vegetables is like water off of a duck's back: easy, easy, easy.

Pulled Pork with Spice Rub:
I made a spice mixture of cumin (Which you can buy bulk at Safeway!), paprika, ground chili powder,  brown sugar (pronounced shu-gah), nutmeg (A substitution for mace, which my recipe called for at 1 tsp. nutmeg for 1/4 tsp. mace), salt and pepper. Do I know the actual measurements? Of course not...but equal parts brown sugar and paprika with hefty and equal bouts of salt and chili powder seemed about right. I got two pork shoulder roasts, about 2 pounds each, which I rubbed tenderly with the spice rub, whispering to with love and care, to take up every little morsel and grain of spice. I'm sure Walker thought I was crazy.

In an oven-safe pan, I heated up rendered bacon fat (What else would I use?), shimmied both roasts in and browned all sides, about three minutes each side. Then, with my oven preheated to 325 degrees, I popped that pot -- tightly covered with aluminum foil -- onto a center rack in my oven and let it brood for three aroma-inducing hours.

Collard Greens:
In another big pot (Big pots equate to Southern cooking in my book) I tossed six strips of roughly chopped uncured Applewood smoked bacon (It's the only kind you can get from Trader Joe's). Letting those get nice and crispy -- which is key, because the two hours of braising they'll undergo can make them as limp as a dishrag -- I tossed in salt and pepper before adding 3 cups water and 1 cup beef broth (I would have gone equal parts but was low in stock), letting it come to a whisper of a boil before adding one head of coarsely chopped, de-ribbed and de-stemmed collard greens. After making sure the greens wilted a smidgen and were completely swimming in the bacony-beefy stock, I reduced the heat to medium-low, covered them and, like my pork shoulder, let them stew for two hours in aromatic heaven.

North Carolina Barbecue Sauce:
Now this recipe I took directly from my Joy of Cooking cookbook but tweaked it with 1 TBSP of honey after tasting it and, much to my heat and spice-taking palate and chagrin, finding it hotter than a two dollar pistol. In this North Carolina sauce (Dubbed North Carolina-style because it isn't tomato/ketchup based) I included 3/4 cup apple cider vinegar, 3/4 cup distilled white vinegar, 1 TBSP hot sauce (I'd reduce this next time), 2 TBSP sugar, 2 tsps chili flake and salt and pepper to taste. While it wasn't nearly as good as what Podnah's Pit BBQ offers, it's spicy acidity ended up mixing well with the smoky-sugary warmth of the pulled pork.

Spicy Vinegar Coleslaw:
Since I can't have dairy and Walker doesn't like mayonnaise, I had to concoct a dairy-and-mayo-free coleslaw recipe. Again, calling on my beloved Podnah's, I tried to recreate a vinegar-based coleslaw with apple cider vinegar, a splash of lemonade (I would have preferred a freshly-squeezed lemon but didn't have one on me), Dijon mustard and vegetable oil. Whipping that up, I poured it over a mixture of  chopped jalapeno pepper (reduce the heat by removing the membrane and seeds) shredded cabbage, carrot and, as promised, beet and let it sit 20 minutes before serving.

And oh, what a grand serving it was: Cold, crunchy coleslaw and hot, tender pulled pork stacked high and voluptuously between beautifully buttered buns slathered with get-all-over-your-face-and-don't-even-care barbecue sauce. Mmmm. Mmmm. Mmmm.

That sounded much more pornographic that it should have...

...but really, it was deliciously sinister enough to make a preacher curse.

I sure do reckon.

The Nymph

I think it's time I finally write about The Nymph.

I mean, I've lived in The Plato for almost nine months now and have just casually mentioned her from time to time.

Okay, I've ranted about her more than once but I figure, since I haven't actually made "The Nymph" a tag in my blog feed that I've been fairly successful in keeping the stories to a minimum. There's part of me that just feels bad about gabbing about an innocent person without his or her knowledge.

But that part of me is gone, rubbed away by the lack of sleep I've gotten over the past four days thanks to The Nymph.

She's not keeping me up with sex (Uh, okay...that's a sentence I never imagined I would write except maybe if I were creating conversational dialogue in a book about a guy whose nymphomaniac girlfriend or wife doesn't let him sleep because she's constantly needing to feed the beast); no -- The Nymph's latest loud escapades involve moving furniture, every day, for the past four days, at four in the fucking morning.

Yes...(unlike Dane Cook), I did say fucking.

For the life of me, and for all the creative juices I have flowing through my head on any given day, I cannot think of a solitary reason -- good or bad -- whyyyyy anyone would be moving furniture for the first, let alone the second, third and fourth, time at four in the morning.

I mean, maybe she has an incredible eye for decoration and spacial arrangement and only gets bursts of inspiration right before the sun comes up. If that's the case, maybe I should get her a job at Pottery Barn doing Visuals.

Okay, maybe not....especially if I'm returning to PB to be part of the Visual Five (No....that's not a team of super heroes, sadly).

Or maybe Walker's theory of The Nymph owning a sex swing is right...and she just has to move it...constantly. But I actually haven't heard her having sex in the morning; just moving furniture.

In all honesty, I don't know what loud noise I prefer to have myself unwillingly subjected to: Her loud sex, her loud sobbing or her loud furniture banging.

No, not that kind of banging.

I mean, when she's having loud sex, I have to hear her moaning and screaming and her squeaking bed and sometimes, when it's really bad -- or I guess really good, depending on what receiving end you're on -- feel the shaking of her floor reverberate down my walls and through my own squeaky hardwood floor. It makes me feel voyeuristic and icky, like I need to take a long, long shower (Which I usually do in the hopes that, by the time I'm finished, she is too).

When she's crying, I sort of just feel bad for her and that makes me want to bring her cookies and hot chocolate and see if she's okay because her sobbing is just so intense. I've sobbed like that before...when my grandmother died and when I tore my hip flexor...that uncontrollable sobbing where you can't even breathe. Her sobbing eradicates all the frustration and anger and grossed outness I have while I hear her having sex; and that just irks me even more.

And now she's got this new fad of early morning furniture rearrangement. It's just plain awful. Sure, she's not making any verbal noise but the constant dropping and dragging of, what I can only imagine is very heavy, furniture (or maybe dead bodies?) is just nerve wracking...

...especially at four in the morning. On the first morning, Saturday, I awoke with such a startle that I clenched Walker's arm (He slept through it) in fear that the sky was falling down (Uhm helloooo! Have you seen Donnie Darko?). Sunday's rude awakening elicited an, "Are you kidding me?!" accompanied with throwing my arms up to the ceiling in disbelief. Monday's rearrangement brought death threats. Today's warranted this blog.

It's a good thing -- for her safety and my unincarcerated freedom -- that we're moving soon. Who knows what might happen otherwise.

Culinary Adventures

After a near solid week of cooking dinner, I've decided to push my cooking to a new level. But, before I continue with the why and how, let me detail the what that led me to this decision. My menu for the previous week:

Sunday: Chicken tomato curry with bell peppers, mushrooms, onions and shrimp.

Tuesday: Fresh fettuccine with with garlic, shrimp, chicken, pancetta (Yeah, three meats). Side salad of mixed greens and the BEST Roma tomatoes and the ripest avocado I've had to date, dressed with my go-to, homemade balsamic vinaigrette (balsamic vinegar, honey, salt, pepper, shallots, dijon mustard and olive oil).

Wednesday: BLOAT sandwiches on ciabatta rolls (BLOAT, I'll admit, is a Walker/Amie co-creation: Bacon, lettuce, sauteed onion, avocado, tomato and pan-fried turkey cutlets).

Thursday:  Carna asada burritos with sauteed bell peppers and onions, white rice, refried beans and homemade guacamole and salsa.

Friday: Lemon garlic pappardelle with pancetta croutons (Yes, you read that right) and broccoli. Salad of mixed greens, avocado and Roma tomatoes, served with the usual balsamic vinaigrette suspect.

Saturday: Egg scramble with onions, bell peppers and pancetta served with multigrain toast and blackberry jam (Okay so Saturday was a Walker meal; I don't do breakfast all that often).

All in all, a solid week of eating in (Which we celebrated last night with happy hour pints at Laurelwood and a tipsy sushi -- I was tipsy, not the sushi -- dinner). Even though last week was slightly stressful, between work, not sleeping and gaining more angst over our pending move, I thoroughly enjoyed coming home at night, taking off my bra, slipping on some sweat pants and hospital socks (The epitome of sex appeal, I know) and cracking open a beer to sip on while I embark on a barrage of onion mincing (Which always, always makes me cry), garlic crushing, meat tenderizing and pasta boiling. It's soothing and calming. Even when I'm worked up and irritable, an hour in the kitchen always makes the frustrations of the day melt away (Though I'm sure the beer doesn't hurt).

But I'm ready to take my cooking further. I've realized, now that I buy food for another person other than myself, that I'm constantly purchasing the same goods. My freezer is always stocked with peas, spinach and broccoli. I've always got onions, bell peppers, mushrooms and avocado in my fridge. My love for Oregon fruit aside, I'm always armed with bananas and apples, regardless of the season. While having the usuals to fall back upon isn't necessarily bad, it's a rut I'm definitely ready to break out from.

So, with my Joy of Cooking cookbook that Santa brought me from the North Pole three Christmases ago, a bit more expendable of a food budget and a boyfriend who's willing to try anything I bring home and/or make (The boy tried a fingerful of Tofutti the other morning), I've decided to make one new thing a week.

And by new I mean something I've never EVER made or eaten before. So whether that means cooking with a new ingredient or whipping up a dish that I randomly flip and point to in my cookbook, I'm going to be stretching my culinary skills and taste buds to new heights.

This week I'm working with beets. Clara and I paid homage to my old stomping grounds on Sunday by going to the Farmer's Market up in Hillsdale. We both purchased the biggest beets I've ever seen. They're Chioggia beets (Pronounced kee-OH-gee-yuh)! Although Chioggia beets are sweeter than typical beets, I'm planning a more savory meal that uses both the beets and the beet greens (I've never cooked nor eaten beet greens so it's a double whammy culinary expedition that meets both prerequisites of my weekly culinary adventure).

Here's the plan:

Shredded beets and coarsely chopped beet greens sauteed in garlic and thyme butter with mushrooms and seared steak. I'm pretty excited because it's a play off of a recipe I found on Epicurious.com (I'm doing steak instead of chicken and garlic and thyme instead of orange zest). The entire dish is cooked in one pan so it should all taste pretty freaking delicious and, if I execute it well enough, the earthiness of the mushrooms and the savory, pungent flavor profile of the thyme should combat harmoniously against the sweetness of the beets. And the garlic? Well, garlic goes with everything!

I'll try to take photos...though doing so will dramatically increase the chances of me setting off the smoke alarm here (I have a crazy affinity for making the entire studio smoky when I pan fry meat).

Although, come to think of it, this apartment doesn't actually have a smoke alarm.

So yes, pictures to come, indeed.

Adieu Pottery Barn...I think...maybe?

So. No need to soften the blow but...

I finally put in my two weeks at Pottery Barn. Last Sunday, on my one-year anniversary at the Barn, I wrote a sad little note, left it on the desk in the managers' office and left for home.

I thought that today and tomorrow was my last weekend. Turns out, as I learned an hour into today's 7 (which turned out to be 6 and some change) hour shift that today, due to the fact that the store was way the hell over in payroll dollars, was my last day.

Walker shot me a text on Thursday morning around 10 to say that (per my request in my two weeks notice notes) I wasn't on the schedule for next week. An odd shock of emotions jolted my body; I was finally going to get my weekends back. But I was also sad knowing that, after just 12 hours (ahem, 6 and some change), I was going to be done at Pottery Barn. It seemed so informally final. So weird.

I shouldn't be sad, really. I shouldn't even care: I'm leaving a barely-above-minimum-wage, part-time job that requires me to cater to the sometimes-uppity and always-rich people who patron our store (when I'm still laid-back, realistic and not-quite-rich) for a new full-time, salaried career. Everything about my life is about to better itself (I'm ignoring the Notorious B.I.G's wane of 'Mo Money, Mo Problems') now that I'm making more money:

Better apartment (Ahem, bigger!) Better healthcare (Actual healthcare...meaning I don't have to keep telling Kaiser Permanente that I'm a visiting member and still don't have a member records number...). Better peace of mind knowing that for the first time in my life I'm going to be able to independently thrive (PS for an example of the type of writing I do at AngelVision, the last paragraph -- sans parenthetical asides -- is a damn good example of my mad marcom skills).

But you know what?

I'm actually a little uneasy about leaving Pottery Barn.

It's hard to leave a place that's been so flexible and unbelievably supportive over the twelve months...a place where I've met great friends, a wonderful boyfriend who I'm apartment searching with and a basketful (we'll go with an XXL Beachcomber's size basket) of people who genuinely care for me.

I've had a lot of people pushing me to finally put my two weeks in at Pottery Barn after landing the job at AngelVision a month ago. And finally, I decided it was time. AngelVision is, as promised, a very demanding job: I've already got projects and scripts up the wazoo (Fun etymology fact of the day: Wazoo is indeed slang for...uh...you know...originally derived from the Pama-Nyungan languages -- the family of Australian languages -- and thought to refer to the uh...you know...of animals, especially the kangaroo) so much to the point that I'm taking my laptop home after 8 1/2 solid hours of clickity-clack typing.

It's so much work that it just taxes my mind to the point that I'm simply pooped on the weeknights and worthless on the weekends. Today for example, I slept in until 8:20, drank lots of coffee, ran 4 miles, ate breakfast then slept for another 45 minutes after moping around worthlessly for 2 hours. The thought of working retail when I'm so exhausted just exhausts my exhaustion. It makes me moody and, as Walker can attest to, less than desirable and fun to be around, let alone live with.

And that's not good because, really, I am a happy and cheery person.

Nevertheless, after shutting off the main lights after closing for the final time (maybe?!), I can't help but feel a wee bit sad. After so much bitching about the job...I just don't get this feeling that I'm going to be missing out on something.

Weird. Very weird indeed.

Hump Day

Today has been a rough day. For no real reason in particular I haven't been sleeping all that well and today was definitely a result of the four hours of sleep I've managed to wink in over the past two days. It's not a case of the Mondays but rather, as the rest of the working world calls it, a case of the Humpdays.

No. I'm not talking about anything pornographic or icky (I hate the word hump with as much passion as I do the word horny. They both just sound so gross).

Allow me to pull some definitions:

Ala Urban Dictionary:
1. The middle of the work week; used in context of climbing a proverbial hill to get through a tough week.
2. Wednesday, the middle of the week, implying you have to 'get over the hump' before you can anticipate the weekend.
3. The middle of the week or the beginning of the weekend, depending on your level of addiction to alcohol.

Ala Dictionary.com:
1. The middle of the work week, usually Wednesday.

Sadly, since I no loner have access to the Oxford English Dictionary since I graduated UP 13 months ago, I can't dive into the serious etymology of Hump Day.

So I Googled instead (Yes, I know...I am indeed a giant dork).

Apparently Wednesday is just a mediocre middle day in most worlds...real and fictional.

There's AE Bray's nursery rhyme, "Monday's Child," that decries Wednesday's child as full of woe (IF...yes, big IF, I ever have kids, I'm sure my mom will hope I have a Wednesday child since, as she and my father have told me numerous times, if I were the first child, I would have been the only.). Solomon Grundy was married on a Wednesday, fell ill on a Thursday and was buried by Sunday (I DO plan on getting married someday but definitely NOT on a Wednesday).

In Winnie the Pooh, the cruddy nature of the "Blustery Day" is attributed to it being "Windsday" (a play off of Wednesday, just in case you didn't catch that). And in Richard Brautigan's "In Watermelon Sugar," Wednesday is the only day the sun shines gray (Considering his troubled life and eventual suicide, it's probably best he was a Montana boy who didn't know that in Portland, the sun shines gray every day).

But it's not even in literature and poetry where Wednesday is a crappy day (PS as I write this the once-sunny day is vanishing under a sheet of heavy, heavy rain). In astrology, the planet Mercury represents Wednesday. Mercury, a/k/a Apollo, is simply the messenger (Maybe there's a reason for that adage, "Don't shoot the messenger" because it sucks to be the proverbial bearer of bad news.), noted for his swiftness and speed...a flat out lie considering the length of the modern day Wednesday. I think that the first century poet Manilius probably had it right when he called Mercury inconstant and vivacious.

If we shoot over to the Bible, we get Ash Wednesday (Caveat: This is all coming from a non-religious individual who attended a private Catholic university so take the commentary with a grain of salt). Yes, of course, it's a wonderfully spiritual day on the whole but it comes with the confessing, fasting and the promise to not eat meat for FORTY WHOLE DAYS. Plus as it was at my college, most people are hungover from going nuts the night before on Fat Tuesday.

So, as one can see, Wednesdays are blah all around. For me, Wednesday's few saving graces are all modern-day guilty pleasures like the Willamette Week (Of which I only read the Dish section. I pick up the free weekly paper solely because it means I get a THIRD crossword puzzle to work on), America's Next Top Model (WGN is rerunning the Petite Model season, fyi) and no boyfriend until later at night to make fun of me for indulging in either (Quarter Orange duty calls). On my cross country team in college Wednesdays were always an easy training day; no practice and either a light run, cross training or a total day off.

Considering my lack of sleep and the fact that my body feels more zombie-like and less humanoid, I'm going to pay homage to my cross country team training schedule and take the day off from running (I've gone a solid 12 days in a row!), kick back with an IPA and watch ANTM while doing the crossword puzzle.

Of course, that's after I finish this ginormous internal project that's due...oh...today.

Hump Day indeed.

Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden #%&*#@! Sun

Warning: I'm a bit of a potty mouth in this post.

For a very brief 15 minutes this afternoon I saw blue sky.

No, I'm not kidding.

For those of you readers who aren't Pacific Northwesterners (Which might be just Meghann, Rachel, Timmy and the occasional random outsider who might, maybe, perchance stumble across my blog), you don't know how incredibly awesome seeing blue sky was.

We had just finished our weekly Friday lunch time meeting (Which actually sorta sucked because my sandwich -- we always get lunch purchased for us on Fridays, courtesy of a department in the company -- was slathered in gut-wrenching cream cheese so I was forced to buy my own lunch) and were back in our cave of an office when our boss came to talk with us, the messaging team. He was in the midst of explaining how we need to really hammer down on perfecting the narration aspect of our Impact Movies (since our writing and graphics are already pretty bomb) when I, gazing past him, blurted out:

"Holy shit, that's blue sky!"

I was obviously mortified; embarrassed by my foul-mouthed word vomit and apparent inability to pay full attention to what my boss was saying at the time and scared because I interrupted the flow of creative reconstruction of a major step in our scriptwriting process.

I was indeed the new girl who wasn't paying attention to the man who signed her paychecks.

Shit.

It wasn't even that...I mean, it mostly was, but there's also the factor that the big boss intimidates me. I'm pretty sure he is indeed a genius and because of that, I find myself super hesitant when speaking around or directly to him. I don't want to sound like an idiot, which doesn't actually happen to me often (I swear I'm smart and articulate...Jacob would call that smarticulate). However, I've found myself sounding like a total ditzy airhead (or perhaps the platinum blonde I've made myself to be) in front of him (I was actually surprised I landed the full-time position here, considering that I've never had such a bad and awkward interview as I did when I spoke with him prior to being hired). So, to blurt out something so remedially obtuse was really, the icing on the idiot cake.

Especially because my interruption didn't go unnoticed.

"What?" My boss asked.

"Oh...uh...there's...uhm. A break. In the clouds. And...uh...yeah...the sky...the sky is blue. Blue sky."

Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

"You don't say? Well there it is. It's about fucking time."

Phew. Crisis averted.

But yes, there was a teeny, tiny sliver of blue sky this afternoon. After a month's worth of rain in the first four days of June, the third wettest May in history and a record-breaking 25 days of measurable rain in April, the slice of blue sky was a slice of hope for better, warmer and drier days to come.

Honestly though, they can't come soon enough. I'm ready to let these pasty white legs see some sunlight for a change; to not wear hooded jackets when I walk from car to apartment; to be able to wear sandals without having soggy toes afterwards.

Not that I'm complaining; I'm well aware I've established residence in Portland where we're as famous for rain as we are for great coffee, great beer and a great abundance of homeless people. And that's okay...sometimes a good rain is cleansing and soothing (Also like coffee and beer, though not really like homeless people).

But, after three months of rain with just a teaser of warm weather, I think we Portlanders (and all Pacific Northwesterners, for that matter) deserve a little big of Mr. Sunshine love.

It's about fucking time, after all.

Movin' On Up!

I hate moving. The whole idea of packing up every little piece of my property, whether it's my black pub style table and corresponding wobbly stools (We're talking Target here, not Pottery Barn) or one of 12 dinner plates (This time we're talking IKEA) is just exhausting. I loathe getting boxes together and filling them in an organized fashion with trinkets and dishes and books and toiletries only to have to unpack them within the following days. 

Then there's the cleaning. It's not as though I keep a dirty apartment (My mother would be so ashamed) or anything but I just have this nagging guilty conscious that forces me to perform the deepest scrub on any place I leave behind (Save for the last place I live that is, but hey--I was jipped out of my Eight Pound Oreck in that deal so I don't feel much remorse). I'll wipe down walls and scrub corners with a toothbrush until I've inhaled so many cleansing fumes that I'll start scrubbing spots that are more a figment of my intoxicated imagination (It's also at that point that I usually get distracted and think it'd be a good idea to go on some kind of Gonzo crusade).

I personally blame my three years living in UP dorms for my inane moving-out cleansing ritual. At the end of the school year, RAs would scrutinize our dorm rooms like a grandma scrutinizes fingernails, pointing out with horror and dismay the teeniest, tiniest, most minute speck of dirt. Unlike grandma though (hopefully!), UP charged a bleeping dollar for every one thing left in the dorm room. I once had to pay for a dried leaf the size of my pinkie nail.

And of course, along with the packing and cleaning, there's the whole finding a new place to live process and the accompanying stress that hides in its back pocket. I always get bullet-sweating nervous that I won't be able to find a place to live, despite the fact that Craigslist touts an average of 90 new listings at my price range in Multnomah County alone each day. Obviously I'm going to be able to find a new place to live but that still doesn't stop me from embarking on my search for a new abode weeks before its even sensible to start the application process.

Nevertheless, despite loathing the actual moving process, I can't help but be totally and completely stoked that I'm moving at the end of this month. Thanks to a 100 percent increase in my monthly budget, I'm able to afford a bigger apartment so that Walker -- bless his heart for putting up with being squished in a studio for three months -- and I can live more like adults in a real, live, well-put-together apartment and less like close-quartered college roommates.

Where we're going to live yet...well, we haven't figured that part out yet. But anywhere than where we are now will be better. It's not that The Plato is all that bad...there are worse places out there (Gresham, Tigard and Hillsboro to name a few). It's just become a bit inconvenient as of late, what with my apartment manager threatening to kick me out because Walker has a set of keys and The Nympho's Johns confusing my apartment for hers (I had a guy on Monday who, honestly -- looked 14 at best, knock on my door, push his body partially into our studio in search for her). My early mornings sometimes conflict with Walker's late night so the fact that he can legally have a set of keys would make our daily routines a bit smoother. My early morning runs and stretching routines won't bother his beauty sleep and his late night post-QO meeting drinkfests won't bother mine.

Now that I've put my (our) 30 days into the landlord, I'm starting to get antsy about finding a place, even though I'm still 9 days away from being able to make any kind of deposit. And there's the fact that we'll be headed to Spokane for Hoopfest (No, not to play 3-on-3 basketball...we're going to watch my brother and his friend play hungover) the last weekend of June, possibly leaving us with just weekdays, probably more realistically weeknights to move all of our stuff...

...which we have a lot of. Combined, we have enough place settings to throw a killer three-course meal dinner party for two dozen people -- predinner drinks and postdinner coffee included -- without washing a single dish. I have as many books (Helloooo English major!) as he does movies (Hellooooo Film major!) and the sheer quantity of appliance we have probably require more than one packed-to-the-brim car trip to our yet-to-exist new place.

We've yet to nail down where we want to live...though the lure of Northwest living is a luxury I've definitely gotten used to. Forest Park? Shopping? Close to work? Coffee every three feet? Yeah...leaving this area would definitely force me to make a change in my daily routine that I'm not quite sure I'm ready or willing to make.

I can only handle so much change at one time, after all.