A Tree Among Thorns

The day we bought the 4th Christmas tree of our married life was SO horrible. It was the kind of day where the alarm goes off late, and the coffee is already cold. So many things went wrong, that if I wrote about all of them, youd get pretty sad too. It started off not bad though. We got to Skype with some friends in the States, and had a whole list of fun things to do on a fun Saturday in Dublin: Christmas shopping! The Zoo! But nothing went like it was supposed to, and everything slowly fell apart. As thing after thing didnt work out, it was progressively more difficult to stand near each other. The most significant disappointment that day Ill tell you about, was us trying to find our Christmas tree.

This Christmas is obviously one of the most poignant of our lives yet. For so many reasons, this year will stand out in our memories forever. One of the highlights will undoubtedly be the fact that Jon & I, for the first time ever, get to host family, in our very own home, for a major holiday. Its not like a practice holiday that people only minimally care about because they get time off work for it, like Columbus Day or President's Day. People only know when its President's Day because when they stop by the bank, the sticky note taped to the glass says, "Closed during business hours again, because you really needed to cash that check to buy food for your family, and generally just to piss you off. Oh and its President's Day." But Christmas? Thats a real life holiday folks, one that the whole world knows about! Banks are still closed, but nobody cares! Hosting the family for Christmas is just about the biggest honor you can have bestowed on you, and you cannot take it lightly. Needless to say, getting The Tree to set the stage was paramount.

The first bad omen of the day was that after walking ten minutes to the bank, it was closed so we couldnt cash the check. From there it just got worse. It was surprisingly hard to get a straight answer from people about where to find a Christmas tree to buy. Sometimes it was a language barrier (those are adorable cookies, but I meant a REAL tree) and sometimes just poor judgement on our part (just because she's carrying a wreath made from pine tree branches apparently doesnt mean she knows where the branches came from originally). Then we heard about trees in Smithfield.

We bought our tickets, hopped on the Luas, and four stops later, we got off again. Having never been to Smithfield before, we had only a vague idea about where to look (but were assured that we'd definitely find a tree there). Would you be surprised if I told you the mythical Christmas tree lot didnt come to greet us as the doors opened to Smithfield? The only trees we found were the sugar cookie kind. Thinking we were going to (definitely) find a tree there and have to carry it back, we didnt buy return tickets to the City Centre. Let me tell you, having to carry a tree by ourselves for 20 city blocks would have sucked, but having to walk all that way and NOT have a tree to show for it at the end was even more depressing.

By the time we finally got back to our sadly tree-less living room, half the day was over and we had spent it failing at life, and blaming each other. The worst part? We hadnt even done our grocery shopping, so we didnt even have a pizza to throw at the situation. Being grumpy and hungry is no way to shop for anything, especially not for groceries. Jon gets super frustrated in two seconds if he cant find something on the list, or when people practically rip the skin off his forearm with their sharply angled hand-carts, and then dont even bother to look back and apologize. Oh wait no, thats me. And so much for going to the Zoo.

Knowing that bad days like this are random and not the fault of anyone, we ate our chicken fingers and mashed potatoes in silence, trying to be civil until the calories recharged some spent energy. Since theres almost no bad mood that deliciously fatty food cant make better, we eventually re-grouped and decided to check out ONE LAST place we'd been told that there were (definitely) trees. We grudgingly re-bundled in the many layers we had earlier chucked to the far corners of the room in annoyance, and braved the icy wind one last time. Fifteen minutes later, my heart fluttered and the throb in my feet was suddenly less painful than before: I could see green just up ahead!

Being a good foot taller than the rest of the group, it was immediately obvious what tree would be coming home with us. I pointed, Jon paid, and we carried our living treasure home one joyful step at a time. I felt like Santa Claus carrying that tree. Adults pointed and smiled, and kids screamed, "Look Mommy!" It was like if we had started singing a carol, the entire city would have joined in with choreographed moves, and then there would be a really cool aerial shot of the Earth sprouting arms and hugging itself. World peace by Christmas tree. Our completely ruined day was instantly un-ruined by one sparkly green fir. The presents finally have a place to call home, and we are officially ready to host Christmas. Its going to be the best Christmas ever!

Christmas is Green this year, in so many ways!

Christmas is so close I can feel it! It smells like cinnamon buns and tastes like snowflakes, and its just 23 days and counting down to the best Christmas in history! Well, recent history. Ok just my personal history, but it still counts. We are having a simple Christmas this year, so far from home. And half our family will be missing on that special morning by the fire. But having half is SO much better than having no halves at all!

We are trying to spend our money wisely, and that means I cant decorate exactly like I would want to. There will be no fluffy green wreaths on the door or over the mantle. No pricey matching ornaments or expensive designer wrapping paper. No gorgeous ceramic nativity, glittering in the candle light. If you make your own decorations, does it count as being "green"? I know the "hey quit murdering the Earth with your mass-produced disposable products" sentiment is old news, but it still is a great excuse to skimp out & save money, even if youre not a total hippie! Im not extreme about it; I still went to the 2euro Store (like a Dollar Tree) and got some cute little birds to clip to the branches, and a pack of red velvet bows that were probably made in China or Indonesia by small children whos homes and lands are being ravaged by conglomerate outsourcing. Out of sight out of mind? But I really love a home-made Christmas, and I mean home made by me, not home-made by the people of the Etsy community (however awesomely talented they all are).

And the best part: home-made decorations can be easy and simple, and even basically free! This year, I spent hours cutting out nearly a hundred snowflakes out of white printer paper. Jon helped me string them together on kitchen twine, and hang them over the windows. Pretty much free decorating right there, especially because Jon got the paper from his work office. I even forced Jon to cut out a snowflake, but it was like the size of a pencil eraser and I "lost" it.

We are spending money for Christmas though, its impossible not to during a holiday, especially one as important as this one! We are buying a tree, and with the ridiculous ceilings we are blessed with here, it will be 10ft tall if I can find one that big! Carrying that up a flight of stairs will be fun for Jon. I let him do stuff like that so he feels involved. We also ordered a 17lb free-range turkey from a local farmer, for Christmas dinner! As I write this, the big guy is probably happy as a turkey can be, gobbling it up on the farm. I hope they're feeding him lots of stuffing. Thats how it gets in there, right?

But even if we didnt have a tree, or a turkey dinner, we will have family. And thats the absolute most important thing to us, no matter what holiday it is. Hope yours is just as awesome!

Is it still a pumpkin if it doesnt come from a patch?

Jon & I really love Halloween. Like really love it. After Christmas, its the one holiday we most look forward to every year! When we were dating, October 30th was our "anniversary", and we loved to throw a party to celebrate. Ask anyone whose been to one of our parties over the years - we go all out. We had an extensive Halloween decoration and costume collection that could have supplied a small store. Every year the collection grew, and got bigger and better. One year we made a life-sized witch for the lawn, made of particle board and black paint. She stood in our "graveyard" stirring her cauldron. A stuffed figure of a man sat eerily silent at the front door, hands in pockets, hat down. A giant black spider crawled over the doorbell, and footsteps and screams came from behind you, playing from a hidden stereo. Even the food was scary, and sometimes gross: green slime to drink, and goblin fingers to eat. We love Halloween for no other reason than it is the perfectly themed party night, where even the guests become a part of the decoration, filling the house with laughter and color. Its hard to not have a good time if you get to dress up.

But even without the blow-out Halloween party, October is the color of love. Theres maize mazes, hay-bale mazes, pumpkin patches, Autumn fairs, roasted corn-on-the-cob and farmed lilac honey and strings of garlic bulbs. Driving to Half-Moon Bay for the Annual Pumpkin Festival was a ruthless trip, and took hours on the weekends, but everyone does it because everyone knows itll be a great time. Walking through Santana Row on the actual Halloween night was an experience to remember. Adults in every costume, some funny, some weird, some really disturbing. But every person having a blast being someone (or something) else for just one night.

But moving to Ireland mean that we had to rid ourselves of most of our earthly possessions. We kept only the non-replaceable and very sentimental things: wedding albums, scrap books, favorite blankets, and a crock pot. Things that we just couldnt part with, or were not worth having to buy again when we moved back. Everything we kept, is graciously stored underneath our parents' houses, so there was limited room. Sadly, our Halloween collection of a lifetime was donated. Sentimental? Yes. Non-replaceable? No. Its just stuff.

So when I wanted to have a small Halloween-themed get-together this month, it was just a little sad to think about the awesome Halloweens of our past. This was the first year in a long time that we havent had our barrels of spooky stuff to choose from. And while Halloween is a pretty big deal to Americans, its a small thing to people here. At our party, one of our new friends carved the very first pumpkin of his life! Hes Jons age, and had never once stuck his hands into the slimy goodness that is a freshly butchered jack-o-lantern! Another friend there said he'd carved pumpkins at his grandparents' farm before, but in the summer, and not even for Halloween. I couldnt locate one pumpkin patch on this side of Ireland at all. I had my five little pumpkins delivered to me from a local fruit&veg seller. They're all the exact same size, and perfectly round and uniform. I miss the freakish oblong ones, the icky warty ones, the Cinderella carriage ones, and the pretty fairy-white ones.

But no matter. We celebrated Halloween Ireland style, and have the baked pumpkin seeds to prove it! It may not have had all the earmarks of what we have come to know and love about Halloween, but it was just another awesome night in our new country. We are constantly learning new things, but it was really great being the teachers for once. Happy October my fellow Americans! Enjoy every second of it for us!

Mussels in Brussels

Belgium answered that longing in my heart to visit exotic places. I always fantasize about traveling to far-reaching lands with sexy-cool names like Istanbul, Vienna, or Cairo. Places that steam with street food while you walk hand in hand with your lover down the narrow cobbled streets at night; gazing at the twinkling stars gracing the velvet sky peeking over dilapidated clay-tiled roofs. Wild, untamed places that feel dangerous and dreamy, teeming with people, some like you: seeking the same adventure of a different kind.

We were only in Brussels for two night and one full day. We were excited to have to learn how to say "Thank you" in Dutch, but turns out that the most common language in the capitol is actually French. Having spent a long weekend in Paris last month, we felt confidant enough about our "Merci"s that we even left the cheat-sheet at home. It was complete with Please & Thank You, but also had such gems as, "Leave me alone, Im not a tourist!" It was also the first trip that we both packed everything we needed for the weekend in to ONE backpack! And it wasnt even full!

Brussels is the perfect spontaneous getaway. To say its beautiful there is something of an understatement. The buildings that surround the Grand Place square loom like trolls in the sun, frozen in time forever while life around them grows and dies, and grows anew. Walking down the corridors of chocolate shops is a treat in itself! The large glass windows shine from within, sparkle with every color imagined, and promise the secret of happiness in a bonbon. Every store has a different ambiance too, like so many sisters lined up in a row: Related, but each having its own unique flavour.

At night, the streets dont really sleep for the night, but are awake with a new crowd. White linen clad tables spill out of every door lining the uneven stone walkways, a romantic flickering candle on every one. The maitre d' is as well-dressed as the tables, and if you catch his eye he will show you a menu and sell you the dish of the evening before you even sit down. Many of the menus feel the same, all sporting mussels and other shellfish by the bucket. We chose a less formal restaurant, and got the last table of the night, the waiter giving us a chastising glare while setting the table and taking our order. The food was hot, the wine was cold, and the street we sat on glistened with all the exciting charms I had hoped it would. And it was perfect.

The Trouble with Islands, and Other Anomalies

I've been thinking about islands. Let me tell you how an island works. I always figured an island was a small sandy thing that sits around on the water, unattached to anything, usually inhabited by a lone palm tree & perhaps a really hairy man. This lost island floats about aimlessly on the calm sea, going where it will, or maybe staying where it is. The palm tree survives because it's roots go thru the sand to the ocean, to drink all it needs. The hairy man isn't so lucky, since there's no way of controlling this teeny meandering plot of land, and he won't ever be found. So he will die of exposure, if not first dehydration. That's an "island". Absolutely everyone knows this is how islands work. I even found a video, filmed in Ireland (even on our own River Liffey) that proves I'm not the only one who knows these things are facts.

So if you take a place like Ireland or Manhattan, that are both islands, and apply to them what you now know about islands, you'll get really confused. Like I did. I thought, "How can there be metros on Manhattan?" Then I thought, "Well obviously there can't be, since when the metro-guys were digging the tunnels, they would have run into the water under the island." Like when you're 6 years old and at the beach, and you're happily digging a pit to stick your little sister in, but the hole you're trying to throw dirt out of keeps slowly filling with salt water and ruining all your plans of being an only child. Because when you're that close to the water, your hole has obviously been dug too far down, and you've actually broken thru the Earth's crust to the ocean underneath it. But since there are in fact metros on Manhattan, I then decided that Manhattan as an island was just a really deep island, and the earth/sand it was located on top of was just thicker (it has to be because they definitely have more than one palm tree there). And those metro-diggers better not dig their magical spaceship transporter tubes TOO far down, or else just like at the beach, they'll open that one hole to the ocean, and then ALL the previous tunnels will fill up with salt water and kill everyone and possibly even sink the island of Manhattan.

Well. Usually, I tend to think of these kinds of things entirely in my own head, and naturally assume it's a correct thought that everyone else thinks & knows about, and only when I happen to voice these thoughts to someone else, out loud, do I become aware of the flaws in these assumptions. For example, when I asked Jon how Ireland stays where it is and why it doesn't just float off further into the ocean, the look on his face was enough to make me second-guess my previously assumed solid lines of logic. I have to give him my thanks for setting me straight. Thanks babe! Your literally uncontrollable laughter is so great for my self-esteem!

But in the end, there is good news, concerned family & friends! Jon & I won't probably die of exposure! If anything, we'll be drowned in rainfall, or stabbed in the face one too many times by rabid inside-out umbrellas in the wind. Hooray!

Bonjour et Au Revoir!

As I rolled up my skinny jeans and shoved them to the bottom of my camping backpack for our trip to Paris, I was suddenly struck by that prickly feeling they call excitement. I was just as excited to add another awesome stamp to my passport as I was to see the Eiffel Tower! And eat real croissants! And meander the romantic streets that so inspired the likes of Van Gogh! It was the night before our 4am flight, and I was finally allowing myself to get keyed up for our 3rd Anniversary weekend away.

But look up "excited" in a thesaurus, and you will simultaneously find "upset". Because as we know, there's good stress and bad stress, but it's all stress. I knew we were in for a memory of a lifetime, but I was getting nervous about the small stuff. Will the metros be as scary as the ones in New York? Can we get by on 6 phrases of French? Will everyone recognize us as Americans, and immediately pull out their angry eyes? Happily, 99% of the French stereotypes we found to be unjustified. People were very polite when we were polite to them, we spoke some French and they spoke some English, and we didn't feel unsafe anywhere. The 1% truth, that may as well be the 200% truth, was that the food was awesome!

After living in California, the fruit basket of America, living in Ireland has been something of an adjustment when it comes to buying fresh produce. It's just not readily available like we're used to. You have to trek out to random streets on the weekends to find good cheese, or a bag of tender baby greens. Pineapples and artichokes are a rare sight. People tell me that you have to know where to go. Well it's a sad world to me, in which grocery stores don't sell avocados year-round. BUT in France, I found figs forever, gallons of grapes, and lovely lettuces, on all the streets of Montmartre. And I fell in totally in love with that enchanting village-city. Montmartre was the dreamy older sister slowly morphing into a relic of existence, locked in a time capsule of yellow tree-lined streets and sleepy corner bistros glowing from within; not quite the sinful lady she started life as, mellowed with age. In contrast, Paris was the spicy hip sibling gushing with energy and zest, ready to swallow up her eager, camera-strapped visitors; boasting her venerable beauty like a child.

Far from my initial fears about this wonderful place, France was incredible. It turned out to be a place that we now hope to re-visit someday. It was the perfect date: extravagantly alluring, shining vistas galore, and everything bewitchingly candle-lit. Definitely an experience we'll remember for the rest of our lives.

Surfing in Ireland

When our friends Jordan & Sarah first told us about it, we thought it was a crazy idea. Allow total random persons into our home? For multiple days? AND give them a key? Are you nuts? Our friends told us there was nothing to worry about when participating in Couch Surfing, and that the people you meet are always really awesome. To be truthful, in my mind the best case scenario was a weird smelly traveler who would be hard to communicate with, and who would eat all our food and be loud and make our neighbors hate us. Worst case scenario was that they would kill us in our sleep.

But we have such a great location for tourists, and an entire room and bed to spare, so we couldn't not share. We also both truly enjoy having friends and family in our home. So we went for it. As I was filling out our profile on the Couch Surfing website, I tried to think what people would think of us by reading it. Theres a lot to answer! They ask you about everything from weekend hobbies to favorite things. Because who doesnt like to read about a total stranger's addiction to Colgate toothpaste? BROMG I use Colgate too! ilubesties4eva!!1

Anyway. My profile was updated (aka - novel completed), and my couch icon was set to 'Available'. We were ready to set out on an untried trail. Five minutes later, my 'Couch Request' inbox had 5 requests. An hour later, I had 3 more. The next day I woke up to 4 more bolded mails. I was suddenly drowning. I was trying to figure out everyone's requested dates and arrival times to see if they worked with our upcoming schedules, and having to read EVERY surfer's complete (or not so complete) profile, looking out for signs of crazy. I turned my couch icon to 'Coffee & a Drink' which is a polite way of saying, 'dont ask to stay with me and I will also ignore your emails'. Not really, it just seemed nicer to have an image of a coffee cup, rather than a big X, on my profile. So after sifting through every request, we had to deny some, but accepted a few others. We replied back and made plans. It was happening.

A week later, our very first Surfers were taxiing on the runway! I straightened the duvet one last time, and before I knew it they were texting us from right outside. They were a very nice young couple from Germany, over here for a 10-day trip starting in Dublin with us. It was both their first time Couch Surfing, and our first time hosting. They even showed up bearing gifts: two (freshly imported) German beers, and their favorite German salami are cooling in my fridge as I write! We took them to Porterhouse for dinner one night, which is one of the only two pubs me and Jon have actually been to. We ended up having a lot in common, and they were so polite and courteous the whole time, it was great talking with them and sharing stories. It was not a thing like my previous scenarios at all. It went so well, we are now actually very excited to host again! Because our friends Jordan & Sarah were right about this whole Couch Surfing thing. The people are awesome!