When Adam and I first started dating, he didn’t want me using his real name/picture on my blog—this was pre-Tumblr, btw. To accommodate his wishes, I would refer to him as Neutron (Adam→Atom→Neutron), and I represented him with a picture of Jiminy Cricket. The image wasn’t a random throwaway; he made me want to be a better person and I considered him to be my conscience.
Well, last night I was watching Horton Hears a Who and one of the characters mentioned something about cookies. That’s when I remembered that I had about a 1/2 cup of Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate chips in the pantry. I dashed to the kitchen, scaled the recipe down to use what I had left of the chips (do you know how difficult it is to do math when you’ve got cookies on the brain, or for that matter measure out 1/2 an egg?) and baked the cookies at 9:30 on a Sunday night.
Here’s the thing: I don’t even like chocolate chip cookies. What I do like is eating enough cookie dough that contracting salmonella becomes a distinct possibility. As I sat on the couch, using my silicone spatula to scrape the dough from the mixing bowl into my gaping maw, I thought to myself “Who’s going to drive me to the hospital if I get violently ill?” and then I thought “Adam would if he were here, but I probably wouldn’t be doing this if he were.”
That, my friends, is what you would call a paradox.
Things that have made not having Adam around and not knowing when he’ll be back bearable:
Going out to dinner and drinks with Ryan and Chelsea, followed by watching “Life” with a little buzz on at their place.
Trying Del Taco for the first time (and loving it) and capping it off with some frogurt at the new place by my house with Jackie and Randy.
Going to see Leaves of Grass—the only Florida Film Fest offering I got to see this year—with Jon and Jen and then meeting up with a hilariously drunk Chelsea, Ryan, Bob, and Laine for some amazeballs Thai food at Napasorn Thai Restaurant. To clarify: only Chels was lit, the others were their fun, normal selves. Oh yeah, and then I had fro-yo for a second night in a row.
“Conquering the world” with Jackie (her words not mine). Really, this just involved going to the farmer’s market and getting some light shopping done before hitting up Too Jays for some lunch.
Having an amazing dinner with Jackie and Randy at Todd English’s Bluezoo in Walt Disney World’s Swan & Dolphin resort. Our waiter was great, the food was tasty, and we enjoyed some good people-watching because the Dolphin was hosting two high school proms that night.
With friends like these, who really needs a husband? I keeeed. Come home to me safely, my tallest.
I took very few photos at the Strawberry Festival, but this one is my favorite because it looks like Adam is a country-western star and he’s holding court with his entourage.
We leave for North Carolina (with a pit stop in Georgia) tomorrow morning. A smart person would’ve started packing last night. We are not those people.
Instead, I got Adam all caught up on White Collar.
Adam’s brother Ryan has been living—untethered to the digital world—in North Carolina for the past eight years.
Over the years, we’ve only been able to visit him a couple of times. We once drove up with my father-in-law for an over-night camping trip. We drove up, hiked up a mountain, set up camp, slept, woke up, broke down the camp, and drove back. That was in 2007, shortly after our wedding (which he was unable to attend). Adam’s dad joked that it was our honeymoon. And I guess if you go by the loosest definition of the word: A holiday or trip taken by a newly married couple, then yes; it was technically our honeymoon.
Last year, the three of us drove up to Adam’s grandma’s place in Georgia to celebrate Christmas. Afterward, we continued our drive north to visit Ryan in North Carolina. We mostly hung around Bryson City and talked about how he should come visit us in Orlando sometime.
Through the years, communication between the two brothers has been very limited. Ryan lives in a remote area of Bryson City, so the postman is not very dependable, and he only recently got his hands on a cell phone. Adam and I always said it would be so much easier to keep in touch with him if he had a computer. So, for Christmas this year, we’re giving him a brand new Dell laptop. We bought it last week and Adam has been setting it up. He already posed the question on his twitter/facebook, but I figured I’d ask it here to get a wider sampling:
What would you install/bookmark for someone who hasn’t had a computer/been online in 8 years?
this is so beautifully done
…
it’s logical, elegant, and when you explain it to me, I can work with it
—
Adam, giving feedback on the project I did for him.
We were both wary of working together on this project. And actually, I’d turned it down, but he couldn’t find anyone else to do it so the guilt kicked in and here we are.
This makes everything—the fights, the late nights, the stress—completely worth it. It reminds me that while I sometimes dream of leaving this field and becoming a teacher, I’m right where I’m supposed to be.
