Beansies

1. I just polished off the leftover powdered sugar from a batch of puppy chow with my finger.

2. I know of at least four people having bachelor/bachelorette parties this weekend.

3. When did bachelor/bachelorette parties become weekends?

4. This morning I made a batch of absolutely delicious (if I do say so myself) rosemary bagels topped with sea salt:

They look funny but seriously folks, they were so good. Right out of the oven.

5. One of my regulars at the coffee shop, Greg, brought me a bag of skittles today. No particular reason. 

6. I finally won $50 Target Gift Card #6 - which brings me to $300, enough to buy myself a brand new KitchenAid stand mixer in... buh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh.... Yellow!

That was a drum roll.

Summer Anthems

As our beach trip approaches, I am become very aware of the music that has defined our past beach trips. Last year we listened to a lot of the Arcade Fire's Neon Bible. I remember this because one night on the boardwalk, a shop was blasting "No Cars Go," and like the awkward people we are, Corbin and I stood in the store listening to it because I loved it so much. At first we were able to play it off like we were looking around, but come on, it's a long song and those shops are only so big. So we just stood there kind of bouncing, trying to make it clear that we were listening to the song. In retrospect, we probably could have sat on a bench outside. The store front was completely open.

Anyway, it's interesting that the Arcade Fire was our defining music last summer because they just came out with a new album, The Suburbs, and Corbin saw them in concert a few days ago. Before the concert, we were both pretty iffy about the album... since the concert he's listened to it nonstop, and it's totally growing on me. I realize this is how I learned to love Funeral and Neon Bible as well, so I have faith in the end result here. I can tell already that the Arcade Fire will once again be our defining music, and I'm excited about that, but it inspired me to put together a playlist of the songs that I've loved this summer. I'd like to share it with you. Note: I am opening myself up for judgment beyond reason by putting some of these songs on here (cough... Adam Lambert...) but what's the point in doing this if I'm not going to be honest? Judge away. I also apologize that some of these songs have been on here previously.

This is a very important decision!

Which one?

A New Tradition

Corbin's family owns a house on Assateague Island in MD, near Ocean City. They love that house so much that everybody in the family has to book time there, and an email gets sent out with the schedule every time it is adjusted. Lucky for me, Corbin books about a week there every year.

This summer will be my fifth time at the beach: three summers, one spring break, one Thanksgiving. It reminds me of my own family's beach house, which my grandparents sold almost ten years ago. It was a 50's-style beach-front house on Hilton Head Island, and my dad's family used to spend every summer there. I grew up spending time there every summer, and I remember the first time I walked into Corbin's family's beach house, it smelled the same.

I've always liked going to Ocean City, but this year I'm actually excited in anticipation of it. Every day I think about it and I look forward to it more and more. Perhaps it's because I'll get a five-day vacation from work; perhaps it's because I've been there enough that it's familiar and comfortable to me.

Here are the things I love about the beach:

1. The local farm stand nearby, where we get amazing white corn and other veggies that we cook all week.

2. The local food joints we hit every visit: Smoker's BBQ, Dumser's ice cream, Meroni's, Thrashers...

3. Fractured Prune. This is the donut shop to end all donut shops. Hot cake donuts prepared to your liking. My favorite: the OC Sand, with honey glaze and cinnamon sugar. This has been a Corbannah favorite since our first tandem visit to the beach, and we were thrilled when we found out that there were two in Northern Virginia... then highly disappointed when they both closed. I was also secretly okay with it, though, because I like it being just a beach thing.

4. The boardwalk. This is one of the trashiest places I've ever been but it is so fun. It is lined with souvenir shops, crappy food, and smokers.
    **When I say crappy, I mean amazing. Fried candy bars. Kettle corn. French fries. Fudge. Skewers of
        chocolate-covered strawberries.

5. The beach next to the boardwalk. Last summer we visited the boardwalk at night and walked out to the water, and it was a cool experience being by the peaceful waves yet hearing the voices and music coming from the boardwalk.

6. No alarms. Seriously, when was the last time you went five days without setting an alarm?

7. A new one: Frontier Town. This is the hokey-looking, Country/Western-themed water and mini-golf park near the house. We pass it nearly every time we try to go anywhere, and I've been eyeing it for years, so last year I finally convinced Corbin that we should go. The verdict? Best day of our vacation by far. Spent the morning there, left for a lunch of trashy food on the boardwalk, came back for the afternoon, and ended the day in the low sun, asleep on a tube floating around the lazy river. Glorious.

8. Playing house with Corbin. I know we do this every day because we live together, but it's fun to do it somewhere else. Planning our days, grocery shopping, cooking dinners... I love it.


I'm not sure this list is complete, but just writing it made me even more excited about going. What's your favorite vacation spot, and what do you love about it?

Update #32: My Life In Movies/Bread/Bowling

First off: apologies for it having been over a week since I've blogged.

Last weekend Corbin and I saw Inception for.... yes... the third time. Shawn has us beat, though, with a grand total of seeing Inception four times in the theater. Anyway, I highly recommend seeing Inception three times, and here's why: the first time, you are totally along for the ride and though you may not understand every word that comes out of their mouths you feel as though you get the story; the second time, you're paying more attention to the details and you enjoy the viewing but you come out of it with questions; the third time, you've discussed your questions and theories with your friends and you seek (and find) the answers to your questions.

It's kind of crazy how much closure I had after the third viewing. The next night, on our drive home from Northern Virginia, we put James and Shawn on speakerphone and had long talks with each of them about our feelings. Then I didn't think about the movie for days. This movie that had been on my mind for a week since the first time I saw it - the questions that Corbin and I had been asking ourselves and each other over and over again every day - they were gone. And when I ran into my cousin on the street on Friday, and he asked if I'd seen Inception, it was like he'd dug up a memory. I'd almost forgotten about it.

Another great thing about our third viewing: we saw it in an IMAX theater. And not those fake IMAX theaters that regular theaters are boasting; I'm talking the science museum, huge, blow-you-away theater. This movie, unlike parts of The Dark Knight, was not filmed in IMAX, but the sheer size of it and the amazing sound made for a fantastic experience.

Moving on. Yesterday I did something I've only done once before and not in a very long time: I attempted to bake a loaf of bread from scratch. Wegman's grocery store has this amazing Rosemary Olive Oil bread that they make with sea salt on top, and I decided that for my (basically) first attempt at baking bread, I would attempt to make my favorite kind of bread. I scoured the interwebs for recipes and picked one out that seemed to make the most sense to me. Let me tell you something: watching bread rise is amazing. I don't mean actually sitting there watching it do its thing, but setting it in the corner to let it rise and checking it in 45 minutes is absolutely incredible. It gets so big! So fast! And then when you knead it and let it rise again, it does it again! It was amazing. But I think that the second time I let it rise, it collapsed a little bit. It expanded outward instead of up... sort of blobbed on the pan. Then when it was done, it was kind of dense. In addition, the recipe called for part whole wheat flour, which I didn't really think about, and the bread ended up being rosemary wheat bread. This is not what I was looking for. To give myself a little credit, it was pretty good - not a bad first attempt at all. But if I really want to perfect my rosemary bread, it's going to take a lot of tries.

If this rosemary wheat bread sounds good to you, here's the recipe.

For some reason, when I woke up yesterday morning, I wanted to have a fun day. This doesn't happen often. That's not to say that I don't want to have fun days, but usually if I want something from my day, it's productivity. Other days I might want to do "interesting" things. But yesterday, I really thought about what I would enjoy doing. That is why I baked the rosemary bread. I decided yesterday that I wanted to bake. I had the day free, and I wanted to make something new. I also decided yesterday that I wanted to bowl. So that's what I did. Last night Corbin, Will, Anne and I made our way to Shrader Lanes and bowled four games with two pitchers of Yuengling and all-you-can-eat pizza. Here's the thing I love about bowling: it's still fun even if you're bad. And believe me, I'm bad. I momentarily thought I might have a successful night when I bowled a strike on my very first turn of the night, but it went downhill from there. Luckily Anne, who wasn't bowling, was keeping track of "style points." I rocked those. It's been a very long time since I've been bowling... perhaps sophomore year of college?... so I definitely had a great time last night.

Here are a few little beans to end my post:

1. I'm on a mission to win a MacBook Pro for my sister on bidfire.com. We have agreed: I will not stop until I win one.

2. Corbin is leaving his position at Aromas (the coffee shop where we work). This is sad, because I love love love working with Corbin. This is interesting because now I have to hire somebody new and training somebody is stressful. This is awesome because losing the little bit of extra money he makes here will motivate him to find a new job by Thanksgiving (he still works at ABC). This is SUPER awesome because now that Corbin and I don't make up 2/3 of the employees who work here at Aromas, we can go on vacation at the end of August. YES!

3. If you're in Richmond, can you please look outside? Glorious. Another cloudy day. I'm not being sarcastic! After so much sun and heat, I love these cloudy - sometimes rainy - days. Yesterday afternoon it was 78 degrees outside. I'm going to pretend it won't be 101 on Thursday.

4. I resisted it, but I think I actually like the new USA show "Covert Affairs." That's tough for me to say because I am a die-hard fan of Alias. In fact, I'm in the middle of watching the series for the, oh, fifteenth time or so. Covert Affairs is basically the same thing but with Piper Perabo instead of Jennifer Garner. When I first saw the commercials I was resentful that this type of show would be on because they canceled Alias several years ago; I also thought it was dumb to make the same show again when the first was so fantastic. But I gave it a try, since I like White Collar so much, and I have to say I actually like it.

5. Between the time that I began writing this blog and now I have decided that this afternoon I'm going to give another go at the rosemary bread. Practice makes perfect, right?