6: countries visited...yes, I'm counting the layover in Ireland :)
13: airplane flights
2: weekends with my grandparents, who retained their spots as the funniest people I know. After a particularly funny dinner in Canada Brian and I decided we would have paid at least $15 or $20 just to listen to them talk for a few hours. I think they should take their show on the road.
8 and 1: sandwiches and jars, respectively, of pimiento cheese fed to us by the aforementioned grandmother (see the almost empty plate on the deck). Yes, she still hand cranks it, no, it's not just a southern food, and yes, it's awesome.1: shoe theft witnessed on the overnight train from Paris to San Sebastian. I watched this old guy putting on a pair of shoes in the next row and walking off...turns out they weren't his! And he stayed on the train, wearing the stolen shoes! Even the not so swift French train police could crack that case, and our train neighbor got his shoes back.
3: tapas bars in one night in San Sebastian, Spain.
We thought that was pretty good until we saw the Spanish grandmothers and toddlers staying out late into the night while we stumbled back exhausted to the hotel. I blame the 1 L of sangria consumed at tapas bar #1.
2: weddings. Congrats to Mary and John Pitts and Kate and Peter Devlin!
25: relatives, roughly, at Koopers Tavern for a post-wedding brunch in Baltimore. My ukelele playing uncle put on a show which was great, until Brian and I realized after singing Old MacDonald Had a Farm with the dancing little cousins we might not be able to show our faces at Koopers anymore...so long, favorite crab dip. You haven't been the same since they stopped serving you in a bread bowl anyways.
38: points in touch football scored in our first Baltimore Sports and Social Club game for a dominating victory. Brian is the QB and I'm the "hiker" which I much prefer to being called the center.
34: points scored by Appalachian State to beat Michigan in the Big House! Although I've talked plenty of trash about NC football being weak, I'll take that victory any day. Buckeyes are still undefeated.
20%: historically low voter turnout in the primary race for Baltimore mayor, which Sheila Dixon won. She did re-pave our street (conveniently 5 days before election day), but we're also on track to hit 300 murders for the year so not so sure she was my first choice...
1: angry cab driver chastising me for not voting. I am a bad person...or just a person who works in a city 50 miles away, gets on a train at 7:15 and returns on the train at 7:40 and shares a car with her husband and can't get to the polls. I am still feeling the civic duty shame spiral, which I might try to make up for by reporting for jury duty Nov. 17.
Numbers are an easy way to explain the exhaustion, lack of communication, and multiple bouts of illness over the past six weeks, and they are also easier to calculate and process than all the emotional highs and lows that I'm still wrapping my head around. The idea of staying put for the next 6 weeks (well, except for that pesky daily commute) is pretty appealing right now-- an unusual thing to feel as I'm usually game for any kind of travel, anywhere, to do anything.
Lately I'm also feeling more acutely the seemingly quickening pace of life and time passing...maybe it's being married to a schoolteacher and all the flurry of activity that back to school time brings, or maybe it's working at an organization where 40% of our business can happen in the last month of the year due to holiday donations. Staring these next few months in the face feels exciting but daunting at the same time! Brian and I were running errands a few weekends ago and walked past a young couple pulling a stroller out of the trunk, re-assembling it, pulling the baby out of a car seat along with all the gear...we looked at each other and laughed thinking the exact same thing-- it's at least a few more years before we're ready to tackle that challenge. As B said, sometimes getting the dishes done every day feels like a big deal, so how on earth do you add another human (or hell, even a dog) into this crazy mix and survive? Then again, I did get sucked into watching 3 episodes of Beauty and the Geek (that would be my reality TV shame spiral to accompany my voting failure shame spiral) so something tells me I have more free time than I think I do...
