Man oh man, has life been crazy! Apologies for not writing a pre-honeymoon post, but most of those final days were spent editing photos and making last-minute arrangements. I hope you all got the chance to follow our adventures on the travel blog, but in case you'd like to catch up on what you missed, all the details of our adventures can be found
here. I've also posted a photo album on facebook, and we're in the final editing stages of a video. All I can say to summarize is that we definitely fell in love with Hawai'i and can't wait to go back for more.
Upon our return (in the midst of Superbowl frenzy) we picked up Chewy from my sister's house, had one day to chill, and then went up to Wixom to celebrate Devin's dad's birthday. His mom had arranged for all 3 siblings to be there as a surprise, and it was a wonderful weekend of disc golf, game time, and general merriment.
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| Visiting Grandma K in the nursing home |
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| Chewy with the birthday boy |
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| They wore each other out! |
Unfortunately, this blessed weekend also cursed 7 out of the 8 of us with a nasty stomach virus. I'll spare the gory details (although I feel I should add for posterity that this was the first time I had to puke out of a car window...), but after the worst had passed, Devin and I were cooped up for about 4 days, napping, watching movies, and just being bums in general. Extended honeymoon? Kinda, but not really...
So Devin finally made it back to work and I finally picked up on my to-do list - edited another round of photos, changed my name, submitted photos to a contest at TACA (was accepted!), and cooked a delicious vegetarian dinner for my love on Valentine's Day. Now, we aren't strict vegetarians, but partly because of cost and partly because of our health, I as chief grocery shopper only ever buy deli meat for sandwiches, and I wanted to challenge myself to cook something delicious, satisfying, and healthy. Anyways. 2 of the 3 recipes were found on Pinterest, which was a fun little foray in itself. For the appetizer I made strawberry-basil-goat cheese-balsamic
bruschetta, and our main course was
spicy cocoa carrots and
butternut squash gnocchi. The gnocchi turned out pretty dry (probably because I disobeyed about 1/3 of the recipe...) but the bruschetta was amazing and the carrots were quite tasty, with the added bonus of being very easy to make. And here are some hopefully mouthwatering photos of my creations:
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| Bruschetta |
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| Spicy coca roasted carrots |
No photos of the gnocchi. It was ugly.
Earlier in the week, I happened to be perusing craigslist out of curiosity when I came upon a job listing at
Good Dog Hotel & Spa...where I actually had a friend already working! Hey! There's some hope! So I messaged her and she talked to her managers. I applied on Friday the 10th, got a call on Saturday, interviewed on Wednesday and started work on Thursday the 16th. WOW. So Thurs-Sun I put in about 25 hours in the daycare, and while overwhelming at times, I can say that I definitely like the job - cool people, great dogs, relaxed atmosphere, AND I'll be able to bring Chewy with me. It's not anywhere near a "normal" job but then, I'm not really a normal person, am I? ;-) Really, I've wanted to work with animals for about as long as I can remember. First it was as a dolphin trainer, but I'm not a strong enough swimmer; then it was veterinarian for awhile until I realized I was much too squeamish. Marine biologist was a consideration until I heard about the tedium of things like measuring the acidity and salt content of seawater...sorry, I'm not really scientist material! But this. This is cool. And it's already under my skin. When your job is something your mind wanders to when you're driving to your mom's house, you're probably on the right track.
I'll end it here. My husband is on his way home, and I've got paczkis waiting for him. :-D Happy Fat Tuesday!
