Merry Halloween

A few weeks ago, the Halloween decorations started going up. One of the families who lives on Warwick between my house and campus put up these giant, horrifying inflatable jackolanterns. I told W about how much they bothered me when he took me over to his place and his roommates' pumpkin was sitting uncarved in the corner.

And I don't remember how exactly happened, but ultimately Woody made the following suggestion: "Why don't you carve a Christmas tree into one?"

I think he was joking, I really think that at first he was joking, but I thought it was the best idea I had ever heard. I asked if we could wear Santa hats while we did it. He got as excited as I did about it. We had an adventure finding pumpkins and had the best time carving them. The result is the best pair of pumpkins you will ever see.

And yes, we wore Santa hats.




This is my Christmas tree pumpkin. I made a promise that most of the pictures would not make it to the internet, so this is the only one you get to see unless you come to my house and ask for the rest.

Pumpkin Theory

You should know, first of all, that this story happened long enough ago that I don't remember it - all I know is what my mother has told me.

When I was very young - preschool, I believe, but certainly no older than kindergarten - my class went on a field trip to the pumpkin patch for Halloween. We were supposed to spend all afternoon selecting a pumpkin but I hopped off the hayride, looked around at pumpkins for about five minutes, and found the best pumpkin at the entire pumpkin patch. My mother asked me if I wanted to look at the rest of the pumpkins before choosing and my response was the five year old version of "why? I've already found the best one, let's not waste time."

I'm bad at metaphors - I'm really quite horrible with them, but the connection I'm trying to make here is to my love life. My relationship with Woody is already the most serious I've ever been in. I am thrilled about this and I've never been happier; he is the kindest and most thoughtful person I've ever known and I feel so lucky to have him in my life.

Let me be clear: I'm not calling my boyfriend a pumpkin, that is way too Cinderella and implies he will be gone by midnight. I do keep telling him I feel like I am living a fairy tale, though. From our very first night together there has been adventure & laughter and I knew right away that this was special.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is this: I've always been pretty good at knowing what I like and what I want. I think there is something to be said for knowing when something is right and letting your heart dictate how you feel.

And this feels like the best thing that has ever happened to me, like the start of the biggest adventure of my life.

Drawn to Scale

Yesterday, my boyfriend:

• Took me to see Moneyball in the afternoon
• Came back over to watch the Rangers in the World Series
• Told me wonderful, romantic things that I am still smiling about this morning
• Challenged a teenage mutant ninja cockroach to a duel in my kitchen (& won!)

The following image is drawn to scale* and entirely reflects the happenings of last night:

MY HERO

Yes, in my self portraits I nearly always resemble Medusa. Actually if I ever have to dress up for Halloween again I am TOTALLY going as Medusa because I have the crazy snake-like hair to pull it off.

And I am also certain that my art skills are leaving you all wowed. That's a cockroach, by the way. See his evil glare and hairy legs? Don't be fooled by his cute antennae; they were supposed to be malicious but now he resembles a grumpy teddy bear instead of the mastermind of doom who was hiding in my kitchen when I went downstairs to get us beers during the baseball game. But - Woody to the rescue! He agreed that it was the largest cockroach ever (he probably moved here from New York City) and then we found the old fly swatter, and W took him out in one punch. If I had been alone this would have been a battle that lasted at least an hour! I was thoroughly impressed and then threw my arms around him and declared him my hero. It's really for more reasons than the bug, but you know. 

Also accurate? The size of the fly swatter. It is comically large and claims to be from Texas.

Also we are officially out of beer and this is a crisis considering Game 5 of the World Series is tonight and my W is coming over after I have an obscenely long day in class. I'm looking forward to it more than you can know.


*Size of cockroach may be slightly exaggerated.

Completely Cut Off

I spent a great deal of this week cut off from the outside world. Voluntarily, I'll add.

Starting Monday night and through this morning, for the most part, my phone was turned off and my computer was unplugged, the TV was off and I didn't even miss it.

Try it sometime, when it isn't forced upon you due to power outage and inclement weather - when you're with someone you care about and you can talk and spend hours together. You won't even miss the technology, it's liberating.



(Now you know he's special because I've never said anything even remotely similar to that before in my life.)

Adventures in Baking

This story ends with me saying this: "You know, I kept experimenting with the size of my balls, but nothing helped."

If that didn't get your attention, just walk away now.

I need to back up just a little. Woody went to my house in NN yesterday to fix the problem with my internet connection (that I had made worse when I myself tried to fix it on Thursday night, this is why I shouldn't live alone) even though I was riding horses all weekend and not around. I felt like he was always doing these super sweet things for me and I really wanted to do something to show him how much I appreciate him - so I thought about it for awhile. I mean, we just started dating so some really big gesture is probably not the most appropriate, but I just wanted to do something special, because seriously you guys, seriously - he is amazing.

I made the decision to make him some cookies. I'm not sure if you know this, but given my past escapades in the kitchen - which include but are not limited to, attempting to use a plastic pot to boil water (this ended very messily) and even more recently, melting the wiring on my toaster because it was on the stove when I turned it on and I didn't notice - I should really never be left unsupervised in the kitchen. Uh yeah, let's call that Reason #2 that I should not be living alone, because let's face it, one of these days I am going to burn the house down while making a grilled cheese sandwich. Anyway, I asked mom to supervise because as one of my professors accused me last week, I am "always the voice the caution." However Mom was sort of stressed out and I was like "Nevermind, you go relax, I've got this."

Ladies and gentlemen, this is our first lesson of the night. Under no circumstances when I say the words "I've got this" should you leave me to my own devices; I can now guarantee you with 100% certainty that no, I most certainly do not "got this." By speaking these words I have just jinxed myself and you should probably remove any sharp or flammable objects from my general area.

I am not really sure where things went wrong, exactly. Cooking is easy, right? There's a list of things and you do them in that order and then you have created food. I'm good at lists; write something down in a list for me and I can not only get it accomplished but I will kick it's little listy butt. Not to mention, I have made these exact cookies more times than I can count and they have always, always been perfect. I'm out of practice, sure, but there is really no explanation for what happened tonight. It was just - wrong. It was clear from the beginning - the cookies were not ever flattening out into cookie-ness, instead they remained like mountainous blobs of dough. They didn't ever darken in the middle no matter how long I left them in there - some of them were burned on the edges and still really tall and poofy in the middle. We tried a few of them. They were not moist and delicious and chocolately-chippy treats, they were large, awkward and dry and didn't really taste like anything. They had the consistency of cake. I tried everything - leaving them in for longer or shorter lengths of time, adjusting the size of my balls of dough, but every time it was the same. I had my mom look at them and her ultimate decision was that a) either I had left out an ingredient in the initial mixing-the-dough stage, or b) something was up with the oven. (This is about the time when I made the comment about the size of my balls.) Anyway, this is a really new oven and as an equestrian I have to blame everything on rider error. Well in this case, baker error. It's not the oven's fault - I messed up the cookies that I was going to make to give to my sweet, sweet boyfriend.

And yet even after realizing these were not up to my standards I kept going, getting increasingly frustrated and disappointed as each little batch of cookies that came out of the oven had the same issues as the ones before. I managed to burn my finger in the middle of this and at that point just wanted to give up on them. And then one cookie came out that made this whole night so incredibly awesome that instead of going to sleep write now I felt the need to blog about it. And I promise you that I pulled it out of the oven looking this way, I did absolutely nothing to make it take this shape:

It's a heart. It's a chocolate chip cookie in the shape of a heart. For my boyfriend. It probably tastes terrible (the rest of them do, they are not fit for public consumption) but look at it. I could not have planned a more perfect cookie. I'm going to give it to him but I'm going to warn him that he probably shouldn't eat it.

October

October has, historically, been two things for me, very reliably:

1. Romantically fantasic
2. Academically horrible

This year is no exception, it seems.

I have made the decision to drop one of my classes so that I am no longer in 18 credits, and that class is Latin - I can retake it next semester. I am speaking with my advisor this week to finalize everything but I have already notified my Latin professor of my intentions. I am really sad about this because Latin is one of my favorite classes and my absolute favorite subject - but logically it made the most sense to drop, because I can retake it next semester and because technically I do not need it to graduate.

Also, since late September I have been spending a lot of time with a really amazing guy, he is the sweetest, most romantic guy I have ever met and we have so much fun together. Tonight - after he took me to dinner and we watched part of the Rangers game - we had a talk and made things "official" and all that :) He is seriously amazing and I am so happy.

So that's what has been going on with me for the last few weeks. :)

True Life

Sometimes I really do not understand how I get myself into these situations.

The cable guy came today to hook up the cable in my room. If this story already sounds a little bit like my experience with the AC installer guys, you have a keen grasp on what it means to be Libby. He did install cable in my bedroom, so success there.

As he was leaving he was all, "that's it!" so I asked him if I owed him anything. For his cable man services. And he looks at me, and he says,

"Well... What do you WANT to owe me?"
I swear to god he winked.

Why? Why, of all the super powers that the gods could have bestowed upon me, did I end up with "creep magnet"? Who was it that thought, "you know what this woman needs? A superhuman capability to attract the real "winners" - yeah, that'll be a laugh! Who's got popcorn? We are sending the cable guy to her place this morning!"

Sometimes I like to imagine that someone, somewhere is getting as much amusement out of my life as I am.

That being said it is certainly not all bad these days. In fact, on the contrary, things are going so well that I hardly know what to do with myself. Sure, I am beginning to think there is a chemical in my basement that turns regular crickets into teenage mutant ninja crickets, but I'm learning to deal with that. And school is going relatively well, I've gotten a few assignments back and I'm happy with them, I'm having a great time with my friends and seriously, right now I'm not sure things could get any better.

Also, there is a boy. :)

Goooooooooal

I wasn't going to post about this but then I decided I would because it is a big deal to me and damn it, I look good.

This week I officially hit my target weight and have lost 50 lbs in the last year.

This is a picture of me, from this time last year (almost to the day, actually, it is from October 2.)This set of pictures made me cry originally because I never felt fat until I saw them:

Here is a picture of me from just over two weeks ago, because I haven't showered yet today and I've spent all day studying for a midterm tonight:

A few people have expressed concern for my health and one of my friends keeps instructing me to "eat a cheeseburger," but the truth is that I look better, I feel better, and I've been told that my ass is "bangin' " (which is a compliment, Mom).

Also: smaller portions, exercise, and a lot of good luck.

He's back

Don't worry, not talking about the mosquito.

I'm not one to boss people around or tell them how to spend their time on the internet, but seriously, follow this guy on Youtube and your life will improve 100 fold.
SO FUNNY. And he raises such good questions. You've all asked them before, I promise.