Amsterdam, Day 4

The sun came out today!

1. Anne Frank house. As my husband said, "Inspiring and really, really sad at the same time."

2. Swans on the canals. And seagulls. (My husband: "That seagull must be speaking Dutch--I've never heard a seagull make a noise like that!") And they light the semicircular openings in the bridges where boats can go through at night with Christmas lights. Wonder if they do that year-round?

3. Sun for the first time. And church bells ringing as we walked all over the city

4. Ice is still everywhere on the streets and sidewalks. This evening walking to an Indonesian resaurant under what looked to be a full moon, we passed a garbage truck with one guy driving and two young guys hanging onto the back corners in their reflective vests, sliding from stop to stop on their boots, smiling big

5. Crooked (leaning) houses everywhere. Are they crooked inside, too?

Amsterdam, Day 3

Ice forming on one of the canals.

1) Van Loon museum--an old house on one of the canals. Gorgeous textiles in the bedrooms, beds and walls and curtains all match. One blue with monkeys and ostritches. One East Indian with fronds and trees and sheep

2) Found the flower market. Every kind of tulip imaginable

3) X-mas trees at the flower market too, 3 feet tall and the cutest thing you've ever seen. They have a wooden X nailed into the base so no need for a stand

4) Ice forming on the canals, the pattern of the floes so cool and angular

5) A design store we popped our heads into on the way back to the hotel. Dishes with owls and foxes and birds. Way cooler than anything in the US

Amsterdam, Day 2

The central train station's wind dial.

1) Hawaiian panakes for breakfast--pankackes with cheese and ham and pineapple. Lovely

2) Snow and ice everywhere but we walked all over the city today. Beautiful in winter

3) Wind dial at the old, old train station

4) Watching ski jumping and cross country ski racing at a coffee shop for a few hours in the late afternoon

5) Ribs for dinner at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant a guy on the street told us about. Everyone sits around an old wooden bar. Met some locals. Fun

Amsterdam, Day 1

The houses in Amsterdam are so beautiful...

We're on vacation! Some cool things we've seen so far:

1) Snow, it's magical and fairy-tale like, 6 or 8 inches, coming down hard the first day we were here

2) People on bikes in the snow

3) Parents pulling little kids on wooden sleds in the snow down the sidewalks, getting from point A to point B

4) Van Goghs "Sunflowers" all to ourselves...lots fewer tourists in the winter

5) Stalks with balls of cotton as flowers in vases in the restaurant we had dinner in

A Quote I Read This Week That I Keep Thinking About

"Wonder is our need today, not information."

--Elia Kazan, A Life

Just Because You’ve Been Damaged by Tragedy Doesn’t Mean You Have Nothing Left to Offer the World

Here's where we got married, Glade Park, Colorado.

A sweet story, told to me yesterday about the little log cabin chapel where my husband and I got married:

“When we were building the chapel,” Alice, who owns it, told me, “we were getting wood from an area of Glade Park that had been ravaged by fire. The supporting pillars for the structure that you see in the front, we decided not to strip them of evidence of the burn. We did that to remind us--I could picture those poor trees saying ‘I’m so damaged by the fire, I’m burned and disfigured, I’m no good for anything anymore.’

"And look where they ended up--the most important part of a chapel that’s meant so much to so many, many people.”

"Health and Family First"

The last few days of work before vacation have been, predictably, crazy. I keep repeating to myself over and over my mantra for the year, which is: "Health and Family First." Not work.

So when I'm asked to do another and another and another thing before leaving, I say no and instead get some exercise and help my mom with something she needs and go out to dinner with my husband. I no longer say yes and sacrifice all else, which is how it used to be.

I need to keep this up as I go through IVF in January. It's OK to take days off to deal with the appointments etc.

Work is no longer king. "Health and Family First."

Wrapped Gifts Last Night...

Last night I listened to my favorite holiday album, Merry Mixmas, and wrapped gifts.

I really love plain brown wrapping paper lately. Saw it recently with a gray bow on Creature Comforts. Here's my interpretation...thanks, Creature Comforts!:

Trying to get gifts wrapped and delivered before leaving on vacation!

I had fun with the tags too, like little pom poms cut out of stiff red and pink paper with patterned scissors. The letters come from a stamp set I've had forever, from Anthropologie.

Love the font of these letter stamps.

And I ran out of regular tape, but love the way masking tape looks:

Used patterned scissors on the tape, too, to give it a cool edge.

Love gift wrapping. Almost done for the year. It's starting to feel like Christmas! :)

Grief: Does it Ever Get Better?

Luke on our last Baja surf trip, just before lighting the evening's fire. He died April 29, 2005 at age 27.

So I lived with my little brother in Santa Barbara, CA, in a little stucco house on the hill we called “The Cota House.” He was killed five years ago, a Friday evening in a motorcycle accident, coming home for a barbecue before we and a bunch of friends went to Ventura to see his band play. He was my best friend, and, when he died, the person I was spending all my time with. My day-to-day life was catastrophically disrupted.

The first few years were absolutely horrible. Lately, I can’t pinpoint exactly when, I’ve been feeling a little better. It’s taken so long to get to this point. I’m starting to feel like his death won’t destroy me. I’m trying hard to build a new life for myself. It’s complicated because it wasn’t just losing him--I also feel like when he died, my whole world got taken away from me. I loved Santa Barbara, loved the beach, loved to surf, and life had it’s challenges for sure but overall the set-up we had, it was pretty idyllic. None of that’s part of my life any longer and that in itself is so, so hard.

The way I generally cope with my brother’s death is to try not to think about it. Pretend it didn’t happen. But once in a while (well, often, if I’m honest) things happen that make it rise to the surface. Like yesterday evening an email inviting me to a bachelorette party for a friend who was there for me those first days and weeks and months. Her party’s the day after my brother’s death date. I’m going to go if I can because I love her and I really believe in celebrating every little thing you can in life, but I wonder how I’m going to be. And reading the paper this morning, I happened across an article that said Prince William's wedding will be held the day of my brother’s death. I’m really sensitive to dates, not just the day my brother died but the days right around that, I have such crystal-clear memories of everything that happened. Seeing those dates the pain comes back and it’s raw and awful, like no time has gone by at all.

I know time has healed me, at least to some extent. But sometimes I wonder if my brother’s death didn’t permanently break me in some very fundamental way.

In the end, I look at it this way. There are two choices: suicide, or to get up every morning and try to make the day a good one. Suicide is absolutely not an option for me, never was. So I get up each day and  try.

Some days are harder than others. I’m feeling edgy today. But I have a lot of good and happy things planned for this lovely Sunday--finishing Christmas gifts for people I love, packing for my long-delayed honeymoon trip to Europe (we got married two years ago, leave Thursday), taking my dad to the airport, making my husband (a third-year engineering student) and the guys he’s studying for finals with chicken tacos for dinner so they can concentrate on thermodynamics or fluids or electronics or whatever they’re doing.

I pray for some happiness and peace today, as I do every day. We’ll see how the day pans out.

Striped Baby Blanket

A blanket for little Uma.

A very dear friend of mine from Seattle days is having a little girl. She lives in Florida and her colors for the baby's room are pistachio and robin's egg blue. I knit her this blanket with multiple stripes up and down the length...it was so fun to knit, even though it didn't turn out exactly as expected...the blue stripes shrunk in the wash. I'm still a beginning knitter...I'll learn. Anyway, as my husband says of things that are homemade and aren't perfect: it's a blanket made with love.

Sometimes I Just Love My Job

The bedding that's on my bed was a wedding present from my friend Wendy. Love, love, love it.

I freelance from home, and it's almost always 9–5 in my office (or, more accurately, 7–5, with maybe a break for something fun in the middle). But I've been working extremely hard this week getting ready to go out of town, and woke up this morning feeling very run down. So I'm working in bed, and it's so lovely, lovely, lovely. I have a lot of gratitude for the little perks of my job like this one, even if I don't take advantage of it very often.

A Lovely Hike Last Night

Newton at full run up on the Mesa last summer.

I used to surf pretty much every day, and one of the things I miss now that I don't do that anymore is being outside and leisurely watching the sunrises and sunsets. I love the light that time of day, the colors in the clouds, how peaceful it is to be out in it. 

I went hiking at dusk last night, and although it of course wasn't the same as being in the surf, there was so much loveliness about the evening.

It was cold but not too cold.

My two boxers were with me, and chased each other the whole time, the older one, Dexter, getting down into a crouch and stalking the little one, Newton. Around trees and bushes, over rocks they didn't stop the whole time. It was good to see their unbridled joy.

And then going up, there were three young guys mountain biking, college students, perhaps. There's a place where the trail veers off and one part is hiking and the other is mountain bike only one way pretty gnarly from what I hear. It's called "Free Lunch." We were where the trail veered at the same time, and I could hear but couldn't see them make it to the bottom, hooting and hollering the whole time, no question the fun they were having.

And then watching the sun leave the valley, and the Book Cliffs and the Mesa turn the purple they turn sometimes, pink clouds in the sky. Lovely. A great end to an insanely busy day. Happy.

My Dream Life, Part 4 of 5: Create Something

I want to do something creative with words.

I’ve been doing a series of dream lives here; see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 if you haven’t already. This fourth dream is something I’m probably already closest to vs the others, and that is to make something creative that involves writing--and more.

I dream of getting a letterpress and learning how to use it. Learning bookbinding. Putting some things together that have writing (the writing is central) and photography, drawing, other things.

And/or, maybe what I put together is digital, and has audio and video besides. But whatever it it, I want the way the writing’s packaged to be as special as the writing itself. And what I put together to go beyond writing. I’m just not sure exactly what that looks like yet.

Image credit: katietower.

Is it OK to Be an Older Mom?

I’m going to be an older mom. Not really by choice; I tried to have kids back in the 90s, and have been trying hard again for years. But it is what it is at this point, and I really need to find some acceptance with it. I think I’m also having a hard time living in a small town, where everyone seems to have their babies in high school or just out. In a place like San Francisco or New York, I’m sure I wouldn’t feel like such an oddity.

There are definitely advantages to being older, I know: more stable emotionally and financially, and I’ve done pretty much everything I wanted to do as a young adult, so there will be no regrets along the lines of “if only we didn’t have kids, we could be doing A, B, C and D.”

Still, the age thing is something I struggle with. Is it fair to the kid? Am I going to have the energy? Am I going to be able to make the necessary adjustments, having had so many years to get set in my ways?

My parents last week both inadvertently said things related to this that made me feel better.

My mom mentioned that when (if) I have the baby that’ll come out of the January IVF cycle, she’ll be the age her mother was when she had Luke, my youngest brother. Now granted, my mom was her mom’s last child, and Luke was my mom’s last child, but still, when my mom’s helping me she’ll be the same age as when her mom was helping her.

And then I was hiking with my dad and he was talking about how the life span is 20 years longer now than it was in his grandparents age, and why is it that we’re still pushing kids through college right after high school and then to get married and work and start a family? Why are all those extra years being tacked onto retirement? Why aren’t we altering things so they can be enjoyed earlier in life?

Now, I am well aware of the biological reasons to have kids in your 20s or 30s, and the earlier the better. But circumstances worked out so that that wasn’t possible for me. Instead, I got a whole lot of extra years to be young and have fun before starting a family.

“Well, seeing as if all goes well I’ll have my first baby next fall, I’m doing my part to put some of those years up-front,” I told my dad, laughing. Maybe I need to step back and truly appreciate that. How lucky to have some of those years up front when you’re young.

It’s OK to not be a young mom. I’ve just got to get my head around it. The things my mom and dad said, they’re helping me do that.

What I'm Listening To: Robyn's Body Talk

So my best friend has this cool job in the music business, and one of the benefits of that for me is I get recommendations. One of her latest: Robyn's Body Talk.

“I can’t stop listening to this album,” my friend said to me, and I feel the same way. How is it that I’ve never heard of Robyn? The album: dance-y and pop-y and so very happy. I’ve been listening to it this weekend making Christmas presents, running errands.

The artist herself is interesting, too. She’s been in the music business a long time, and I love that she left her label when they didn’t approve of what she was doing artistically, and has since been releasing her music on her own, so she can do anything she wants to do. Artistic freedom/integrity is something I think about a lot with my writing. It’d be easy to turn to very commercial projects, get them published. Even this blog--I know I could put together a different kind of blog that’s very commercial, if I was trying to get an enormous readership or make money. But my creative projects, I want to do them the way I want to do them, stay true to my vision vs letting somebody else/the obvious money-making needs and wants of the marketplace dictate what I do. I love seeing other people follow that same path (and be successful at it--that’s inspiring.)

Love Robyn’s artistic vision. Body Talk's definitely worth checking out.

Fuzzy

Being fuzzy isn't easy.

My husband’s nickname for me is “Fuzzy,” sometimes “Little Fuzz,” or “LF” for short. As in:

“Hey, Fuzzy, you ready to go to dinner?”

or

“Why you crying Little Fuzz?”

He uses it as a noun, but it’s really an adjective that describes my personality, which in a nutshell is ultra-sensitive and ultra-emotional (these are the difficult parts), but also very caring and nurturing and loving (the good parts, according to my husband.)

Being fuzzy is hard. I take the weight of the world onto my shoulders. I kind of need to be shielded from things (eg, violence in movies, the news), because if I’m not, I’ll obsess over something I see. Say a bad guy dies in an explosion in a movie (which I know is fiction), I’ll still think about his family, the people who loved him, how sad they must be. When I saw the movie Changeling (great movie, but a lot of pretty horrible stuff happenes), I went into a funk for weeks. And the things in real life that have happened to me? I cope best by not thinking or talking about them too much. Pretending, for the most part, that they haven’t happened. Not sure how healthy that is, but it’s the only real coping mechanism I’ve been able to figure out.

My husband’s personality is the opposite of fuzzy--he’s cool, calm and logical at almost all times. He refuses to get caught up in emotion. Which somehow works out. I get to be my artsy, dreamy, sensitive self, and he keeps us rooted in the real world.

One of the many things I love about him.

Photo credit: Jenny Downing.

Fertility Update

There’ve been little bits of things to do here and there over the past few months, but thing are about to ramp up for our IVF attempt in January. Here's our history, and here’s the latest:

• My period should come in ~2 weeks, after which we’ll get a solid calendar
• We had appointments in Denver last week to update things that were expiring (baseline ultrasound, communicable disease blood work). Frustrating and EXPENSIVE to have to do that, but the rules are the rules. My husband also put away another frozen sample
• I've got a couple of what look like fibroids in my uterus, but Dr. Gus as my husband calls him says not to worry about it
• We’re going to be traveling in Europe with syringes and needles and meds; that should be interesting
• I’m feeling a bit scared and detached. I actually did not like going to the clinic last week at all. Really, not one good bit of news came out of that place in 2010; in a way it’s a little traumatizing to go back. Even when I had positive betas (pregnancy tests) they were like, “well, it’s positive, but the numbers are low (and/or aren’t increasing the way we’d like).” Even last cycle when we seemed to get a lot more eggs than before that was followed by a fertilization report of “sorry, all but 2 died.” Our clinic (CCRM in Denver) is one of the best in the nation if not the world and I’m really grateful to be able to go there, but I really hate physically going there, if that makes any sense. It’s hard for me to truly feel like anything positive can come out of that place after months and months and months of disappointment. This cycle is our absolute last. I’m scared to get my hopes up again. The past few months have been amazing, taking a break for the most part from thinking about how much I want a child and how nothing we’re doing’s working. The disappointment of it not working is so painful, I can’t imagine willingly putting myself through that again.

Except this time it might work…

Books to Read While Traveling (Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Venice)

Love to read while traveling...

My husband and I are going to Europe, two weeks from tomorrow. I love, love, love to travel and it’s been so long since I’ve been out of the country.

When I travel, I like to read. Books about the places I’m going and/or by authors who are from there. A lot of times it’s books I’ve been meaning to read or re-read, sometimes for years. A great place to round out the list is Longitude: Recommended Reading for Travelers.

Here’s what I'm bringing on my upcoming trip:

Amsterdam

• The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
• Amsterdam, a Traveler’s Literary Companion, Manfred Wolf (Editor)

Berlin

• The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass
• The Berlin Diaries, Marie Vassiltchikov

Prague

• The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka

Venice

• Watermark, Joseph Brodsky
• Across the River and Into the Trees, Ernest Hemmingway

Can't wait to be on a day-long train trip, cities and towns and country I've never seen, cup of tea in hand and a good book spread out before me. 

Photo credit: chillihead.

My Dream Life, Part 3 of 5: Snowboarding

Powder days. Best thing in the world.

I wish snowboarding had been big when I was a child, and that my parents had had the money/time/interest to get me on a board as soon as I had the muscle coordination. In my dream I’m a pro snowboarder, at least through my early 20s, and then I get married and have a passel of kids and live in a little A-frame house in the mountains with prayer flags strung over the loft like a house I saw once in Vail. Funny how this dream doesn’t include any sort of education or intellectual success—things in my real life I’ve worked hard to achieve.

How to make this dream a reality? Well, I’m obviously not going to be a pro snowboarder in this lifetime, but that’s OK. I can still have the little A-frame in the mountains. Hopefully a kid or two. A life lived largely out-of-doors (although my husband, though he’ll go with me occasionally, is decidedly not an outdoorsy person, so that presents some difficulties).

My brother who died, he and I always planned to take one winter off together, live on the mountain, snowboard every day. Maybe there’s a way to make that happen. Snowboarding’s one of the very few places I’ve found peace since my brother died, one of the few things I genuinely want to do.

Hopefully this snow season I’ll be pregnant and sidelined. There’ll be many more seasons to come.

Photo credit: Mihai Japan.

An Ex-Boyfriend Contacted Me Through Facebook

My ex-boyfriends generally fall into two categories: those I’m friendly with, and those who don’t want to talk to me. One of the ones I though was in the latter camp sent me a message over the weekend, out of the blue after about 6 years.

He’s actually the last person I seriously dated before I met my husband. I’m sure his version of why we broke up is probably different, but my version is I was still in love with someone else, and didn’t really want a serious boyfriend, and he wanted to get married and have kids. Not necessarily to/with me, but that was his goal.

Anyway, really nice message, and his picture shows him with a baby so I assume he got the marriage and kids part figured out, which is great. Happy for him. And I’m glad we can be in contact, even though I’m sure it’ll be very sporadic. I hate losing anyone to the past.

But. Ex-boyfriends popping up make me feel unsettled. It’s got me thinking about that time in my past--things were complicated back then but they are infinitely more complicated now. I’ve lived through a lot since we dated, things I don’t necessarily want to talk about in a catching-up conversation with an ex-boyfriend. I feel a lot like I can’t really talk about how things have been. It’s too heavy. So I give the cheery “got married, still doing the same job, living in Colorado now, snowboard season’s going to rock, all’s well” reply, instead of “since we last talked my brother’s been killed, I’ve had to leave California and the ocean and I’ve been to hell and back trying to have a baby and we’re nowhere near through yet.”

And I feel more isolated than ever.