home again home again...

well after two wonderful weekends and wonderful hosts, it's hard to come back to a city you don't know very well yet! i spent last weekend in atlanta with ashlea and jules, and this most recent weekend with nate visiting laura and drew in nashville (pics posted). had a wonderful time at both!
i flew back to orlando this evening and realized, i'm not so crazy about it yet. i can always tell if i've grown attached to where i live by whether i'm excited to come back home or not. i'm sure there are several factors at play here, the main one being that my husband doesn't live here yet! also, cleo is at the kennel still tonight since i'm back too late to get her tonight.
so, i was a little down on my "city beautiful" this evening, and spent some time researching new places to check out. i did find several :) on my list to explore (keep me honest!):

1. brandywine books: used bookstore with over 30,000 titles - i'm excited about this one ;)
2. tim's wine market: organized by type, then by region - they not only have tastings, but also wine classes!
3. harry p. leu gardens: apparently beautiful gardens and a house that can be toured as well- $4 admission for a nice way to spend an afternoon.
4. park avenue shopping: a refreshing absence of strip mall- just neat bistros, boutiques, etc.
5. orlando science center: what it sounds like! complete with planetarium :)

so that's the start to my list. when i'm done, i'm writing a guide to orlando that's for residents, not for toursits! ;)

it's friday!

for gram :)

any any others seeking photos of nate in florida at easter :) click here:

http://floridaiveys.smugmug.com/gallery/1378670

should take you right to it! :) and grandma, for nate's blog, click where it says "mr. ivey" on the left of the page. but he NEVER updates it so you might get bored ;)

I Crave Your Mouth by Pablo Neruda

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

check this out...

this guy has traded up from one red paperclip through various items and now has 1-year's worth of rent in phoenix instead. his ultimate goal is to trade up to a house. i would have never thought that kind of thing would be possible, but he's already gotten this far! isn't that crazy?
it reminds me of the story of the guy that sold his every possession on e-bay, then trekked across the U.S. to visit his possessions in the hands of the people who bought them. then he wrote a book about it!
where do people come up with this stuff? i love it! :)

pictures from nate's trip

i posted pics from nate's trip :) (link to the left) -- also available on our photo website is any and every wonderful photo taken by red turtle at our wedding :) they're password protected, but if you know our dog's name, you'll be fine- oh, and capitalize it :)
so nate and i had a fantastic time the past few days- we had all kinds of grandiose plans to go to the beach, etc. but decided to just spend the time at home instead :) the easter bunny found us both sunday morning- i got headwear this year for easter, one in the form of a pink bike helmet (with flowers!), and the other a member's only hat for my favorite house on the yough river ;)
more later- i'm sleepy! :)

happy easter!

hope everyone has a wonderful easter! we didn't ham shop until yesterday, so we'll be having easter beef wellington ;)

nate's home :)

"To a Stranger" by Walt Whitman

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as
of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste,
matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only
nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take
of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake
at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

*Constance Merritt comments:

There is the all-encompassing Whitman, container of multitudes,
wandering, restless, appetitive, sprawling, desperate to be everywhere,
everything, everyone (There was a child went forth every day, / And the
first object he look'd upon, that object he became...) -- is fragmentation
the end of such desire? wholeness? -- , anywhere but here within the
prison of the self (And you O my soul where you stand, / Surrounded,
detached, in measureless oceans of space...) and a quieter, self-
possessed, concentrated Whitman, who speaks with such poignancy and
clarity of loneliness and longing:

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark
green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not...

And yet (solitary in a wide flat space, / Uttering joyous leaves all its
life without a friend a lover near) he does precisely that, the thing he
knows very well that he could not. And yet one feels that I could not,
the dislocating wrench between the soul's deepest necessity and the
accidents that condition a life.

Founded on the bedrock of human estrangement, "To a Stranger" approaches
this universal problem not through imaginative merging, a penchant for
which D. H. Lawrence takes Whitman to task, but rather through a vision
of mutual recognition. The moment of encounter is pregnant, an
unprepossessing acorn opening out into a glorious oak, a moment which not
only extends future promises, but also one that heals the past, the
passing stranger recalling the speaker to a life of joy already lived. A
life before the schism of gender, before and beyond the compensatory
couplings of sex, a life at once redolent of the uncompromising
innocence of childhood and the sensual and spiritual ripenings of age
(fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured). And note how Whitman's syntax
enacts reciprocity at every turn and the delicate balance between
restraint, passive receptiveness, and active willing (I am to see to it
that I do not lose you) struck in those last three lines. In "To a
Stranger" Whitman figures a way of both losing and finding the self.
Finding through mutual recognition: we can only hope to know ourselves
through another's eyes; becoming is always and only in relation. And
losing because in relation one no longer stands apart (surrounded,
detached in measureless oceans of space...), but rather becomes a part
of something entirely new and larger than the self and is thereby healed
of (quoting Randall Jarrell) "that long disease" the self.

CONSTANCE MERRITT, author of *A Protocol for Touch* (University of
North Texas Press, 2000), lives in Lynchburg, Virginia.

short post!

i've had such long posts lately i felt the need to mix it up a little...

happy monday!

good morning! another day, another week :) except THIS week nate is coming to visit! he'll be here wednesday night :)
yesterday i worked at the park- it was interesting. i had a 5 hour shift in one of the "quick service" restaurants which is really fast food :) i filled trays and handed them over to happy guests. i arrived home lastnight around 8ish appreciating my office job more than ever before and wound down with a glass of wine and a good book :) it was a lovely relaxing evening! i'm reading da vinci code - i actually held out until it came out on paperback but i did want to read it before the movie hits the screen this summer - i'm about 1/2 way through and am really enjoying it so far :)
also, i cleaned! finally unpacked and hung the bags and bags of clothes that have plagued the corner of my room since i moved- wanted nate to think i'd done something while he'd been gone!
this weekend marks the beginning of a flurry of weekends: nate's here this weekend, atlanta the following weekend to visit ashlea and jules, nashville the following weekend to visit laura and drew, my mom's in FL the following weekend to visit me, the weekend after that is open, the weekend after that nately is in FL, the weekend after that i'm in PA :), and the following weekend nate moves in! whew! i got tired just typing that! :) so needless to say, the next couple of months will fly by!

i feel bad for this poor guy!

DEAR MARGO:
I'll try to keep this brief. I'm a 45-year-old guy who met, fell in love with and married my beautiful wife, who is 28. We met in January, married in September. The relationship was very strong for the first year, and then started dissipating to where it is today, with me sitting in this apartment, by myself, writing to you.
I spent very lavishly on her, to the point where I had to sell my house because I couldn't keep up the payments along with all the other debt I'd acquired. We had been looking at places together, until one day she decided to get an apartment by herself, "to take a break from each other" and have friends of her own. So now she lives across town in her place, and I'm here, in mine!
I let her take all my stuff (furniture, etc.) to her apartment with her, I guess because I hoped that within a month or so I'd be there with her, but now it doesn't seem that way. She does not want a divorce; she says she just needs her space and her friends. This makes me jealous because all of her friends are male.
She is adamant that there is nothing sexual between her and her friends, but still I feel my heart being ripped out of my chest when I know that there is another man with her watching movies or just hanging out. To make it worse, she has all the comforts of a home, and I sit here on my only chair.
What do I do -- wait for the love of my life to realize she misses me, or get my stuff and move on?
-- DAZED AND CONFUSED!

DEAR DAZE:
You have proven once again that love is blind. I regret your heartbreak, but here is what you need to do: Get off your only chair and find a good lawyer. This babe has you totally bamboozled, and you need to inform her that the jig is up. You will no longer finance her "space" or her "friends," and you don't care if she wants a divorce or not; you do.
By all means, get your stuff back, stop being Daddy Warbucks, and fire up some anger about the way this gold-digging femme fatale has been using you.
-- Margo, correctively

giving blood in florida...

... is way cooler than virginia for the following reasons because:

1. they put a cool colored bandage around your arm (i got pink!)
2. they give you a cool sticker that says "take me out to eat! i gave blood!"
3. they give you a $10 grocery gift card
4. you get to watch disney movies

i also found out during my physical that my pulse is approximately that of a comatose person: 54!

in other news, my apartment has been under construction and i have my windows back! lovely to have the light flowing back into the apartment (they were covered in black plastic). plans for the weekend? cleaning! i still have residual unpacking to finish and nate will be here next wednesday! i'm also working a shift in one of the parks :) which means i'll be off the friday when nate's here :) have a good friday all :)

do you know what month it is?

it's national poetry month :) as a result, poetry daily delivers poems to my inbox not weekly, but daily :) here's today's, followed by a brief discussion on it (and if my posting of long poems scares you, don't even bother reading the discussion) :)

"Friendship After Love"
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)

After the fierce midsummer all ablaze
Has burned itself to ashes, and expires
In the intensity of its own fires,
There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin days
Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze.
So after Love has led us, till he tires
Of his own throes, and torments, and desires,
Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze,
He beckons us to follow, and across
Cool verdant vales we wander free from care.
Is it a touch of frost lies in the air?
Why are we haunted with a sense of loss?
We do not wish the pain back, or the heat;
And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.

*David Baker comments:

Issa's masterful haiku

The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet--

is one of my favorite poems. The delicacy of the simple first image is
one thing. But the reiteration of that image in line two becomes a
mirror in a drop of water, which in turn prepares the ultimate
reflection inside the last line. "And yet, and yet" quivers as though
the bead of dew is about to spill, or evaporate. What restraint yields
what power. The poem's last repetition seems hesitant, even as it evokes
acceptance of its own transience. It is 1819. The poet's young daughter
Sato has died, in June, of smallpox. The provisional, Issa reminds us,
is what lasts.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox's sonnet, "Friendship After Love," haunts me for its
kindred reiteration in the last line. I love the way poems echo and arc,
calling to each other across time and languages. Wilcox's poem is
resigned, rueful - Issa's provisional. Even in her first lines, I admire
Wilcox's fine craft and complex syntax. "All ablaze" points back, as a
modifier, to "midsummer," the object of the preposition; but also
resolves forward into the predicate after the line break. Likewise
"St. Martin days" closes a phrase but further modulates into the
participle in the next line.

St. Martin's Day comes from German culture, and commences on the 11th
hour of the 11th day of the 11th month to mark the end of farming, the
beginning of harvest. This reference is part of Wilcox's larger pattern
of seasonal imagery. It's a familiar association - the seasons of the
year reflect a person's life and love - notable in Wordsworth and
Barrett Browning, notable in Yeats's chilly tropes in "When You Are Old."
Less effective is the bathos of Wilcox's phrase "large-eyed friendship,"
though I remind myself that her image anticipates by a century the
cartoonish greeting-cards, Anime, and black-velvet urchins we find so
saccharine.

The real power of her poem derives from the way Wilcox leads to the
clarities of the final four lines. She proceeds from conventional
romantic tropes of language and love toward the surprising modernity of
the last lines. Notice how her earlier long clauses and heavy enjambment
resolve into her ending's more deliberate lineation, each taut line a
closed clause with no syntactical inversions. A powerful clarity. Notice
finally how she slips from one mode into another, the way the erotic
poem - with its requisite pain and anguish - becomes the more serene
love poem. The grief of her lyric arises from Wilcox's realization of
that transformation. She wants the summer back. The fire.

the results are in!

pick four club

since i received this by e-mail, i decided to join the pick 4 club :)

Four Jobs I've Had (I'll pick the coolest ones) :)
1 - Industrial Engineer - Disney
2 - Engineer on an Oil Rig in the Gulf
3 - Typsetter for a local copy place
4 - Bagel girl at Bagel Nosh :)

Four Movies I can Watch Over and Over:
1 - Music from Another Room
2 - Something's Gotta Give
3 - Love Actually
4 - So I Married an Axe Murderer

Four Places I've Lived (again, I'm picking the coolest, not listed in order of coolness):
1 - Burlington, VT
2 - Blacksburg, VA
3 - Phoenix, AZ
4 - Orlando, FL

Four TV Shows I Love:
1 - Arrested Development
2 - Desperate Housewives
3 - Sex and the City
4 - CSI

Four Places I've Vacationed:
1 - San Diego, CA
2 - Acacia National Park, ME
3 - Pacific Northwest (Portland/Seattle)
4 - England!

Four Of My Favorite Dishes:
1 - Dough noodles (childhood favorite) :)
2 - Bean burritos (or ANY variation involving refried beans)
3 - Mom's Chicken Pot Pie
4 - Nate's Hot Sausage and Pasta :)

Four Sites I Visit Daily:
1 - gmail (of course!)
2 - a gammet of blogs :)
3 - theknot (yes, i'm that sad still)
4 - cnn (most of the time)

Four Places I'd Rather Be Right Now:
1 - Virginia
2 - Arizona
3 - Italy
4 - San Diego :)

i have a date tonight...

and it's with my husband and an online scrabble board!

"Make a list of things you need, leave it empty

Except for number one, write 'love', gamble everything Keep it under lock and keyIf you wanna, you can gamble everything for love"...
i'm recently addicted to ben lee :) he opened for carbon leaf as a one man show and was a commanding performer-- the lyrics above are from 'gamble everything for love,' my hands down favorite. makes me want to get groovy and dance ;)
since i've lived in orlando, i've seen a sky writer write 'jesus loves u' no less than 3 times. some days, it's too windy and the wording is gone by the time they're only 2 letters away. i wonder who sponsors it. it's interesting.
went to see big bad voo doo daddy lastnight at the house of blues and loved it -- had a lot of fun singing along and dancing while standing in place so i didn't lose my view of the band ;)
today switched my clock, got up late, went shopping, did some cleaning and organizing, finally tracked down the spyware on my computer and played the sims (not necessarily in that order) :)
and now, it's back to cleaning and then a bit of tasty dinner i'm looking forward to (flank steak spiraled around mozerella and fresh spinach) mmm...
lifestyle change #313 when living alone: i bought wine in mini bottles- they're so cute! they're even fairly good wine, so i'm no compromising my quality $7.99 limit on bottle purchases... ha ha :)