Being Present

One of the best bits of travel, for me, is the thought that I don’t want to be anywhere but THERE, wherever THERE may be. At home, while my awareness of this problem has improved (more on that later), I find myself always thinking about the next thing due, whether it’s a great thing like a wedding, a good thing like a lesson plan, or a terrible thing like my check up at the dentist. Being a planner has done a lot of good things for me, but the downside is that it is hard to be present in any one moment.

When we travel it takes me a few hours, even a day or so, to shift my thinking. One sure sign that we are on vacation is that I woke before Ben, slaved over pouring a bowl of muesli (made on a local farm with macadamia nuts) for us both, and headed down to the estuary with my coffee and nothing else—I knew I had some “being present” work to do, which means leaving the book and camera behind, and trying to quiet my mind.

Here’s how it went at first: Wow, are those limes? I hope this deck is sturdy—if I fell into the water, I could climb up over there, but are there snakes in the water? I would need a really long, hot shower if I got in there. Don’t take long showers—they’re having a drought. You’re on vacation, don’t worry about droughts. One of the best bits of staying in a hotel is the fresh towel every day, and I hate how that fresh towel now comes with a heap of guilt and the image of a lone polar bear floating on a chunk of ice cap. I wonder what the tomatoes in Italy are going to taste like? Those aren’t limes. I’m going to go squeeze them just in case. What is scurvy, exactly?

(Flip, flip) Ooh, a fish! Was that a fish?

There were fish “flipping out” all over the estuary this morning, and it was great. It was a good reminder that the universe is always giving me a show and capturing my attention if I just watch for it.

I spent a lazy hour watching the fish, (success), and a couple of even lazier hours inside with a book. As I write this post, we’re digesting a yummy lunch of roast pumpkin salad, flat head fish, and dark chocolate beignets for dessert. Ben is playing with his photos, and I’m people watching. Dinner in tonight, methinks, and a beach walk on the morrow.

I also learned that I am not passionate about passion fruit.

Love,
Robyn and Ben

Back in Oz

Hiya, folks—as I’m writing this a news chopper just flew over because the beach where we’re staying was hit this week with the “worst storm in thirty years” and they’re doing media coverage of the “disaster” area—our timing is impeccable. Having witnessed a lot of storms, I empathize with the locals, and admire the clean-up crews. That being said, it’s the right time for a storm like this to happen, if it is going to: It is the start of winter here in Australia (which still means 70 degree days) and the tourist season is over. The upside for us is that the village where we are staying is nearly deserted—we are the only people staying here tonight, in fact—and I’m writing this sitting here:

Not too shabby. There is very little people-noise but lots of bird songs. I can appreciate them at a distance.

Let’s keep the journey talk to this: It was long. I’d rather talk about what was unique about this journey: Australia seems to be in a panic about swine flu, like most of the world, and as we walked through customs they had us walk past heat-sensitive cameras to quarantine those of us running a temperature. We also had to sign some paperwork swearing that we weren’t concealing flu-like symptoms, and several of the people on our flight were wearing masks.
Once we arrived (and showered—why does travel make you feel so grimy?) we walked into the village and had breakfast. If you’re dieting for a wedding or the like stop reading now. While I’m not trying to write a food blog, I have to tell you about our breakfast. Here it is:

We really liked it. Can you tell? I nearly licked the plate.

I know almost nothing about cooking, but I do love eating—and the chef at this joint achieved that really amazing balance of the things on the plate—rich goat cheese in the omelette, crisp Ciabatta bread (even the bread was delicious) and this tart salad to even out the omelette. Ben has gotten used to me saying things like “this (insert food here) is changing my life” but even he agreed this was an exceptional omelette—filled with yummy salmon to boot.

After brunch we took a walk to what is left of the beach—but the ocean is still beautiful, and Ben graciously took photos of flowers for me on demand. Isn’t this flower as pretty as a cupcake?

We hit a local grocery this afternoon in town to supply up—bread for toast, coffee, and honeycombed-chocolate for Ben. I’m a nerd for grocery stores so I had a great time. While we did not find it at the market today, there is a brand of cheese in Australia that has the head of Dick Smith on it, an Aussie businessman and millionaire. Am I the only person who thinks it is funny to put the name Dick on a block of cheese?

On our first trip to Australia, Ben and I established a game for long hours in the car. It’s a hybrid of Slugbug, called Magpie, named after the Murray Magpies that are populous in his home state. When you see a Magpie, your endeavor to punch your partner first, but, beware: If you mistake a Murray Magpie for a Kingfisher or another bird, you get double-punched. I got the first punch in today—and made the first mistake. Ben owes me two punches. I’ll let you know how it goes

We’re doing our best to stay awake until 8 p.m. Tomorrow: The beach. And more honeycomb chocolate.

Love,
Robyn and Ben

Packing, Packing, Flying, Flying, Flying

Because spending nine weeks out of the country isn’t enough of a challenge, Ben and I decided to move in Lawrence to less-expensive digs… by August 1, about two days after we get back to the U.S. We’re excited about our new place—owned by a friend who is moving home to save money to buy land—and much more energy efficient and user-friendly for our needs—but we will miss our wonky house on Arkansas Street.

While I was studying abroad in college, my friend A.J. and I spent a week in Spain with my best friend, Kate, who was studying in Granada. About six days into that trip, (and very early into my first experiences with real culture shock) we happened upon a used book stall and I looked desperately for something written in English. The only book I could find was called “Star Signs: What Your Personal Horoscope Means about YOU” or something to that effect. I read excerpts out loud to Kate and A.J. all week, in a mocking tone, all the while secretly feeling that the book had some real truths to tell about my life as a Cancer—“You love cream and sauces” YES! “You are easily hurt” Yes, but don’t tell anybody. “You are naturally round in shape” Shut-up. “You frequently buy several of the same article of clothing because you are easily attached to comfort, continuity and your possessions.” True—especially the comfort bit, which reminds me of how irritated I am that I have to wear pants to fly.

Maybe it’s these truths thrust upon me by the heavens that make moving emotionally difficult for me—I like to feel like I could walk through my house in the dark and know exactly what I will encounter (as if I’d ever do that, ghosts and killers!) More likely, however, is that I’m attached to the memories of that house on Arkansas Street—it’s the house in which we lived when we were engaged, and where we held our engagement party (and ate Karen’s delicious hors d’ouerves); it’s the place I met Kate’s first child, hosted my first Christmas dinner for my family, and that housed upwards of a dozen different loved ones during the week of our wedding; it’s the place we lived when my cousins came to visit and we repeatedly rewound that scene in Nacho Libre where he punches the corn, “Get that corn OUTTA MY FACE” and laughed until I had to use my inhaler; it’s where we had a party for Ben’s birthday and watched the Carlson kids and Lily play in the backyard, and where we’ve hosted our beloved book club; it’s where we had the “all carbohydrate” birthday dinner for Autumn, and where I learned to cook, and where I cried when I spilled my fresh cherry limeade from the Farmer’s Market; it’s where the neighbor lady stops by to say “Hello” when she is walking her dog Chico and where a mother Robin put her nest last month for her chicks, who just left the nest last week; it’s where we get daffodils and bluebonnets each spring even though we didn’t plant them, and I will miss it.

On to this summer—this is supposed to be a travel blog, not a lame-ass moving blog!—our itinerary: I’m writing this from LAX as we await our flight to Brisbane. We’ve got four days at Byron Bay, eight on Ben’s folks’ farm outside Adelaide, two in Tasmania, and four in Melbourne. After a SOLID forty-eight hours at home, we fly to Edinburgh for about seventeen days (with a couple of T.B.A. weekend excursions in between) and to Glasgow for fourteen days. We head back to Edinburgh on the sixteenth of July, meet Caitlin, Cristin and Diane, and wing our way to Italy, with Esme in tow, on July twenty-second for eight days in the Cinque Terre and Vicenza with Kate , John and their boys. We’re back on the twenty-ninth of July to move house, and away to Toronto and Niagara in early August for a work conference. When we return, we’ll have just enough time to wash the travel from our clothes before Ben starts his program at KU and I start my fall semester, thankfully, back at Emporia. Come August we start celebrating weddings: Matt and Nadine, Jonathan and Jenn, Andrea and David, and Angela and Mike, and then 2009 is a memory, with Ben on his way to India at the start of the New Year.

We feel incredibly fortunate.

Between packing the house this week, we had a host of temporary goodbyes: To Mandy and Donovan as they prepare to move, to my folks’ as they pack for an Alaskan cruise, to Andrea and David while they plan their wedding, to Autumn as she gears up for summer and the arrival of her first niece, to Lindsey and Brandon who expect their fourth child while we are away, to my students and clients, to Carrie as she plans for India next month, to Wilcox who is going to keep the local food movement alive this summer in Kansas, between wrangling neurotic pre-engineering majors and their parents; to Aileen and Nathan while they celebrate being newlyweds, and to a certain couple who are putting in new floors before they get knocked up, and to Lawrence during the best time of the year to live there—when the Farmer’s Market is in full swing, and the students are gone, and the pool downtown gets so crowded that no one is actually just swimming, just bobbing in place and hoping that the kid next to them isn’t peeing in the pool.

We will miss our friends near and far this summer; the kind of people who never pee in the pool.

Love,
Robyn and Ben

The Backyard of the Future and Christmas

Howdy Loyal Readers (Nadine!),

It's been about four months since my last post.

I've been real, real busy. Mostly, I've been thinking a lot about ideas discussed in this post, spending approximately six hours locked in a bathroom, and giving great thought to legally changing my last name to Hammerhead Shark, and these things take a lot of energy. In between I work and sleep, but won't write about the former, as I don't want to get Dooced.

A friend once told me that she knew a guy that built himself an outdoor pizza oven. He even makes his own dough! Needless to say, I've been fascinated with this concept since about May of this year, and have even done a bit of internet research and considered sending away to Australia for the instructional DVD. Step one: Must own house with backyard in which to build outdoor pizza oven. We're on a 2-3 year plan to complete step one.

I've been talking about my longed-for outdoor pizza oven for about six months, as well as our plan to purchase and care for two miniature horses, who, with the aid of a cart, will be responsible for pulling boiled shrimp on ice and beer around at future parties. Everyone in my immediate family thinks this is an amazing idea, or, if not, can't get a word in edgewise to say otherwise.

Last weekend my folks, brother and future sister-in-law visited for the weekend, and the conversation quickly turned, as it so often does, to the pizza oven and miniature horses, to be collectively referred to henceforth at "The Backyard of the Future" or TBOTF.

This is basically how the conversation went down.

Dad: "This is good french onion soup, Robyn, maybe a litte sweet. In the future, maybe don't carmelize the onions quite as much."

Brother: "Where's the meat?"

Mom: "Robyn, I'm surprised that you have become such a good cook. You know who's a good cook? Your brother. He is also very funny/good looking/smart/good at making biscuits."

Brother: "If you're going to bother building an outdoor pizza oven, you should really look into also building a tandoori oven for Indian food."

Dad: "No, no...you could do both tandoori and pizza in the same oven. If you're really thinking of doing this, you should get one of those upside-down Mongolian bells that you can use as a grill."

Brother: "What the hell, Dad? I've never even seen one of those things."

Dad: "You can cook shrimp on those things."

Brother: "I wish I had some shrimp right now, at least there would be some meat with this dinner."

(Husband and future sister-in-law just exchange sympathetic looks)

Robyn: "Fine! If I build the pizza oven, I'll also build a tandoori and somehow secure an upside-down Mongolian bell."

Mom: "What's a mongolian bell?" Subtext: I'll ask (brother) because I know he is smart.

Dad: "Dammit, Nancy, it's just a bell, you cook on it."

Mom: "Oh, thanks (she directs this thanks at my brother)"

We move on to dessert.

This weekend, we were home to shop for wedding dresses with my future sister-in-law, and around the table for dinner we begin discussing what to do for Christmas this year:

Robyn: "I want Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and a subscription to Oxford American."

Dad: "Only if you give me old issues."

Brother: "I can make a bomb-ass coq au vin."

Mom just roles her eyes. My husband, once again in survival mode, just quietly eats his meal.

Brother: "Robyn, you can't cook French in a pizza oven."

Dad: "We should really think about getting that upside-down Mongolian bell."

Mom: "What's a Mongolian bell?"

Brother: "And a tandoori oven."

Dad: (very excited) "No, scratch that all. For Christmas this year, I want you kids to get out in the backyard and build me an outdoor smokehouse. Now, that is an idea. I would live out there if you kids would just build me an outdoor smokehouse."

Now, dear readers, you see that I come by it naturally. We are an idea family. Execution may be lacking, but we have some big ideas. Big ideas that will build TBOTF.

Montreal

One more thing...

Dyngus Plus Balls, especially me, loves to hate on French Canadians. We don't ACTUALLY dislike French Canadians, we just like to pretend we do (in your free time, look for Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in Montreal on You Tube.)

Anyway, I come by this honestly, as many of you know that my father recently said, at the dinner table, "Look, I'm not saying that I hate the French, I'm just saying that, if I went to Montreal, I might have to kick some ass."

Anyway, Autumn has long been proud of her Canadian (British Columbian, tea-loving, Cougar fearing) heritage. When she moved here last month, though, her father gave me the greatest birthday gift of all. We were talking about her grandmother and Doug (Autumn's dad) casually mentioned that Autumn's grandfather was FRENCH CANADIAN.

I still almost hyperventilate just thinking about the sheer joy of it all.

Dyngus Reunion Tour and Polterwang

First, a lesson. Dyngus is most widely understood to be the state of Andrea, Autumn and I all being in the same geographic location, a great meeting of the minds, but is also the name for Easter Monday in Poland. To wit (and thank you Wikipedia!):

Dyngus Day or Wet Monday (Polish Śmigus-dyngus or Lany Poniedziałek) is the name for Easter Monday in Poland. In the Czech Republic it is called Velikonoční pondělí or Pomlázka. Both countries practice a unique custom on this day.

In Poland, traditionally, early in the morning boys awake girls by pouring a bucket of water on their head and striking them about the legs with long thin twigs or switches made from willow, birch or decorated tree branches (palmy wielkanocne); however, the earliest documented records of Dyngus Day in Poland are from the 15th century, almost half a millennium after Poland adopted Christianity.

Dyngus discovered the existence of this tradition sometime early in our 20s. Mostly we just liked the idea of a holiday where people run around slapping people's legs with pussywillows. A great tradition was born.

Dyngus is a little like Fight Club lite: We can talk about it, but don't really elaborate on his laws and customs. Suffice it to say that there are few things one can do to be evicted from the State of Dyngus, but there are frequent judge's rulings on issues of contention, e.g. "Judge's Ruling: Robyn is an Asshole."

With too-rare exceptions in the form of weekend visits, Dyngus had not convened since August 2003, upon our return from an International Tour in Scotland. As you can imagine, we were most pleased and excited when Autumn made the move to Lawrence this month and Dyngus reunited permanently for the first time since 1996. I know you are all excited too. In celebration of this extraordinary event, we decided to go on a Dyngus Reunion Tour, celebrating Dyngus as well as Andrea's 3oth birthday.

We went over the 4th of July weekend. Our first order of business was to officially discuss and determine a role for Ben, who committed to supporting Dyngus when he married me in October.

We had to have a new name.

When Ben is in residence, we are "Dyngus Plus Balls."

We headed to The Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. We chose The Crescent because it is a haunted hotel, having once been a hospital of sorts, that was featured on an episode of Ghosthunters. My friendship with Andrea and my many nights at her house has opened my mind to the possibility of spirits in the afterlife that stick around, although, with one exception, my exposure to these spirits has largely been limited to the presence of Polterwang, to be described later.

Some highlights and lowlights of our trip:

We ate in Nevada, Missouri at a place called The Cowboy Grill which offered chicken fried chicken (highlight), only to be informed that they were out of gravy (lowlight);

My fellow road-trippers allowed me to listen to three Celine Dion songs on the road trip (highlight, naturally);

The weather was gorgeous and Eureka Springs wasn't nearly as hillbilly as I'd imagined (highlight);

Still, Eureka Springs was hillbilly enough for me to feel comfortable, e.g. signs that said "Pete's Car Wash: Free Hand Job";

They had rocking chairs on the porch (highlight) and unlimited bacon on the breakfast buffet (major highlight);

There is a giant statue of Jesus, called "Christ of the Ozarks" that turned its head to look at me (highlight) but also had boobs (lowlight);

Andrea became overly excited in the glass slag pit of the gift shop and almost severly cut herself (lowlight);

I made that last bit up, mostly, but she was excited (highlight);

Our ghost tour guide thanked me for giving him good eye contact and minimal encouragers on the ghost tour (highlight) but refused to tell me the name of one of the ghosts so that I could summon said ghost in the morgue area (lowlight);

Andrea's GPS system, Angelique, tried to make us drive through a house (lowlight) and Autumn thought were were going to be attacked Deliverance-style, which was hilarious (highlight);

I was able to watch a fascinating show on the 50 states on the History Channel (highlight) but primarily caught information about Ohio (lowlight);

When the tour guide described a ghost that grabs people's ankles in the men's bathroom, I made a very clever joke about Larry Craig (highlight) but only Andrea and the tour guide heard me (lowlight, I hate when my comic genius cannot be shared, see: this blog);

Finally, at midnight on July 4th, my two best friends and my husband all wished me a happy birthday, and, since we were all in the same hotel room, it only took me tour hours to fall asleep, what with the fear of being attacked by ghosts.

In the end, other than getting a creepy feeling a bunch in the hotel, getting a picture of "orbs" that may or may not have simply been my boobs, and Andrea and Ben's insistence that a phantom made the papertowel dispenser dispense an extra towel independent from human movement, the only supernatural activity discovered on the reunion tour was the constant threat of Polterwang, or the effect of appearing to have a boner, (trust me, this is mostly Andrea) when you are female and generally boner-less. At least we think she's boner-less, but still a boner, no doubt.

Strangely, this phantom follows Andrea everywhere she goes.

Go gently, Andrea and her Polterwang, go gently.

Love,
Robyn

30 Years

Howdy!

Just back from two weeks (mostly) away and, having played catch up at the office, ready to regale you all with tales of my adventures. But first...

I just want to thank you all for what proved to be a super fabulous birthday. Whether it was a phone message wishing me a happy birthday, a thoughtful email wishing me a lovely day, gifts that prove you really know me (thanks, Nadine, Lindsey and Brandon, Caitlin, Cristin and Diane), or lovely cards that now reside in a place of pride on the dining room table, I felt really loved, and thank you all for that, as it is the best gift of all, is it not?

I got this (approximate, from memory) message from Caitilin, Cristin and Diane, and I think they said it best:

"What to get you for your 3oth birthday? You already have a handsome hubby, a hysterically funny family, gorgeous friends, and a rockin' degree, so what else is there to get you? Cheese--glorious cheese, with funny names and even funnier smells..."

A membership to the Cheese of the Month Club. Genius. It started with three glorious cheeses that ARRIVED ON MY DOORSTEP like they had been delivered by the Cheese Fairy. It was a miracle. A delicious, delicious miracle. A week later I am still basking in the joy of Jarlsberg.

Thanks, all, it was truly a very, very happy birthday.

Love You,
Robyn