Fall in Massachusetts

I know my last post was about North Carolina, but today I was in the mood to write about one of the few things I actually like about living in Massachusetts, which is fall. The weather cools off pretty quickly--although it's been warm for much longer than it seems it should have been, it's going to be in the low 60s all week--and there's apple and pumpkin picking, which you can't beat. I have a plan to go apple picking, get a good carving pumpkin, and eat cider doughnuts after we get back from Raleigh. There's a great farm in Northboro where we went strawberry picking back in May, and we'll probably head up that way just because I liked it a lot.

Fall is my favorite season. I have a tendency to get colds in fall rather than spring, but I don't even care! (Except when I give them to the baby. Which I have. I feel terrible about that.) It cools off, the leaves are GORGEOUS--and somehow, in New England the leaves seem so much more vibrant, and there are old farmhouses and cider mills and crazy rural stuff that go so well with the changing leaves--and I can start wearing sweaters again. I like wearing sweaters and jeans because I like how they cover up my flaws. I also like that in fall and winter, I'm only kind of pale, not ghastly. Pale in winter WORKS.

And I like buying winter clothes for Calvin. Fall is the time when winter clothes start appearing, so I get to go stock up on fleece pajamas and rain gear and long pants and sweatshirts and the like. He's got a rain jacket and a puffy winter coat now, and if I can find his damn tiger hat he'll be almost set. My only concern is snow boots. I haven't bought any yet, because I think they'll be $20 and I'm not sure how much use he'll get out of them. Of course, it's going to snow up here, but I'm still clinging to the hope that we'll be moving back to NC soon. I suppose it couldn't hurt. He can wear them even if it's not SNOWING, just cold, and it may snow some down south. It did last year.

There are a lot of things I don't like about living up here, mostly because it's so far away from home, but I like fall. I'm glad we're experiencing it again, at least one more time.

About North Carolina

Hey y'all. I miss North Carolina; were you aware? I've been thinking about all the things I miss and that I can't wait to have when we visit Raleigh in two and a half weeks. It's going to be amazing. We're going to hit up the NC State Fair, and eat lots of horrible food (both at and outside of the fair), and see our friends, and I get to drink Caribou Coffee and Cheerwine and Cottonwood Pumpkin Ale. I love October in North Carolina.

And I love all the other months, too, because the weather's not too cold in winter and the leaves are beautiful in the fall and the summer is so oppressively hot that you want to jump in a pool--you don't even want to sit inside all day in the air conditioning, because you know you should be in a pool--and in spring, the pollen is so thick that it coats your car and turns it this funky greenish-yellow and you have to wash it but it's cool because you do that outside, with the hose on the side of your house, and somehow the pollen exacerbates my allergies a little bit less than it does up here, and there's that weird sulfuric smell from the Bartlett pear trees but they look so pretty.

You know what I miss most about North Carolina, though? My family is there. My friends are there, all the ones who came out and helped us move just over a year ago. There are so many new babies for me to meet and hang out with and get to know. There are weird local things, like fish camps, that you have to live there to understand. There's the beach on one side and REAL mountains on the other. The beach has dunes and proper waves and soft sand and afternoon thunderstorms, and the mountains have the Nantahala River and hiking trails and campgrounds and scenic overlooks and waterfalls and Canyons, oh dear God I need to go eat at Canyons again before I die.

I love North Carolina because they do barbecue two ways, and then South Carolina has its own equally awesome way, and I can go visit someone I like and get a different kind of barbecue every time. I love it because people actually wave at you when you walk down the street, and you don't feel like you have to cover it up when you talk like a hick because no one makes fun of you for it. I love that you can buy Martha White cornbread mix, and that you can get proper biscuits and gravy, and when you order breakfast you can choose home fries or grits. Not that I ever choose grits. I don't actually like them. But my dad does.

I want my son to grow up a little slower, a little sweeter, because he lives in the South. But I also want him to know what's wrong with it, and not to be caught up in the backwards ideology that tends to overshadow everything that's so great about my state. I want him to learn to respect people, regardless of how they look or what they believe or who they love. I hope that I can raise a child who becomes a man who can help change the things that are wrong, or at least support that change, because I think that then North Carolina would be perfect.

Of course, we have to get back there first. But we're working on that.

Things We Lost In The Hurricane

1. Power
2. A modicum of sanity

...that's about it, actually.

So we've been without power for two days, which is boring. We cleaned. Calvin climbed up AND DOWN the stairs. We lit candles. We tried to sleep with the windows open and our neighbor's generator sounding like a weed eater all night. I woke up in the middle of the night convinced that the night light I had rigged for Calvin out of an LED headlamp and the shade from my reading lamp was going to catch on fire, even though it doesn't even get warm, and had to go check on it at 3:20AM. We woke up with the sun. Brandon went to work. Calvin and I hung out and cleaned his room and napped and went to lunch with Brandon at work and drove around.

I don't know when the power will come back on but it's amazing how much I miss internet and TV. Honestly, the thing I really miss is that I only listen to music on my computer, and I can't do that now.

Right now I'm hanging out at Molly's hotel room, which they got because their condo is a billion degrees with no a/c. Our house, fortunately, has lots of trees to shade it and is well enough ventilated that it's not thoroughly unpleasant, but there's wi-fi at the hotel so I can write. And check facebook. And my email. There's nothing of consequence in my email. Sigh.

There was this girl...

Sometimes I remember stories about people that I kind of knew, in passing, and I retell them, but I refer to that person as "my friend." Mostly because it's shorter. I just wanted to make it known that if I am telling you a story about "my friend," there is a decent chance that the subject of the story was not actually my friend, but it's a lot easier than saying "this person I kind of knew in college through my roommate, who was in the same major, but who I wasn't really close to." Then I forget what the story was about before I even finish introducing the subject.

I am not going to tell you a story about anyone else right now.

Today we took Calvin down to Plymouth, and ended up going to White Horse Beach. It's on the bay, so there aren't really waves, but there's sand (and rocks, but mostly sand) and there's water, which Calvin splashed around in until I got worried about it being SO COLD THAT MY FEET WERE NUMB and took him out. Then he tried to eat rocks and check out the cooler belonging to the people near us and play with Abi's bellybutton. So we're totally getting a pool for him. He loves the water, and I can't even tell you how happy that makes me. Next summer, I am teaching him to swim. I think you can actually teach a two-year-old and have it take. I'll need to look into that.

We also got the most delicious Thai eggrolls and seafood and cupcakes. Plymouth is bad for my figure.

Dear Internet,

OH GOD I MISSED YOU. It's only been a week or so that I haven't had the internet (actually, it's only been about 5 days) but WOW. It's hard when you're so used to something and suddenly you don't have it anymore.

Calvin's WALKING. Yeah. Seriously walking, all over the place. He climbs the stairs in our new place, and climbs onto the couch, and is all-around terrifying. I'm so proud of him. He also has a new tooth, possibly two, and is taking a nice long nap (which I tried to do too, but the Comcast guy came and I had to find all the cable/internet components and...yeah.)

So we moved. I'll take pictures of the place when I actually get done cleaning it. I should be cleaning right now but...internet. My parents were here for a week and ALL WE DID was move. We did nothing fun. We were hoping that Monday could be fun day, but we ended up having to clean the old apartment, so it didn't happen. But everything got done in time and we should be getting our whole deposit back, which will be a couple hundred bucks in the bank. I love surprise money.

That's all for now. I'll try to write more detailed entries later but having a mobile child requires a lot of supervision, and in between times I have laundry and cleaning and a whole lot of other stuff. So I'll go be responsible now.

Link

I read this article on Jezebel and it made me really happy. I think the epidural was the second-best part of the whole labor experience, and I stand by my decision to use it. This lady just explains how I feel better than I can :)

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/column-10-pain-is-womanly-and-other-bullshit-myths-of-childbirth

Sixteen Stone*

I decided to stop wanting to be thin and start trying to actually achieve it. I hate to admit it, but I weigh more now than I ever have in my life, and I can't exactly blame the pregnancy. Two years ago, I was at my goal weight and I felt good about things. Then I got pregnant. For the first few months of being pregnant, I actually lost weight, and even by the end of it I weighed less than I do now. But we moved to Massachusetts, and having the baby meant I was looking for fast options for food so that I wouldn't have to work at it so hard, which mostly meant cooking bad food or eating out, and I started baking because I was bored, and then winter came and we went into this awful hibernation mode because there was SO. MUCH. SNOW, and...well...now I'm heavy.

So my mother and I have a bet that whoever loses the most weight healthily gets $100. I hope I win because I can't really afford to pay her if I lose, but I'm ahead right now because this is getting out of hand.

I don't know why, exactly, I've always been so concerned with my weight, but I can honestly say that I've never been fully happy with how I looked. Even at my lowest points I felt fat--I don't think it's anything like body dysmorphia, but I do think it's an attempt to reach an unattainable ideal. I actually am big-boned. I'm never going to be a waif, and unless I really exercise a lot (which I don't enjoy) I won't have a great athletic body. It's really hard to find role models for the type of body that I'm actually able to have, but I think this is it:

I think she's absolutely beautiful, and what's more, I think I can get my body to look like hers. The sad thing is, modeling people told her she was fat, and she whittled herself down to nothing before she snapped back. I can't imagine perceiving this as fat. I can't even think of this as "plus-size." It's just...pretty.

Anyway, so those are my thoughts on weight. I've lost five pounds this week by making a minimal effort, so we'll see how it goes from here on out.

*not my actual weight