Happy Leap Day! (An almost wordless Wednesday)

Granny's childhood pet, Lucky the duck.

Wishing you luck this Leap Year!

Couple Friends

When I moved to South Carolina in 2008, I landed myself in entirely new territory for friend- making. I was no longer in college, where you make friends because you  share a bathroom. In college, everyone is approximately your age and at a similar place in life. The people surrounding me at my first job were of all ages; most had babies and husbands or grandchildren and less than a decade to retire. Friendship by proximity, when it came to coworkers, wasn't automatic.

Also, I was now part of a couple, so I wasn't just trying to make friends for myself. I discovered a common problem of couples trying to make friends. One half of the couple is charming, funny, and grounded in reality and the other turns out to be a mean drunk or a NASCAR fan or really into couponing. Maintaining a couple-friendship with an only half-cool couple can create a strain on your own relationship. ("Don't make me go out to dinner with them. I can't pretend to appreciate One Tree Hill anymore. I hate it.") It took us three solid years in South Carolina to feel like we had a solid foundation of great couple friends. But then we moved back to Cleveland, and have had to start all over again!

My friend put boots down in Denver with her boyfriend.
Read the tale here.

A good friend just did something totally crazy and awesome: She and her boyfriend quit their jobs and moved to Denver on a whim. She asked me for advice on making couple friends, and since I'm such a natural people person, and am so the opposite of awkward in new situations (hahaha!) I thought I'd share my wisdom with all of you.

So how do you go about meeting new couple friends? I'll be honest, there's no formula to it. Which I will illustrate with a story about how we met one of our closest couple-friends in South Carolina.

OBA Meetup

Both times I have attended the Ohio Blogging Association's Cleveland meetup, the week within which this event falls becomes the busiest week ever. So I'm way behind my comrades who have already posted wonderful things about this month's fantastic event/venue/hostess. This is going to be a short, lazy post, but I'm doing it anyway because there are some people who deserve credit for keeping me entertained for that long!

This month's meeting was in Tremont at Wine and Design, an adorable boutique that sells both wine and furniture. The owners were kind (and brave!) enough to let us take over the shop for two hours and even sit on the furniture. I hope that a windfall of spare cash comes to me and at the same time my couch breaks so I can get back there and adopt my new couch-love in the near future. Their wines are also very reasonably priced and displayed in a manner that makes even ignorant boobs like me feel unintimidated by the selection.

Hosting our tasting was the delightful Miss WineOH (pronounced wino) who has been showing up all over Cleveland doing crazy things like pairing wines with savory cupcakes. The six wines she presented were fantastic in their variety and affordability, and maybe I'm just easy to please but I enjoyed each one of them (not to mention the pile of cheese and other fantastic snacks that went along with them.) I'm looking forward to trying to make her beer and cupcake pairing at Market Garden Brewery in Ohio City.

I'm not even going to attempt to upload photos I took from Tuesday night's meeting because there was a weird fog on my phone's camera lens, but head on over to Poise in Parma for a full list of people who probably took more time out of their week to do a better job telling you about this great event!

Happy Friday, friends.

Job 6: Off the Record

Artist's rendering of me as an 18-year-old baby journalist.
Image source.

My parting gift from my high school was a great, pre-college internship at Scriptype Publishing in Richfield. When I was there, the company published five hyper-local, black and white community magazines in Hinckley, Richfield, Brecksville, Broadview Heights and Hudson. As I was about to start studying journalism at Ohio University that fall, this was an incredible segue from spending six hours a week after school reaching near-madness trying to teach myself InDesign to honing my inverted-triangle writing skills. It also was a little scary at times.

You see, even the editing staff at a small community magazine could be easily described as "no-nonsense." Not having had to work anywhere before that didn't require some sort of actual uniform, I hadn't caught on to exactly what business casual meant. Walking into the office on my first day, the first words out of my editor's mouth were, "That's not business casual."

Job 5: Patron of the Arts

Remember how I was telling you about my jobs in high school? I left off at Bob Evan's a few weeks ago because I wasn't sure where to begin with this next one. You see, it was an unusual job, full of perks and interesting life experiences but also at times just North of completely inexplicable. Also, it was in the personal home of a very sweet but arguably very eccentric couple, and as I strive to avoid embarrassing anyone or talking about things that aren't my business, I've had a tough go of how to entertain you with this one without it being at anyone's expense.

So here I go.

The End is Nigh

Get there while you can!

We checked another museum off our list yesterday by passing through the Museum of Contemporary Arts. We were greeted at the door by an actor with a megaphone shouting about The End, which turned out to be my favorite "exhibit" of all. This can be seen each Sunday through March, I believe.

I didn't hate the museum, but we were the only visitors in a very open, very quiet space, trailed at a distance by a watchful staff person. I suppose she was posted with us to answer any questions we might have, but really it felt like she was following us around to make sure we didn't touch anything. And I felt like I couldn't remark above the tiniest whisper to El Greco about the pieces without revealing my enormous ignorance about art. It was unsettling.

The main exhibition in the museum right now is by a sculptor named Ursula von Rydingsvard. There are enormous sculptures made of cedar beams, some of them adorned with sewn, stretched cow intestines. (Yummy.) I liked the freestanding pieces better than the wall reliefs. They reminded me of gnarled tree trunks that you could climb into and hide from the world. Maybe it is a good thing there was someone to follow us around and keep us from touching the art.

There was a 50% off sale at the gift shop, so I picked up a pretty cool gift for a friend.

Today, El Greco and I are both off for President's Day, so we're going hiking!

Urban Chick

This is unintentionally my second post in a row with the word chick in the title. But I just got this quarter's edition of Detroit Shoreway Neighborhood Views and squealed with excitement at a new shop opening, and I thought this would be a good time for me to confess something to you.

Frack City Chick (Or, Soap Box Step Aerobics)

You'd likely never guess it, if you pull up next to me downtown on any given day after work, I will be rocking my face off to some Z107.9. (If you've ever gone to a bar with me that has plus-or-minus one other person in the bar dancing, this will not surprise you.) Sometimes the greatest stress relief after a long day is a thumping bass and a little Young Jeezy to guide you home.

Actually, this is neither here nor there, as I actually intend to write about the most recent Cleveland Plus e-newsletter that landed in my inbox yesterday. My introduction is just an explanation for why, at 5:15 a.m (elliptical-ing and blogging again!)., I have chosen to reference a filthy, degrading song about strippers in the title of this blog. Because a) I shamefully confess to loving the slightly less horrifying radio edit version, b) I think fracking is pretty horrifying in itself, and c) frack rhymes with rack, and I fancy myself a clever person.

Finding true love

My grandparents on their wedding day.

Love. It makes the world go round; it's all we need; it stinks. No matter how you feel about romance, there's absolutely no avoiding having your nose rubbed in it on Valentine's Day. I confess, any notions about Valentine's Day being anything but a tremendous disappointment built on contrivances and forced sentimentality have long been wrung out of my system. Hell, where the date falls on the calendar alone turns reasonable people into desperate, depressed axe murderers. I have instituted (much to El Greco's relief) a blanket-ban on Valentine's Day festivities. This February 14th, we will be dining at home and trying to figure out how to track down and corral all our 401ks. (Aside: My husband is my best friend. I'm sorry if that elicits nausea, but he really is. We just both really hate Valentine's Day.)


Anyway, despite my distaste for this particular holiday, I have been exceedingly lax in posting anything of merit lately, so I thought I'd take advantage of the easy subject and share some stories about love, in hopes that they will not cause anyone to fly into a wintry rage.

The Longest Happy Hour

Yesterday, after a long week, El Greco and I decided to grab an after-work drink with some friends who live in Tremont. You know, just a quick stop on our way to whatever we actually intended to do on Friday night.

Except, of course, that Tremont is awesome. So happy hour turned into happy six hours.

If you live in Cleveland, I'm sure you've spent some time in Tremont, as it has become in recent years the glowing hot epicenter of drinking and dining, thanks to the likes of Michael Symon, Rocco Whalen, Zack Bruell, et al. Surrounding Lincoln Park are enough bars and restaurants to keep a person busy for months. (And also, of course, perpetually broke. The problem with Tremont is that along with the big-city restaurants come big-city prices, in many cases. Not horrific prices, mind you, just enough to make the thought of a bar crawl a little intimidating.) Fortunately for El Greco and me, our friends are experienced Tremont drinkers who also work in the nonprofit sector, and therefore were well equipped to show us a good time that's well within our budget.

Meet the cats

I made us get cats a few years ago in anticipation that I'd need them to legitimize my presence on the internet and drive traffic to my blog. Now is the time I'd like you to get acquainted.

Bills is a male brown tabby cat. Charlie is a male brown tabby cat.

Bills is a male brown tabby cat.

Charlie is a male brown tabby cat.

They may or may not be related, as they were both adopted strays, but Bills has an enormous head and a history of violence against other stray cats and Charlie was neutered as a kitten and therefore is a giant baby.

Charlie farts almost constantly. Bills has a tendency to sleep on my entire pillow, therefore causing me to have long sleepless nights and serious neck pain. They will destroy you for some chicken jerky. They love snuggling with each other.

I have almost no pictures of them not asleep.

Happy Wednesday.