Santa Fe!

Hello world! Eric and I are together in Santa Fe and are having a blast doing mundane things together like cooking, organizing our house, eating ice cream, and buying new running shoes. We decided a blog would be a good thing to have, not because we are self-important, but because we are far away from a lot of our friends and family and we want a non-Facebook way to tell them about what we're up to. For those of you that we haven't talked to recently, here's a quick update: We're engaged! Eric is working as an Assistant Manager for GoLite in Santa Fe, and Marie is starting work this Friday as an Administrative Assistant for a violence prevention organization called IMPACT. Most importantly, we are adopting a cat soon and will undoubtedly fill this blog with adorable cat pictures. (What else is the internet for?)

First things first: We had to name the blog. We knew that starting a blog where we write about our coupledom might (definitely) get too cheesy sometimes, but we are also cheesy sometimes so we wanted a blog title with only a little cheese. Lacking inspiration after a busy weekend of packing and traveling, we turned to an anagram generator and spent many minutes laughing at the weird anagrams for "Eric and Marie." Some of our favorites were "Iceman Raider" and "Careen Midair." Yet none of the anagrams really captured our future blog's essence.

After some fruitless Google searches, we remembered a message we had seen on a car in the food co-op parking lot earlier that day:

LOVE TRUMPS BUMMERS

Could there be a better message than that? In a world that is unarguably filled with bummers in our private lives and globally, it would be pretty hard for me to live a good life without the love of my friends, family, and partner. Remembering that good and love exist is one of the best antidotes to cynicism and despair, and love can inspire you to keep working to change the world.

One of my favorite quotes from a Barbara Kingsolver book comes from Animal Dreams:

"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?'"

So in the spirit of embracing love and not running screaming into the woods (with some exceptions), here we are.

Now that you know all that, here are some pictures of our house!

The view of our patio from the kitchen. Note the Red Chile Bible cookbook.

Here is Eric on our patio!

A cute chicken that lives on our windowsill.

Our kitchen's best feature, a double oven!

We have a FIREPLACE in our bedroom that has this awesome tile mosaic.

More pictures will come once the rest of our house is not messy from unpacking, but take my word for it that is is pretty sweet.

Coming from the wet moss forest that is Bellingham, I'm a little shocked at how dry it is here. Dried-up riverbeds are prolific and there is much more dirt. I'm definitely missing the greenness of the pacific northwest. On the plus side, all of our dishes and clothes dry at (comparatively) rapid speed and it is sunny every day! Today I spent hours reading in the sun and wearing my floppy sunhat, and when I walked to the plaza I left my coat, hat, and scarf at home.

On a walk to the park in the sun! Almost every building or structure here is adobe.

There is a park near our house called Amelia White Park (named after a philanthropist who funded the area's first animal shelter, so cool!) which Eric and I walked to the other day:

Since I now have brand new running shoes, the last two days I have run to/around Amelia White Park. Did you all know that the altitude of Santa Fe is 7200 feet? Since I was raised in Colorado, I can walk around without really noticing. But since I became a runner at sea level, running here is SO HARD. Seriously, I already had respect for all runners, and now I have even more respect for runners who run at high altitude. Luckily, this park is pretty deserted mid-morning, so no one is around to witness the gasping and collapsing that take place. However, I am determined to run a 10K in Boulder in a month so I am just going to run a little more every day until it does not feel like I have sand in my lungs. The good news is that the highest point of the Bolder Boulder is something like 5300 feet, so after training at 7200 it will hopefully feel way easier.

Eric here. I'll be posting on this blog in bold. Marie basically covered everything so I don't really have much to say, but I hope all is well with you and yours and that someday tons of people will read this blog and Marie and I will become rich beyond our wildest dreams. Which leads me to wonder... how do people make money on blogs?

Anyway. Much love. Keep on the lookout for the impending flood of kitty pictures.