A Weekend Outdoors (With Donuts)

As everyone hopefully knows, we love having visitors - we think Santa Fe is an amazing place (enchanting, even), and we relish the opportunity to show it off. Eric's parents visited Santa Fe over the holiday weekend, and we got to visit some of our favorite haunts while exploring some new-to-us places.

2014

The other day, my coworker Nicole told me that she doesn't make resolutions for the new year, but instead she makes suggestions to herself. I like that - 'resolutions' always sounded so firm and inflexible when we all know that life is anything but. It's been a few years since I've made an actual list of resolutions, but I do like to take the new year as an opportunity to think about things I'd like to improve on and accomplish. If I still want to improve on and accomplish those same things a few months down the road, then I usually get a little more proactive with goal-setting. Now that I write it out, it seems like kind of a lazy way to go about things, but I also like to give myself room to change my mind and to not be too hard on myself if things don't go according to plan.

New year, new giraffe statue discovery in Santa Fe!

 Eric & I feel like we're in a pretty great place to start thinking about self-improvement - we both love our jobs and we love living in Santa Fe, and stability is always a good starting point, right? But we are also getting married this year (woah), and we have no way of anticipating how the planning and the marriage will change or not change our lives. So we've got to be a little flexible.

With all that said, here are some of our 2014 suggestions for ourselves.

130 contacts

I finally just did one of those little tasks that you have on your brain but never do. You know what I mean? Usually pretty insignificant stuff, like vacuuming out the car, oiling a squeaky door hinge, things like that.

This task in particular was to delete excess contacts in my phone. You know, the people who you know you realistically will never see again. Believe it or not, I haven't lost my phone since the second one I had, my sophomore year of high school. So, every time I partook in the modern ritual of phone upgrading, I had my contacts transferred so as to not lose phone numbers. Pretty standard stuff. So when I need to look up someone's phone number, I have to sit there and scroll through, scroll, scroll scroll STOP til I find the person's name in alphabetical order. (I know I could search, but my way seems lazier. Habits.) Sorry, I know this is probably boring each person and cyborg from the Ukraine that apparently keeps tabs on our blog. (Blogger tracking statistics don't lie, Ukrainian bots, I know you are out there!)

Anyway. I finally did it. At least, I selected each contact I would delete, but I haven't yet pressed "delete." And you know what?

Pictures of December

We're back! We've neglected our blog a little, and we feel bad about it. But after an energizing morning at the gym we are ready to blog again!

Even though we hardly blogged at all last month, we did a lot, which is probably why we didn't blog. December is always a great month for me because my birthday* (the best day of the year!) is in December, followed shortly by Christmas and New Year celebrations. This was also our first holiday season spent in Santa Fe! So without further ado, here is the photographic evidence.

Dec. 14th

Note: I wrote this a week or so ago, but didn't get around to posting it with Marie's birthday week/weekend/month-long celebrations. Since then, there was another school shooting in Colorado, and several episodes of gun violence here in New Mexico, likely with many other gun-related tragedies across the nation. I hope everyone is having a great holiday season, we miss you all down in New Mexico and will surely write an update about Marie's birthday, Christmas in Santa Fe, our latest shenanigans, and who are we kidding, probably some kitty photos very soon! (Also as I was posting this, I found out NM is now the 17th state in the US to legalize same-sex marriage! WOOHOO! Very touching to see the reaction in my office.) Anyway.

______

It's been a year since the mass shooting in Newtown. That event sparked an anger in me that I haven't felt in my adult life. Something about Newtown was different than all the other mass shootings, at least for me.

I readily admit that I got caught up in the flurry of gun control media. I signed petitions, started my own, seething in private and in public at Americans' codependent fear and love of the gun. 

In the months since, I haven't forgotten. American gun culture is something that I think about on a daily basis. I think, before Newtown, I absent-mindedly accepted guns as a mainstay of American culture. After Newtown, I began to truly see how far guns have permeated the daily lives of so many people.

Guns to me represent the laziest kind of resistance to authority, a power grab that ignores the solution and contributes to the problem. The terrible irony is to consider the NRA's political influence as felt by John Morse and other politicians in Colorado now out of a job in the name of decreasing public safety. Not to mention the folks in positions of political power  on the national stage, pretending to represent those paranoid of a powerful, influential federal government, when they themselves comprise it.

I think I do understand why some people feel that they need guns. They feel threatened directly, indirectly, currently, or in the future. Gun violence is not a disease, it is a symptom. Or rather, a band-aid for a bullet wound, to use an unfortunately common metaphor. The bullet wound in this case being economic hardship, domestic and gang violence, substance abuse, mental health, and other factors that create fear and distrust. What can we do in the wake of Newtown to stem the tide of those epidemics?

I believe that gun-owners (for any reason other than hunting) possess a mental fear. This mental fear, I believe, is symptomatic of a greater irrational distrust, and a departure from the social contract that a citizen of society invariably finds their self in. I believe that the factions of society with this collective mental fear are responsible for enabling gun violence, and disabling the ability of civilized society to peacefully solve endemic problems. 

I believe most everyone wants the same thing: safety, peace of mind, freedom from fear. Gun advocates hide behind their weapons in a selfish pursuit of these virtues, breeding paranoia and distrust. A true tragedy of the commons. 

The above virtues are consistently squandered on the victims of both ends of the gun - those hit with bullets, and those who buy bullets.

Florida!

This weekend, we got over a foot of snow in Santa Fe, so it's almost impossible to believe that last weekend, we were in Florida wearing shorts and sitting on the beach.

These pictures make it seem like we spent a lot of time with animals... which is true. My mom has three dogs and two cats, and my family that we visited in Sarasota have two dachshunds and two cats. We also got attacked by seagulls on the beach. (Pro tip: Don't eat burritos on the beach, the seagulls will dive-bomb you.)

Aside from dealing with hungry seagulls, it was a great weekend!

Eric and Kermit

Eric and Ron Weasley

Me and my cousin Madeline, holding Mr. Edison and Taffy.

Chalk art at the Sarasota Chalk Art Festival

Giant statue that no one likes in Sarasota - Eric & I are standing next to it for scale.

Clearwater Beach!

My mom & I outside of the Straz Center, before seeing Book of Mormon!

Me with the statue of the first suffragist in Florida, Eleanor McWilliams Chamberlain!

Our view for Book of Mormon, which was AMAZING!

Now to make some hot toddies and play in the snow!

November Madness

November is looking to be a pretty busy month here in EricandMarieland, for a few reasons:

1. It is National Novel Writing Month and I am participating! By the end of November, if all goes well, I will have a 50,000 word novel. (I just hit 17,000 words!) So I've been writing every day.
2. The NBA season started! (Unfortunately, the Nuggets are not doing so hot.)
3. We are going to Florida and Colorado this month.
4. Now that it gets dark and cold much earlier, we have been going to bed earlier as well. (Which I guess doesn't make us busy exactly, except that we are busy sleeping more.)

 All of that doesn't leave a lot of time for blogging, BUT I wanted to post some pictures of our life recently.

Halloween, Part 1

I know he doesn't look happy about his costume, but he did keep it on all evening!

Halloween, Part 2

(Little and Big Dipper!)

New Car

(Yes, we got a Prius, and it makes us feel like Adults.)

Fall