France Days 1 & 2

To start off, the flight from Seattle to Iceland was LONG. It was 7 hours total, but we were in an exit row, so at least we had a lot of leg room. Our 1 hour layover in Reykjavik was no big deal, although by the time we got there, I was completely exhausted. One positive was that we had to check our bags (European flights apparently are stricter on carry-on size) so we didn't have to to worry about lugging 2 heavy bags around. Score!

Side note: Nick had a shrimp salad sandwich at the airport in Reykjavik and loved it. I'll have to try making it when we get home.

Upon getting to Paris (a short 3-hour flight from Reykjavik), we took a taxi ride from the airport to our hotel, which took about 30 minutes. The surrounding suburbs of Paris are not an impressive sight. Many modern buildings and LOTS of graffiti sprinkled all over made it feel very gritty. Our hotel, however, was anything but. The Hotel Castex is a great place to stay in Paris. It is close to the metro and, therefore, it's just a short walk and subway ride to get anywhere you need to go. The neighborhood was beautiful too.

Our room was a nice surprise. It was spacious, for Paris, pleasant and filled with wrought iron accents.


Dinner in Paris: Our 1st experience in ordering.
Finally, real French food at the Reveil Bastille.

Once we made it into Paris at around 2 in the afternoon, we took showers and short naps and then went out for dinner and a long walk to combat the jet lag. Here is our first view of the Seine River.

At the restaurant, Nick decided to be brave and ordered the steak tartare. Yep, raw meat and a raw egg mixed with capers, onions, and some other stuff. He liked it (weirdo). He said the texture was very soft and he'd order it again, but it wouldn't be his first choice. I had a little bite and had to fight back a gag. I have serious texture issues and my brain was screaming, "YOU'RE EATING RAW MEAT! SPIT IT OUT!" The flavor wasn't bad at all though, for the record.

After "reading" the menu and trying to figure it out, I thought I'd get steak cheval (or something to that effect) until Nick found cheval in the phrase book. Yeah, that's horse. Um, no. I ordered poulet rotî a frites. Roasted chicken and fries, in other words. We had bread with the meal, créme brûlée for dessert, and café at the end of the meal. Café comes in very small cups and is essentially a shot of very dark and bold espresso. All thoughts of going back to bed ended with that little cup.

So, no longer tired, and a little jittery from the jolt of caffeine, we walked about 3 miles around the neighborhood. The buildings were beautiful and old. Some needed a bit of repair.

We took some pictures of the monument at the Place de Bastille.

We also walked along the Seine-all this occurred between 8:30 and 10:30pm. The Seine has boats cruises as soon as it gets dark that light up the city streets as they go by.

The Seine also has many bridges, most built by kings and emperors.

This is a city that never sleeps and watch where you walk! The bikers (motorcycles and scooters) drive like crazy people!

One interesting thing we noted was the massive amount of restaurants. There is one on every corner and multiple in between. And there's everything you can think of to eat: sushi, Thai food, Japanese cuisine, and, of course, all things French. And everyone smokes in Paris-something I'm not too fond of. Blech! Hold your breath a lot. (On a side note, by the end of the trip, we didn't notice the smell of cigarettes as much. I guess you get used to it, but still-yuck!)

Clothing is also very fashion forward here. Women in leggings and skinny jeans with boots were all over. Everywhere there are boots! No tennis shoes here, but lots of high-heeled boots. Darks colors, scarves, and beautifully draped tops and wraps are everywhere too. It's easy to feel out of place in tourist gear. Unfortunately, as in any big city, there are plenty of homeless people sleeping on sidewalks and in large boxes under the bridges. It's quite a sad juxtaposition.

One interesting bonus we found was that all historical markers are in French, so Nick can't read it! This means less time spent staring at historically significant monuments, buildings, objects, etc. I'm all for anything historical, but I don't want to stare at a rock for 45 minutes every 5 steps. And in Paris, EVERYTHING has a historical significance. It's mind-boggling.

Great moment of the day: Asking for l'addiction (the check) in French and the French-speaking waiter getting really excited for me. (Up to that point, it had been a lot of gesturing, pointing, and yes and no nodding to order.) I said merci a lot and excuse moi once too. I speak French better than Nick, who took three useless years in high school-and remembers none of it.

And that sums up days 1-2. Tomorrow, day 3!

Bucket List (a beginning)

I realized today that there are some random things I would really like to accomplish in life and I decided to write them down as I think of them. What better motivator than a list of things to accomplish making me feel guilty every time I think about it? This is a true statement from a professional procrastinator, let me tell you! So here are the few items I thought of today:

*Become a canning queen (learn how to and then promptly can everything in sight)
*Tile a floor by myself (probably the only way my bathroom floors are going to be redone)
*Write a book and get published (a lifelong goal)
*Produce 2 or 3 kids (Nick would freak if I didn't have this on my list)
*Grow and cultivate an herb and vegetable garden (and not kill it in a day)

This is a short list for now, but I'll add more and write about anything I may accomplish in the coming years. One that was on my list and I get to cross off is attend a family reunion, which Mom and I did this summer. I'll have to blog about that because it was a lot of fun and incredibly interesting. I have a wonderful family! Ooh, I thought of another one for my list:

*Go to every family reunion I can and become a part of the Roloff reunions so that I can help make sure they do continue for years to come.

That's a good one!

New Blog!

This blog was supposed to be about Nick's and my life, but I've been using to document recipes as of late. I really want to go back and retain the original purpose of this blog, so I have moved all my recipes to a new blog called Stephanie's Cooking. If you enjoy my recipes, you should go check it out!

Ah, the gifts from Gus

When we had everyone over for Easter, Nick and I did a deep-clean of the house. We were concerned about our niece, Isabelle, who hasn't really been around a lot of animals and we didn't want her to have any issues because of Gus or Budda. It was a lot of work, completely worth it, but a lot of work. I don't think there are enough ways to describe the feeling of sitting in your own clean house, knowing that your sweats and tears made it clean. But it's a lot of work!

Anyway, enough of the rambling about cleaning the house. There is a point to the ramblings, however. When I've vacuumed twice and spent time on (likely imaginary) spots on the carpet and then the dog runs around the backyard and drags in dog poo not once, but TWICE, it's amazing if your head doesn't explode. And mine did a little bit. The first time the poo only got on the rug by the French doors and a footprint or two ended up on the kitchen floor when I dragged him in there to clean it off. No big deal, right?

Round two: Gus has poo all over his foot and I don't realize it until he's in the kitchen and there are footprints all over. When I go to grab him, he runs from me. Still has poo on his foot and he proceeds to run all over the house. Livid doesn't begin to describe my feelings at this point. I cleaned Gus up and dragged him upstairs to his crate while I spent over an hour cleaning the kitchen and carpets downstairs. Serious angry face. Took me a little while to forgive him.

And then last night. Ah, last night. Nick called me as soon as he started shift to tell me that they needed him to work overtime, so he was picking up an extra 4 hours, meaning he wouldn't be home until 6am. Fine. I had 3 huge loads of laundry to do and I was really tired. At about 1:30am, Gus and I went upstairs to go to bed (because of Nick's work schedule, we've turned into real night owls, rarely going to bed before 3am). I'm reading Interview With a Vampire, so I read for a little while and turned the light out at around 2. I'm having some crazy dreams (the result of reading a macabre book before falling asleep, I'm sure) when I hear the sound every animal owner dreads. Blehhh! Gus puked up his dinner on the bed. Lovely. It's 4:30am. At first I'm thinking that I can clean the spot, not tell Nick it happened, and wash the bedding when Nick goes to work. Unfortunately, that was not in the stars for me. Those lovely stars that were still shining outside our window since it was still so FREAKING EARLY! The puke had gone through the comforter to the sheet underneath. Off came all the bedding. Nick came home at 6:30 and the sheets were done, so he went to bed and I stayed up for another hour to wait for the comforter. I put it on Nick when it was done and then took a nap on the couch while I waited the two hours for my alarm to go off so I could start the crockpot for dinner. Yeah, slept through that. What a crappy day!

Anyway, point of all this: I love Gus. He's our first "child" and that fact doesn't change because he drives me crazy sometimes. In fact, it probably proves the point that he's our baby. Of course our baby would walk through his own doo and chuck up his dinner on the bed. Of course . . . dysfunctionality reigns supreme in our house! (And, quite honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way.)

My Mom Says . . .

I don't update this blog enough. She's right.

Nick and I have had a really lazy, do-nothing week, which we earned because the previous week was psychotic and mental disease-inducing. We decided to do some renovating in our downstairs guest bath. This meant taking down the wallpaper, painting, removing and replacing the light fixture, mirror, toilet paper holder, and towel rack and then cleaning up the giant mess we made. Between two adults this should not be too much work, right? Wrong.

It took us 4 days to take down the wallpaper (one of those days both of us were incredibly sick and didn't really do any taking down of the wallpaper, so I don't know if that day counted). Then we had to paint and do all that other stuff (we didn't actually get the light fixture up since neither of us felt like getting an electric shock, but that's okay since there is another light in the ceiling that we didn't mess with). All this on top of getting the house ready for two separate Easter celebrations. Yes, I did TWO Easter celebrations at my house. Why? Because I'm crazy.

On Saturday, the day before everyone came over, we did all the painting and other stuff. Why did we wait so long to do this? Well, the wallpaper wasn't completely off the walls until 3am the night before/morning of. This was also the day that I cleaned the entire house, top to bottom. And made a brunch casserole and a GIANT batch of roasted tomato salsa. This salsa took 3 hours to do by itself, considering the fact that I had to roast 10 cloves of garlic, 25 roma tomatoes, 3 onions, and 25 serrano peppers.( And yes, we still have a ton of it in our fridge. It made a lot of salsa!) Add to that the fact that I had to process it in 4 batches and you have one messy kitchen, which I had spent the morning deep cleaning. Anyway, lots of work.

Nick and I were so tired by the time Saturday was over and then we had a long day on Sunday too. First, my mom, dad, and brother came over and they brought my Papa, who hadn't seen our new house yet. It was really nice to have Papa there for brunch and he liked the house, which meant a lot to me. We had lots of great food and everyone kept saying how nice it was just being together like this. It was! But then they left and we had to clean all over again to get ready for dinner with the Pritchetts. A nap was in order, but it would have taken a full 8-hour "nap" to help us feel rested. Fortunately, Nick and I have amazing families who make it incredibly easy to entertain, so we had a delicious and successful dinner on top of our delicious and successful brunch. All in all, it was a great day. But we were exhausted when it was all over!

So Nick and I took this week "off." We also relaxed on Nick's 3-day this weekend. Next weekend we're going to Powell's Books in Portland (a huge, amazing bookstore) and to the Woodburn factory outlets to go shopping. And then after that? We start getting ready for a big Mother's Day brunch with my family and Papa and the Pritchetts. That's right, everyone in our house at the same time! Crazy! I figure since I did so well with brunch and dinner separately, I can handle an all-in-one brunch. As much work as it is to entertain, I really love it, especially when it's with family.

And don't tell Nick, but my goals for home renovations before Mother's Day include painting the upstairs guest bath and two spare bedrooms. He's going to poop a brick when he finds out!

Lazy much?

Here it is 5:30 on a Saturday afternoon and Nick and I have gotten little to nothing accomplished. We had a huge list of "stuff" to do on Nick's three day and we only got 4 things done on our list. Do I feel bad? Maybe a little bit. But Nick hasn't had a three day in a month because of all the overtime he's been working, so it seemed more than fair that we spend some time just vegging.

Oddly enough, the only thing I regret that we didn't get done is the partial remodel of our downstairs bath. We needed to remove the wallpaper and putty up the holes, decide on a paint color, paint, and change out the mirror, toilet paper holder, towel rack, and storage cabinet. What did we get done? Well, we bought the stuff to remove the wallpaper. That's it. And I really feel guilty about it because I posted on facebook that we were going to complete that stage of the remodel yesterday. I hate it when I say I'm going to do something and I don't get it done. It makes me feel very unaccomplished. Bleh.

The best thing about this weekend? I got to spend time with Nick! And we finished setting up our master bedroom, which turned out beautifully. It feels like the room we stayed in on the first night of our honeymoon at the Salish Lodge, sans fireplace. That means it's super romantic and soothing. I love the colors and the lighting, and just being in the room makes me relax. The other best thing about this weekend? I booked our extra nights at the Hotel Castex in Paris before and after our European trip. We start and end in Paris, and the Rick Steves tour site recommends coming in a day early because of jet lag, so we added an extra day to the beginning of our trip. This means that we will be traveling on our 1-year wedding anniversary, September 26th. It's not the optimal way to spend that day, but big picture: we're going to be in France for 2 weeks right after that, so who cares if we spend that one day flying? We are also adding two days to the end of the tour because we want to spend some extra time in Paris to see Versailles, which isn't on our tour itinerary. All in all, I'm very excited! Looking at flights, it seems like the best deal we're going to get is to fly through Iceland. Of course, Nick and I are very excited about this too, in typical weird Nick-Stephanie fashion. Who wants to go to Iceland? I guess we do!

Overall, life is stressful, but we're handling it okay and we have lots to look forward to in our upcoming vacation. After that, it's all about the babies. Scary . . .

Gripes

I have a few gripes I would like to put out there, so bear with me.

#1: Attention whores. Definition: any person who does anything specifically designed to gain attention, whether that attention is good or bad. To clarify: this person has an agenda in everything they do and his/her life revolves around any kind of attention he/she can get. My feelings about this: the world doesn't revolve around you and I don't care about your issues/ridiculousness. Period.

#2: Today's parenting techniques. My mom teaches preschool and has told me that kids never say please, thank you, yes ma'am, etc. anymore. Having taught high school, I know it gets even worse as they get older. My mom's generation was taught to be polite, as was mine. So why has my generation turned around and chosen to be "friends" with their kids instead of parents? It's called discipline and yes, it's harder than giving your children whatever they want and it takes more work (gasp!), but we're responsible for molding the future leaders of this world and quite frankly, I'm terrified for our future because of this.

#3: People who don't take responsibility for their actions. Nick sees this all the time as a cop and I saw it all the time as a teacher. You must put in the hard work in order to reap the reward. If you screw up, there are consequences for your actions. I may feel sorry for you because of those consequences, but you still deserve them. And NO, you do NOT deserve a reality TV show because of your stupidity.

#4: Media-influenced culture. The reason for crummy parenting, people who don't take responsibility for their actions, and attention whores (besides laziness and stupidity): the media. We are bombarded by images of celebrities acting like idiots and getting away with it. We see them get married and divorced over and over again. We see them drink and drive and get away with it. We see them doing little to nothing and getting paid millions of dollars for it. The media has turned our society into lazy, helpless, self-serving, I deserve everything just because I do jackasses. You don't have the right to wealth, happiness, and a do-nothing lifestyle just because you live in the US. You have the right to work. You have the right to vote (and how about we do a better job of that next time, huh? YES WE CAN . . . drive the country into the ground). You do not have the right to commit a crime and get away with it. You do not have the right to hurt other people or lie without garnering consequences. You should not have the right to treat cops the way many people do (Did you all freaking forget the number we've lost this year? Because you're all acting like you have. RESPECT MY HUSBAND AND THE OTHER MEN & WOMEN OUT THERE PROTECTING YOUR SORRY ASSES!). You should not have the right to treat marriage like a joke and divorce like it's no big deal. In my opinion, the law has become too liberal/lenient and that is another reason why no one is held accountable for their actions. When a certain state passes a law that says no cop can search a vehicle without a search warrant EVEN IF THERE ARE DRUGS IN PLAIN SIGHT, there is something wrong. When a certain state is unable to seek the death penalty for one of the most prolific serial killers of all time, there is something wrong.

So what does all this add up to? Even with my usually optimistic outlook for the state of our country, I'm appalled by the deterioration of our culture. What are we barreling toward?

REVOLUTION.

So, enjoy the irresponsible, lazy, and ridiculous nature of life for now. I will enjoy the after-effects of the total upheaval of our culture and pray every day for a return to a more polite, community-focused culture that values intelligence and hard work instead of get-rich-quick schemes, sluttiness, and lies.