I'm Thinking of Adding a Pear Tree. And a Partridge.

Yesterday's backyard harvest was one of the best ones yet! I ate all 5 of the strawberries, made a tomato-basil salad with a couple of the big guys above and whipped up zucchini pasta for dinner tonight. Maybe there'll be a stuffed pepper dinner later in the week.

For some more pics of our little backyard farm, check out 'S Wonderful.

A Quiet House Makes a Thankful Heart

I'm over at 'S Wonderful today thanking my lucky stars and thinking about the effects we all have on each other's lives. I can't help it—I get a little schmoopy when Mr. W is away for work.

Read my post here.

Nothing Satisfies Quite Like the Real Deal

I eat dark chocolate almost every day.

I keep a stash in my desk drawer and peel into it in the late afternoon, pretending I'm just out to get my fill of antioxidants. But really, I just want the chocolate fix.

I've tried substituting other things. Fruit. Almonds. Cottage cheese. Milk chocolate. Which usually just leaves me eating more and more to try to fill the original craving. Nothing is as good as a little square of the dark.

But what if all my dark chocolate was out of the country for 7 weeks? How would I hit the 75% cacao spot in my stomach?

I suppose I would schedule as many activities as I could and start a million craft projects for my Etsy store and try to finally get my chocolate-eating butt in gear when it came to writing. At night I would lie in bed, missing the chocolate. I would get up and hike the next morning with an apple or a graham cracker and feel reasonably satisfied, but not fully.

I would drink wine alone on the couch, remembering times chocolate had been there with me, laughing over a mishap on Iron Chef. I would tend all the vegetables in the backyard, wishing chocolate was around to give me a little energy boost.

I would see movies with friends but think about having chocolate's hand intertwined in mine during the film.

All the distractions in the world couldn't quiet the chocolate yearning. Which is why it's going to be so hard to go without him for the next 7 weeks while he's in London working on that damn movie again.

Is It Better to Contract or Expand?

A couple of weeks ago, I broke down and joined Twitter. Feel free to follow me...

My main motivation for this was the thought that maybe I could promote my Etsy store on there after I beef it up a little. And maybe someday, promote a book I write. I also felt a sort of duty to my job to round out my grasp of social media. Everyone is tweeting now, everyone is liking everything on Facebook.

The problem with adding another site to my collection of online endeavors is that I now have yet another time sucker to keep me from writing (or blogging or giving scalp massages to my new groom). And it has me wondering whether it's smart to expand all this Internet stuff—indulging hobbies on Etsy, documenting life on the blog, socializing with old friends on Facebook—or if I would be wise to simplify. Contract. Decrease.

I appreciate social media as a marketing tool. But in my effort to embrace social outlets, I'm worried I'm going to keep myself so occupied, I'll never actually have anything to market there.

So I'm wondering where you all net out with this stuff. A lot of you blog. Do you lose hours on Facebook? Do you tweet? And if you do it all, do you find it hard to balance? Is less more here or do I need to widen my perspective?

Men Are from Mars. And Sometimes So Are Their Daughters.

My dad worked for the same company for 44 years.

He started out there as a slick-haired 18-year-old and retired at 62, the grandfather of three girls. I have no idea how he stuck with it for that long.

He used to leave for work every day at 6:30 a.m. and return home at 4:30 p.m., change his clothes and retreat to his rocking chair where he would engross himself in crossword puzzles or the latest issue of Popular Mechanics. By the time my mom got home at 5:30, he was refreshed and ready to hear the tales of her hen house-like office job.

He had a system and it worked.

When I read the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus in college, there was a section in it about men "going to their caves" that immediately made me think of my dad. That's what he was doing in his rocking chair: removing himself from society so he could recharge his batteries.

The book said women dealt with stress differently, but I don't think that's the case with all of us.

You see, lately I've been noticing that I too do better if I can "go to my cave" after a hard day. Although I've been living with Mr. Wonderful for almost 8 months now, this just occurred to me last week. I was having a particularly frustrating time at work and one night Mr. W wasn't home yet when I arrived.

I poured myself a glass of wine. Decompressed. Shed my grumpiness from the prior 9 hours. By the time Mr. W got home, I was perky and pleasant to be around. (My mother and sister are rolling their eyes and muttering "liar" right now.) Every other day last week, I wasn't in the best mood when I greeted my hubby.

I really think the alone time did the trick.

Not quite sure yet what to do with this information. Maybe I need to tell Mr. W not to talk to me for 15 minutes when I get home. Or maybe I need to make it a habit to lock myself in the bedroom for a little while until I can have a peppy attitude.

Just when I think I've learned everything I could from my parents, dear old dad gives me another life lesson...

The Beauty of a Staycation

The big, fat Internet company I work for threw us a nice juicy bone this past weekend when they gave us not only Monday but Tuesday off for the 4th of July.

Mr. Wonderful and I debated on whether we should take advantage of my free holiday and go on a trip somewhere, but the idea of not packing, not getting travel weary, and cleaning out the garage (note: garage cleaning is NOT vacationary AT ALL) appealed to me more. So a staycation it was!

Rather than just hang around the house and catch up on chorebies (sometimes even hobbies feel like chores...) we brainstormed some ways to spice things up. When Mr. W proposed the idea of visiting the LA County Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, I was sold. We've always been big fans of those sorts of places.

We loved strolling the gardens of Paris in 2009.

And we dug Kew Gardens outside of Richmond in the UK.


The Arboretum definitely satisfied our European garden appetite. Visit 'S Wonderful to check out some of the cool pictures we took while we were there:

http://ourlifeofwonderful.blogspot.com/2011/07/all-this-and-they-filmed-fantasy-island.html

A Little Smidge of Horrifying Humor

This isn't necessarily a story I'd normally broadcast all over the Internet, but I found it quite funny and my pants are too tight today (likely cutting off bloodflow to my brain) so I'm going to share it.

Let me first start by putting us all on an equal plane: we all have body hair. In weird places. I think everyone has experienced the boobie creeper hair that pops up overnight. (A friend of mine once called it haireola.) And we've all caught the glint of a random chin whisker in the mirror. Some of you even have patches on your toes that require shaving.

So it should have been no surprise that I would end up with a tickler in my nasal cavity.

It all started Sunday when Mr. Wonderful and I went to a screening of Cars 2 and, in the darkness of the theater, I thought I had a cat hair up my nose. Every now and then, I'd breathe out and feel something up there. But I didn't seem to be able to whisk it away with the back of my hand.

Maybe it was the wine I had later in the night, but I stopped noticing the feeling and figured the stray fuzz/cat hair/phantom poker had disappeared.

Then I went to work Monday and felt it again. And I knew.

After work, I greeted Mr. W in the kitchen and told him I thought I had a monster nose hair growing in my right nostril. I don't think he signed up for that kind of talk when he married me, but he's stuck now.

I assembled my tools: a hand mirror, a pair of scissors and a set of tweezers. I sat down in the bright evening light by our sliding glass door and peeked up my nose.

Sure enough, there it was. A rogue hair growing from somewhere far up in the cavern down toward the entry hole. Tickling. Horrifying.

I'm happy to say that he is much shorter now. And that Mr. W has not served me divorce papers. Likely because of that one random sprout he gets on his earlobe sometimes.

Ah, the joys of getting older. I seriously do not even want to know what else lies ahead...