moving dazed/hamilton crazed

Hi.

I'm going a little bit insane this week. Really, I've been going a little bit insane for close to a month now. I wrote at the beginning of the year about how I wanted to say yes to everything, wanted my life to feel full and rich and varied, and that resolution is being realized with a vengeance. I'm exhausted. 

Last weekend we celebrated Jonathan's graduation, and I can't wait to share photos and stories from the weekend. That said, I got home to Minneapolis on Tuesday and found myself facing down a three-day turnaround before, oh right, MOVING. I feel like a bit of a fool for being stressed, given I'm moving less than half a mile, but the logistics (and ensuing emotions) of packing up my favorite home have left me a little bit leveled.

For the last several weeks I've been sad and stressed and not sleeping well or really, at all (what else is new)...and I feel like I need a lifeline, or a day to just recover from the frenetic pace I'm setting for myself.  Between the first weekend of May and the first weekend of July, I haven't had/don't have a single weekend "off," and that in and of itself is enough to make me want to crawl into bed and bury my head under the covers and quietly groan a little. Everything coming up is spectacularly fun and exciting...weddings, parties, galas, oh and a trip to Europe (!)...but a BIG part of me wishes it was all going to be spectacularly fun and exciting and a little tiny bit more spaced out. 

I guess this is just the season of life I've created for myself right now...and I really, truly am loving it. 2016 is flying by, with all the highs and the lows and in-betweens a girl could possibly imagine, and I kind of feel at this point like I'm mostly along for the ride. A passenger on my own personal rollercoaster, to leverage a totally hackneyed cliché. I've been listening to "Hamilton" pretty much non-stop since Monday, and the number of lines that hit me directly in the heart is off the charts. This one in particular, from "Wait for It," is looping through my brain on repeat today: 

"I am the one thing in life I can control...I am inimitable, I am an original. I'm not falling behind or running late...I'm not standing still, I am lying in wait." 

It's Aaron Burr, overwhelmed and stressed out by his frenemy Alexander Hamilton's seemingly meteoric rise, and it's resonating with me hard this week. Expect a lot more "Hamilton"-life parallels, fyi - I'm hooked. 

So I'm going to grit my teeth and control myself and get shit done. Apologies in advance, it's going to be sparse these next couple days/weeks--send happy thoughts my way and if anyone has a burning desire to lift heavy boxes at any point, I can totally help you out! 

 

Moving up, moving out, moving on

Hi friends. It’s been way too quiet around here for way too long and, for that, I apologize. In classic April fashion, things have been tumultuous and incredibly busy and transitional, and as we all know, I handle all of that extremely well. Ha!

For starters, the most exciting news: I got promoted! It was completely out of the blue, and I was, accordingly, totally unprepared. The promotion comes with a really cool expansion of my role into areas I’m very excited about – lots of working with new people, taking on extensive and high-profile leadership roles, and best of all, mentoring and working with interns and new hires in a way that I have always found enjoyable and deeply meaningful. Since I don’t talk a lot about my specific job or company here, that’s all I’ll share for now…but it’s been a true whirlwind and I’m finding my day-to-day so much more exciting and engaging than I have for a long time as a result.

Along with that promotion, my company offered me a spot on the board of a non-profit we’ve always extensively partnered with, and I’m completely in love. The program works in Twin Cities-area schools to help at-risk or traditionally disadvantaged students gain a strong foundation in the business world from day one of their freshman year of high school. Through the program, their curriculum offers them innumerable opportunities to engage with colleges and professional environments, ultimately leading to eventual scholarships, internship placements, and eventually (ideally!) job offers from companies like mine. I’ve only been on board for about a month now, but it’s been a huge eye opener to see what goes into serving on a board, both from an advisory and a practical standpoint.

And finally, in the most bittersweet and angst-causing revelation of all…I’m moving! To make a long and torturous story very short, my current corner penthouse apartment comes with corner penthouse apartment prices, and my lovely friend Hal is in a similar boat. We decided we were both tired of paying rent that makes our eyes water, and ended up making the decision to move in together to enable our champagne taste on a budget.

After a lot of frustration and drama (trying to move from a 1-bedroom to a 2-bedroom in my building, the whole process of lease-breaking, and of course apartment-hunting in general!), we decided on a gorgeous, character-filled building literally around the corner from my current Loring Park pad. Built a hundred years ago, the building has been fully renovated to beautiful, spacious, modern apartments while maintaining its original charm, and I’m obsessed, but also incredibly sad to say goodbye to the Chateau de Liz so much earlier than planned.

Bottom line: all this transition has left me reeling a bit! Then throw in the usual friend activities/relationship angst/general “omg I’m 27 what am I doing with my life” soliloquizing and you have me, retreating from the blog, trying hard to get myself back in check before I launch back into this space. That said, I’m feeling really good about a lot of things now and can’t wait to get back into my normal routine again…or to create a new normal that encompasses all these wonderful, exciting, terrifying changes.

Here’s to April, campers! 

A bad case of the Tuesdays.

Warning: This is a straight-up vent session.

I know it’s probably bad form to jump back in after several patchy weeks with a whiny rant, but I have a bad case of the Tuesdays and so that’s what you’re getting. Sorry. Back to regularly-scheduled sunshine programming as usual tomorrow, I promise.

I am, as I’ve mentioned in the past (and as anyone who follows me on Snapchat knows), a terrible sleeper. Most nights I’m awake a couple times a night, but can get back to sleep without too much angst. Some nights though, like last night, it’s multiple full-on wakeups and takes me close to an hour to get back to sleep. Basically your standard “Princess and the Pea” scenario, minus the frozen vegetables. Last night, I went to bed at 10, was up at midnight for a solid 20 minutes, and woke up at 3 for close to 45. It got so bad that I actually got up and went and sat out in my living room for a few minutes just to break up the tossing and turning. (Also, the moon was really pretty.) I think the problem is that I stress myself out so much about how the heck I’m going to fall back asleep that it just makes everything worse.

So after my little late-night prowling, my alarm went off at 5:30 and I snoozed. And snoozed. And snoozed until it was 6:15, and that’s bad-news bears because I leave for work at 6:40 and I had done nothing to get ready. So I speed-showered and put on bare-minimum makeup and defaulted to my standard-all-black part of the closet just hoping something would match, and it was fine, whatever, I was going to be a few minutes late but I could deal.

I started my coffee and went back into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and when I came out two minutes later, ready to transfer the coffee to my Thermos and go, I realized I had never put the cup under my Keurig. There were 16 ounces of coffee flooded across my counter and dripping across the front of my dishwasher, soaking into my kitchen rug and covering the floor around my refrigerator in a lake of pure caffeinated misery. And I could genuinely feel the tiny bit of resolve and pride in saving my morning metaphorically crumble to dust inside me at that moment. I pounded through half a roll of paper towels and a crap-ton of carpet cleaner trying to salvage the rug, made a second cup of coffee (cup under Keurig: check), and raced out the door, now nearly twenty minutes behind schedule.

AND I LEFT THE SECOND CUP OF COFFEE AND MY LUNCH ON THE COUNTER.

So I did what every rational, well-rested, functional adult does: burst into completely childish, hysterical tears, turned around and got my coffee ugly-crying the whole way, and went to work half an hour late, with that ultimate red-eye combination of tears and sleep deprivation. You better bet that my thermos was death-grip clutched in my crazy-person claw-hands, too. At any rate, as I stomped and sulked the half-mile from my ramp to the office, I officially decided that I am deep in the throes of THE TUESDAYS.

I hate Tuesdays. They’ve never been my friend, they always make me kind of cranky and kind of manic and a little bit extra-stressed even when life isn’t that stressful. And lately, life has been stressful. Details to follow (soon), but between some personal stressors and some changes at work, I’ve been stretching myself a bit thin. In classic Lizzie form, I’m spending way too much time letting my inner type-A control freak spazmonster over-analyze every choice I make and every situation I find myself in, to my detriment. And this morning, it probably wasn’t even really about the coffee, it was about the seventeen other things that are making me feel uncertain and out of control and just plain not fully adult, and the coffee just happened to be the catalyst/straw that broke this camel’s back/lightning rod for all those other feelings.

I’m at work now, and in classic actually-sane-Lizzie-fashion, determined that life is good. So my rug smells like caramel coffee. So my hair is twisted up wet on top of my head. So I basically cried off the minimal mascara I even bothered to put on. Whatever, Tuesday. Nowhere to go from here but up, you butthead. 

101 in 1001 #57: Grow some succulents/flowers.

I've written extensively about how incredibly grump-faced I get every January, pretty much since I started this blog. It's an established fact: short days, lack of holidays/birthday fun, and disgusting weather combine to make me a highly unpleasant person to deal with from time to time. One of the best ways I've found to counteract that is having plants or flowers around. Problem? I have, if not a black thumb, definitely not a green one. 

I'm that spaz who will buy myself a plant or something and then forget to water it until it's drooped down to the tabletop, or who won't change the water in flowers like...at all. And it's so terrible, because I absolutely adore flowers! I buy them for myself all the time. It's just the care part that I tend to forget about. Given that, to me, growing something "from scratch" seemed Herculean in difficulty. I feel like I kind of cheated on this one, because I let Bachman's do all the work for me and got a pre-potted spring bulb garden. Isn't it cute? 

This is what it looked like when I got it in mid-January...not much going on, but I was so shocked by how fast everything started sprouting as soon as I put the pot on my south-exposure windowsill. (I realize, now, that it looks incredibly dorky to leave the little stick-in thing sitting in the pot. I used it to remember to rotate it, because my inner control freak can't handle when a plant leans one way toward the sun. Excuses for my moderate idiocy!)

Less than a week later...

Seriously though, these things are idiot-proof if they are Lizzie-proof. I almost feel like this shouldn't merit checking off a goal. But it makes me incredibly happy, so I'll go with it. 

And then they bloomed! 

Daffodils are 100% indisputably my favorite flower (which I've mentioned before). Needless to say, I gasped like a small child on Christmas morning when they were the first thing to bloom. 

And of course the damn thing chose the week I was gone to go absolutely full-blast...here's the current state of things! 

There's a purple-pink hyacinth hiding on the other side, but I'm just completely head-over-heels for those weird little bluebell things and the gorgeous red tulips. There are yellow tulip buds coming up too, and more daffodils on their way (my excuse for ignoring the slightly crispy ones, I've never figured out how not to kill the plant when nipping off dead blooms!). Bottom line: best $12 I've spent in a long time. 

There you have it: a 101 in 1001 that totally delivered on the "life-enriching happiness" front! See more here. 

Reasons I probably need a roommate.

Wanted (potentially, possibly, maybe, no sooner than next October): a roommate. 

Must not be afraid of graphic shit on TV, and/or ambivalent toward sharing roomie marathons. For example, having read the books, I kind of think I want to watch “Game of Thrones,” but I’m such a chickenshit that I can’t do it alone. I need someone to squeal to when things get graphic and nasty. Similarly, having someone there to tell me when the horror movie commercials on TV end was a luxury I never appreciated to its full extent. I try to ballpark it and inevitably end up opening my eyes and uncovering my ears right at the peak of the scariness, and then my overactive imagination takes over and of course the creepy guy with no face is under my bed…the bed that I sleep in alone, making me extra-vulnerable to all things scary. Just waiting to get me. Because, you know, I’m 26 going on 6 and all.  

Must enjoy wine. Wine goes bad if I open a bottle to have a glass, myself, after a long day at work or to savor a particularly good evening. I know I can't finish the bottle on my own in the time before it inevitably spoils, but I love to buy and drink good wine and wasting it seems so terrible. Maybe I just need to befriend my neighbors or something. 

Should be committed to equitable division of household chores, ideally permitting me to handle all surfaces except the floors. I hate the floors, especially thanks to my beloved (but sheddy) polar bear rug. Bonus roommate points for bringing a powerful vacuum to the equation to vacuum up said polar bear-shed (and next year's inevitable holiday glitter explosion). 

Ideally, would not be fazed by occasional sartorial assistance. Potential roommate must be willing to offer fashion advice and feedback at any time, including but not limited to before weddings (dressy), work (professional) and/or dates (duh). I will respect and admire the kind of future roommate who is unafraid to tell me that I own too many striped shirts, and to offer suggestions for alternatives that I will, potentially, someday love just as much. Getting zippers on the backs of dresses past that hard-to-reach middle-of-the-back spot is always a 30-second ordeal in the mornings now. Such a small thing, but it never fails to make me irritated and huffy, and a roommate who is unafraid to offer assistance in the event that I start frustratedly whimpering will have my heart forever. 

Definitely must be confident in all things bug-related. I kill my own spiders now. To be fair, it’s never without a lot of out-loud pep-talking myself through it. It’s not even usually well-executed. I just grab the closest flat thing and start whacking in the general vicinity hoping for the best. Sometimes it’s a practical thing like a shoe or a spatula (which, duh, gets washed afterward). A few months ago it was my hair straightener. Which was heated up and everything. Not the neatest, but definitely effective. Roommate must either be willing to equitably divide bug-killing duties, or at least be there to offer moral support and a giant wad of paper towels to clean up. 

Preferably a fan of brunch. Mostly so I can select the location of future shared apartment based on brunch places in the immediate, walkable vicinity. Further consideration will be given if prospective roommate is willing to go halfsies at a moment's notice when I invariably fail to commit to one menu item and end up in an existential crisis between the waffles and the eggs Benedict.

Future applicants should bookmark this post and bother me about locales next summer. 

(This is mostly facetious. I love living alone, I have been incredibly privileged to afford to do it, and these last fifteen months have been soul-restoring in the most visceral way. That said, I am already starting to think ahead to what happens when it's time for Willow Street and I to part ways...and this is just a thought I've been kicking around.)