Manly

A few months ago the inevitable happened and J visited Pinterest and opened an account. Not to share recipes with his friends, he'd like me to point out, I'm sure (although I think what he'd like even more than that is for me not to write this post), but to discover cool ideas and projects, which, from my passing observations of Pinterest, seems like a great way to use the site. 

Like, Pinterest might show you how to turn the wine corks you've been storing in a container in a basement into miniature planters for succulents and other tiny plants. As J has a collection of wine corks he's been saving up for years in order to "do something with them someday" (NO COMMENT) this particular link was a useful find. 

J is much more into "projects" than I am, a term he - and now Nora - seem to use to define doing semi-crafty things with stuff you find around the house. My response to the proposition of commencing a "project" is to run for it, super fast, but Nora's gotten really into cutting pictures out of magazines and making collages, and I do like to watch her work, safe on the sidelines. She's dropped roughly 400 glue sticks from the table to the floor during her creative endeavors, resulting in them rolling under the dining room hutch where they dry up never to be used again, but I think it's worth it. 

And in terms of helpful life-hacks and easy and inventive home projects, J gets really motivated, too. And it's great to see him get motivated and to think about how his inherent creativity will enhance our lives, and how I will be involved in these endeavors in no way whatsoever. 

Which I'm not sure he totally gets. Because this morning, when I mentioned that I was feeling a little lackluster, J immediately responded with the confident suggestion, "You just need to find some inspiration on Pinterest."

Nashville!

February was a frigid, interminable and, like, pretty awful month if you want to know the truth. I mean, yes, I love my family and my life in general, but I could have wiped February clean off the calendar this year with few regrets. 

One of the highlights, however, was our annual President's Day get together with what was once made up of college friends, and now has morphed into a group that's harder to define, except to say that we all have a lot of fun together. 

We went to Nashville this year, a city I've never visited and absolutely loved...the music, the heart-disease-inducing food (which included for me a hamburger topped with pimento cheese, jalapeño bacon and onion rings) and the people. The people! I miss you, southern people! We hired a babysitting service one night so the adults could go out, and the entire experience was so easy and pleasant compared to interactions I often have up north, where people are sometimes defensive and irritated from the get go, probably because it is so COLD, that I was nearly convinced to move there. That's what this winter has done to me. I think seriously about things like moving to Nashville because it's really easy to hire a babysitter there, compared to Connecticut, where it's been icy for four solid months. 

Anyway, that night the grown ups headed to Broadway, the city's most happening street, and hit up a honky tonk bar, where an absolutely amazing band was playing while the audience drank PBRs and swayed to the music. Everyone was having such a good time. 

It was one of those places where the experience you imagine yourself having prior to arriving ends up being exactly what it's like, one of those nights that imprints itself on your mind and reminds you what an incredibly diverse and interesting country this is. 

Amplifying that takeaway was the fact that we drove to Nashville, and go to see many more miles of the U.S.A. over the long weekend than we'd originally anticipated. We drove there from New Haven, because, after waiting way, way too long to book flights - a bad habit of ours - we realized that flying the family there would cost thousands of dollars and we said, "You know what? Let's turn this into a fun road trip!"

And it was a fun road trip, which included stopping to see friends and family and teaching our kids some of the central activities required to make long rides fun, like browsing the many brochures in rest stops and playing "I spy," which quickly turned into a variant of "I spy" that seemed to be called "I see something..." which is like the former, but with no guessing. You see something, you say it. 

Although we took plenty of extra days to turn this into an actual road trip, rather than just a frenzied car ride, it was still a lot of distance traveled in just a few days, something that was very clear to our astute Nora, who insisted at one point that she and Gabriel pretend they were airplanes, going very fast to various locations she'd announce over her pretend loudspeaker, like Florida and California. Then, after awhile, she informed me, with a serious look, "I think for our next trip, we should fly."