LeahAndMark.com

We didn’t realize that we already had two dozen eggs so Leah bought another dozen - so we’ve been eating eggs every morning lately + avocados! We didn’t buy bread so it’s just the two items + coffee! ‘Cause obviously, more than anything else, coffee is a breakfast staple (for me at least!)

Okay look. I just haven’t had the time to cook-up my 3 small meals that I eat while at work (all part of my six small meals a day-lose-weight-build-muscle-plan) so, I’ve been cheating and splitting up panda express food. But wait! Before you all out laugh at me, let’s look at the nutritional facts… ah nevermind. Ah um. Okay. The short run-down. Compared to their Orange Chicken which is about 500 calories + like 14 grams of fat per serving.

If you choose mandarin chicken or kung pao - that’s roughly 250 cal per serving + white rice which is something like 380 cal per - SO. If you get the lunch combo with 2 entrees and white rice, then divide it into two - that’s two ‘meals’ at roughly 600 calories… um. Okay. When you do the math it’s a lot I guess - but not compared to eating the whole thing at once. 1,200 calories in one sitting? AND that’s with the lighter entree options - just think if you get the orange chicken for lunch, the math works out like this: 

(500 cal per serving X 2) + (760 cal. 2 servings of rice in a to-go container) = 1,760 calories for lunch.

And now to negate all that ‘health’ talk - up above is the ‘Sunrise’ bagel sandwich - Oh, it’s so good - from my usual coffee stop before work - Bagel Boys Cafe.

This is a sea salt bagel sandwich from Belly the General Store in Virginia Highlands. Leah gets these and loves them. Oh. Below is a picture of the ‘General Store’ - look, it looks all vintage and ‘old time’ - kind of like the Cracker Barrel except this place isn’t full of ‘vintage’ garbage and knick knacks that you shouldn’t ever buy.

But still, this place is one of my favorites because of one thing. Their Nutella & Banana Panino sandwich. Forget doing the math (’cause I’d die) - I don’t see a reason for ordering anything else on their menu. I haven’t ordered anything different and I won’t - simply because I know that no matter what, I’ll wish that I had chosen to get this sandwich instead. In fact, here’s a link to our first post + video about Belly.

It’s Thursday! Just one more after today and then we’re free for the weekend… free to pack, do homework, sleep in, eat more food, workout, and just generally rock this life.

We decided that we were going to get a new couch/sofa when we moved to the new apartment. Our current one is a pull-out sofa bed and it was just torn up (by our cats) and old. Since it was an old pullout, that meant that the metal frame was actually iron - which meant that the whole sofa was REALLY heavy as far as sofas go these days. So moving it out of the house and to the curb was going to take some work. Coupled with the fact that Leah’s wearing a wrist brace right now - this wasn’t going to be easy. However, given my general stubborness when it comes to moving heavy objects (I can do it!) - I secretly vetoed Leah’s plan of helping me, and decided that I should do this when she wasn’t at home and was instead taking care of her mom/visiting her grand mother.

I can’t have some rational woman yelling at me to stop moving heavy objects - since I’m obviously not going to listen - it didn’t work when I/we moved the washer and drier up/down/up the stairs, and it was not going to work in this situation either.

After removing all of the other junk we had sitting in the front room (chairs, bikes, boxes) I put One-Two and Three-Four in the bedroom and literally pushed the couch thru the living room, out the front door, and then slid it down the front steps. That was the easy part. The couch doesn’t really slide too well on sidewalk/concrete. So it took some scraping/pushing/pulling to get it to the point you see up above.

But I couldn’t just drag it up the driveway - I don’t think it would’ve made it all the way and the scraping was making a really horrible sound. So I just sort of horizontally flipped it end by end, in a circle. The side closest to you in the left picture is the side furthest from you in the right picture. Doing it this way, I only had to lift one end and then walk it to the ‘other side’.

See? It kind of crawled up the driveway like that. But when I got it onto the grass, things got slightly rougher because the ’feet’ were digging into the dirt - I don’t know why I didn’t just keep going up the paved driveway.

Now if you’re wondering who took the pictures - I did of course. I stopped after each turn, grabbed the camera and snapped a shot. But eventually I did get it to the curb.

And you may ask, “Why didn’t you ask for help?” - well, this is the price I pay for not having any friends close by - (not true, I could’ve probably asked Chris of Chris & Anna) - but also the price I’ve always paid for just being too stubborn to ask for help - especially when I can clearly just lift the heavy object and get the job done. *Hulk is Strong!*

Oh yeah. Doing this on a cool day is one thing - but yesterday was kind of warm and humid - so I was really sweating after the 23 minutes it took to do this. Also, in case you were wondering if I could’ve asked any passers-by for help - the only people who passed by were women running/walking with kids in their strollers.

When Leah did get home there was still more than enough daylight to take more photos.

Goodbye!

Okay, so, I’m all set to order the wedding dress online. I’ve been e-mailing the designer, my measurements have been taken, etc. But there is one detail about the dress I remain unsure about… the stitching on the bodice. I keep going back and forth as to whether or not I want it. And I have to make the decision before I order it, because she adds the stitching before sewing the whole dress together.

So, I’m taking a poll. Please comment and tell me which you prefer. Feel free to comment anonymously, if you’d like - I’m really just looking for feedback here.

Pics of the dress might help, huh? Here ya go!

Edit: Thanks for the comments thus far!!  I’m definitely planning on keeping the sashes in the back, I’m just debating the stitching because I haven’t figured out the balance of funky/unique and traditional that suits us.  I think if I do go with the stitching, I’d want it to have a little more oomph to it… maybe use darker thread or something.

As for the straps I discussed with you, Chi… I was mainly considering that because I didn’t think a strapless dress would look that good on me, but then I tried some  on and I liked the strapless ones a lot, sooo… I decided to go with the strapless.

Thanks again - and if you haven’t added your two cents yet, please feel free.  I love hearing everyone’s ideas!

China! The 798 Art District in Beijing. A must-visit place in one of my fave cities on the planet.

This is Pele. He’s the son of the Dutch owners at The Giggling Tree hostel we stayed at in the village of Aishanmen near Yangshuo. I’m not sure if I’d let a one-year-old run around with a bag full of eggs, but hey- this how they do it in China. And he didn’t break a single one. So now, maybe I would let a one-year-old run around with a bag of eggs.

Yup, that man has a TV strapped to his back. He’s being studied intently by a boy in a fuzzy pink vest. How’s that for defying stereotypical gender roles?  You rock that pink vest, little boy.

Great Wall at Mutianyu.

We did not obey this sign. Mark was on a secret mission to find the perfect proposal spot.

And he did.

And here is a really awesome website that will make you cry… Earthquake Strips

Mi Barrio Mexican Cantina in Grant Park, on Memorial Ave., across from Oakland Cemetery and down the street from Six Feet Under - truly has some of the best, home-made/authentic SouthWest Mexican food in Atlanta. The GOOD stuff that you would have at any family gathering if you have any hispanic heritage in ya, and live in Arizona, New Mexico or Texas. Well - actually what you have here is a better version of the good junk you can get at any of the ‘-Bertos’* Mexican food shacks back in Arizona.

And the rambling begins.

If you have only one cat, I kind of understand letting it go out and about outdoors. Especially if you’re not home all day, or just too busy to hang out with your cat all day. It kind of comes back to having only one pet (cat or dog) that you leave at home all day alone. It’s just kind of sad. Especially when you could get two and then they could at least entertain each other when they wanted to, as opposed to one pet just zoning out on nothing - unless they actually like to be completely alone. I just think about if we only had one cat and not two - but I’m just going on about nothing really because some pets, just like people, want to live alone.

But for the sociable ones, like our cats - being alone all the time would suck. Especially since our cats actually like each other (most of the time) and play and fight and sleep next to/on top of each other/with us. But what am I going on about? I don’t know, I’m just waiting for the laundry to finish.

Warm, golden chips + good salsa are a requirement for a good Mexican restaurant right? - even if we try to not eat them - when you get a bad set of chips or salsa before you meal, it just starts everything off on the wrong foot.

I know we mention some blog(gers) quite regularly, so I figure today I’ll mention our friend YogaGirl! She used to work hardkore in a lab and then she started teaching yoga/fitness part time and then she quit her lab job and became a master instructor of all things fitness-class. I ‘met’ her while she still lived in Houston and then she moved to Oregon a few years ago with her husband where they do A LOT of house remodeling - so much so that her blog is about half fitness and then half HGTV. Still. I’ve known her since back when I had a blog @ blog-city.com, and then through all of my different incarnations of MarkRoX. Fortunately, she’s relatively slow to update her links and she kept me listed during the months(years) where I would stop blogging and just kind of do nothing online or off. (Is there life offline?)

So. I’ve been in school for a while now (this round) and I’ve been thinking about the whole idea of pulling an ‘all-nighter’ and how, I haven’t done one of those this time around. I mean, sure I’ll stay up late to finish a paper, or the ‘participation posts’ (it’s online school - and um, well, it’s at least a degree) but I haven’t had to pull an all-nighter. I suppose that’s because I also don’t have real tests. They’re all take home. So there’s no need to really ’study’ in the same manner. And even then, everything else? It’s just measuring the hit I’ll take (10 points off for each day late)  and how much I’d rather be sleeping - mostly when it gets past midnight, sleeping is worth more since I still have to go to work the next morning.

My Chimichanga (and I know, they don’t really have these things in Mexico - but thank god they do in the border states - because damn, a fried burrito? Genius.

I LOVE the fact that I finally bought a replacement laptop battery for my larger HP laptop - now it functions as a laptop again and I can take it places since the battery holds a charge now. Now if I could only get the USB ports repaired and actually connect things to it…

*-Bertos’ mexican food shacks are these things we have in Arizona where basically, you take some sort of small rundown food spot (often times in a strip mall) - add a window for people to walk up or drive up to and order - and just keep it open 24 hours day, serving the largest burritos possible and other magical mexican foods back in the hole of a kitchen that barely passes the health inspections - and the food is probably better for it. Of course, you don’t have to listen to us, remember we LOVE street food and everything that that entails (the mystery, the dirty, and the fact that many people won’t touch the stuff.) Oh, and they all have a naming convention of where, you can choose anything you want in front of the ‘Bertos part, but you MUST have the Bertos in the name. Some examples are FiliBertos, RigoBertos, JuanoBertos, MarkRoXBertos…

We have boxes, and now we’re fighting the urge to just let a Sunday afternoon slowly ease away like it should - without too much trouble or work… but we all know that’s not what we should  do. So. Like the list has been saying to us for the past week - Laundry, Packing, Cleaning, Packing, Homework, Packing.

Last Thursday after getting home and then taking a short nap on the floor, Leah woke me up so we could go to an art gallery showing @ Dresscodes, the clothing boutique owned/operated by our friends Karen & Brett. They have an art showing about every few months with a new artist each time. We haven’t been to one since the first one but this one definitely had many more people and it was a lot of fun to stop by, check things out, and catch up with the two of them. As usual, the clothes are fun to look through and they also have some cool accessories and hard to find jeans and um, other things I mentioned in the first post about them that night we had dinner together.

These are always nice ’cause like any art showing, they have free beer (or wine) and cheese and crackers! Okay. Sure, it doesn’t sound like much to get excited about, but Free is FREE! And I’m always in a good mood for free alright?

Karen is the one in Blue and Brett is over there with the polka dot hat on.

Afterwards, we went across the street and had some thai food @ Amaryn’s - it’s decent enough there with no real surprises, but it’s our default place lately when we don’t feel like thinking. Still, rarely do we get all out disappointed.

Just a few more days house sitting @ the big house. Good. Great.

Mi Barrio last night and Highland Bakery for breakfast today. The Good Food Never Stops Here.

Okay, so I originally posted this morning, and Mark said he wanted to type some in it, so I said okay.

Then he changed it up!

And I liked mine the way it was.  So I’m posting it again.  Hmph.

Continue reading »

These are shots we took when we visited our friend Anna (of Anna & Chris!) back before we went to Summerfest - I never got around to posting these shots ’cause um, well it happens often and we keep doing things and then those get pushed to the front and shots from days like this get pushed to our filler days or when we simply just haven’t had the time to edit/upload the new photos (like ones from last night’s art show @ Dresscodes.) But still! It’s Friday! Seriously. Seriously, thank goodness it’s… well, close to the weekend.

I didn’t really get nearly as much as I had hoped last night, what with the thing and then also having to go over to the house sitting place and turn on the lights, try to convince the cat to come inside and feed her - which we didn’t do since there was another cat in the yard and so the rightful cat decided to fight/scare off that other cat away - since y’know, it was encroaching on her property. But we left food on the back porch (as instructed) and I checked it this morning - all gone so she probably ate it.

This whole letting your cat outside for the day or night is crazy to me - simply because I’ve never let One-Two or Three-Four out and about. Never. Which is good and bad for reasons I’m unaware of, but at this point, they’re not going out there - even if they think they want to - and the few times they have escaped for a second - they freeze once they’re outside and run back inside anyways.

Photo Removed

This shot and the 1st one up above are my imitations of Jan Vermeer paintings and his window lighting.

I’ve been going to the same spot for coffee in the mornings - Bagel Boys Cafe - near work and recently, they’ve started giving me the whole ‘regular customer’ treatment - which isn’t hard since I usually only get a large coffee, and rarely get a sandwich (they’re good there by the way) - but yeah, I forgot how nice it is to be a ‘regular’ somewhere and have the staff actually remember you. Even if they don’t know your name (even if they did, they’d probably only remember my drink anyways - you know, that’s just how it is when you serve coffee or drinks all day) but still, I’m apparently sucker for any amount of recognition. It also helps that they have really good flavored coffee (I’m over being a coffee purists and wanting to only taste the natural flavors of coffee.) They have this chocolate macadamia nut flavored blend… and then a good vanilla hazelnut one… just add half & half and I’m good - I don’t even need to add my usual 2 cups of fake sugar.

Okay. I just got the hang of Twitter - but now I’m lost on how useful/accessible plurk is going to be - of course, that could just be me since um, it took me until yesterday to upgrade the WordPress version around here - and it was only a matter of two clicks since we use Bluehost.

Enough rambling, let’s get to the end of the work day already!

No More Photos on this blog!

No just kidding. I do have questions though.

Well, mainly just one. Are you generally confused as to who writes each entry (is it Leah? is it Mark?) or can you generally get the gist of things from reading the text? Either way, how much does it really matter to you? - since the writing is done at about a 9/1 ratio. Okay. I guess that’s two questions.

In an attempt to figure out how I met MelMaples and how long I/we’ve known her, I went through my LJ account and realized that I used to make blog entries with no photos. Entire paragraphs with nothing in between them except space. Who knew I could get so wordy? Maybe I had more to say back then. Oh yeah, we also didn’t have cameras that work as well as the current ones.

Is it bad when you have to move in 12 days and you haven’t packed ANYTHING? Seriously. Is that bad? Because it’s true. True enough that I could feasibly stress out about the whole thing except I take solace in the fact that I could technically throw everything into boxes and sort it all out later - as long as I had enough boxes - which I do not. It’s just that collecting/buying all these boxes so that we can pack everything and move 6 miles down the road seems like a big hassle. Sure, we’re hiring movers and that’ll make EVERYTHING easier, but we still have to pack it all up so that they can just carry the boxes over with the furniture. Pack. Pack. Pack.

Actually. It’s going to come down to a simple matter of throwing out everything we don’t need and throwing everything else into boxes. Which again, is simple enough as long as we have enough boxes. And ‘collecting’ enough of them could feasibly cost as much in time as it does to just BUY them. So. Um. The end of that thought.

Tonight we’re stopping by Dresscodes - the clothing boutique in Downtown Decatur that our friends Karen & Brett own/operate. They’re having another gallery showing for an artist who is showing art in their store (they rotate them on a regular basis.) So ya know, if you’re bored around 6pm and happen to be in Decatur, stop in and let me take a picture with you! Oh. I suppose you should also check out all of the clothes and art and stuff that’s there too. I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Okay. Just one photo. Have a great day.

One-Two! Three-Four!

***Edit***

Ah nevermind. Following Melissa’s instructions, ‘Posted by’ is clearly added at the bottom AND I even finally got around to updating the Wordpress version we’re using here.

***Edit*Edit***

Now I wanna do more coding edits! and throw more junk on this place! (I regularly try out different widgets/plugins on the sidebar - to see how they look/usefulness/interesting and stuff like that. That’s why some things appear and disappear every now and then. PLUS - obviously if it’s too wide then it can’t go in the sidebar no matter what. And every now and then, I even think about changing themes! But then I look around and there’s just nothing else compelling/looks good enough to change it up - besides, we’ve only existed four months. Ah. I guess I’ll leave it alone.

There is relatively nothing else that I want on a daily basis in the morning, than coffee. Sure I’ve tried to stop before, tried to give it up, but who was I kidding? In the same way that I don’t give up on myself - I don’t give up on coffee! It’s magical in the same way that bacon’s magical - except it doesn’t kill me in the same way. No. It makes me a genius. A certified genius even. Actually, drinking coffee while writing papers/assignments has been my habit this past 1.5 years since I returned to school. And now it’s required to trigger my brain into thinking about long run-on sentences to fill up 1,000 word papers in less than an hour with nothing more than an illegal wikipedia entry (in terms of school paper material.)

So yeah. Even now as the summers here in Atlanta get hotter, and our uncooled house gets even hotter than that - I’ll sit there at the kitchen table with a cup of hot coffee, sweating away and hacking at a paper due the next morning. Of course I have a fan aimed directly at me, and sip from a large cup of ice water in between coffee gulps. It’s a ritual at this point and I doubt that I even need the caffeine aspect of the drink, but I need the taste to make my brain remember that it’s time to wake up for an hour and think only in long sentences and convoluted logic.

This just in on Financial News - I’m poor.

There is still a lot to do and I’ve taken on studying new things in hopes for a brighter future - If you’ve ever read my other blog, you would know that I take on new things on a weekly basis… and drop them on a bi-weekly basis. But I do this because I’m always made better by whatever sticks - whether that’s a whole something or just pieces of that week’s new project/subject/interest. It’s kind of like… not being afraid to pick up a new interest whenever I find one. Sure it’s kinda flaky, but again following the general philosophy of my life so far… I want to try everything and find out if I don’t like it or not.

It’s a stretch today. Especially since I thought yesterday was Wednesday, so really, I’m a day behind and this week is moving slowly. I even had other people in the office pull the data for my Wednesday reports (they didn’t realize it either) and only when I finished processing them did I realize that… hey, it’s only Tuesday. Yeah… so I have go through that whole thing again today on the actual Wednesday.

I’m a little tired this morning… but that’s okay - it’s time to wake up now.