interesting book

i just started reading a really interesting book. last friday, on our way back to eugene from thanksgiving dinner (and delicious thanksgiving-leftovers brunch the next morning) at my auntie's, matt and i stopped at powell's and this book was one of the recommended reads. it's called "better off," by eric brende. it's a non-fiction account of when he and his wife (who, interestingly enough, he married immediately before this experiment) went to go live with an amish community for 18 months to learn what it is like to exist without using fuel or electricity. the author is really wordy, and uses a lot of "big" words awkwardly, and his sentences are kind of hard to follow, but what he has to say is intriguing enough to make it hard to put down. i'm only two chapters in but i'll keep you posted. (unless i move in with the amish and quit using my laptop. just kidding. but seriously, it's tempting. but i don't think there are any amish around here. are there?)

what ever you do, do not buy...

...three-buck chuck's new wine. i like the chuck, generally, especially the shiraz. out of the 2-5 bottles of trader joe's wine that make their way into my shopping cart every 2-3 weeks, a couple bottles of chuck are regulars. i was at trader joe's the other day and was lured to the charles shaw display by bottles saying "nouveau." i don't speak french at all (as b knows from when we were in france together), but i assumed that meant this was a new one. i picked up a bottle and saw that it was a "valdiguie" (pronounced "val-de-gay," i later found out). i had no idea what that was but i put it in my basket anyway. yay! a new chuck! i googled (actually blackled) it--not chuck specifically, but valdiguies in general, just to find out what they were--tonight, and all i found was trader joe's on blast all over the internet for this nasty, nasty wine. "no way, these are just snooty wine snobs," i thought, as i opened up my lovely new chuck and poured myself a glass. i put the goblet up to my nose, took a breath, and smelled...grape juice? raspberry cider? what the hell?! then i tasted it, and it's GROSS!!!!!!

black and green

i signed up for this green email tip of the day site (www.idealbite.com) and the other day it told me about www.blackle.com, which is google, but with a black screen. and not all the other cool stuff like maps, images, etc. it's pretty basic. but it's point is that a black monitor screen uses significantly less energy/fuel than a white screen. and when you go on blackle, it says how much energy has been saved to date by people using blackle instead of google as their home page, search engine of choice, etc. i also (as you i'm sure have noticed) changed my blog layout to be all black, and since i waste so much time on there i'm about to go see if there's a black myspace layout i like. it may seem like last minute and too small, but any steps we can take i believe are important...

ch ch ch changes

yeah, i know i stole that title from jenn's blog.

changing my name is much weirder than i though it would be. having gotten married in the 21st century, it was completely my choice to do it. i asked matt what he thought and he wouldn't give an opinion one way or the other; he said that it is an individual decision. i want my future possible kids to have the same name as their mom and their dad. and i want to have the same name as my life partner.

it took me a while to do it after the wedding because i had plane tickets to denver in my old name and i figured they probably wouldn't let me on the plane if my ticket said macdonald and my license said beatty. now that i've been back for a month, i'm almost completely switched over. the first thing i had to do was get my marriage license. then i used that to change my drivers license and social security card, both of which were mailed to me a few weeks later rather than given to me on the spot. so i had to run around with a paper version of my new drivers license (they wouldn't let me keep the old one temporarily), which was kind of crappy because apparently you can't get a library card or a margarita with a paper drivers license. i'm also kind of annoyed because i just had gotten a renewal license in may and my photo was so cute! i mean, i looked good! you'd think that with their huge state-wide database, they could save people's pictures for however long just in case people lose their license or, say, change their name, but no. so my new picture just looks blah. i look kind of plain-jane, and suburban (which i'm not) and wife-y. and i don't even know what i mean by that because i'm having all kinds of strange emotions and ideas about wife-y-ness floating up from who knows where into my head. i mean, nothing has changed between me and matt since we got married other than the legal, but all of a sudden i'm feeling aware of all these archetypes and connotations and stuff. and i feel like i have to sort out what my definition of being a wife is from that of society, or past society, or other people, or tv, or whatever else. i mean, is it a description? a label? an honor? a relationship? a role? what kind? i think i might be confusing matt with all this. he says i'm exactly the same person i was the second before we got married, and he just wants me to be myself. and he's right, but where is all this other stuff coming from?

so then i had to use my new license to switch stuff over at my bank and at work, all of which have taken much longer than the last two things, so i've been in this weird name-limbo for a month. i say beatty for some things and macdonald for others, and i sign beatty on everything except for my debit card transactions because they haven't sent me my new card yet. just today they figured it out at work and i couldn't get into my computer because my log-in was changed (and, frustratingly, i could only open the email explaining how to log in with my new name once i'd logged in with my new name). and the voicemail greeting i left today was that my name changed so from now on this will be marissa beatty's voicemail. it feels so optional what my name is all of a sudden. like dying my hair. like i could wake up tomorrow and decide that i want to be called sarah jones and tell everyone that's what they have to call me from now on. and i have this amnesic feeling that i'm going to forget my name. which is kind of like forgetting who you are, right? but then again not really...it brings up the whole "a rose by any other name" thing.

anyway, it's provoked a lot more thought and feeling than i thought would happen, for sure. i do like my new name. it feels very english. and easier to say after my first name. it flows better. and of course i love the man that "gave" it to me from a bottomless well. so that helps.

have a fantastic thanksgiving, everyone. peace.
-marissa beatty :)

hip hop dance class!

i just discovered the funnest (i know that's not a word) thing ever (and i know i'm speaking in hyperbole): hip hop dance class!! i definitely felt like an oaf-ish white girl, but it is so worth it. i put on hip hop and dance around my living room--a little less oafishly, i would like to think--all the time anyway, i might as well learn how to do it right. and the girl who teaches the class is really good. for anyone in town who wants to come with me, it's at 6:30 on monday nights at oakway fitness. (and ib, if you're reading this--if you were in town i would so try to get you to come with me! remember when we used to dance to old school hip hop like mc hammer and stuff? :) those were good times!)

hermity

hey, i know i just blogged yesterday, but i am having such a glorious hermit-y weekend that i have to talk about it. i forgot how much i liked just hanging out by myself in my pajamas. right now i'm on the couch in matt's bathrobe watching "knocked up." matt and troy decided to stay at the coast one more day, so last night i made another mini "test pizza," lit all the candles in the living room, drank half a bottle of wine, watched football, and downloaded mtv mash-ups on limewire. nelly vs. lynyrd skynyrd. brilliant! sitting around doing exactly what i want and nothing i don't. all by myself. when you're living with someone, it's easy to forget how soothing it is, and and how important it is to do every now and then.

pizza

for some reason i have decided to start baking bread. mainly because i think the bread that comes from the bakery section at the store or from an actual bakery (you know, the loaves that aren't sliced and shaped like they come from the factory, and are all crispy on the outside and soft and dough-y with air pockets on the inside) taste WAY better than "normal" commercial bread. also (and really, this should be the most important), bread baked at home or in local bakeries don't take as much fuel to create and take nearly no fuel to get them to where they will be purchased/consumed. that and the fact that i am part owner of a place that always has mad amounts of yeast laying around. (though i used yeast from the store this first time because i have no idea what i'm doing.)

my first try at bread was a pizza dough. matt and troy are off on a man vacation at the coast in the vw bus this weekend and i decided i want to make homemade pizza for all of us when they get back. i was going to do one test-pizza yesterday and another one today for when they come home, but i accidentally made enough dough for two (possibly three, we'll see) pizzas. it came out ok. i used mozzarella cheese and leftover marinara from when i made veggie lasagna. the crust was weird, though, in the same way that the crust on take-and-bake pizzas are weird. all dense and spongy. i like really thin crusts with just a little bit of that air-pocket-y dough-yness that's in the loaves of bread i like. i was kind of discouraged, but i punched down the rest of the dough and decided to leave it out and let it rise again overnight (don't know why...i was drinking beer...). when i got up this morning i had second thoughts about eating something i'd left out all night. but i went on line to see if it was safe, and i read (at 101cookbooks.com) that the secret to good thin-crust pizza is an overnight second rise! so i made a tiny little test pizza, and YUM! :) i love when things accidentally go right. now the guys just need to come home so i can surprise them with my crazy pizza skills. ;)

small world

i was out the other night and i ran into this guy i (sort of) know. i'll call him "j". he's a local artist/metal worker, and he does all the cool stainless steel ninkasi tap handles (see last picture in this post, or even better, go find a bar with ninkasi on tap). so j came up to me and said "i slept in your house the other night."
"yeah?" (dumbly, thinking to myself "how did i miss that?")
"on 18th."
"yeah?" (again. still confused. our house is on 18th here just like it was in portland.)
"in portland."
"oh...oh! my little pink house! :)" (as the blank stare finally dissolved.)

it turns out he knows the people who bought the house, and he was up visiting and somehow found out from them that the guy who lived there before went to eugene to brew, and realized it was matt. so i started asking him all about the house, like did they keep the crazy paint colors i'd put up in there (yes), do they like it (love it), and have they changed much (they put in one of those bow-shaped shower curtain rods that make it seem like your shower is much bigger than it actually is...we had one in our hotel in denver).

then he asked me, rather cryptically, if i had left anything (i can't remember the word he used...something like important? or interesting?) behind. i told him about the grill we had to leave because matt and troy forgot to put it in the moving van. and yes, in matt's defense, i was in las vegas at the time and unavailable to put anything in the moving van. but i remembered we told wendi and john they could have it if they came to pick it up.

so matt told him about the case of beer otis buried in the yard. one day when we got home from work we found otis sitting in the back yard, surrounded by shredded cardboard and a few bottles of widmer hefeweizen, covered in mud and wagging his tail gleefully. he'd dragged a case of beer out of the garage into the back yard, tore it up, and buried it. for a while after that we'd randomly find a bottle here or there sticking up out of the dirt. we never found the whole case. but that wasn't it.

i told him about the dog skull i dug up when i first moved in. i was tearing up grass to put in my veggie garden, and all of a sudden i hit this crunchy thing. i pulled it up with the shovel, saw that it was a dog skull, freaked out and threw it in the bushes. later on, wendi came over and chased me around the yard with it while i shrieked like a 5-year-old. i eventually made jenny deal with it because i was too creeped out to touch it. i wondered if these poor people had dug up the rest of the dog. that wasn't it, either. any ideas? you get three guesses.

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

itwasaGUN!! the whole time i lived there, there was this GUN, wrapped up in a sheet and hidden in the insulation in the attic! so there you go. i guess you really can't know everything about anything, not even what all is in your own home.