Six Months

Carl and I will celebrate our six month anniversary this Sunday- can you believe it!? October 29th feels like a lifetime ago, but at the same time it seems like I blinked and here we are. Some pearls of wisdom I've learned in the past six months:

*Marriage is nothing like it is on sitcom TV. But then again, is anything in life? I hate to say it, but we're pretty boring on a day to day basis. We've come to terms with the fact that something exciting doesn't have to always (and probably won't) be happening in order to enjoy each other's company. We also like to pull pranks... and by we I mean me. I'm already plotting my next good one.

*Changing your name is really annoying. So much so that I haven't officially done it yet. I changed it at work so I do sign Allison Bussells at least 20 times a day, but the government still knows me as Allison Wonus. The problem is that we keep buying plane tickets, and the name on your ticket has to match your i.d. The other problem is that I'm lazy. I WILL become a Bussells officially when I get back from Boston, I'm determined. But my email address and countless other usernames will have to stay in my maiden name for the time being- I'm telling you, name changes involve a lot more than they used to.

*A lot of people assume that as soon as you get married you plan on spitting out babies. And while we do look forward to having some very cute and short children one day, we still enjoy being reckless and irresponsible. Not to mention, the dogs are quickly chiseling away at the baby fund. Next time you see me and I've gained weight, don't get your hopes up. I'm not pregnant!

That's about all I've got! And in case you missed it on Facebook, we made a little splash on The Wedding Row as well as Reese Moore's blog. Here's the various links:

http://theweddingrow.com/allison-carl-thomas-bennett-house/

http://reesemooreweddings.tumblr.com/post/20583551616/allison-and-carl-on-the-wedding-row-another

http://reesemooreweddings.tumblr.com/post/20392663294/love-these-boys-how-can-you-not-adore-these

http://reesemooreweddings.tumblr.com/post/20694747666

http://reesemooreweddings.tumblr.com/post/20825708570/allison-and-carl-with-allison-and-carls

Here's to another wonderful six months, and hopefully by the time a year rolls around I'll have gotten my act together and changed my name!

Great Friends and Good Reads

Hello! Hope everyone is having a great start to their week. This past Friday I got off work a little early and booked it to Greenville to spend a weekend with some good friends. I've never actually been to Greenville, aside from driving through it on my way to Clemson, and I wasn't let down. I didn't have a single bad meal, all the bars that I remember going to were fun, and of course I was amongst great company.

Out celebrating Katherine's birthday! Katherine, Liz, Alex, and me.

On Saturday we went to the Upstate International Festival of Beers, and it was truly life-changing. Carl was a little bummed that he missed out, especially since my brother, Nick, made the trip down to crash our girls weekend (he had no idea what he was getting into!) and enjoy the beer fest. Basically you just pay to get into the festival and are given a little sampling mug to take to the various brewery tables and pick which one of their beers you'd like to try. It went something like this: stand in line, sip, stand in line, sip, dance, eat pretzels, stand in line, sip, sip, sip. I was a little shocked to see multiple people with babies in attendance- what the heck, get a babysitter! Between the loud music and a huge crowd of drunk people, those poor babies will probably scarred for life. There were also a few pregnant ladies, but Nick pointed out that they were probably DD's for the day. Still, that seems like torture. Let it be known that when I am pregnant, any person who dares drink beer in my midst will feel my wrath.

Here's us, towards the end of the festival if you can't tell.

See my little sampling mug?

I definitely plan on making another trip to Greenville soon. What a fun weekend!

Aside from visiting new places, I've also been a busy book reader lately. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I finished The Book Thief, which was amazing. Maybe it's because I  felt gipped in the World War II history department all throughout school, but I've always had an interest in any and all World War II fiction. The Book Thief is about a little German girl and the impact that Nazi Germany had on her childhood, as narrated by death, or a grim reaper-esque character. Sounds really uplifting, right? It actually had a surprisingly perfect mix of sad moments and laughable scenes, especially given such a heavy subject matter. Two thumbs up.

I also read The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory, the author of The Other Boleyn Girl. I'm sure there's a lot of criticism about her interpretations of history, but I really enjoyed this book. For all of the Shakespeare and accompanying history that I was force-fed as an English major I somehow couldn't remember learning about Mary, the queen of Scotland (aka the other queen), who was held captive in England throughout the middle years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, when it was up in the air as to whether she would ever get married and have a son to be heir to the throne. Whenever I read books about royalty I can't help but think how lame it would have been to be pretty much everyone else back then. If you weren't some sort of nobility you had to slave away your entire life for someone else, only to get beheaded or hanged or die at the hands of some disgusting disease. I guess we've got it pretty good now!

Last night I finished Jodi Picoult's Lone Wolf, also a great read. I've always been a big Jodi Picoult fan, although the last few books of hers that I've read have been somewhat similar in terms of the story being told from multiple perspectives and hinting at some plot-twisting secret that doesn't come out until the very end. I will say, the ending is never what I expected so she's got me there, and her subject matters are always different. She also does a thorough job researching her book topics and shedding light on flaws in the legal system as well as sticky moral dilemmas. In this book two children are forced to decide whether or not their father, who suffered severe brain trauma in a car wreck, should be taken off of life support or kept alive in a vegetable state. He had dedicated his life to the research of wolves, hence the title, which meant that I learned a lot of cool wolf facts along the way. Definitely a tear jerker- don't read it in public.

Whew! I feel like I just wrote three very incomplete book reports. I didn't want to give too much away, though- there's nothing worse than starting a book and knowing how it ends. If you have any good book suggestions, let me know... unless it's Twilight. I refuse to read those books.

Beach Day

As a resident of a coastal city, the amount of time I actually spend at the beach is something of a disgrace. It's about a half hour drive from our house without bad traffic, so by the time I make it out I feel obligated to spend at least an entire afternoon there, which is a pretty valuable chunk of weekend to dedicate to wind, sand, and water. This isn't to say that I don't like the beach, just that a lot of the activities that I so enjoy partaking in at the beach can also be done at our neighborhood pool or backyard or on the couch (ahem, day drinking). Yesterday, however, the stars and planets aligned just right and we packed up the Subaru for its first trip to the beach:

Look at the trunk space!

Carl manages to go to the beach all the time with just a surfboard and towel, but for some reason my involvement makes things a lot less simple. Two beach chairs, two beach bags, a cooler, a bocci ball set, a surfboard, some road rage and 3 stops later we arrived at the beach! 

I hunkered down with a jumbo bag of boiled peanuts:

Once the sun came out we started up a game of bocci ball:

The boys all called each other before hand and agreed to wear their red shorts.

And then the thing that you always hope doesn't happen at the beach (but statistically has to), happened to poor Carl:

Seagull poop to the face.

The reason he doesn't look as upset as you'd expect is because even though I scrambled to get my phone to capture the moment (such a good wife I am), the shock had worn off and the poop wiped and when I said, "act like you just got pooped on by a seagull," he took a little light-hearted offense. So really what I captured was his reaction to my obnoxiousness. 

All in all it was a great day! If sunburns were a measure of beach day success then yesterday is a chart-topper.

F is for Failure

I'm going to let the title of this post speak for itself rather than making a laundry list of all the ways that I've failed in my attempts to live and eat more responsibly with the ABC's of 2012 over these past couple weeks. I've been pretty bad lately, but I'm content to move on and settle for less than 100% success. I haven't blogged in a while because I knew that in doing so I would have to admit my shortcomings and I didn't want to be judged. After thinking about it, though, I'm almost positive that I'm the only one doing the judging, and quite possibly the only one reading half of these posts anyways (except for my mom and Carl- hi Mom, hi Carl!), so I'm back and I'm feeling shameless, if not somewhat lacking in the motivation department. When I say that I'm back what I really mean is that I'll be back soon- with something really cool to talk about, I hope- and with more regularity.

Quick Updates:

The Book Thief was awesome. If you haven't read it that needs to change.

I'm going to Boston next month!! Jessica graduates law school and I needed something to look forward to. A workout tally might be in order.

Melman lost 2.5 pounds. So proud of him!

I had my first "Carl hangover" yesterday. For those of you that have been to Ihop or Waffle House or Cracker Barrel with Carl while he's hungover you know what I mean. For those who haven't, consider yourself lucky. Anyways, I must really be getting old.


Annnd that's about all the news I have. Be back soon!

Recipe Thursday: Gazpacho

Helllloooo! First things first, happy birthday to my brother Nick! And congratulations to him on a very exciting job offer- I'm so proud that his hard work and smarts have paid off. Nick and Lauren definitely got the brains gene out of us Wonus children. I'm still trying do determine which gene I got... maybe the weird one? Or the loud one? Who knows, but I'm desperately searching for a way to make my "specialness" profitable. Anyways, I've got a lot on tonight's agenda to make up for my absence: a yummy summertime soup for today's Recipe Thursday, the announcement of this week's ABC (only 4 days late), and a smattering of musings and commentary on life.

Holy smokes, time has been flying. I can't believe that March is practically over. It's also our 5 month wedding anniversary today! I've already been salivating over the Living Social and Groupon getaways, trying to come up with something romantic, fun, and moderately inexpensive to do for our real anniversary. Yes, it's a full 7 months away, but it's never too early to plan these things, and it's nice to have something to look forward to. Please let me know if you have any good ideas or see cheap flights/ weekend packages.

Onto the recipe! If I haven't said it before I'll say it now: I love soup. I can make a batch of soup and automatically have lunch for the next 2 days. Plus, it's just so versatile and hard to mess up. If you're new to cooking and want to boost your confidence in the kitchen, soup is the way to go. I've only ever truly messed up one soup. It was sort of a Mexican tortilla-sweet potato ordeal and it called for 2 tablespoons or so of chili powder. I reached for what I thought was the chili powder, got a little heavy handed with it, and didn't think twice. The more spices the better, that's what I say. Carl and I sat down to eat it and I almost cried when I took the first bite and realized my mistake. I'd accidentally used cayenne pepper instead. Ay caramba, it was spicy! Don't worry, we still ate it. I'm pleased to say that in the time since I've made A LOT of soups, and they've all turned out great. Moral of the story: make more soup, and read the labels on your spices.

I recently made one of Carl's all time favorites, gazpacho. I think he would pull an Augustus Gloop and drown himself in a river of gazpacho if he ever encountered one. We had an abundance of very ripe tomatoes so I thought gazpacho would be a nice way to use a bunch of them up, and welcome the onset of warm weather. I used the Barefoot Contessa's recipe as my inspiration and it was super easy. Here's the all-star cast:

And the obligatory glamour shot, of course:

Red bell pepper, cucumber, tomato juice, apple cider vinegar,
olive oil, salt/pepper, onion, tomato, and garlic.

You just pulse each ingredient in the food processor individually to prevent the over-processing of any one ingredient. Then add the liquid ingredients and let the flavors marry. It gets better the longer you let it sit, so I made this right after lunch and we had it for a late dinner. Look how pretty it is!

All the chopped veggies, before adding the liquids

Carl had caught some fish and a few crabs that day and we had a nice little feast.

This week for the ABC's I pulled the letter 'R,' which originally stood for recycling. As I started to think about how we could improve our recycling habits I realized that we're actually doing pretty good as it is, so I did a little switch-up and changed 'R' to stand for reading more- fiction, that is. I've been reading health and nutrition books left and right, but it's been months since I've sat down and done some true pleasure reading. So I dusted off my Nook, charged it up, and bought a few books. Right now I'm reading Markus Zusak's The Book Thief and so far it's really stinkin' good. Ever since I graduated with my English degree I've found that I'm a lot more hoity toity about my literature without necessarily meaning to be. I guess it's the curse of having sat through hours of "smart book club" and writing paper upon paper analyzing everything from Chaucer to Kurt Vonnegut. I have so much more respect for rich and meaningful writing and The Book Thief is really satisfying in that regard. Expect a review when I'm done!

Facebook and Job Interviews

Before I go off on my rant, feast your eyes on this:

In case it's too small for you to see, that's 568 points for me and 303 for Carl. Victory is mine!

I get a little too excited when I top my WWF high scores, and last night this game made history as my personal best. Such a proud moment, made even better by the fact that it was in a game against Carl.

Anyways, this morning I was listening to an interview with the head of a social media consulting firm- yes, those exist now apparently- when they started to talk about this article run by the Post and Courier today. Admittedly, I'm not normally one to keep up with current events. I understand the tremendous value of being an in-the-know citizen and I've tried everything possible to force feed the news to myself but nothing seems to work. I get notifications from both CNN and local news on my phone but they usually just get in the way of far more important things (like Words With Friends with Carl, obviously). I've tried setting my home page on my computer to various news organizations but again, I inevitably breeze right past them to check my email or bank account without reading a single headline. I don't know if it's just a matter of not wanting to depress myself by reading about the latest natural or political disaster, or if I've become one of those self-absorbed idiots that doesn't even know the name of our vice president but can name Lady Gaga's last 5 releases in order of decreasing popularity, but I just cannot keep up with the news to save my life. The latter can't be true because I don't regularly listen to Lady Gaga (and I know all about Joe Biden, thank you very much), so it has to be some sort of subliminal aversion to things that are going to put a damper on my day, and the news normally fits the bill for that. Today, however, I took particular interest in the aforementioned news story, which hit really close to home for me. My generation is unique in that you can find out anything you want to know about somebody without having to actually ever converse with that person, or even leave your house for that matter. It's sometimes scary to think about the amount of information that can be dug up about me with very little effort. I think that ability gets taken to an extreme when it comes to job searching and the interview process. I can understand a potential employer being reluctant to hire a candidate whose profile picture on Facebook is of them bonging a beer or making out with two girls at once- obviously this person not only demonstrated poor judgment, but they decided to advertise it to all of their friends and family. That one's a no-brainer. I think there needs to be a line drawn at some point, though. Asking an interviewee to provide their Facebook login information so that their profile can be picked over with a fine-tooth comb seems an invasion of privacy, particularly when that person has opted to take advantage of security features that keep their profile hidden from the general public. If the employer can't find the profile, then what business is it of theirs to know what's on it if it's not publicly accessible information? It doesn't seem fair to turn down a candidate for a job based on private information, and I side with Mr. Kerr who says, "it's akin to requiring somebody's house keys." As somebody who will more than likely have a job interview before Facebook comes to an end I find it disheartening to know that what I choose to put on my private page could compromise my chance at a job. I'm interested to see if anything pans out with this "proposed legislation" in Illinois and Maryland, and it's comforting to know that our lawmakers are at least questioning the practice. I'd also love to hear others' opinions on this so feel free to chime in!

Winning the Lottery

Before you get too excited, we didn't win the lottery- shucks. You've got to play to win, and after working in customer service at a grocery store that sold lottery tickets through high school I vowed never to play. I cringe to think about how much money the regular customers lost week after week. Not worth it for one in a gazillion odds! On the drive to work the other day they were talking about a recent winner on the radio and I found myself thinking about what I would do if I won a million dollars and, sadly, how quickly and easily I could spend it all. I'm not sure if it would even be enough to justify quitting my job. I'd definitely take a leave of absence, travel, pay off all of our debt and the debts of our immediate family members, buy a new house, and invest the rest for the benefit of future little Bussells. Just like that it'd be gone!

Where am I going with all this? Well, the other day Carl and I brought in the mail to find a $400 refund check from the closing costs of our mortgage last year. YAHOO!! We had a brief moment of excitement and then started brainstorming possibilities for our "free" money: a weekend trip, a new glass door for our condo, a roof rack for the Subaru, have a few things framed, put it towards our mortgage, car loan, student loans, savings, etc. I got really depressed at how easily it would get sucked into either the black hole of debt or something small-ish that we were planning on getting at some point anyways. It's a shame how easy it is to spend money and how boring it is to have to be a responsible adult! Although who knows, we still could decide to put it towards 1600 gumballs (the 25 cent variety) or 40 cheap bottles of wine, or something far more worthless and unnecessary, yet tangible and exciting. Any suggestions? And no, we won't give it to you.