A Very Valiente Change of Direction

Last last year I decided that My One Word for 2012 was going to be LESS. I laways give my years a theme. Here's a list of themes:
2011: PROACTIVE
2010: Getting over the Boogey Man God
2009: The year of getting my s--- together
2008: Survival, plain and simple
2007: The year of getting rid of things
2006: The year everything changed
2005: The year of trying new things
2004: The year of finding a place for everything
2003: This is a complicated year to talk about, so I'll skip this one

So last year was PROACTIVE and this year would be less. Except that in 2007 I decided to stop arguing with God about the direction of my life, so when He pressed upon me that this had better would in fact be a year of searching for CONTENTMENT, I not-as-quickly-as-I-should-have changed my theme.

When I moved to Savannah in 2003, I was so very angry at God with assigning my life to that city. I moved with a rotten attitude and there was nothing that would have changed my mind. This was the beginning of a downward spiral I call my "Horse's Ass Phase." Because I was, indeed, a horse's ass during that time. When I moved to El Paso in 2006, I decided that I would and could be content anywhere that I could praise the Lord and pay my bills (I've added "love my husband" to that). So now that I am living in New York with fewer local friends than I can name on one hand, I am struggling to find contentment here.

It's tempting to say I was content in San Antonio, because I was for the most part. It's also tempting to compare life here to life there and think that I'll never be content here. But that won't work. Not at all. That's a sure-fire way to end up right back where I was: a horse's ass.

So I am re-emabarking on my journey for 2012, in search of CONTENTment. Not sure how I'll find it or make it, but I'll pursue it and lay it (and my prayers) before the Lord and wait expectantly as David described in Psalm 5:3. Perhaps I won't be content by the end of this year, but I find that proactively pursuing a goal is infinitely more fruitful than passively succombing to mediocrity.

Stay tuned and keep reading, won't you?

A Very Valiente Collection of Crap

Minimalism is so fascinating to me; I admire and desire it, and yet it has eluded me for the 9 years I have lived outside of my parents’ home. A lifestyle of living with less and enjoying more- seems so delightful to me- sort of serene and easy-to-breathe. A loved one of mine confessed that she almost, kinda, just-a-lil-bit was jealous of the people who lost everything in Katrina- that sometimes she wished she could pare down to almost nothing, lose all her possessions, and be left with nothing but the barest of necessities. Not the “possibly going to die” part, or the disease or anything- she didn’t make light of the situation, I think she was just overwhelmed with the stuff in her life.

So my One Word this year is LESS. We’ve moved into a home with exponentially less space and I constantly feel overwhelmed by the amount of “things” that are just hanging around, taking up real estate. There was a time when I lived in complete excess, engaging in retail therapy instead of addressing how unhappy I was with my life. But that’s another blog. So I have been in constant declutter/purge/throw-my-crap-the-F-out mode since 2007. In 2006, I moved to El Paso with a 25-foot truck; when I left in 2008, I had a 14-foot truck (but that's another blog). And yet, I still feel crowded and cluttered and stuffy.

So the Yankee reins me in and prevents me from making a pile and lighting it on fire. He also saves his precious mementos from me and my junk box. I tend to go a bit crazy when I get into the mood to organize, and he knows it about me. My mother cautions me about getting rid of something and wishing I had it later. To be perfectly honest, the only item I’ve gotten rid of that I now miss is my Topsy Turvy, because I could make my ponytails look cuter- but I could also recreate this with a popsicle stick and a piece of string.

Like most people, I struggle with the thought that I’ll get rid of something and either want it or need it later. And I’ll be broke or stuck in the middle of the Zombie Apocalypse and won’t be able to get it again. But it’s been occurring to me lately that just because I enjoyed collecting and owning something at one time doesn’t mean I cannot just get over it. I am a huge fan of Charlie Brown and the Yankee really like Snoopy. But does that mean I can’t just downgrade my loving to liking and boot the knick knacks? I also really like Cow Parade cows, but do I have to keep my collection? I don’t think so… and yet I’m not quite ready to get rid of them yet.

I like to give my items away to people that I think might like them, or find them useful. My friend who shall be referred to here as “B like a Sharpie,” always delights in getting my crap- and somehow, my stuff looks better in her house. But just because I offer, doesn’t mean any person is ever obligated to take it- I won’t take it personally and it won’t hurt my feelings. I mean, I don’t want the stuff either! So if you get a message in one form or another from me, offering you some stuff, please don’t be surprised. And if you’ve given me an item and you show up and it’s no longer in my home, please just know that I have sufficiently loved it and consequently let it go.

A Very Valiente Holiday Season

A very Merry Christmas to my readers; I hope you had a great day and a joyful holiday season. This is my first Christmas in New York, the first one away from my family since I was living in Savannah in 2004. I've been missing my family and friends in San Antonio a lot lately, and the holiday season made the ache just a bit stronger.

I absolutely LOVE traditions, I think probably because I like repetition and steps (because I love efficiency). Since the Yankee and I became a couple, I've been thinking up all kinds of traditions we could have, for everything from birthdays to holidays. I love having inside jokes, wearing matching clothes, and having things that we "always" do. This year I tried recreating the always delicious hashbrown casserole from the Cracker Barre, in an attempt to stake out a Christmas Tradition. It's supposed to look like this:

Instead mine looked like this:

I couldn't find GF Cream of ANYTHING soup at my grocery store, so I tried to improvise by making a pot of gravy. I also couldn't find frozen hashbrowns so I shredded my own potatoes. It turned into a grey, pasty faily. Only the cheesy parts tasted good. I might try it again sometime, if I can find all of the ingredients. The Yankee suggested just keeping it simple with eggs, bacon, and pancakes. He has good ideas like that.

Growing up, we always got a visit from Santa, gifts from Mom and Dad, gifts from various extended family members. We didn't go to church on Christmas Eve, unless we were visiting someone who did. The Yankee grew up celebrating no holidays whatsoever, as his family members are Jehovah's Witnesses. When we started dating, we had many long talks about how to compromise and create our own traditions.

We settled on no Santa (or Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, or any other mythical creature- but that's another blog), one Christmas tree with religious and family-themed ornaments, and exchanging three gifts (because Jesus got three gifts). This year I confess that I broke that three gift rule- I think perhaps because I am always trying to make up for the 20+ years that the Yankee didn't celebrate anything.

We don't really have many traditions started yet. We still have plenty of time yet, and no real deadline. It's been a great day.

A Very Valiente Take on Church, no Christmas, no Church at Christmas time

A few confessions before we get started and then I promise only 4 paragraphs of writing.

The Yankee and I are not good at going to bed "on time" or even at a reasonable hour, even if we have something important the next day.

I love love love Christmas and I love going to church.

I get migraines, which I find to be completely BS.

The Yankee and I share a love of dry, cynical, offensive, and crude humor. We do this in the privacy of our own home 99% of the time, with occasional leaks around the edges. This may or may not be a recurring theme in future blogs.

Church

We have not gone to church regularly since we moved to New York since 2009. We've had bursts when we went every Sunday and stretches when we didn't go at all. However, we were involved in a small group since April of 2010 and we've just joined one here. There is something about the communcal experience of eating together and having regularly scheduled human interaction that - and the Yankee put this best- really feels more like how the Corinthians did "church." For them, it was a community and a life style- not something that occurred once a week. It was certainly this way in San Antonio, and we hope that it will be here in New York.

Going to Church in December

I've had a migraine for 10 days now. The kind that gets sharp for a few hours, dulls down a bit, then feels gone- only to reemerge when I get out of bed or stand up. So we've been planning to go to church for a few weeks now and haven't- last week because of this migraine and this week because of this migraine+the Yankee is sick. My favorite time to go to church is during Christmas and Lent, because I love hearing sermons that remind me of the "uglies" of Christmas and Easter. It's so easy to remember the high points of the story, without remembering how badly a young Jewish woman would have been treated if she's been engaged, gotten pregnant, and said it was God in her womb. 

The thing is that I really WANT to go to church right now. And then my alarm goes off and I struggle with wanting to go, but not wanting to get up, get dressed, go to church, etc. And then I stand up and my head feels like a fiery knife is slicing through my brain stem and it's too easy to decide not to go. I want to go see people and hear a sermon. I've missed being actively engaged in the word of God, pondering and seeking, and learning. Even though I am terribly introverted and it takes a lot of work to talk to people, I want to meet the body of our church and recognize faces and stories. But I am in my pajamas, struggling with whether or not I really could have made it to church this morning (which started about 3 minutes ago).

Christmas and Life

So NY is in full-swing Christmas hustle and bustle. We just got our tickets to see the Rockettes, shopping is almost done, and we have a nicely-scented beast of a tree in our living room. I miss my parents so badly this time of year, as well as our Care Group in San Antonio. This group was my "people." When good things or bad things happened, when something funny happened- honestly, when life happened, we couldn't wait to share it with our Care Group. Christmas is my mother's favorite time of year and my father's favorite time to complain. He grouses about putting up lights, and then spends the day making it all perfect (he's sweet to my mom like that). My mom does an over-the-top Christmas that I just love. I miss these two groups a lot.

The End- these four sentences does not count as a paragrah.

So we're in a new group and do want to go to church, but haven't. We're in the middle of Christmas, missing our people. The Yankee is sick and I am migraining. Stay tuned for my next post; I shall be writing about how the Valiente Family does Christmas and later doing a retroactive post in which I compare and contrast how the Yankee and I behave at parties.

A Very Valiente Life in New York

My friend Whom I Will Call Raw Sugar asked me for a lengthy email about life in New York, which I happily sent. I do love to write about myself, after all. Several of my friends and family members have been asking about the protests and Ground Zero. It's interesting living here because there are all these cool places to go and eat, but we have things like work and groceries and bills to think about in the middle of it all. On the weekends, we still have to do our laundry and buy groceries (which means carrying them all home, BTW), so it's actually hard to make time to do all the amazing things we want to do. It takes us about 45 minutes or so to get downtown- which also means it takes about that long to get home. So it's tempting to think we could just dash off and browse the Met, but that's not always easy. For example, today we are going to Target that is a mile away and that means some complicated subway planning OR a mile walk there and a mile walk home, carrying whatever we buy (great for budgeting purposes though!).

We try to do one fun thing a week; this weekend we went a super fancy steak place. One of my co-workers had some coupons for The Capital Grille so we most definitely made reservations and were on our way. Unfortunately, our subway stop was closed and we ended up in Brooklyn. The train we needed to take wasn't going back to Manhattan so we had to ride further into Brooklyn and double back. When we got out and tried to find a cab in Chinatown, the driver didn't know the area and we had to Mapquest and guide him there. When we finally got to Wall Street, we drive right past Zuccoti Park and saw all the protesters. The dinner was amazing and then we set off to find our way home.

On our travel back to a familiar subway stop, we passed the protesters again. It looks like a Gap commercial. It's like a bunch of hipsters on a camp out, with one or two wierdos who do things like kick the barriers and taunt the cops. It wasn't a ruckus or a shenanigan at all. Pretty peaceful. We also passed Trinity Church and saw Alexander Hamilton's grave and then walked by Ground Zero. This is what people ask me about the most.

Right now Ground Zero is still a very large and active construction zone. I am not sure if there are parts that are open, but from where we were, everything is gated and there are cranes and cameras all over. It looks like it's going to amazing to see once it's done, though.

We went to the Museum of Natural Science and in one afternoon we got through half of one floor! We did go to the MoMA, but modern art isn't really our thing. We went to Columbus Circle, which is all hustle-and-bustle and you're just as likely to get run over as you are to get a cup of coffee! I was in Starbucks and saw this guy and I kept thinking, "hmm, he looks like someone famous," and then I realized, nope- he didn't look like someone famous, he just WAS someone famous. And I can't remember who he is or what he was in!

It's in wholly wierd and bizarre to live in a place where there are protesters that are getting national coverage! It's so bizarre to pass Washington Square every day on my way to work and know that part of "When Harry Met Sally" was filmed there. It's unreal that my favorite place for dessert is Cafe Lalo, which is the coffee shop from "You've Got Mail." It's also refreshing to feel cool, crisp fall weather and not feel like I need to soak it up because it will be gone in a week and 100 degrees plus humidity will return.

Life in NY is cool and strange and a bit too anonymous. I miss my parents so much sometimes that I get teary. I miss my Care Group and girlfriends constantly and I think about them no less than once a day. I wish we had a church already. It's not exactly "home" yet, but I think it will be soon.

A Very Valiente Household Discovery

Moving to New York is an adventure. We knew it would be. We anticipated an adjustment as we figured out the subway and the people, as well as the idea of having EVERYTHING delivered (which we very rarely do). There are a few things that aren't necessarily NY-specific, but most definitely aren't found commonly in the south.

Our building is like the ones you see in the movies- you come into a very small doorway and buzz the apartment of the person you're visiting. For some reason, I felt very shy about using the speaker. We ordered lunch and I asked The Yankee to answer it.


Confession: not once have I ever lived without central air- unless I was a baby and that doesn't count. It kind of hurt my heart to think that I'd have to BUY and air conditioner and install it myself. My inner princess doesn't care to buy items to compensate for a deficiency in a building that I don't own- hey, I SAID it was my inner princess!

So each room but the bathroom has one of these. There is no thermostat. If it's anything like our shower, our home will go from Igloo to Inferno status within about 3 seconds of turning this on. And while we're talking about air temperature, why isn't there a heater in the bathroom? You know what I predict? I'll be shaving in December, get out of the warm hot scalding shower and immediatley get goose bumps, thus negating the shaving efforts. Poor Yankee...


MEASUREMENT FAIL.
I have been pestering the Yankee about curtains since we got married, but we never really needed them, since we had blinds (the Yankee has an inner princess too, apparently). So when we selected out apartment, we decided to buy curtains before we moved so we I could enjoy a naked house as soon as we moved in. See my last post for a list of reasons this was a bad idea.

So naturally we forgot to bring a measuring tape while we were apartment shopping. Since I grew up military, I decided to improvise and use body parts to measure. So the windows were the distance from my fingertips to my breastbone. The window in the picture was two of those lengths, plus a small divider in the middle the was about the size of my hand. Well... you can see the value of a measuring tape in this story, can't you?

So there are a few other things that have been surprising, and I'll be sure to record them as they come along. Subway highlights include having to change lines completely as the police investigated a suspicious package and broken water mane that doused several lines at lunchtime on Monday. The lines weren't repaired until way after lunchtime. Thankfully I work from home- the Yankee was not so lucky, unfortunately.

A Very Valiente Crap Alert

We are here in New York! This is an exciting place to be. Currently I am sitting at my desk, looking out across a park, and feeling a breeze that is gettng colder and colder and as cold front moves across the Tri-State Area.

So the move went pretty well. Sort of. Actually no, the moving part itself was pretty much crap. It rained, we took too much stuff on the plane, some of our items got destroyed by the movers- it was a rough couple of days. In my next few posts, I will relay some of our adventures and lessons.

I always overestimate the amount of allowable space and have and under estimate the weight of items. I cut wrapping paper too small, I grab a hand basket at the grocery store and end up struggling under the weight of 25 items when I should gotten a cart. We knew we could both check 2 50-pound bags and carry on one small bag at Southwest. We also knew our items would take awhile to get there, so we had a pile mountain of stuff that we were taking with us. I didn't want to pay to ship a box, but as we started packing our stuicases, we realized it was inevitable.

We had planned to take blankets, sheets, towels, and air mattress, and clothes for a few weeks with us. We had an apartment and didn't want to stay in a hotel, so we were trying to bring "essentials." By essentials I mean 25 hangers, a coffee press, every.single.piece of clothing we own, and a few other things for fun.

We bought some space bags so we could fit everything into four bags. We bought a 4 piece luggage set. We made stacks. FAIL. Everything DID fit, but zippers broke and when we plunked the items on the scale at the airport. three of our bags were overweight. This left me doing a scramble to re-allocate items into bags and left the Yankee and I carrying a LOT of crap onto the plane.

We landed in NYC to a lot of rain and an hour-long line to get a cab. The Yankee waited with out TEN BAGS while I waited in line. We finally got a cab, got home, and were in bed by 3 am. We borrowed an air mattress from my parents, and it turns out we took the twin mattress, not the queen.

Because I'm somewhat of a Crazy Girl sometimes, I scheduled an interview at 10 am the next day. That interview led to a referral to another agency and a trip down to Wall Street. Stay tuned: this referral paid off BIG TIME.

So that's adventure number one. We now have to PAY to send two suitcases and an air mattress back to my parents. Stay tuned for the story of the Arrow Mayflower movers and why you should never ever use them.