Day 2 -- In which everyone is well fed

If you've never been to Colonial Williamsburg, I am telling you now : go. If only for the food. (I shouldn't blog when I'm hungry. Everything always comes out in cornbread and tacos. I should be telling you about the wonderful little town, but all I can think about is the Brunswick stew.)

Brunswick stew is possibly the most delicious thing I have ever had the pleasure of eating. Today we drove from DC to Williamsburg, and tonight Brayden and I went wandering about Colonial Williamsburg around dinner time. He took me to Chowning's Tavern. It was all manner of authentic. Candlelight, dark wood, musicians wandering around the rooms playing. And, poss

ibly the most interesting feature, "common seating." It's when they put you at a table with total strangers. We sat with another couple (Jeff and Heather) and had a remarkabley wonderful time. Brayden and Jeff found they had alot in common, and we all stayed for over an hour after we were done. The waitress brought us a game to play called "Shut the Box", which Brayden and I now have to get for ourselves, because it was a blast.

When we got home this evening, we discovered that our hotel has a 24/7

mini golf course on the premises. Brayden beat me 60 to 40. And then, when we got back to our room, we found that the hotel had left us a care package! Two bottles of this AMAZING apple cider, a bag of peanuts (from the tavern we'd just left) and a "Congratulations on your recent nuptials" card.

Tomorrow is the tour day. We're seeing as much of Colonial Williamsburg as we can before we have to leave on Friday morning.

Day 1 -- THE WEDDING!

Today, Kaitlin Bellamy became Kaitlin Bellamy Cluff. Brayden Cluff was stripped of his bachelorhood. Another happy couple got to change their facebook relationship status to "married," and I got to wear a pretty pretty dress :)

All is well with the world. And here's the first day of our "Every Day an Adventure Project 365." Although I REALLY have to think of a better title for it. I tried "EDAP" for short but that just sounds weird.

Anyway, the first "adventure" (and I classif

y "adventure" in this blog as anything odd, o

ut of the ordinary, generally interesting, amusing, worthy of discussion, or possibly deadly) came when we got to the hotel and opened our suitcases.

This is what greeted us. Someone in Brayden's family had filled our luggage with rice. Thousands upon thousands of grains of rice. Instead of throwing it to send us off ... well, let's just say we'll be finding rice in our pockets for the next six years.

Project 365

Project 365 : The task of taking one picture a day for an entire year. Usually a year of significance, i.e baby's first year, freshman year of college.

A large part of newlywed life involves creating your own family traditions. In the few days Brayden and I have been married, several have already sprung to life on their own. We also set goals (family prayer and scripture study, etc) and try to mesh our different lifestyles together.

This Project 365 is a goal established to solidify a tradition. The tradition of taking pictures. I took no pictures when I was younger, or even as many as I would have liked in high school and the first two years of college. So Brayden and I are going to have pictures. Every day for the first year of married life, we are taking at least one picture. Of anything. Sometimes it's a picture of us, sometimes it's a picture of the unusually large spiders nesting outside the beach house (trust me, you'll get that story later).

My hope is that we will get into the habit of taking pictures, so that even when we're done with this year, we'll be able to continue to capture our memories together.

And more important than the actual taking of pictures is looking for the right picture to take. Already we've learned that we go out of our way to make things adventurous if it's for the camera (especially me:) So we set out into this first year looking not only for a picture a day, but for an adventure a day.

Wish us luck!

~Katydid

P.S: These first few posts are me playing catch-up. I've only just now been able to find the time (and the wireless internet) necessary to post days 1-6.

Public Restrooms ...

... are sleazy, slimy, smelly, crowded, cramped and all-around gross. And women are insane when it comes to restrooms. Every one of them seems to think that their needs are far superior to the needs of everyone else in the thirty-foot line. And they let their kids run around and look under doors and wreak havoc with the automatic dryers.

And really, how hard is it to keep the countertops clean and dry? You're grabbing a paper towel to dry your hands anyway. An extra second and a half and you can wipe up the soapy scummy wet mess you made while washing your hands.

Public restrooms are messy, and in constant disrepair. Why? Because they are built to be that way. I mean really, think about it. I can't speak for the guys (having only been in a men's bathroom on a few choice occasions) but when women's restrooms are built nicer, they stay clean. When they put wallpaper up and put a "lounge" area just outside them. When it smells nice, because the company has spent the extra three bucks a month and gotten automatic air fresheners. The purpose of the restroom hasn't changed, and yet no doors are ripped off hinges. Toilet paper isn't trailing all over the floor. The countertops aren't wet and gooey. But grey tile and grey doors and two inches of wiggle room in every direction, and no wonder the ordinary public restrooms are treated as they are.

The best public restroom I've ever been to was in New York City, at a restaurant called Mars 2112 . It was clean, it was "themed" without being glitzy and tacky, and it had an attendant. Someone who was paid to stay there and clean up after every single use. She refilled toilet paper the second it was out. She was constantly wiping the countertops and cleaning the mirrors, and she was actually pretty fun to talk to. For a position like that, you've really got to get someone with personality. But she had it, and she made going to the bathroom in a public venue, something I generally avoid, tolerable.

I'll be honest. The food itself was nothing to write home about. But I'd rather go to Mars 2112 again than some of the other places we went that trip. Not because of the theme necessarily (although it was cute and fun) but because I respect a company who cares about all aspects of its business. A friend in the fast food industry once told me, "You wanna know where to eat, you check their bathrooms first. Because I guarantee you they'll be cleaner than the kitchen." Now that is a scary thought.

Public restrooms freak me out. But the bright side to all this is that the particular restroom that triggered this rant was at Union Station. In DC. Which means, I'M IN WASHINGTON DC! Which means I'm getting married tomorrow. Which means that none of this is really important in the grand scheme of things, because tomorrow at this time I'll be at the temple getting dressed, about to marry the most wonderful man on the planet.

Seriously?

What kind of world do we live in that the first time the ice cream truck comes around all season is on a cloudy not-too-hot day halfway through the summer?

Free

As a poor starving college student, I am always in the market for free stuff. AND, add to that the fact that I will be getting married in a little over a month. Free is good. Freely given is always preferred to forcibely taken, or just doing without.

One of the blogs that I follow is having a giveaway. [[I do hereby present thee, dear reader, with a link.]]

Of course, one of the ways to enter is to post something about it on my own blog. I could just post something like "Hey, here it is, have a link and an info dump and I HOPE I WIN!" All of which would be true. But instead, I would like to take this opportunity to spotlight the blog hosting the contest and yes, perhaps suck up just a little bit.

Every newlywed couple has questions, and there are boatloads of answers out there for them. But you have to be careful on whose advice you take. I trust my parents (especially my mother), my grandparents, and all of my aunts and uncles wholeheartedly when it comes to marital and familial advice. But rarely would I go to a stranger, and follow her with the same sort of trust.

I think it has something to do with the values. I found this blog by accident one day, and have been following it ever since. Because the woman who writes it voices common sense when it comes to family life, alongside the exact same strong moral and religious background that I grew up with. I've read other "family" blogs, and I know how other families operate. But I like the LDS way. We specialize in families. So I would like to tip my hat to you Mrs. Mordecai, even if I don't win. Here's to you and your values. May my new family and I continue to honor them as you have.

And here's to my mother, and my grandmother. My future mother-in-law. All of my married and soon-to-be-married friends who have kept those values alive and strong in their homes and their families. To all of you, and your free advice. I am very greatful for it.

Downhill

The thing about going downhill on a bike is this : Part of your mind is always going "Hey, I'm on a bike, so this is exercise! It's not as bad as I thought it would be!" Forget the fact that you're not pedaling, or even breaking a mild sweat at that point. It's all in your head.

But whether or not you chose to give in to this part of your mind and believe that you are becoming a more physically fit person by soaring downhill at incredible and sometimes psychotic speeds, going down is an important part of the biking process. Not only because it's a break from the painful uphill that threatens to kill you off, but because you did, after all, have to go up to reach it in the first place. It's not only your break, it's your reward. Somehow, riding downhill if you've simply walked your bike uphill is never quite as thrilling. I always feel a little bit guilty for wimping out, and I can't enjoy the ride down as much as I should.

At the risk of sounding incredibly corny, I believe life, especially student life, can be looked at the same way. Maybe it's just me, but I never trust something that comes too easy. Grades, health, physical fitness. Love. I think that if we succeed in these areas, it's because we've worked for them. Because we were willing to sacrifice more in the beginning to have more in the end. I went through six years of chorus line roles and bit parts before I ever got a lead, and I don't regret a bit of it. I never would have appreciated getting a bigger part if I didn't know what it took to get there, and if I hadn't been willing to work for it.

I'm getting married in August, and I'm facing all manner of sacrifices. In fact, Brayden keeps telling me, "Less now equals more later." I agree with him. Yes, the first year of marriage is the hardest. But the couples who make it through are even stronger. We're willing to work for what we have, because it's important to us. And every now and then in the uphill life, we get that breath of fresh air as we soar downhill. A break. A reward. But we have to ride all the way to the top of that hill first. Then, the downhill is truly worth it.

**image lovingly borrowed from http://mtnbikersblog.blogspot.com/