Happy anniversary to us! Two years ago today, we stood in my mom’s backyard under a little tent and said our vows, then ate cheesecake with everyone and took off for Cape Cod. And it’s been pretty happily ever after since then.
We celebrated our first wedding anniversary yesterday! I had to work, of course, but we had the evening free. We exchanged gifts before dinner; I got Tom a small checkers/backgammon/chess set in a nice leather-bound box, designed for traveling, so we can take it to coffee shops and other places where one might enjoy chess. He, being awesome, got me the Complete New Yorker hard drive, with every issue of the New Yorker in digital form from 1925 to 2006, with extra space for upcoming years. I’m excited about reading profiles on basically anyone who matters, on demand, and as Tom put it, “We can read the review of Citizen Kane - from when it was released!” Too fun. I’m totally geeked out.
We dressed up went down to Applewood, which we crowned “the best meal we’ve had in Brooklyn, and possibly in New York City”. We had intriguing cocktails (a tarragon Tom Collins for me and some kind of cucumber-infused thing called “Slopeside” for Tom) and a shrimp risotto to start. I ordered a duck breast over wild rice salad and Tom had a hake, and it was all very excellent. Small, succulent portions.
We dropped by Cocoa Bar to pick up truffles and then came home and had truffles and chardonnay over a game of chess. Lovely evening, lovely anniversary.
On an only vaguely related note, the Times book section ran an article today about e-books that’s really interesting, detailing the new e-book readers coming out this fall. I really don’t think anyone’s going to easily convince me to give up my paper books, and Tom, who likes to write in books, will never be convinced, but it’s interesting all the same. As the article points out, they’ve been trying to work on this for years. I just like books as physical objects - especially, as I’ve lately discovered, books published by Picador, which not only tend to be excellent but are exactly designed to attract people with my exact aesthetic.
And that’s that.
Friday night was my first time home since Wednesday morning. We had plans, but they got cancelled. We watched The World, a slightly strange but still coherent Chinese film about workers at a low-budget Epcot-style place in Beijing, interspersed with random thirty-second cartoon bits underscored with Asian pop. I have a really difficult time liking Asian cinema in general, but this one was okay.
Saturday we slept in and cooked breakfast, then went to a small screening of the film Tom worked on in February (just us, the directors and their wives, and the writer). So much fun. It’s great to see something that you were deeply involved with coming together.
We came home and watched Fracture (Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling), followed immediately by Primal Fear (Richard Gere and a mind-blowing Edward Norton) - in doing so, we inadvertently were marathoning movies by the same director. Despite its melodramaticly stupid name, Primal Fear is probably the better movie - but Fracture is worth renting.
On Sunday after church we went shopping, then cooking, and then had a few people over for dinner. I made dijon-dressed new potato salad and hamburgers, and Tom cooked the hamburgers on our new indoor electric grill. They were pronounced by two present as “the best hamburger I’ve ever had”. So, a success for us. We make them with beer and Worcestershire sauce and onions and jalapeno peppers, and I think it makes a difference. Stayed up late discussing life.
We’d originally planned to go to the beach on Monday, but we just didn’t feel like making the long train trip and decided to go out to brunch (Los Pollitos II on 5th Ave in Brooklyn - cheap and yummy) and then went to Prospect Park for a few hours to read books and watch people flying the biggest kites I’ve ever seen in my life, with 8-foot wingspans. I finished Lolita - what a crazy book, but I bow at the feet of Nabokov. Came home and turned the leftover meat into tacos and watched The Wind Will Carry Us, an Iranian film that was surprisingly lively and funny. I was expecting something much more akin to other films I’ve seen from roughly that part of the world - slow, quiet, focus on the cinematography - but this was much funnier, with great dialogue.
I guess this is the start of the school year, which is the start of fall, which means everything starts in earnest again. I got up and took the long route running this morning, managing to cover over 3 miles, mostly running - a record for me, as I have a lot of trouble breathing and I’m trying to push through it. I think I’ve come to understand the concept of pushing through a “wall” better, though. Once you get past it, you start to feel like you could run forever.
Also, we’re returning to small group for the first time in a year, since we got married. We’re trekking out to Jersey City tonight. It’s sort of our old small group (though almost none of the same people), so we have grand hopes. It’s not a long way for me from work, but it’s a little longer for Tom, from Brooklyn; still, it takes a little over an hour, and we spend that much time getting to places in Manhattan.
Tomorrow we’re hoping to go back to IAM’s weekly Wednesday morning breakfast-and-discussion-group, from which we sort of took a break when I couldn’t go any more because of my job and Tom was working more consistently. But we’ll hopefully be back.
Tomorrow is also our first anniversary. :)
We made a CD for favors at our wedding a year ago, but we didn’t have the big wedding after all because of my Dad’s passing. So we’ve dispersed the CDs in our wedding thank-yous, which people have been receiving. But in the effort to get the thank-yous out, I forgot to include a track list, which I’m now printing below.
The CD is also now registered with Gracenote, so iTunes and various other music players should recognize the tracks.
Song of Songs
1. Pierce Pettis - Song of Songs
2. Coldplay - Til Kingdom Come
3. Andrew Peterson - Canaan Bound
4. Iron & Wine and Calexico - He Lays in the Reigns
5. Caedmon’s Call - Table for Two
6. Sixpence None the Richer - Melody of You
7. Glen Phillips - True
8. Blessid Union of Souls - The Rest of My Life
9. Jars of Clay - These Ordinary Days
10. Eastmountainsouth - Hard Times Come Again No More
11. Eisley - Just Like We Do
12. Dan Haseltine - For All the Saints
13. Over the Rhine - I Want You to Be My Love
I finally changed my name (to Wilkinson) yesterday at the Brooklyn Social Security Card office. I don’t have a card yet, but I guess it’s finally done. Our anniversary is in a week, so I guess it was about time. :)
I was confronted with an interesting question when I filled out the forms, though - apparently I could have changed my whole name if I wanted, or at least my middle name, and I could have retained my maiden name as my middle name. I remember a discussion about this last year. I did at one point consider retaining my maiden name as a sort of respectful remembrance of my Dad, but then I realized that he picked out my middle name and it’s the name he chose for me. On top of it, my maiden name is Clark, and that’s a man’s name. So I just scrapped the “Clark” altogether. I have a brother to pass it on.
I am getting on a train tonight after work to Albany. I just printed up a host of directions for Albany to Messiah, Messiah to our friends’ house, from there to the Morristown NJ Transit station, and from there to home for Mom. I’ll go straight to work on Friday and won’t be home until Friday night. I also just looked up Messiah’s schedule for the move-in day; very friendly. I can’t remember RPI’s schedule (which, because I never lived on campus, made sense, until I remembered that I was a Student Orientation Advisor my last summer - oh well), but it will be kind of fun to live through it again from a non-student, non-parent perspective. Parents are very funny when they’re moving their children into the dorm for the first time. That I remember well.
All this stuff with my brother starting college is making me all reminiscent for the ‘Tute - that, and some virtual run-ins with old college friends (hurrah for Facebook). On the bright side, it’s pushing me to work harder on my grad school apps. It’s true, I’m a classroom junkie. My career aspirations grow ever more understandable.
If you didn’t hear, Alissa and I are now starring in our own movie. Kudos to Cori Poley who did up the poster for us. I’m upset about the PG-13 rating though. I don’t understand why it would say, “some material may not be suitable for children.” The movie only covers the wedding, you know? So what’s that all about?
So we’ve been married for two weeks and a day today. And we like it.
Been taking it relatively easy around home, trying to recover from a couple of hectic weeks. It’s nice to just be the two of us for a while!
We had lunch with the excellent Todd at the excellent Dos Caminos in Soho after church on Sunday. I have not been a guacamole fan to date, but this has all changed. Savory, a little salty, nice and creamy but with good-sized chunks of veggies in it, all served with some great fresh tortilla chips in a stone bowl. Vive la guacamole! (Please ignore my preposterous language problems.) I’m still salivating.
In my neverending quest for the coolest feedreader, I stumbled upon Newshutch today. It’s great. I promptly passed it on to Ken, with whom I seem to have an unofficial who-can-find-cool-stuff-first competition going on (mutually beneficial to both us, our families, and our blog audiences). Anyhow, though he’d found it a few weeks ago, I still am all geeked out over it and think it’s great. Elegant and useful.
Because of all the recent activity surrounding my father’s funeral and the subsequent wedding, I neglected to mention that we caught the first official show of Chris Thile and the How to Grow a Band at the Bowery Ballroom on Tuesday night, August 29. It was stunning and awesome and I don’t want to spoil it all but you simply must get the album. They are five highly talented musicians who just rock.
Speaking of Ken, he set up a Flickr group for our wedding photos, so if you’ve got some (or you’re just plain curious), go. Because of the two-day postponement of the wedding, we had no professional photographer and the ceremony took place in my mom’s backyard, but many people turned out with cameras and we’ve still got a lot more to sift through.
It’s good to be back. :)
It’s been a week of tears and sadness and grief, but it’s been a week of an incredible outpouring of love on my family and me.
And tomorrow, we marry. There will be four in this little family again.
Four? I think.
Last night, after pizza and corn on the cob, we packed most of the stuff for the honeymoon. I moved to the city over 14 months ago and haven’t left for more than a few days since then, so ten days means a great and large amount of things to pack. Couple it with the unpredictable early-September Cape Cod weather, and there’s a lot to lug upstate. I am glad that my dress and shoes and veil are already in Albany, waiting for me and for Saturday morning.
Four days.
It’s rainy out - not raining, but wanting to, and it’s reminding me of last September and how it rained for weeks at a time and the sidewalks were littered with black umbrellas turned inside out, with broken spines. I remember that I didn’t have rubber rain boots (and I still don’t), and I remember flapping around town in the rain with flip-flops and being very cold. I remember in particular an evening where I flopped from my French class at NYU to Angela’s apartment for a goodbye party for her where Apryl made all kinds of strange and wonderful concoctions from whatever was in Angela’s fridge, and I remember watching The Ice Storm on her projector and talking about stuff with Tom. Before I knew him.
It’s mobbed outside of here. My office is adjacent to Radio City Music Hall, where Jack Black will be hosting the MTV Video Music Awards on Thursday night, and they’ve been preparing for at least a week already. There’s an actual MTV crew operating off of the terrace that I can see directly across from my desk. They’ve been there two days already. It’s kind of cool, really.
Tonight we head to the Bowery Ballroom with Kevin & Laura to see Chris Thile and his new “How To Grow A” band. There’s been so much to do that I keep asking myself why we planned to blow an evening so close to the wedding, but then I realize that we desperately need the break. We leave tomorrow night for Albany, transportation details still to be arranged, and it’s all a whirlwind from then on.
I have to remember to pack my toothbrush.