it’s been awhile & a list

It really HAS been awhile. Three months and eighteen days since my last post. No excuse, really, except that the summer seemed to vanish before my very eyes. (I suppose that happens when you spend one month of it in a foreign country and another with your head buried in a book studying. When I came up for air, it was August. Gasp!)

LOTS of things going on in the Layer household this summer…and I can’t wait to tell you all about them. Briefly. (Otherwise, we’d be here all day.)

France Trip: It was fabulous. I have a draft in here with a bunch of photos I intended to post when we got home…except that all the photos were the exact same ones that have already appeared on Facebook and I got busying studying for my test. Andrew and I diligently sorted his approximately 6,058 photos into a ‘highlights reel’ that we haven’t managed to show anyone, not to mention picking out the ones we need to get printed. (Not that we’ve managed to sort and print the pictures from our Italy trip two years ago, either.) It will happen, one day, perhaps by Christmas.
RD Exam: I passed! I can’t believe I didn’t blog about this. I did, however, post to Facebook.

The test was way harder than I anticipated it would be, and while I scored well, it certainly didn’t seem like it at the time. In fact, during the entire test I thought it was just as likely that I was failing as I was passing. And the ‘security measures’ they put you through certainly don’t help; I was photographed, finger-printed, forbidden to bring anything but my driver’s license into the test with me and denied my water bottle. The horror! By the time I was finished, I was a nervous, sweaty, dehydrated mess. The proctor handed me a folded-up paper with my score and I couldn’t bring myself to turn it over…until I accidentally dropped it while fumbling for the key to the locker they make you put everything in. I saw the word ‘congratulations!’ and allowed myself to breathe. It was all over.

3. I was in a wedding. Actually, Andrew and I both were. One of Andrew’s work buddies, Jon, got married to Stacey this July at Belhurst Castle in Seneca Falls, NY. Factoid: Seneca Falls was the model city behind the famous ‘Bedford Falls’ of It’s a Wonderful Life fame. So cute. I love her, we love them, I loved my dress and we can’t believe they’re moving to Rochester. Sad.

4. Just days after my test, in August, we flew to Florida for a few days to join the rest of Andrew’s family on vacation at the South Seas Island Resort on Captiva Island. Both Captiva and Sanibel Islands are so cute and charming. It was such a relief to go on the trip after passing my test–I could finally relax and really enjoy myself. Below is the view from our villa (we had our own balcony with a table and chairs where I spent every morning reading), and below that is the ocean from my perch on a lounge chair by the pool. Florida is ungodly hot and muggy, but there is no where I’d rather be for a beach vacation.

5. I’m on book number FIVE since passing the exam. I love to read, and it’s been so hard to find the time these past few years with school. I really enjoyed A Small Indiscretion by Jan Ellison, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer (get the tissues!) and Days of Awe by Lauren Fox. Picking up my next one today!

6. We’re projecting. Again. We’ve been at it all summer. I’ll need to do a separate post with photos to do it justice, but our new deck/patio/partial fence project has enlarged in scope to include a new ‘roof’ for our cellar door opening and extensive drainage for the yard. We just finished the french drain and new gutters and picked out our stone and deck wood today, so that’s exciting. I’ve also tackled perhaps 60% of our landscaping…and it has taken all darn summer. After doing barely the bare minimum in terms of yard work, no joke, for the last three years, I certainly had my work cut out for me. Again, I’ll need to do a separate post with photos. I finally finished a giant bed on the side of the house and am very happy with how it turned out. I’m already excited for more landscaping next summer once we finish the fence in the back and tear out the awful bushes in the front.

7. I protested! As I’m sure all of you are aware, Planned Parenthood is under some major scrutiny after it came out that not only are they taking the lives of unborn babies, they’re profiting from the sale of their body parts as well. A good friend organized a group of us to go to Buffalo and protest Aug. 22, along with others locally and nationally. My picture even made the paper! I was trained to be a crisis pregnancy volunteer in Ohio before we moved, and I’ve always felt called to this area of service. I’m hoping to get involved by offering nutritional counseling to pre- and post-natal women at one of our local centers.

8. I have a job! My first day of work was yesterday. I am a nutrition counselor at Weigel Health Center on the Buffalo State campus. It’s part-time and I really like it. I did it as a student this past spring, and now that I’m official, I get paid more and no one has to sign my notes (sweet). While I’d like to work in a hospital part-time as well, I’m appreciating the downtime right now after four busy years in school, a very busy summer and while we’re still elbow-deep in our summer-turned-fall project.

9. Writing: I’m stepping away from my traditional freelancing with the Advertiser, but am picking up a monthly nutrition column. I think was starting to get a little burned out on the features and really need to focus my time and energy on nutrition-related endeavors, writing and otherwise. I am, however, SUPER excited about the nutrition column. It will be a Q&A format, which I’m also excited about. It will appear later this month in our hometown paper, the East Aurora Advertiser.

10. Big changes are coming to the blog! Now that I’m an OFFICIAL Registered Dietitian, I’d like to take the blog in a more nutrition-focused direction, and use it to further my professional writing. I’m actually having a friend who works in her company’s web/graphic arts department to help me get going tonight! I’m really excited for a new look and purpose to the blog!

princess and the pea

I’ve been complaining for QUITE some time now about the state of our mattress, and the state of my back. I’m just way too young to be in so much pain every morning. Unfortunately, my husband can sleep on just about any surface with no trouble at all, so my cries fell on deaf ears for months. He told me in no uncertain terms that our seven-year-old mattress was ‘just fine’ and that any trouble I was having was clearly in my head. Humph.

Well, one week ago, the man did the unthinkable: he bought a mattress. After visiting only TWO stores on our first outing to try out mattresses. SO out of character, right?! We’d gone to church, popped into a store, ran some errands, popped into another mattress store, and just when we should have turned right to go home, he turned LEFT! When he looked at me and said, ‘Should we just go order it now?’ I thought I was hearing things.

Turns out, I like super soft mattresses. I want that ‘sink in’ feeling. Our old mattress was ‘super firm, which we saw on the label after moving it off the bed. Go figure.

Andrew came home to receive our new mattress just a few days after we ordered it, and decided to start enjoying it right away.

It’s almost DOUBLE the height of our old mattress, which is taking some getting used to. It comes to almost the top of our footboard and I have to hoist myself up each night, but it’s wonderful. I feel like I have to pinch myself each night as I sink into the bed because it’s too good to be true. I know my husband, and I thought this purchase was MONTHS away.

Of course, the man who bought a new mattress (relatively unexpectedly) couldn’t possibly pony up another $20 for the delivery guys to take our other one away…so it’s still sitting downstairs, providing hours of entertainment for the animals.

Between locking the kitties out of the room when we sleep and the new mattress, I’ve been sleeping better than I have in what seems like years, and just in time for my Buffalo General rotation. 5:30 a.m. comes early, folks.

Adirondacks

Andrew and I spent last weekend in Old Forge, NY, with some friends of ours. Paola is a classmate of mine at Buffalo State in the Dietetics program, and she and Mark got married this past fall. Mark grew up going to his family’s place, called ‘The Hut,’ in the Adirondacks. Old Forge is about four hours from Buffalo and a destination in both the summer and winter months. The Hut is on a lake, with a beautiful view from the living room. It’s a cozy, homey-type place–a few bedrooms and bathrooms, a kitchen and living room and fireplace. It’s decorated with very traditional ‘cabin’ decor–bears, ducks, pine trees, wood accents.

We started our trip with lunch at Betty’s, in downtown Buffalo. So good. Can’t wait to meet them there again soon!

We drove up on a Friday afternoon and got in just before dinner. After unpacking and sitting for a bit, we went out for a nice dinner at one of their local favorite restaurants, where we enjoyed great service and great wine. I had a truly fantastic dish, the ‘Brazilian Pork,’ which combined juicy pork medallions with a mix of black beans, onions, peppers and green chilies with sweet potato fries. Very memorable.

The next morning, our only ‘activity’ was to go snow shoeing later on, so we hung around until about lunch time. So nice to just relax in our jammies!

We ate brunch at a local diner, where Paola and I both ordered the buckwheat pancakes with blueberries and pecans. Also very good.

Here we are, snow shoeing at a local golf course in about four feet of snow–SO MUCH harder than the snow we’re used to around here. Talk about a work out! All four of us were glad to be finished as we neared the parking lot.

We spent the rest of the afternoon either napping (the boys) or relaxing on the couch (the girls), channel surfing, reading and writing. And snacking. I wrote a blog about National Nutrition Month to be posted on the Buffalo News (more about that later), and Paola and I caught the end of a sappy rom-com once we relinquished control of the remote from Mark, who’d much rather watch golf.

We went out that night to another favorite spot for dinner, where a bunch of us shared some lobster mac and cheese as an appetizer. I ordered the chili burger–why I don’t know–and ended up eating it with a fork. The ceiling of the restaurant was covered with thousands of business cards, but we weren’t able to finds Mark’s dad’s, which he put up there years ago.

Throughout the weekend, snow mobiliers where EVERYWHERE. It was so neat to see them whizzing across the lake, both day and night, and all the machines parked out in front of stores and bars and such. I loved that even ‘nicer’ restaurants are very casual, especially this time of year, when pretty much the only appropriate footwear is snow boots.

We turned in early that night–must have been wiped out from the snow shoeing–and slept in the next morning. With the time change as well, we weren’t all out of bed until well after 10 a.m. After relaxing a bit, running the laundry and cleaning up, we stopped at another local diner on the way out of town for lunch. My Rueben sandwich was fantastic, and Paola and I got some bread pudding to-go for the ride home.

We had a great weekend and were so thrilled to spend time with our friends in such a beautiful place. Sometimes you really have to ‘get away from it all’ and just relax. Between Andrew’s summer trips to Lake Tippecanoe in Indiana and this year-round getaway in the Adirondacks, it makes me want to have something like that for our kids one day. Somewhere not too far away to call our own, to make memories, and to get away from it all.

One day.