My Thanksgiving or A Strange Day to be a Vegetarian

Thanksgiving is a favorite holiday of mine.  I love the nostalgia it invokes, I love the smells of the meal cooking, I love sitting with my siblings in our pajamas, eating carrot bread and watching the parade.  This year we decided to do it a little differently.  As I just moved to the East Coast 2 weeks before the holiday it seemed silly for me to fly all the way home again to eat a meal with my parents.  Instead, on Wednesday I took the train down (over?) to Boston to spend the holiday with my little sister and dearest friend Marissa and her family.  This was my first Thanksgiving not spent at home in California, and it was full of joy and laughter and delicious food.  You may be wondering, "Ashleigh, if you have forsaken the eating of meat, what, pray tell, did you nosh on this most gastro-focused of days?" (sorry, I watched a lot of Deadwood over the weekend). An excellent question, certainly--Marissa's all to kind parents made salmon just for me so I could partake in the beautiful feast they prepared.  And even though I was eying the turkey and mashed potatoes the entire time, salivating like an idiot, my own food was so delicious that I was easily distracted.  Thanksgiving is a strange day to be a vegetarian, to be sure, but I made it through with hardly any trouble and a very full stomach.

I, like an idiot, left my camera at home so had to rely on my iPhone to capture the weekend, a mistake I won't likely make again.  Being without my SLR in a beautiful place like New England was pretty agonizing; I kept kicking myself all weekend.  Alas, here are some lovely shots from my cellular device.  Hope your holiday weekend was as magical as mine!

p.s. As you can see by the last row of photos, my sister and I made a sojourn to Hingham, MA with Marissa's family to Wahlburgers which is exactly what you think it is: the new burger joint owned and operated by Mark, Donnie and Paul Wahlberg.  It was a great time--I had yummy grilled cheese (they don't have vegetarian options yet), Steve Carrell was there (literally), and Hingham is right on the beautiful water.  Such a lovely day. 

An Ashleigh Grows in Brooklyn

view of the sunset from Ikea

 It’s official.  After 2 and a half years of waiting and longing and bitching and moaning I, Ashleigh Hill, am a New Yorker once more.  Or should I say a Brooklynite? Or a Red Hookian?  No matter how you slice it, I am back and ready for adventure.  Truthfully, Saturday was a scary day.  A month ago when I decided to move back to New York my mom decided that it was something I had to do alone; for the first time in my life, she wouldn’t be there when I moved.  I didn’t realize just how fucking big of a deal this was until Saturday morning, as I drove around Brooklyn with a lost cab driver, Googling directions to the apartment and praying to see a glimpse of something familiar.  It was scary as hell, having no idea what I was walking into, that fear that grabs your insides and makes you stop in your tracks.  As I stared at my stark room at 8 am Saturday morning, running on probably 2 hours of sleep, all I could think was, “WHAT HAVE I DONE?!!? I CANT DO THIS!”  I stood there for probably 5 minutes, just looking around the room and mumbling, “oh shit oh shit oh shit” under my breath.  Some tiny part of my brain, thankfully, had planned for this exact situation in the days before moving.  As soon as my bed and bedding was delivered a few days ahead of my arrival I began to run through my plan for settling in.  Item #1 was to make my bed so I could crawl into it and sleep.  In the midst of my freak out, that tiny pre-planning part of my brain started shouting, “ASHLEIGH: make. the. bed. MAKE. THE. BED.”  Pretty soon my “oh shit” chorus became a round, melding with “make the bed” and before I knew it, the bed was made, I had retrieved pjs from my enormous suitcase and was in bed.

Top: Dean and Kyle, Bottom: sights of Ikea

I woke up a few hours later with a plan.  I had spent the winding down to sleep time planning what I wanted to do with my room.  I made a list in my head.  I went over it as I slept.  When I woke up I wrote the list in my phone and set about preparing for my darlings, Dean and Kyle, to arrive for lunch and an Ikea trip.  There is no need to go into a ton of detail about this part of the day as most of it consisted of browsing the Ikea show room and laughing until my sides nearly split but needless to say we found 90% of the things on my list and brought them back to my apartment.  Here is what I will say about Dean and Kyle: these are they people you want as friends—the people who will haul their asses on a bus out to Brooklyn and spend 3 hours in Ikea with you, planning and mentally decorating your room and THEN return and set everything up.  These are the guys, the ones who stay until it is done.  The ones who, even though they are clearly tired, carefully move through the set up to make sure that everything is done correctly.  The ones who, after all is said and done, still want to go out and celebrate and don’t even get mad when you get everyone lost walking to the train.  These are the guys you want to have with you.  I am BEYOND grateful to them for all they did today (and to my new roommate, Kyla, as well, who has kept me sane the past week by working around weird mattress delivery schedules and giving me huge pieces of furniture).  I know that without these three I would have spent most of the day in my room, crying over a seemingly terrible decision.  These three, with their confidence and their caring, gave me the strength to be brave on a day when I missed my mom and dad more than anything.  And it is because of these three that I know that everything is going to be ok.  Because I know I have people in my corner, even if I’m not 100% sure where that corner is or what bus I need to take to get there.  And knowing this is half the battle.  Looking back on today, the best thing I did was to make a plan and then set out to execute it, detail by detail.  And the absolute best thing I did was chose to surround myself with people who wanted to help make that possible.

Things that are difficult might not always be fun, but they certainly help us learn in a way that nothing else can.  And sometimes these are the experiences we need, the ones that make us take a step back and make a detailed list, the ones that make us feel hyper aware, the ones that force us to take a risk.

I'm Back!

New York was absolute magic.  Getting there was absolute hell (thanks for canceling my flight, San Jose International Airport) but after a 12 hour delay and getting to sleep in my own bed (which, truthfully, was awesome) I made it to my favorite place in the world.  And let me tell you, NYC did not disappoint.  She was beautiful and sunny (ok, it was a little hot) and I got to see all of my favorite people there.  I think I spent more time outside and walking around this weekend than I have in the last month, which was both awesome and sort of sad since, after all, I live in California where outdoor adventures are an integral part of our crunchy, hippie demeanors.  Anyway, I was having so much fun that I didn't snap a ton of pictures.  I was too busy being in the moment and trying to absorb as much sun and lovely friend time as humanly possible.  I'm still in the process of editing them but try to share some of them later this week.

New York has this way of re-glueing any loose pieces of my heart that might have come undone.  I feel revitalized and rejuvenated and I feel more creative and ready to tackle the rest of the summer.  And it is awesome.

If Found, Please Call...

I have lost my creativity.  Ok, not lost.  Lost seems a little to dire.  Let's say misplaced.  I have misplaced my creativity.  I don't really know where it went, but it seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet.  I go through spells like this every once in a while, where I don't feel inspired.  Typically, I just ride it out, work through whatever is going on and bing bang boom, in no time at all, the creative juices are flowing through me once more.  But now?  Now is literally the most inconvenient time in the world for me to feel uninspired.  I have so so so much to do for The Violet and nary a shred of motivation with which to accomplish any of it.  I feel frustrated, especially since my usual tricks aren't working.  Ok, trick.  I have one trick.  Do you want to know what it is?  Singing.  LOUDLY.  Often while accompanying myself on some sort of stringed instrument.  Lately, however, my throat is doing this thing (my osteopath called it a "stress response") where it gets all tense and doesn't want to relax and so singing isn't so much relaxing as it is frustrating and agitating and discouraging.  Worry not, oh friends of the blog, I have a doctor's appointment on Thursday and we are going to figure this whole thing out.  I promise to keep you posted.

Until then, I am trying to find little other things to distract me from my creative ennui.  For example, on Sunday I took a drive up to Napa (as much as I dislike living here, sometimes Northern California has perks) with two beautiful friends for a wine tasting afternoon.  It was pure magic, even though it was a tad bit rainy, with mist rolling over the hills and winding its way through the vineyards.  As far as Sundays go, this one was the tops.

Weekend.

I don't know about you, but I really needed the weekend after this past week.  On Friday, my coworker, Adam, and I looked at each other and said, "seriously, are we done yet?"  It was only a 4 day week but it felt like it took forever.  I was extremely happy when the end of Friday came (even though I was officially the last person to leave the building....at 7pm) and I was free to gallivant off into the distance to do god only knows what.  Side note, do you actually know the definition of gallivant?  Here is the definition, according to my computer (which, as already discussed, carries most, if not all, of the knowledge): 


gallivant |ˈgaləˌvant| verb [ intrans. ] informal
go around from one place to another in the pursuit of pleasure or entertainment : she quit her job to go gallivanting around the globe


Fascinating.  I guess this means I've been using it correctly all along.  Score one for me!  Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that the weekend came around and I did what any self-respecting 20 something would do:  I didn't get piss drunk but instead spent a lot of time eating good food and watching silly 80s movies (Some Kind of Wonderful, anyone?) and hanging with my sister and dog.  I know what you are thinking, "Woah, woah woah, 80s movies and good food?  Party animal!"  Correct.  I also got the chance to meet with the lovely Camilla on Saturday in Mill Valley, a fascinating place I'd never been in Marin County.  For those of you not from California, Marin is on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, just outside of San Francisco.  And let me tell you, it. is. BEAUTIFUL.  Right on the water.  Stunning stunning stunning.  I must say that as much as I do not enjoy San Francisco as a city I do appreciate that it is stunningly beautiful.  Here, for example, is a very safe (read: probably shouldn't have taken it...sorry, Mom) picture I took on the way home:

Oh, California, how you sneak up on me.