ruling the air waves

I have so very cool news to share. I'm pretty excited and you should be too! Tomorrow I'm going to be live on the radio with two of my fellow skaters (Dropkick Muffy and Kobra Kai) pimping A FULL WEEKEND OF DERBY right here in Lincoln, Nebraska. That's right, me, on the radio! I'm exceedingly jazzed. It'll be on at 8am on the Blaze 104.1 FM (if you're not Lincoln local you can stream it right here to your computer or smart phone) and 106.3 FM KFRX at 8:30 (again available streaming to phones and comps alike right here).

Our very own Kobra Kai sneaking by an Omaha blocker at our last bout.

You'll get to hear about the upcoming bouts (2 on Friday! 2 on Saturday!), what it's like to be a derby girl and even win some tickets so be sure to tune in! If you are in the Lincoln area you should definitely come check us out. I'll be playing in the first bout Friday night for the Roadies (white). First whistle is at 7:03 but if you want good seats be there by 6:30. You can buy your tickets right here from Ticketmaster or at the Pershing Center Box Office. If you're there, swing by and say hi! My derby name is Kilda Messenger and I'd love to meet you! When I'm not playing I'll be down on the floor shooting photos of the Maxines bout.

Edited to add: Bouts are very family friendly with kids activities at half time and kids under 12 are FREE.

Photo by me, Shayna Kalish. Please don't take it without permission and crediting me! (If you ask, it's almost guaranteed I'll say yes!)

workout wednesday

Don't hate me, I was kind of a slacker this week. Last week was all about kicking ass every day, but this week was giving it all during practice, but taking a hard earned rest on off days. I've been pretty tired this week Eh, no excuses. Not as much time as last week. I'll live and the rest will do me good before my bout on Friday and the grandparents-in-law rolling in to town on Saturday.

Workout Wednesday for the Week of 3/23-3/30:

Wednesday: Off
Thursday: Practice
Friday: Off
Saturday: Off
Sunday: 2 hour All League Scrimmage. Played Maxines vs. RW again and it was hard again. We had a bit of a better plan and got to switch it up and exchange the jammers.
Monday: 2 hour Practice/RW scrimmage.
Tuesday: 2 hour Practice/RW scrimmage. I won't lie, this practice was frustrating, but I knew I worked really hard and if not to the very best of my ability strategy-wise, certainly to my physical limit.

Total time: 8 hours on skates

cleaning house

Since getting married and quitting (well, maybe not quitting, but at least paring down) my wedding... er... preoccupation, I've been entirely obsessed with interior design. Apartment Therapy, Design Sponge, Young House Love, all of it. Gone are the days of hoarding photos pretty white dresses, here to stay are the days of designing dream bathrooms when my insomnia hits. I'm going to level with you here, all the pretty pictures of dreamy bedrooms and perfectly organized spaces can make me feel bad about the crappy, cookie-cutter rental the Hubs and I currently live in. Rental white, popcorn ceiling, and a suite of furniture that was either purchased at Target, without me, or both doesn't help. Combine that with a dual predisposition in our little family towards being (what's a nice word for slobs?) tidiness-avoidant and our apartment can seem more like our mess than our home.

In a fit of cleaning and pent-up dust bunny rage, Hubs and I have spent the last two evenings giving the mess a run for it's money. Tuesday night we started with the pool room. There is neither a pool, nor a pool table in this room. We call it that out of a deep seeded love of an Australian movie called the Castle. It's hilarious. Put in in you Netflix queue. Don't worry, you can thank me later. Anyhow, in it the family has a room in the house (presumably with a pool table, I've forgotten) where all the "special" things go. Mug that says "World's Best Dad?" That's going straight to the pool room! For us, it means that our second bedroom is a giant closet with a desk and my yarn stash in it. There was stuff everywhere. There was nowhere to move, sit or work. The closet itself was overflowing. After several hours of cleaning, organizing, sorting, trashing and donating to Goodwill the closet is once again organized and the floor is cleared out.

Look! Evidence of closet organization!

That's not to say we're done. I'm going to show you what it looks like now in a double effort both for no one to think I'm in any way perfect and to motivate me to keep going until the job is done. To be fair though, my 50mm lens takes lovely pictures but makes it really hard to see the nice empty space taking up most of the room.

Yeah, my yarn gets "organized" periodically. I still have yet to do it in a way that is either a) helpful or b) sticks. We're currently in the market for something that'll help organize the stash. That stack of boxes is the wonderful china we got for our wedding. Believe it or not, that's consolidated by about 65% in terms of box size. Ordering china covers (these are surprisingly hard to find. Macy's doesn't carry them at all. We've found one specialty store online that carries them.) is next on the docket. I've been wanting a hutch to store/display them, but what with our hating our apartment, we've been holding off buying a huge piece of furniture that we'll have to carry up and back down our 32 stairs in the near future. That funky pseudo-Victorian telephone bench that you can kind of see in the corner of one of the photos looks like this. I'm signed up to take an intro upholstery class this coming quarter through the local community college and this is my project. More on that as it comes.

Fresh off our victory in the pool room we decided to tackle the kitchen last night. If you can look past the totally covered fridge (you can't make me get rid of my magnets!), the place is freaking spotless! Perhaps not magazine quality, but everything got a really good scrubbing and all the surfaces got cleared (I have a nasty habit of not putting away small appliances after I use them).

See that burner? All that white? That sucker got at least 45 minutes of combined effort. Did you know the top (white metal part) comes up like a car hood so you can clean underneath? I didn't, but it does!

Still left to cover:
-dining room table
-living room and hallway
-our bathroom
-spare bathroom
-yarn "situation"
-Hubs' desk
-our bedroom
-our closet needs a once over, tidy though it may seem

Tempting as it may be to have a house of my own, it's times like this that I'm glad all we're responsible for is a 2 bedroom apartment.

getting a handle on this thing

It's no secret I've been pretty lax on the posting of late. I've been going through some growing pains with this blog trying to figure out what it should be since it's not a wedding planning blog any longer. For now I'm going to try to be more regular with my posting and in terms of topics, I'll try to keep it relevant to what I'm doing now.

Last time I introduced you to Cappie. When I'm not chasing my scraggly little furball around, I probably skating. That's right, I'm a roller girl! I joined the No Coast Derby Girls in November. Before I joined I had been on roller skates a grand total of twice in my life. (Ari took me skating for the first time for my 22nd birthday. It was me and 4 birthday parties of 9-11 year olds.) I'm not going to lie and say it's been easy, it's been a lot of hard work and a huge time commitment, but it's so worth it! In the coming weeks I'll start talking more about derby, the rules, the community, the history. (If you have any questions, let me know and I'll go more in depth.)

Derby is not for the feint of heart. I work out on skates several time a week both on and off skates. Sometimes it sucks but I know that it both makes me a stronger skater and skinnier person (I've lost 10 pounds since I started!). So, I've decided to start cataloging my efforts on Workout Wednesday, starting with the previous Wednesday. I'm owning up to my off days and hopefully I'll keep myself honest and even get my junk food addiction in check.

Workout Wednesday for the Week of 3/16-3/22:

Wednesday: 1 hour Interval Group Class (lots of running uphill since spring is finally starting to show up in Lincoln!)
Thursday: 1 hour Body Sculpt Class
Friday: 35 minutes (3.67 miles, 397 calories) on the elliptical. I did what I've deemed a "half." I set the elliptical to do one giant hill up and down (Kilamanjaro on the Life Fitness machine at the gym) for 30 minutes, the length of half a roller derby bout.  I then mimic the jam timing. 30 seconds active rest (the 30 second set-up time between jams) followed by two minutes of flat out sprint (the maximum length of a jam). This worked out nicely with the 30 minutes because each increase or decrease in resistance coincided with 5 little 30 second sections, just the same as my jam plus set-up. I'm going to try to work up to sticking this in on all but one off day a week (everyone needs to rest some time!)
Saturday: 2 hour All League Practice (these are harder because the A team girls practice with us too.) Admittedly I only got about a third through this before I rolled my ankle. It was stupid and my fault. I wasn't paying attention when I was falling. I spent the end of practice icing my ankle and watching.
Sunday: 2 hour All League Scrimmage. We played A Team (Mad Maxines) vs. B Team (Road Warriors, my team!). We worked HARD.
Monday: 2 hour Practice.
Tuesday: Off. At this point I'd gone 6 days in a row and I was TIRED.

6 of 7 days in the week, just like I aim for! I've got a bout coming in a week and a half so I'd better keep it up!

meet Cappie

This past year on my parent's anniversary, I gave myself a present. Ari and I met at lunch and headed down to the Capital Humane Society. I was prepared for excitement, heartbreak and to come back until we found the perfect dog for us. Well, I was mostly right. There were lots of dogs, many of which we had to cross off the list right off the bat because our apartment has a 15 pound cap on dogs. Big boys were out, which left us a handful of little guys. The poodle got adopted while we were there. The Min Pin barked louder than the German Shepherd. We ended up taking out two little guys, a Sheltie mix and a Boston Terrier mix. We saw the Sheltie first and I really liked him, despite being a total whiner. But then they brought us Cappie. Ari picked him out of the kennel because he didn't bark, he just wagged his tail, looked up at us and said, "Oh yeah, I'm the best, nicest, cutest dog here. You sooooo want to take me home." In the meeting room the first thing he did was lick us. We were pretty sold. I asked Ari if he was sure (I really wasn't expecting to bring home a dog!), he said go for it. So got for it I did! $90 and two pieces of paper later I had a goodie bag of treats, a ghetto donated leash and my new best buddy.

Cappie Halloween 2010, 4 months old

I had been pushing hard for a dog for a few months. I was going a bit stir crazy with the wedding gone, no job happening and the fun of unemployment long worn off. Cappie is my buddy, we hang out all day. Ari gets up first thing in the morning and when he and Cap come back from their walk, Cappie jumps back in bed with me for a mid-morning snooze. He gets me out of the house and keeps me on my toes. And I wouldn't have it any other way. I love the little furball.

other people's weddings are an excuse for pretty clothes

Dear Stefie,

You are awesome. You are one of my blog's biggest cheerleaders and for you, I blog again! You're a maid of honor in a wedding, so of course I have spent time procrastinating searching for a kick ass bridesmaid dress for you to (not so subtly) suggest to your bride-to-bride. (Well, not your bride-to-be, but your friend who's getting married. You know what I mean!) Since you haven't yet given me specifics (not that you asked for help, but let's gloss over that.) I took a quick shot over to ModCloth. Here you go:

First up is my favorite, the Romantic Incarnation dress ($90).

Next is the Standout and Deliver dress ($60).

Then comes the Dianthus Fields dress ($90).

Apparently I'm in a pinky purple kinda mood. Anyhow, wedding aside, I'm pretty sure you just need this one for nights on the town.

Love you,

Shayna

you're welcome

OK, so it's been 18 thousand years since my last post (again). This one is just a drive-by. But it's worth it, I swear. This is quite possibly the handiest thing I have seen in a long time: how to fold a fitted sheet.

count in the heezie

Why yes, this is the best thing I've seen all day. 

One, two, three, four, fizzle.

via

i remember

And you should too. See you at the polls.

tastes like autumn

Ok, I admit it. I am not Julia Child. Or Mario Batali. Cooking, it's not really my deal. But now that I'm the currently at home (aka momma needs a job!) half of the team, I decided that we couldn't have frozen dinners in a bag or ravliolis every single night for dinner. So last night Ari and I spent some serious time cooking. I wrangled a fresh butternut squash from a local farm (which is harder than it sounds) and we got to cooking. It was so good, we had it again for lunch! And the dog liked it! But you don't know about him yet, but he liked it like whoa! We even made our own recipe, and damn, it came out AWESOME. So, friends, for your gastronomical pleasure, bacon butternut squash soup!


Butternut Squash Soup

Plus, it was fun to try out our new food processor (thanks, Browns!). Try it and let me know how it turns out!

bring on the rain

So if you know me in real life, you know how much I love Australia. If you don't, the reason is that I spent six months there doing a semester abroad at the University of Melbourne and touring the east coast.

Seriously, Oz is the most amazing place. It's full of all these totally cool things and sayings and plants and places that are nothing like anything that exists on any other continent. One of the places I didn't get to go to but is on the top of my list for when I go back (and I will be going back, thank you very much!) is Uluru (formerly known as Ayer's Rock). Uluru is in the middle of the Outback in extreme desert conditions. So when I saw this post (via web-goddess), I knew I had to share. This week, Uluru got a rainstorm for the first time in over 20 years. This photos are pretty awesome and speak for themselves.

Photo credit: Peter Carroll

the return

Dear Gentle Readers*,

I have been a delinquent blogger. I got way-layed writing about the bachelorette and just lost my steam. Well kids, I am back by popular demand. I will be back soon with tales of broken bones, a new puppy and of course, the long awaited wedding recap. Once that's all sussed (and I'm not too worried, that's gonna take a while), we can get on to the business of figuring out what to write about now that it's not wedding central up in these parts anymore.

Much Love,

Shayna

*If you get this reference, I will love you forever. I will potentially also mail you chocolate products of some sort because you will have earned it.

lazy blogger placates eager readers

This weekend went all too quickly and I don't have the brain power? energy? werewithall? something else? to write my bachelorette post just yet.  Instead I will placate you with more pretty wedding pictures.

I couldn't resist this one. My husband looks too hot. Also, I can't stop saying "my husband." Husband! Husband! Husband! Photo via Noah Devereaux.

l'shana tova

Ari and I are home this Yom Kippur.  To distract from our fasts, we are having a Battlestar Galactica marathon.  I'm starving.  It's pretty awesome though, not gonna lie.  Best wishes for a happy new year and to be inscribed in the book.

pre-wedding vacation?

So I suppose I should start at the beginning. Well, maybe a little sooner than that. In a fit of "oh my gosh the wedding is so soon and she's moving out" and "holy crap we all reeaaaallly need a vacation" my parents decide that it is a fabulous idea to take me to Block Island, Rhode Island.  Well, I love Block and am pretty much defenseless against its siren call.  We had planned to go Tuesday, I think.  Well, you get there by ferry and Mother Nature had other plans in the form of a hurricane so the ferry didn't run.  Instead, we went down on Friday.  Yes, 9 days before my wedding.  I told you it was insane.

Anyhow, we drove down to Point Judith, RI (where the ferry leaves from) and had lunch at a place looking at this:

After that we got on the ferry and as we were leaving saw lots of cute, tiny beachgoers.

The very first day there we dragged our butts (and beach chairs) a mile up the road (which is far in flip-flops carrying a lot of crap).  I immediately proceeded to totally sunburn my whole face.  I may or may not have had a freak out, yelled at my parents for putting me in this situation a week before my wedding and complained about it all weekend, even as it began to fade.

Complaining, time crunches and panic aside, it was really so lovely to be there.  Block in late August and early September is a thing of beauty.  Sunshine, cool weather (mid 70s!) and the perfect breeze.  It doesn't hurt that it's so damn cute, either.

Also, the best ice cream cone on the face of the planet.  Seriously, Aldo's makes a banana cream pie ice cream.  Banana ice cream with pieces of pie in it!  It is beyond the best thing ever.  Now, there are a lot of choices, and I am a chocolate girl and not at all loyal to one ice cream flavor, but it was so good, I had it two nights in a row.  I'd eat it right now if I could.  It's worth the schlep to Block for this ice cream.

And I found a knitter!  Well, a knitter's car at least...

In the end, it was sad to leave, but I was anxious and eager to get back to New York to finish Wedding Prep (yes, that does require word initial capitals, thank you).  I think the moral here is yes, absolutely go on a quick little vacation with your parents before your wedding.  It was really great to have that nice bonding time with them before the insanity of the wedding week and the insane emotional upheaval that a wedding is for everyone involved.  However, for your own sanity, do it three weeks before, not one!

PS.  Thanks Mom and Dad, I had a blast!

Next Up: Arrivals begin and bachelorette party ensues!

re-entry

And we're back!  Adjusting back to real life is no simple task, and we're tackling it head on with some good old fashioned quality couch time.  Teaser photos are in, so recap and honeymoon talk coming soon!

Ok, I couldn't resist.

Courtesy of our amazing photographer Noah Devereaux.

it's here!

WEDDING DAY!!!

the night before

Forgive me if this post turns to Ramble City, USA.  I'm not sure exactly what I want to say, but I feel like I want to say something.  Or I should.  Or something.

I am getting married tomorrow.  Well, it's 1:12am, so technically I am getting married today.  It's the most surreal feeling.  I told my dad tonight that I'm as ready as I'll ever be, that I think you can only be 95% ready until you've already done the thing.

Ari called me his wife today.  I turned into a little gooey mess of girly loveitude.  Really, honestly, I love the "stuff" that goes with my wedding, but I am ready for my marriage already.  It's not about my beautiful dress or lovely flowers (that my mom, friend Ros and I have slaved over for the last 2 days) or the dancing or the cake.  It's about this wonderful, incredible, perfectly imperfect person who has chosen to love me and let me love him back.  Ari, Baby, I can't wait to stand in front of all the people I love and tell them why I'm yours.

I have this song stuck in my head.


It's going to be a good day.  I can't wait.  Married.

my brain is too tired to come up with a witty title

These posts keep getting shorter and shorter, I know.  But it's really crunch time (2 days)!  The family has descended and with them the chaos (and love, but still chaos).  Family BBQ tonight followed by bachelor and bachelorette parties.  The boys are going to a steak house, but the girls and I, we're going to see some hot boys take their shirts off and drink sugary drinks with umbrellas.  I for one can't wait.  Maybe I'll have some pictures for you.  Hopefully there won't be any tame enough to share.

it's on

Ari and I got our marriage license today.  This thing is officially on.