Moving ain't easy

I used to love to move. Maybe it's because I moved so much I was forced to love it. A year here, a semester there. We spent two years in our most recent place, the longest I've lived in the same place outside my parents' home. That little old apartment was also the most dynamic of the places I've lived.

As the Pregnant One, I got off the hook when we moved in two years ago, letting my uncles and cousins trek up and down those stairs carrying heavy boxes. A few months after we moved it, the apartment served as the home we welcomed Julian into, the one where he'd eventually learn to walk and sleep in his own room. A television crew and two stylish celebrities also blitzed through that house, ridding of our lives more than just holey jeans and stretched-out shirts. I learned how to tip-toe down those stairs in shiny new shoes, and then I quickly figured out how to haul back up them -- still in the heels remember -- with bags full of new cookbooks, food magazines and product samples to try out.

We knew we'd need a yard and more space when Julian entered toddlerhood, which didn't exactly coincide with our lease expiring, but we made do for the months in between.

When it was time to find a new home, we looked for weeks and nothing stuck, until we happened upon a nice duplex with a big yard and a kind landlord just 200 yards from our apartment.

We signed the lease and started moving in the same day. Well, Ian started moving. Thanksgiving week happens to be one of the busiest for any food writer, so I couldn't do much until Wednesday, which is also when my parents arrived to help. By Wednesday night, I still wasn't doing much moving because I was bowing to the porcelain gods after a bad something or other at work. Triste, ineed.

By Thanksgiving morning, I was feeling better, and the family had most of the important stuff moved. We had dinner at Uncle Tom's house, but I wasn't that into it, either because of the menu or my weakened appetite, I'm still not sure. We decided we'd spend our first night in the new house on Thanksgiving, even though said kind landlord hadn't had the gas turned on, so we were without heat, a stove or a water heater. Mega triste, I know.

Thanks to a big fireplace, lots of wood from Uncle Tom's and a house full of folks, we made it through the long holiday weekend just fine.

My parents took off Saturday night, just a few hours before another Missourian arrived. Scott, who has been in the process of moving to Austin since spring, will use us as a home base while he figures things out this week. With all the piddling to be done, Ian and I are grateful for the help with Julian and for keeping that fireplace going until we get the gas going on Tuesday.

On one of our final trips back to the old place, I scrubbed and scrubbed to get the crayon off the wall, with little success. Ian vacuumed, and Julian shrieked as he playfully ran from empty room to empty room.

I forgot how hard it is to adjust to completely new surroundings. I think about what it's like for the little guy, who now, in addition to having a whole new house to adjust to is also learning how to sleep for the first time in a bed, not a crib.

To be continued when I have time to add photos and update on the new house with gas and Internet...

Hip to the news

The Statesman did this TV commercial a month or so ago to start branding itself as THE place to get local news first.



Not too bad if you ask me. With all its Twittering, social media-ing, blogging and, oh yeah, hard-working journalism-ing, I think think the paper is doing a fine doing transitioning into the next generation of newspapers. What do you think?

Heels

Stacy and Clinton would be so proud of Julian's heel-walking ability (I think he gets it from his dad).

They probably wouldn't approve of his maroon sweatsuit, though. Mix it up with a pattern, they might say. Work with your body; don't hide it under bulky clothes. Clean off the baby juice. Throw on some accessories that "pop." Stay away from sweatshirt material, period.

He would reply with a big smile on his face and by rubbing his snotty nose on Clinton's nice cuff or Stacy's fancy sweater. :)

Fourteen

Y'all won't believe me until I catch it on video, but I swear Julian just counted to 14. (He's not a fan of three right now, though.)

Ahhhhhhhh...choo

I think Julian's already better at numbers than I am. Well, I guess I can count to 10 without missing a few numbers, but to hear him do it sounds so much more impressive. A week or so ago, I swear he counted to 10 and only missed 3 and 8, but now he's just doing the 1-2-3-4 or 5-6-7 or 9-10, but not together. He will call out 6s and Ws when he sees them, and he's starting to string together words more. "Biiiiig truck" or "milk please mommy." "Ready set go" is one of his favorites right now, too. As you can tell from the video, he's added "casa" to his short list of Spanish words.

The cutest thing right now might be his fake sneezes that he'll draw out over several seconds and then look at us because he knows his antics make us laugh. Or maybe the cutest thing is that he'll chime in and say "me too" anytime Ian or I says that or if we say we love you or miss you.

He also tinkled, which is the perfect words for his three little drops of pee, in the potty for the first time today.

Where is this Quoz you speak of?

William Least Heat-Moon, whose 1983 travel odyssey "Blue Highways" holds a special place on the bookshelf in my heart, spoke at last weekend's Texas Book Festival. I was there to write about the cookbook authors and food writers who were speaking, but I sneaked into Heat-Moon's Sunday morning session and was, as expected, inspired and rejuvenated.

He talked a lot about writing his newest book, "Roads to Quoz." Quoz, he said, is the fecundity, or richness, of the unexpected, which in itself creates more fecundity in your life. What Quoz is exactly in *this* book? Well, I want that for your own discovery, he said. Travel does not merely change us, he said, but it transforms, expands and connects us.

He laments that today generation (who me?) has a lack of connection with anything beyond themselves. "We are so far from first things," he said.


The letter Q is a thing for him. In the book, he refers to his wife as "Q," and in the lecture on Sunday, he talked on a word I hadn't heard: querencia, a special place where a human has a special connection, where when they return, they are a different person. Querencia comes from the Spanish for "to love" (ie, quieres taco bell. mi querido.) and has meant in Texas culture the place where a Longhorn steer was born. One of the reasons I feel connected to Heat-Moon is because we share una querencia. He lives near Columbia, Mo., where I went to school and he, too, spent his youth in the Ozarks.

He lives in his querencia; I don't, but the wisdom he gains by relishing in the old growth and surrounding himself with slow-changing sameness I found inexplicably touching and reassuring. That there will always be my querencia and there will always be the road.