My dad started giving money to William & Mary when I was in elementary school. The alumni magazine started to arrive quarterly in the mailbox stuffed between all of the bills, Cosmo Girl, and letters from my pen pal, Maggie Dougherty. The conversations started around then, too. It was a great school that would make me an even greater writer and wouldn’t I just love to go to school in Williamsburg?! Subtle, though. At least subtle enough that by the time my college hunt really went underway, the whole idea was off the radar.
I’m an idiot.
As I turned the midpoint at JMU, near the end of sophomore year, I remember sitting in my adviser’s office working through the next two years. His office was stuffed floor to ceiling with resources on journalism and public relations and the corporate media and Garfield. Everyone loves Garfield. That hole of an office was such a mess. But, anyway, it took us about two minutes to realize that I would be fulfilling my graduation requirements a semester early and wouldn’t that be wonderful? Mom and dad said no to turning my art history minor into a second major and so my second minor in writing was born.
It was fun while it lasted. No, I loved every moment of it. But who does anything with a degree in writing and rhetoric? I still don’t know. So here I am. Catching up to 27 years of forgetting to chase my dream with any serious pursuit or commitment while being occupied with all of these other, better ideas instead.
When you play tag, the whole point of the game is to run toward the other players. You run your little butt off until you’re huffing and puffing and your legs start to jiggle under the weight and the pressure. And then, when you have those kids within your reach, you stretch out as far as your little wingspan will take you, leaping, bounding, and tackling as you go. Nobody likes to be “it” but what’s even worse is to be “it” and never tag anyone else.
Dreams are just about the same. I don’t think anything could be worse than feeling them slip out of reach, racing exponentially faster in front of you while your heart rate rapidly increases and your knees begin to buckle under the weight. Especially when you are just starting to recognize them for what they really are.
So there you have it. I’m chasing 27-year-old dreams because I’ve been too stubborn and too busy to realize they’ve been right there, right in front of me my whole life. And it’s an exhausting, emotionally deadly struggle, let me tell you. But I kind of like to think that I’m only one or two giant leaps away from being within their reach. Well, it paints a nice picture at least. So here I go with giant strides and flailing arms. I can rest when the game is over.
& then the world lay still
reading some F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night. My Coralie Bickford-Smith edition came in the mail yesterday and I just love reading a gorgeous hardback.
writing…. yes. I will be writing this week. I didn’t write much last week because of preparations for our big weekend. Everything should start to look more like normal here soon.
listening constantly to Janis Joplin these days. I’m on a kick. Don’t you get those from time to time?
thinking how incredibly lucky we are to have such great friends and family. We had one of those all play and no sleep sort of weekends. And it rocked.
smelling the mint, lemon and lime from my ice water. Detox, ya know?
feeling this hollow sense of calm that falls upon me after every busy, exciting, crazy time in my life. My mom and Jim just got back on the road for Michigan, the house is finally cleaned up from our barbecue yesterday and Alex is taking a nap upstairs. Quite a difference from only six hours ago.
hoping to spend the rest of the day with my cats and my book.
wearing an old Madewell tee and my Matchstick jeans.
loving this fat, grey furball that sits on my lap as I type away right now. Baci and Misha spent the majority of the weekend hiding underneath our bed from a white, cat-eating mini schnauzer and masses of humans they cared little to appease. I think they are happy to have their house back.
wishing for a visit from Mr. Golden Sun. Please shine down on me. These grey skies can move along now.
wanting a soft cross breeze, two trees and this. Wouldn’t that be perfect?
needing a nap. In fact…
Did you miss the other Sunday editions of Currently? No worries. You can find them all here.
And head on over to link up with Lauren.
photo credit Jodi Miller Photography
I met my husband on April 28, 2007 at a mutual friend’s 21st birthday party. The next night, the dude actually called me. Two weeks later, the semester was over and he was stopping by my house five minutes before I hauled out of there for the summer “to pick up that extra box of spaghetti if you’re really going to just leave it on the shelf over the summer”. A month later, we were madly in love.
We spent our senior year hating each other. Two overachievers figuring out where our lives were going and trying to keep emotions out of the picture. We fought a lot to keep the annoying love thing to a minimum. Lessen the blow come May, you know? So he pretended like he would be going straight into his PhD in psychology somewhere, anywhere they would accept him. I pretended like I would be at some big wig pr firm in any city anywhere in the country except the south (because I hate the heat). We had the world’s best poker faces most days. And we were not going to pretend to do that whole long distance relationship thing.
Perhaps we sabotaged it all on purpose, or perhaps life just has a way of surprising you, but none of that really happened. And by mid-July we were moving furniture into our first apartment, back where I grew up in Annapolis. Life happened and here we are, five years later; still madly in love and not a penny to speak for it.
Jenni’s prompt today was to share something difficult about my “lot in life” and how I am working to overcome it. So there it is. I didn’t marry for money, I married for love. And these days it sure seems hard to have both.
To say we think about, worry about, stress about, and even fight about money would be an understatement. It’s not even that we can’t make ends meet, because we can, but it’s more so that we aren’t left with much wiggle room. And, really, it’s that we didn’t ever plan to be here, as underpaid teachers, in the first place. Things happen and my husband’s dreams of going back for his PhD are slim. My dreams of moving back into public relations in post-recession America diminish a wee bit more with each year that passes. Cost of living is high and our mobility right now is low. What are we doing about it, you ask?
My mom always told me that “if it happens to you, it’s your fault” and I grew up owning that idea. She also told me that you can’t help who you fall in love with. Together, those words of wisdom have shaped our marriage. We control our destiny. Things aren’t easy now, but when will they ever be easy? We could sit back and just complain about money some more. But we’re not. We’re making changes and making plans and it’s all going to be our fault.
It doesn’t really matter what “lot” your given in life. It matters what you do with it. If it happens to you, it’s your fault. So start making positive changes. I didn’t marry rich. Yeah, it sucks sometimes. But I married my best friend and love and together we can move mountains if we need to. And that’s a hell of a lot better than sitting back and blaming anything or anyone else.
Make it your fault. And be proud you did.
P.S. If you want to see more wedding pictures, because, you know, weddings make everyone happy, you can see more here.
We finished watching Silver Linings Playbook last night and it’s left me in the same sort of love story funk that I get after watching Garden State or Breakfast at Tiffany’s or really any movie that looks at love from a not-so-perfect angle. It’s raw and it’s real and it’s ugly I’m pretty sure these sort of movies are the closest Hollywood will ever get to truly documenting love.
So along those same lines, I found today’s prompt of documenting a day in my life to be rather cathartic. May is no man’s land in education. The kids are done. The teachers are done. June is still weeks away and the work still piles up. I find it to be terribly ugly and nothing to write home about.
But isn’t that the point? Wasn’t the point of this challenge to find beauty in the most mundane details of our daily lives? It was unseasonably cold today, the sky stuck in that grey awfulness that forces me to wear sunglasses like a fool because otherwise I’ll come down with a migraine, and I accomplished just about half of what I planned to do. But it was a day in my life.
And I found beauty. Whether it was in the fresh bunch of peonies I arranged for our guest bedroom or in the patterns of my grade book, I found it today. The trick, however, is to find it every day.
So awhile back I teamed up with Melissa to co-host the Friend Connect Blog Hop. We’d love for you to add your blog to the list and for you to visit some new friends while you’re here! You can choose to follow the co-hosts in whatever way is best for you. The blog police won’t come after you so go ahead and choose your weapon of choice: GFC, BlogLovin’, HelloCotton, RSS, Twitter, Facebook.
Ok, so let’s get to the party, shall we?
RULES are simple:
1. Follow your host
The First link below
2. Follow your co-hosts
The Next 8 links below
3. Link up below using your main blog url not a specific post.
4. Make sure to visit some of the blogs in the link up and follow them
and if you want to leave them a comment, I’m sure they’d appreciate that as well.
5. Tweet about this blog hop
It has been an honor to sponsor The Home Depot Garden Club over the past two months. I feel truly blessed to have them finance and support my lawn project. As always, the words, pictures and video (!!!!) in this post are solely mine.
So, let’s summarize what Alex and I have been up to in our front yard. Here goes it then….
PROJECT GREEN from Tina Byland on Vimeo.
Aw. That was fun, right? I will be suggesting Baci and Misha for best supporting actor and actress to The Academy this year. I told them to start learning English so they could give their acceptance speeches when the time comes.
This has been an education. We knew our lawn was bad. In fact, we knew it was terribly bad. The truth is, we had no clue where to start. We’re still learning, for sure. I mean, you saw me using the seed spreader… that thing has a (very fun) learning curve.
So I thought I’d share with you the little things we know for certain on the other side of this project:
* Weed killer’s are fantastic. We used this one. But you’re still going to have to rake them out. And that still stinks. Bigtime.
* Fertilizer is also fantastic, but make sure not to overdo it. Many of you have been clued into our other lawn project via instagram. We dug up half of our front lawn last week and it got a bit muddy in the process. When went back to The Home Depot to pick up some more seed to lay down, we were wise enough to realize that this time we shouldn’t get another bag that included fertilizer. Our lawn already had fertilizer in it. We actually ended up buying a bag of Scotts Turf Builder Sunny Mix. You guys. This seed is baby blue!!!
* If you’re really nice to mother nature, she’ll give you rain every day for two whole weeks. Or just about. We’ve been extremely lucky with the weather since planting our seed. Especially because our spicket sprung a leak last weekend. How do we know, you might ask? Well, when I went to water our lawn, Alex went inside to see water gushing through the drywall on the other side of the wall! So, since then, it’s been either borrowing our neighbor’s hose (thank goodness for living in a townhouse) or using my watering can to keep the grass wet. But, seriously, never underestimate keeping your soil and seed wet. This happens to be key. And, as a side note, the plumber is coming next week.
* Like everything else, growing grass requires patience. I peeked out our bedroom window to see if our grass was growing every single morning. People say it takes about ten days. And it does. Now we have baby sprouts. They’re adorable.
So, there you have it. We’ve come a long way on this epic journey but it’s not over yet. We’re sort of at that point in The Lord of The Rings where Gollum falls into the Crack of Doom and you think the movie’s about over and then it goes on for another hour. Yeah. We’re like “done” but not really done. Once this week’s grass starts sprouting up, we’ll have a better idea of where our patches still lie and we’re going to have to fix those up. But, overall, I’m confident in saying that we sure look better than before!
Thanks again to The Home Depot for providing us with this amazing opportunity. It’s been fun.
Take a look back at our project here:
Project Green: The Introduction, Project Green: The Shopping Trip, Project Green: Manual Labor
It’s home improvement time, and The Home Depot has everything you need to #DigIn for Spring. No matter what projects you want to tackle, they have great values on all you need. They’re ready to help you with renovation ideas and expert advice, too.
Get over $300 in email exclusive savings each year, sneak peeks on new products, monthly lawn & garden ideas for your region and access to The Home Depot’s gardening experts. Click here to join the world’s largest garden community today! Or go to homedepot.com/gardenclub to see some of the many benefits of membership.
This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of The Home Depot.
madly in love with my new hanging wandering jews….
missing my family up in Michigan. Especially my mom on this Mother’s Day. This is my very first Mother’s Day away from my mom. It’s…. weird.
reading not a whole lot this weekend. It’s been a busy weekend filled with spring cleaning and gardening and bridal showers so I haven’t left much time for reading.
listening to the birds singing outside. The storms have finally passed, taking the heat and humidity with them, so the first thing I did this morning was open the windows.
smelling a clean house! Well, cleaner. I’ll be cleaning the rest of today, too.
loving how our terraced retaining wall turned out in our front yard. More on that to come later this week. If you follow me on instagram, you’ve surely taken note to what we’ve been up to!
thinking that it’s going to be hard to focus this week knowing that my mom will be here on Friday!
wanting a tan… or maybe I shoud’ve left that one for “needing” a tan…
wishing I had a maid so that I could spend all day digging in the dirt outside instead of inside cleaning the house.
feeling relaxed and calm. Even though I’ve been anything but lazy this weekend, I’m feeling good about how our house is coming together. Come to think of it, I never feel relaxed and calm if I’m being lazy. That just gives me anxiety!
writing a whole bunch of blog posts. Ohhh boy. So I knew I wouldn’t blog every day in May like Jenni’s challenge said. In fact, I already had a good idea I’d be skipping a couple prompts because last week was very busy for me. Still, I’m really excited to sit in front of this screen and type away. Plus, the last installment of Project Green with The Home Depot comes at you tomorrow! AND I MADE A VLOG!!!!!!
hoping you all love said vlog when I post it tomorrow. Eeeks!
wearing my Lucky shorts and an old t-shirt. I’m running a ton of errands after I finish this post. You know how Sunday’s go.
needing an iced hazelnut macchiato from Starbucks. Doesn’t that sound just divine this afternoon?
clicking through my favorite blogs. I haven’t been around much this week, but I refuse to miss out on any posts!
Did you miss the other Sunday editions of Currently? No worries. You can find them all here.
And head on over to link up with Lauren.
Within a week of bringing Misha home, her name changed three times and her size grew zero. She didn’t really want anything to do with humans, but at least she wasn’t hiding underneath the dresser any longer. When you least expected it, she’d hop up on your lap and kind of just sit there, looking at you. A few weeks later, she actually let you pet her. But she wouldn’t let us pick her up for the better part of a year. We thought she was such a dud. A gorgeous, perfect little siamese dud, but a dud nonetheless.
“Give her time.”… that’s what everyone told us.
And so, it all began the winter of the snowmageddon right after we bought our house. Baby girl already slept at the foot of our bed, but now she decided she deserved to sleep under the covers just like a human. She’s been there ever since. We snuggle all night long and she’s there, squished against me as close as she can get when that alarm sounds every morning. And those next few moments…. they are the best part of my day.
She usually comes to bed a few minutes after me, so she taps my face in the dark (three times, every time). That cat has me trained, it’s pathetic. I lift the sheets and under she goes for the night. My little teddy bear. We cuddle while Alex takes up the rest of the bed. And we like it that way. If I get up for a drink of water or to use the bathroom, she follows. We’re inseparable during that time and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Alex constantly reminds me that I’m going to be a wreck when she dies. And he’s right. I don’t know what what I’ll do without that little Mish’. We’ve grown rather inseparable and it’s incredibly therapeutic, having six pounds of fur love you the way she does.
I didn’t write a post yesterday. Sorry. I’m sure you’ll forgive me but I wasn’t in the mood to be doling out advice. But here’s some for you today…. own pets. Cats, dogs, birds, whatever. Share your life. The return on investment is priceless.
I’m about to tell you a story that will make you believe in miracles. It doesn’t matter who you pray to (or don’t). It doesn’t matter how skeptical you are of luck and chance and the serendipitous nature of things. All of that is about to change.
My mom calls me her miracle baby. And I am. After an entire decade wrought with constant pain and endless miscarriages, I stuck around through a full term. And then some, actually. I guess I needed a wee bit longer to bake. So I arrived, at noon on September 29th, 1986, as my mom and dad’s miracle. Over a dozen miscarriages and a number on Catholic Charities’ wait list later, I stuck it out and made it to the delivery room to meet them for the first time. My great uncle, Jack, claims he named me. Christina Marie Griffin. Plain enough for quite the miracle I was. But whatever.
Then there were more miscarriages. Twins that I was so proud to meet one day. But there were two other miracles, too. I call them Bud Mud Bud and Sister. They call me Ten Pen Ten. Together we make up the Griffin Trifecta Miracle (which I just coined right at this very moment in history). There’s over a dozen others of us that just weren’t strong enough to make it that we’ll never know. But I guess three miracles were really plenty for one lifetime, right?
This upcoming weekend we celebrate Mother’s Day and I’ll be celebrating not only because I love my mom, but because she’s the strongest woman I know and she fought tirelessly to be a mom at all.
Today Jenni prompted us to discuss the thing we are most afraid of. You know what I’m most afraid of? I’m ghastly terrified that I won’t have the same enduring strength and courage as my mom to fight for my own little miracles. The silliest part is that I may not have to wait a whole decade like my mom. Hopefully, at least. It doesn’t really matter. I’m afraid, so there.
But now you all believe in miracles and that’s all we ever really needed in life was to believe. We make our own destinies, but it surely doesn’t happen without a positive outlook. I know plenty of women who have already met their miracles. I also know plenty of women who are slowing dying a bit every time their miracle disappears yet again. And this all scares me so much.
Sometimes the scariest, toughest, most terrifying things are those things that are made up of the fibers and fabrics of what’s worth the most value.
Except snakes. I’m just plum out afraid of snakes.
I’m thrilled to be sponsoring The Home Depot Garden Club in this series of posts on spring lawn care and fertilizers. While they are financing and sponsoring this post, the rest was really up to me. If you’re new to this blog, I’d hate for you to be out of the loop as to what I’ve been up to with The Home Depot so be sure to catch up here.
After our shopping trip, we went to work at spreading our Scott’s Turf Builder 2 Plus Weed Control. Fortunately we were expecting rain that evening and into the majority of last week. I always say it’s best to let Mother Nature do work for you. You do have to lay the weed killer down on a damp lawn, anyways.
Let me tell you. That little seed spreader is so much fun. It gets heavy, though. You can adjust the mouth of the opening based on what you are spreading. For the weed killer, we kept it right in the center width at 3. And then, after the better part of the week, we checked back in to pull out our weeds and lay down more seed.
Now would be a good time to remind you of just how many weeds our lawn actually had. To be honest, I didn’t even realize how ridiculous our weed situation had become. The great thing about the Scott’s Turf Builder 2 Plus Weed Control is that those weeds just shriveled right up. The bad thing about the weed killer is that you still have to dig them up. Want to know the best way to tell whether you’re dealing with grass or weeds? After you let your weed killer sit a few days, brush a rake through your lawn. The roots of the grass are deep enough that they don’t even budge. The weeds, on the other hand, come right up. In our case that practically meant our entire lawn. Two gigantic trash bags of weeds and dead grass later, it was time to lay our Scott’s Turf Builder EZ Seed.
The most difficult part of this lawn project was opening the bag of seed. Seriously. That bag looks like it has a ziploc on the top but it doesn’t and as far as we could tell, it wasn’t resealable. It turned out that didn’t matter and quickly after tearing into it the old-fashioned, hapless way, we figured out that there would be nothing to reseal, anyways. We started off using our seed spreader but after pulling all of the weeds, the lawn was rather patchy so we found it easier to dump handfuls around the patchy places.
The bag is filled with a combo of mulch, seed and fertilizer. Since our weeds were so bad, the store recommended that we throw the ez seed down after the weed killer. If your lawn isn’t in as bad of shape as ours, you may be able to get away with just Scott’s Turf Builder 2 Plus Weed Control, since it’s a fertilizer as well. Not us. We’re going heavy duty here. Immediately after we turned the hose on and wet down the lawn, we could tell a difference. What only moments ago looked like a barren desert of dust and clay, looked like an actual lawn. Even if we didn’t have grass growing yet!
Be sure to check in next Monday for (hopefully) pictures of our baby grass!
It’s home improvement time, and The Home Depot has everything you need to #DigIn for Spring. No matter what projects you want to tackle, they have great values on all you need. They’re ready to help you with renovation ideas and expert advice, too.
Get over $300 in email exclusive savings each year, sneak peeks on new products, monthly lawn & garden ideas for your region and access to The Home Depot’s gardening experts. Click here to join the world’s largest garden community today! Or go to homedepot.com/gardenclub to see some of the many benefits of membership.
This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of The Home Depot.
