Dumetella Carolinensis: 2nd anniversary: Organic Pigskin?

Mike and I celebrated our two-year wedding anniversary on Labor Day weekend. We had talked about making it some elegant get-away, but planning never panned out. I think after planning a six-week road-trip this summer I was spent on making travel arrangements. I just wanted the Vacation Fairy to make a magical reservation at a spa for us, and she never showed up.

Instead a best-friend couple - Donnie and Jen - invited us to join them in Atlanta to see the Crimson & Clemson bowl at the Georgia Dome. Mike and I know so little about football, but we love spending time with the McMaster's. Their passion for the sport kind of rubs off on us some.

Since it was a four-day weekend for us (bonus to marrying on a Federal holiday), we stayed in Atlanta through Monday. The plan had been to surprise my youngest brother, Nathanael at church Sunday night when he planned to be baptized for the first time. My mother had driven 6 hours with her husband, my sister came in from Athens, and we were twittering away about our surprise when the joke came on us: apparently churches don't do business on Federal holidays, either. Not ones to waste things, we surprised him with dinner instead.

Monday - actual Labor Day - we decided to allow Columbus to show us its best in fine dining. There's a fresh fish market in the historic Uptown district that boasts a professional chef (not typical of this region), and I had heard good things about the place prior to making our reservations three day earlier. The surprises were the theme of the weekend, as it turned out, because fine dining establishments in Columbus, GA also do not open for business on Federal holidays.

Fortunately, our love and desire to celebrate our life together took precedence over the mood for the evening, and we were undaunted as we settled into a booth at Houlihan's (a chain, but still on the classy side) for a bottle of wine, a couple of tapas-style appetizers, and conversation. We topped off the evening at the local cigar and martini bar - which is also a pleasant surprise here - and my shoes never started to pinch. It was all I could ask for!

Today I've been thinking a lot about Bloomington. Every Thursday night I used to have dinner with three other girls. Often we had pesto on spaghetti squash, and this morning I pruned our basil plants with enough to make a good batch of fresh pesto. I keep very little contact with those three girls anymore, because I denied them genuine intimacy with me while I was there. That was the first time in my life I entered a place with expectations to leave it, and I decidedly never let myself love very hard there. Mike is the only one who truly broke through. Since being gone I've grown so attached in a cyber way to Amy - a classmate and fellow lab-worker - but I don't entirely associate her with my "Bloomington life". The physicists I sang karaoke with every Thursday night for two years? Never talk to them. That's all it was. Then and there.

Thank God I did meet Mike or I might consider the entire two years a waste of time.

::Couldn't help glancing up at the Master's diploma on the wall when I wrote that.::

The degree gives me the opportunity to teach, but I'm teaching composition and rhetoric, not linguistics. I feel as though I'm pretending to be a teacher, hoping that I'll gain enough hindsight quickly to be able to prepare for my next lesson and the next. Everyone in my department is generous, but I feel lesser in their midst. I'm a little old to have just a Master's. Combine too little education with too little experience and there I am: "I don't have much experience, mister, but I sure am a hard worker and I promise to try real hard, honest I do!" I'm scared my students are going to bust me for not having the background, but so far they haven't found out.

I dress different for them, too. I've only ever worn black, white, and gray in the classroom (sort of as an experiment to see if I can keep it up). My goal is just to be classy and understated.

Going back to graduate school you may wonder? Probably not. I've begun to focus on "issues" that interest me. Here's a seed:

Mike and I love Charleston
Mike and I are very interested in realestate for investments
I despise urban sprawl, building poorly-constructed strip malls then abandoning them to build more
Charleston has a lot of abandoned historical buildings and warehouses
Charleston is beginning to exhibit sprawl
I want to learn how to develop changes against sprawl (public transportation, living within walking distance, re-using buildings, and constructing buildings to last)

Do I have to go to school for this or can I just be on the Committee? Can I begin learning before we make it back to Charleston?

I'm hoping we are stationed in Europe for our follow-up assignment so that I can observe their model of reusing century-old buildings.

Remember: there are three elements of our "going green" mantra, and the first two are the hardest ones, but so essential: