Childhood Memory Monday: Princess Positions

Monday's post, since I was watching a True Blood marathon with a friend and didn't get around to this. I may have to move the TV post day, and I think I will dispense with the current events postings and instead do a favorite vegetarian meal. I am starting to feel the call to vegan a little bit more these days and would like to inspire myself in that area.

As I've mentioned previously, when we lived in Massachussetts we drove down to Florida every year for vacation. This served several purposes: to visit family (we had aunts and uncles on both sides who lived in various parts of the state), to take a vacation (we visited a wide variety of tourist attractions), and to look for a place to live.

My mother's health had begun to decline when we lived in Vermont, and among her ailments were arthritis and bursitis (both of which lead to painful joint inflammation). Her doctor suggested that living someplace warmer would be better for her. I'm a little unclear in retrospect why we had a three-year stopover in Massachussetts, where we lived in my grandfather's house (he was in a nursing home), but live there we did.

When we visited Florida, we drove - a process that took 3 days each way. My dad bought a guide to restaurants and hotels along the Interstate, and made fun math problems to help us determine how far we might drive in a day and, therefore, which hotels we should be looking at in our guidebooks - once this was determined my sister and I were happy to spend the entire day in an endless debate over amenities and whether the hotel name boded well for our stay (was an inn named Sleep luckier than a hotel named Quality or Comfort?). Despite the fact that, given our budget, all the hotels we actually stayed in were generically similar did not deter us from our mission to find the absolute best place. Nor did proximity to a variety of restaurants cease to be one of the primary deciders, when in fact my sister and I refused to eat anything except MacDonald's chicken nuggets with sweet and sour sauce despite our parents' begging: "doesn't a Whopper sound good? Arby's Roast Beef? A sitdown place? ANYTHING?!"

The hotel arrangements were quite cramped, since we'd get one hotel room with two queen-sized beds - my sister and I sleeping in one bed and my parents in the other. Now, while we did play together quite a bit (being close in age at about 2 years apart), 24 hours a day for a week and a half or two weeks at a time is quite a bit to ask of two children under 10. We professed to hate each other completely, and the awkward thing about the hotel was whether or not we would touch each other in our sleep, this being a fate worse than death. Enter Princess Positions.

Princess Positions were a variety of approved sleeping positions that genteel ladies of good breeding could assume in order to not disturb the sleep of their similarly genteel sleeping companions. I remember there being at least three "approved" Princess Positions (which meant my sister and I both agreed that the position drastically reduced the odds of nocturnal touching) though the most common was flat on your back with your legs together and your fingers intertwined on your chest.

Every night in the hotel, we'd change into pajamas, lay out our clothes for the next day, and lay in bed watching TV as a family for awhile before my parents turned out the lights, at which point either my sister or I would announce "Princess Positions!" and we'd immediately assume our chosen option for the night. After two weeks of this, we were always grateful to return to the relative spaciousness and freedom of our own twin beds!

C+G Wedding Wednesdays: Save the Date

So, on our four year anniversary (where we ate at the astoundingly delicious Roaring Fork) I was talking to C about how I didn't know what size ring I wore, and that it would be absolutely horrible to get a beautiful engagement ring that I never wore.

Since we were right by Scottsdale Fashion Square, we jetted over there after our dinner and tried some rings on! Or, more precisely, it turns out I am the most common size (6) and could therefore try on practically every ring in the store. Awesome!

After that day, we looked at a bunch of rings online so that he could get an idea of exactly what I was looking for - I have no idea when the proposal's coming but I'm excited! We've set the date:

May 12, 2012 - the six year anniversary of the day we met (it's a Saturday).

We've also been looking at locations online and hope to choose one and put a deposit down this summer. The frontrunners are.

• Desert Botanical Gardens, catering either by Altasta or Creations in Cuisine.


• The Arizona Historical Society Museum, catering most likely by Green Vegetarian, though I am sure there are lots of other options since AHSM doesn't require you to pick a vendor off a specific list.


• Sheraton at Wild Horse Pass, catering by their chef (this place is 10 minutes from the airport, seems to have a decent vegetarian selection, is already a hotel for out of town guests, and is basically attached to a casino).

Feedback? Suggestions? I am thinking that we should go for hors d'oeuvres and an open bar rather than a buffet or a sit down dinner, but we'll see what the vendors say.

Television Tuesday: SYTYCD

This will be a quick one since I haven't seen this week's Bachelorette and that's pretty much the only thing (aside from Pawn Stars, American Pickers, and Tosh.O) that I care about - just an observation.

I am bored of SYTYCD. Perhaps it is because they changed the format. Perhaps it is because I missed the tryouts and only caught it starting with the episode where they listed the top 10. Perhaps it is because the show has been on over 5 years and they had 2 seasons last year instead of 1.

Whatever it is, I have 4 episodes saved up on the DVR and can't be bothered to watch any of them. I am hoping to have this Friday off, perhaps I can get back in the groove then...

Childhood Memory Monday: Unicorns

I named this blog The Enchanted Unicorn for several reasons. The first is that it is the name of my favorite slot machine. Once while living in Tucson I started with $20 and ended up with over $200, playing penny slots, no less. Another time in Phoenix I started with something like $100 and ended up with over $600 (4 rows of lions, rawr!) playing nickel slots. The rows are all princes, and princesses, and unicorns, and roses, and the bonus game consists of treasure chests guarded by evil sorcerers. I love it!

But my love of unicorns goes back much farther than that. When I was young, I was completely obsessed with them. When we lived in Vermont (up until I was 5 or so) I wanted to be a unicorn so badly my dad made little paper cones shaped like unicorn horns and taped them to the bright orange hunter's caps he made us wear (we lived in an area so rural there truly was the off chance that we'd be shot in the autumn and winter if we weren't wearing a bright color, and my sister and I loved loved loved our caps - we felt so grown up!). We galloped all over the mountain we lived on, our delightful whinnies filling the crisp fall air.

Later, mostly when we lived in Massachussetts from when I was 6-9 or so, I also had an imaginary unicorn in the way that some children have imaginary friends. Every year that we lived in MA we drove down to Florida (yes, drove, it took 3 days because my dad wouldn't let my mom take a turn driving) and I stared out the window, imagining that my unicorn ran swiftly beside the car. Periodically, I would tell my dad that my unicorn was tired and we needed to pull into a rest area. Typically, that meant that I was bored, stiff from sitting, or had to pee :-)

During our time in Massachussetts, my sister and I also shared an obsession with the animated classic, The Last Unicorn. Every weekend my dad would take us to the video store and ask us what we wanted to rent, and every week it was the same. He tried in vain to get us to widen our selection, but The Last Unicorn on a weekly basis for months at a stretch was not unusual. I remember that my dad cried almost every time...whether from boredom or because it's such a heartbreakingly beautiful film, who can say? I still own both the book the movie was based on and the DVD. Though I think to call Mia Farrow's singing a "voice talent" is overstating things a tad (it also features the "voice talents" of Angela Lansbury and Jeff Bridges).

I read every book that had to do with unicorns that I could get my hands on. This was back in the days when Choose Your Own Adventure books were hot, and of course my favorite one was called The Magic of the Unicorn. Those books must be collector's items now because a new copy on Amazon runs over $75, can you believe it? I also remember a time that we were walking around an open-air flea market and I came across De Historia et Veritate de Unicornis: On The History and Truth of the Unicorn. A brand new copy of this sucker goes for over $160 on Amazon. The book is made up of copies of an illuminated Latin manuscript accompanied by translations and the author's notes - the manuscript being purportedly held in trust by monks and passed on to this worthy author, who begins to walk the boundary between our world and the unicorn's over the course of the translation.

The book ends with the monk entrusting the author with an actual unicorn horn, which is buried in a secret location that can only be revealed by cracking the riddle in poem form that is reprinted on the last page of the book. Of course I immediately committed the poem to memory, convinced that I and I alone was destined to uncover the horn, wield whatever mystical power it commanded, including drawing the few remaining unicorns in our world to me by virtue of its power. I still remember some of it:

and I shall guard the source of greatness
waiting by a teardrop, from neither joy nor sorrow born
in silver bound, beneath the ground
I am the spiral horn

Like my friend Dalyn, who believed in Santa Claus for an obscenely long time, I was CONVINCED that unicorns were real right up until I was in high school. And hey, so far my belief in unicorns has led to a profit of about $700, so who's to say it isn't so?

Giving This Blog Some Structure

So, as some of you may or may not know, for the last two and a half years or so I have been blogging under a pseudonym. Why a pseudonym, you ask? Well, it's because a) I started a business with a friend, and if I failed completely I didn't want it to be totally obvious to everyone, and b) it was a very explicit blog about dating and relationships, and I figured that most of you didn't want to know that much about my personal life. However, I'm moving on from that endeavor for a variety of reasons that I am sure I will mention briefly at some point, and for another variety of reasons, I am going to be giving a lot more attention to this blog.

Namely, that C and I have set the date (more about this very shortly) and I figured that if I was going to be blogging about our relationship, I was probably going to want to do it under my own name and make sure that my family and friends had access to the blog! So here I am. However, I have also found myself wanting to blog about more than just my relationship with C - not that he's not wonderful, but I do think about other things every once in awhile :-)

So I thought I might divide the weekdays up into the categories I am likely to blog about and give that a try for a bit. Not promising that this is how things will be for infinity, but we'll see how I like it and modify from there. Here's what I am thinking:

Childhood Memory Mondays - I have often wanted to write about some of my favorite memories and traditions from childhood, as well as some of the things that I went through when taking care of my mother.

Television Tuesdays - I watch practically everything under the sun, and am very excited about snarkily judging reality tv contestants as well as providing insightful commentary about some of the dramas I enjoy.

C+G: Wedding Wednesdays - I'll keep you updated on all of our planning, as well as talk about relationship issues and things we've done together recently. Followers of my previous blog should enjoy!

Politics & Current Events Thursday - What I think of what's going on in the world. Full disclosure: I am so liberal it's almost unbelievable. I find that the older I get, the more extreme left I become. Socialize everything, huzzah!

Books + Blogs Friday - What I most enjoyed reading on the web each week, as well as any recommendations for heavier reading (if by heavier you mean fantasy novels over 500 pages long).

I may post more than once a day with something off-topic if I feel so moved, and may post sometimes on the weekends, though mostly I enjoy spending those with my Sweetie C, so no guarantees.

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend!

Books & Blogs Friday: My New Favorite, Robin Hobb

So I have a new favorite fantasy author - her name is Robin Hobb. In order to explain why I think she is so awesome, though, you should probably know a little bit about the way I read and the type of books I prefer.

I love loooong books. 500 pages or so is a minimum for something I feel like I could really get into. Bonus points if it's part of a series. I read so quickly (I have read over 1000 pages in a day before - once it was Stephen King's It, probably one of my top 5 books ever, and once it was Swan Song by Robert McCammon - each of them is about 1100 pages or so) that in order to feel that I have any time to immerse myself in the universe of the story at all, it needs to be quite lengthy.

This is a huge reason why I adore Stephen King, and many of my other favorite authors - Sara Douglass, Robert Jordan, Melanie Rawn - also write lots of really long novels (King doesn't do many series, but I forgive him because he is fantastic). I have been getting frustrated with Sara Douglass lately because the first two books in each of her series tend to be very good, and then the last book or two tend to blow goats. Nothing like getting all invested and then having the story become practically unreadable on you.

I've also been angry with Melanie Rawn for awhile because she started this awesome series called The Mageborn Traitors, and then only wrote the first two books in the trilogy (and it is VERY OBVIOUS at the end of the second book that another is required). Yes, yes, she suffered a meltdown from clinical depression while writing the second book in the series, and is afraid that if she writes the third that she'll go back to that place. I understand I'm supposed to be sympathetic. But all I can think is WRITE THE BOOK, DAMMIT!

So the beautiful thing about Robin Hobb is that she has 4 complete trilogies and another trilogy with the first two written. All of which are long enough to fit in my minimum page length for a novel. Hooray! Then I found out yesterday that she has also written ten novels under a pseudonym, Megan Lindholm. Double yay!

I do not like reading nonfiction of any kind, or most "literary" fiction. So anything recommended by Oprah's book club is probably not up my alley. These days, I prefer fantasy and science fiction exclusively. I used to force myself to read literary fiction, and since I have a BA and an MA in creative writing, I can appreciate it on a technical level, but I realized at some point, the time I have to do the things that I want to do is so limited that I shouldn't feel bad about saying no.

C on the other hand, is more on the sci fi side of things, and he also prefers shorter books (a lot shorter, maybe half the length that I like) and will even read short stories, which I have ZERO interest in at all. I have discovered that our friend Logan has identical taste in books to me (previously, the only such person I've located is Dalyn) and he has a lot of books that I've never read, which is awesome. He also has, not identical, but very compatible TV taste as me, which is another post entirely :-)

The Bachelorette

Despite the fact that Reality Steve knows all the spoilers before the season's even begun (seriously, read his blog) and the fact that the show is absolutely, totally fake and (if it were real) totally scary in what it says about relationships and dating, I love The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. I only wish they didn't whittle down through the people so quickly, because even though I hate most of them, I looooove drinking a beer alone an a weeknight and judging people who are out their living their lives while I wear my pajamas and try to finish the ep before C gets home. :-)

This is the week that I was kind of disappointed that Kasey got sent home, because he seriously has a mental disorder and is one of the scariest people I have seen in a long time. The bachelorette, Ali, told him that most of what he said was cheesy and came off as insincere, and that he just needed to be himself and not be so over the top. Of course he was "devastated" that she would question his "sincerity, [his] emotions, and [his] genuine heart," but he eventually realized that he did need to back off...

So he got a tattoo. On his wrist. Of a shield guarding a heart and a rose (the rose being the longtime symbol of the show). Because, as he's told her 5,000 times at least at this pont, he's there "to guard and protect [her] heart." Gag. I would've told him a long time ago that I can guard and protect my own heart, thank you very much! But Ali stammered something about being glad he was the way he was, while secretly telling the confessional "all he had to to was be normal" and cut him from the competition in the most dramatic way possible - stranding him on a glacier next to an erupting volcano in Iceland. Awesome. I know what the next twist is going to be already (thanks, Reality Steve!) and I can't wait because...duh duh duh...it involves the guy she didn't cut on the two-on-one where Kasey revealed his ink.

Oh, how I wish the show was on every day...I also wish that there was a channel out there that showed the reruns. Come on, We TV, step it up! The ladies are dying for it.