Tag Archives: Marshfield

A happy Belvedersary, even still.

Pregnancy or Lack Thereof, , , , , ,

I’ve got to admit, I’m at something of a low point. Until now, things always seemed to work out according to some sort of natural order… and if they didn’t, it was removed enough from my day-to-day life that I was able to deal and keep going.

Losing the infertility battle, though… it feels like I’ve been cut in half, scooped and scraped clean, and refilled with something unfamiliar and painful before being put back together. I don’t know how to move forward. I can’t figure out what comes next.

Though far more painful than the last, it’s not the first time I felt adrift…

On Friday, we celebrated our sixth Belvedersary. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, we mark the fateful day in 2010 on which a weird series of events led to our next big step. I was in grad school at the time and had spent nearly six years being trained for a career in academia… a career that I knew I didn’t want. But a girl needs a job and I was desperately searching for an better-than-nothing position as a post-doc after graduation. Until that day we celebrate year after year.

On the day after Thanksgiving in 2010, and please forgive me for repeating myself (it’s been a while), Seth and I were in Wisconsin for the holiday when my in-laws suggested we head to Marshfield for a fish fry at the Belvedere Supper Club, a quick stop at Festival Foods for a couple bottles of Captain’s Walk White to bring back to Maryland, and a tour of the Marshfield Rotary Winter Wonderland at Wildwood Park and Zoo. On the way through Marshfield, I noticed the big clinic anchoring the town… and the rest is history.

My future as a Scientific Research Writer was literally triggered by a million tiny light bulbs.

It doesn’t get much more obvious than that.

 

So yesterday, my amazing-at-humoring-me in-laws came to Marshfield to join Seth and me in celebrating our sixth Belvedersary.

First, a fish fry at the Belvedere.

belvedere-2016
Love him for humoring me; I only ever get one shot at a photo. If I get one at all. Oh, Sethy!

Then, the lights at Wildwood.

wildwood-2016
Just the drive through version for now… we’ll walk the park when there’s snow on the ground, it’s even prettier then.

It was so much fun. It’s always fun. And it’s such a good reminder of how things can work out, even if it’s in a way I couldn’t in a million years have anticipated.

 

And last night, celebrating our Belvedersary with people I love very, very much, my ucky new insides didn’t feel quite as painful as they did the day before. I don’t know if the future will be as clear as the million lights at Wildwood this time, and I know that I’m going to hurt for a while, but there will be a future. Somehow, some way. Just not the one I imagined.

Five long/short years.

Thoughts about Things, , , , , , , ,

Fives years is five years. Except…

It’s been five years since we moved to Marshfield.

arriving in Marshfield

Those five years have flown by in the blink of an eye.

It’s also been five years since I left DC.

leaving MD

But when my plane touched down here tonight, it all felt like a lifetime ago.

Same five years. How can it feel so different?

 

You guys should have seen me tonight. Fumbling to purchase a SmarTrip card, trying to figure out which side of the Metro platform to stand on, acting like a total tourist as we transferred from the yellow to the blue line. Oh! oh! and I almost forgot about the time I knocked my suitcase down the up escalator as we exited at Federal Center SW. Nothing but suave. Yes. Suave.

My public transit skills have evaporated, my mental maps have faded, and my sense of where I am in the city is basically gone, gone, gone. I’m no longer the young, metropolitan woman I’d spent six years becoming. Five shorts years — and I’ve completely unbecome.

And also rebecome. A pretty poignant reminder of what time can do.

 

It’s so interesting to be back here. So exciting. Somehow scary all over again.

And in a few short hours, it’s exhausted me. So. Netflix in the hotel room until this midwestern local yokel ventures back out into the big city for a few days.

netflix in hotel

Can’t wait to tell you all about it!

Sidenote: Melissa McCarthy’s Spy, which we’ve discussed before, is SO DAMN FUNNY. Sexy and reckless! Love!

A nerdy girl’s happy accident.

Book Review, , , , , , , , , ,

Kind of a crazy night last night. Definitely not what I expected. Fortunately for a “nerdy girl” like me, expectations aren’t always meant to be met.

We’ve gotten our fair share of snow here in central Wisconsin over the last couple of weeks and my husband and I had a shoveling date (su-per romantic) planned for after work. In retrospect, I should have eaten a snack before hand. But I didn’t. So an hour and a half and goodness knows how many shovel-fulls of snow later, I was much more hungry than I generally like to be. (Seriously, I do not handle hunger well– it makes me panicky. You’d think I’d have experienced food insecurity or something in my life the way I behave. But nope. Just food neuroses.) I was also sweaty and had cra-a-a-zy hair from sweating while wearing a hat and being constantly bombarded with snow blower snow dust. To complete the look: yoga pants tucked into snow boots. I believe this is what the kids call a “hot mess.”

I dragged my starving butt back to the truck and the husb (because “hubs” really doesn’t make sense to me– that’s not the order the letters go in!) and I decided we’d get Culvers (mmmm… butter burger…) and soon! But two quick errands first!

We went to Fleet Farm first. I was starving, so it was unpleasant. But my ridiculous looking self fit right in. In fact, there’s probably no better place in all of Marshfield to show off the kind of look I was rocking right then, to be honest. It was a quick trip, in and out, and back to the car and one more stop to go!

But that’s where my expectations went awry.

I had never actually been to a book signing, I’d only seen them on tv, really, and I expected the author to be sitting at a table, surrounded by stacks of her books and a personal assistant or security guard or something. I expected to walk in, wait in a line, have my book signed, and go.

What I forgot was that I live in Marshfield, Wisconsin, population 19,000-ish, yoga pants tucked into snow boots pretty much a-o-k November through February. (Fine, March. Whatever.) And the author was too. So this was not a made-for-tv book signing.

It was actually quite a bit better than that!

The Marshfield Public Library was hosting author Lisa Boero, who wrote the book Murderers and Nerdy Girls Work Late. (Oh, and also FIVE more in the series! Woot!) It was the first book we read as a book club and it was awesome. And different. So different.

Nerdy Girls
{Available on Amazon!}

You see, Liz Howe, Nerdy Girl heroine, has prosopagnosia, or face blindness. She cannot recognize faces. Interestingly, Lisa Boero, Nerdy Girl author, also has face blindness. So she’s actually writing her super clever fiction from a place of personal experience– and that made for a really interesting talk last night! (Because that’s what it was, a reading, a talk, a Q&A, PLUS a book signing… there’s my happy accident!) It was fascinating to hear not only what Lisa had to say about her condition and her fictional character with her real condition, but also to hear all of the questions people asked her. Most interesting of all, and very Under-the-Tapestry-relevant was her reason for writing about it.

Lisa knew she had a really hard time recognizing people– she thought she was stupid. Although she acquired prosopagnosia sometime around the age of 12 (coinciding with removal of a brain tumor), Lisa had no idea that her issues were even a legitimate medical concern until she started dating her husband, who happens to be a neurologist, in her 20s. She never even thought to ask. Instead, the number one driver in her life was the desire to be “normal” at any cost.

But now Lisa Boero has a 10-year-old daughter and what she wants for her is to know that when you experience a hardship, you can use it as a springboard for growth. (Her example: another rejection letter about her book? at least it’s not a brain tumor!) And that no matter what, you should never hide who you are. But how could she ask that of her daughter if she couldn’t do that for herself? So she did do it for herself. She came out about her condition to her friends and family (her husband knew, of course, but her kids had no idea) and “nerdy girl” Liz was born.

And Liz is fascinating. Lisa is too.

Sound familiar?

Probably not, because what Lisa Boero went through was pretty extreme. But I just kept thinking that it was such a good lesson. An extreme example of something crazy common. That middle school desire to be normal, no matter what. To fit in in any way that you can and hide your true self away if you can’t. Lisa seems to recognize now that having prosopagnosia is something that makes her extraordinarily unique… and exceptionally interesting to a lot of people, not just neurologists. Myself included.

As I sat in the next to last row with my crazy hair and dripping snow boots, I was absolutely mesmerized. I loved listening to Lisa talk and despite my ridiculously loud stomach screaming “Feed me, Seymour!” every 30 seconds or so, the hour and a half long “book signing” just flew by. Not only that, but I took the opportunity to get signed up for the Marshfield Public Library Adult Winter Reading Program and earned NINE entries into the prize drawings for registering and attending the book signing. Double bonus, much? This is way better than BookIt! (Unless what I end up winning is a pizza gift certificate… then it’s exactly like BookIt…)

A little while ago, my friend Adriane who co-shares (not a real thing) my Kindle account (shhhhh) forced me to read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks… it’s essentially a series of case reports about people with strange neurological disorders. While I technically read it, I didn’t really internalize it, probably because I couldn’t really imagine the people described in the real world. But now I can. And I’m fascinated. I think I’m going to give that man and his wife/hat another shot… there may be more nerdy girls in there and I need to re-visit that possibility!

How to Start a Book Club in 10 Easy Steps

Awesome Things, Instructions for Life, , , , , , , , ,

My husband (well, at the time boyfriend and eventually fiance) used to travel a lot for work while I was in grad school.  Sometimes I was super lucky and gto to go with him so that I could hang out with his boss’s wife, and my bff, Melissa (Boston! Miami! Seattle!  We’ve had pedicures all over this great country of ours!), but most of the time, I had mice and I had to stay home to tend to them.

Doing a mouse experiment is seriously exhausting.  They are tedious, they are long, and they are non-stop until the bitter end.  (Bitter for the mice, not so much for me…)  So, to unwind, I binged on movies.  And my drug of choice?  Romantic comedies, of course!

During one of those Seth-less rom-com marathons, I watched The Jane Austen Book Club… and my life was changed forever.  I absolutely loved the movie, but more than that, it sparked in me a brilliant idea.  You’ll never guess what it was!

I kid, of course, because it’s ridiculously obvious:

I was going to start my own book club!

While I love, adore, worship, and consume anything and everything Jane Austen wrote with a very happy heart, I realize that Pride and Prejudice isn’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea.  So I decided we’d read something else… and anything else!  I quickly sent out an email to some of my local girlfriends that I thought might be interested, asking them to join my book club.  And some of them did!

We met once a month-ish, took turns picking books, and read and chatted and ate and drank until I left the state.

I hear things may have continued even without me, but you can imagine that it’s hard for me to believe that a solar system could function without its sun…

(Seriously hoping The Big Bang Theory picks that line up for Sheldon to use… what a jerky, but hilarious, thing to say! ha!)

Anyway, that book club was such a saving grace for me.  Getting together with my friends, bonding over our shared experiences with the books we were reading as well as life in general and grad school in particular was awesome.  Jess, Stephanie, Ellen, Christine, and Alyssa were my lifelines and it was such a good way to de-stress and have fun in the midst of all of the things that were so stressful and un-fun (see description of mouse experiments above).

Since moving to Marshfield, I have really missed that book club.  I love having a group of good girlfriends and while I work (and play!) with a bunch of really amazing women (seriously, they are incredible— everyone deserves to have coworkers like this), I was really missing that piece of the puzzle that book club had become for me while I lived in Maryland.

So, in the midst of much hemming and hawing (not to mention all the whining about it being so hard to make friends in Marshfield) I decided to start a book club.

In a town where you don’t really have many friends, however, deciding to do something and actually doing something are two very different things.  So again with the hemming and the hawing, toying around with ideas, and dragging my awkward and nervous feet…

I thought about putting up flyers at the library, but not a ton of people my age use the library… I thought about posting an ad in the Pulse classifieds, but that’s internal to the Marshfield Clinic and I didn’t want to limit the book club to only people that work in the same place I do… I thought about advertising on Craigslit or MeetUp, but neither are as big in central Wisconsin as you might think for such a bustling metropolis and I was doubtful that I’d get much of a response…  So I procrastinated.  Until I figured it out.

And now, without further ado (because that was a lot of ado), I will share with you how I did it, in 10 simple steps.

How to Start a Book Club in 10 Easy Steps

1. Drop hints to gauge interest.  The best people to invite to a book club are, obviously, book enthusiasts… people who like to read.  And people you think you could be friends with.  So drop some hints in places you frequent, see if anyone expresses and interest, and start building a mental guest list.

Gauging Interest in Book Club

2. Choose a book.  Stop stressing about which book… just pick a book!  Pick something you’ve been interested in reading, or ask someone you’re planning to invite to pick something they are interested in reading.  There are a million and one different book club reading lists out there, and you could totally try one of those, but why not let everyone take a turn to pick– yourself included!  You’ll end up reading things you may not have otherwise picked up and that’s kind of fun!  Plus, everyone gets to feel like they’ve had input and like they can share their interests with the group.

3. Set a date.  True, it’s going to be hard to find a day that works for everyone, but it’s not going to happen for anyone unless you pick a date and time and get the ball rolling.  I ended up picking the second Thursday of the month for reasons described below in step number 5… it worked brilliantly!  The majority of the people I invited were able to come and the couple that couldn’t know that they have an absolutely commitment-free standing invitation, whether they’ve read the book or not!

4. Send an invitation.  Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!  So easy to capture someone in your Facebook web when you tempt them with a book club… and once you do you can send big, weird, group messages all the time.  Yes!  Seriously though, the event thing worked great.  I sent a message with the date, time, and location and included a link to the book on Amazon.  However you do it– send that invite with plenty of time for people to read the book.  No stress, low commitment is the best way to get people engaged and to have fun without feeling like it’s something else they have to do.

5. Engage spouses, significant others, and man friends who may not like to read.  Books aren’t for everyone, and as such, book clubs aren’t for everyone.  Personally, I like love stories… a lot.  So when I pick a book, it’s likely going to have an element of that going on and men, in particular, are often averse to such things.  So I was planning to invite a bunch of girls over and Seth was wondering what he was going to do.  Solution: Thursday night football!  Husbands, significant others, and man friends were sent invitations to what I like to call “Super Man Time Football Club” to coincide with our book club.  They were banished (with snacks) to the big tv in the basement and we stayed upstairs to chat about the book.  It worked brilliantly and it was super fun having everyone over with no one feeling left behind.  Rumor has it that Seth is thinking a foosball table in the man cave would really complete the experience 😉

6. Read the book. The second best part!  (Second only to talking about the book with other people that read it!)  Leave yourself lots of time so you don’t have to rush or stress as the date approaches and enjoy the heck out of it– because that’s the whole point!

7. Tame house beasts.  For me, this meant cleaning like a mad woman, hiding visible messes in closets and Seth’s office, and feeding my crazy dog two benadryl.  The cleaning and the hiding seemed pretty effective, the benadryl did not.  She may have cost us a member or two, but hopefully most everyone will see past the crazy into the cuteness that is my Curly girl and be willing to come back.

8. Prepare snacks.  Snacks and drinks for book club are super fun for me.  I especially love when I can make something that fits with the theme of the book.  (I’m a nerd.)  For example, we read a book by a local Marshfield, Wisconsin author, so I made Wisconsin-shaped cookies and marked the city of Marshfield with a cow sprinkle.  I also bought lots of Wisconsin made wine.  (Please remember that Wisconsin is not exactly known for it’s wine.  I now regret this purchase.  You live, you learn.)  But regardless of whether they are somehow based on the theme of the book or not, wine and snacks are always an excellent way to start and finish a book club.

9. Eat, drink, chat, and discuss the book.  The meat of the party!  The whole point, if you will.  Sit around in the comfiest positions possible, bring your book, and chat about what you liked, what you didn’t, take the tangents that lead you elsewhere and come back, and (some cheese to go with my Wisconsin theme) enjoy the friendships that develop!

10. Gather, rinse, repeat.  (Do you see what I did there?)  Keep it up!  Make sure you have the next book picked out and a date in advance.  Having a rule like “second Thursday of the month” makes it easy to shift the date slightly as necessary during different times of the year, but it’s kind of nice to have an idea of when it’s coming up– always another month, another book, and another meeting of the minds to look forward to!

Book Club

Last night was my first book club in this new town… and it was a smashing success!  And not only was book club a success, but so was Super Man Time Football Club!  I had a blast, and I have it on good authority that at least two of the other attendees did as well.  (Because they told me.)  But I’m pretty sure that everyone had a good time.  Everyone at least had good food.  (And someone else brought good wine, so we were saved from the Wisconsin atrocity I had over-purchased.)

The thing that was most striking to me was first, that no one else had ever been in a book club (that movie really made it seem like it was a thing everybody just does) and second, that everyone was kind of in the same boat as me, friend-wise.  What a revelation!  Guess what fixed both of those things: BOOK CLUB.

So whether you’ve ever done it before and whether or not you’ve already got a lot of established friends in your town, if you like to read and you’re looking for new ways to connect, a book club could be a great thing to do.

If you don’t like to read, or even if you like to read but want to supplement your book clubs with other such meetings of friends, here are some excellent ideas we brainstormed in our excitement last night (plus something we’ve already done once):

  • Game Night (Get everyone together to play board games– boys against girls?  So much fun!  Yes, this is the one we’ve done before.)
  • Romantic Comedy Watching Club (A chance to watch a romantic comedy with girlfriends once a month?  yes, please!  You know we’ll be starting with Love Actually.)
  • Pinterest Party (Each person brings enough materials for everyone to make one or two Pinterest crafts and then you all get together to make them– everyone leaves with one of each thing but only had to purchase supplies for one!  Genius!)
  • Cookie Exchange (Like the Pinterest party, but you bring cookies to share… and recipes!  Come with a boat load of chocolate chip, leave with a little bit of chocolate chip, sugar, molasses, gingerbread, pinwheels, spritzes, whatever…)
  • Shopping trip to Appleton (works best if you live in small-town Wisconsin, of course)

No matter what you decide might work for you, I hope you find a way to engage in your community.  This truly was this missing piece for me in Marshfield… I think I’m finally home.