David Day and Terri Day

Every summer Dave and I indulge ourselves with special days meant to celebrate all we've each accomplished over the year...and to counteract any tendencies toward taking each other for granted. And plus, don't you think we all deserve more attention? Adults barely even celebrate their own birthdays! That's crazy! There should be multiple days every year where each of us holds the world back and devotes some focused time to celebrating our own unique brand of amazingness. Or, even better, allows someone else to shine the spotlight on us. So I host "David Day" and Dave hosts "Terri Day" and it's chock full o' fun! Frankly, I think I enjoy planning "David Day" even more than having my own "Terri Day." It's so fun planning a whole day around a single goal: showing someone you love how much you love them.

This year's round of "days" turned out to be more low-key than previous years...but more relaxing.

Dave woke up and was given a printed "David Day Agenda"along with a gift (books). I also made a huge breakfast for him, including eggs, sausage, butter-fried mushrooms, and homemade lemon/raspberry muffins (I got the recipe from SmittenKitchen.com, and I tell you it's freaking amazing!):

Those of you who follow this blog know that sometimes I force spa treatments on my long-suffering husband. Well....we has some left-over cuces, so I thought he might enjoy a cooling eye treatment to relax him before our day o' fun.

Then we went for a long walk at Hidden Falls and eventually enjoyed a picnic lunch (you can see some of the left-over lemon/raspberry muffins there...I wish I had one right now).

Then it was off to the MN History Center to see The Greatest Generation exhibition, the main attraction for Dave being this here armoured car. Dave sure loves armoured vehicles.

Since he loves armoured vehicles so much, I bought him this little souvenir.

Then we had a relaxing evening at home, where I made fresh salsa:

The next weekend was Terri Day, and since Dave is not as much into taking photos of every detail as I am, we don't have many photos to share of Terri Day. But Dave made breakfast in bed for me...quiche, scones, clotted cream, fresh pineapple, yogurt, and something called "wine soda." All things I love. He also bought me this beautiful bouquet:

Then we went to the Titanic exhibit at the Science Museum, had lunch on the terrace of The Liffey, and spent a relaxing evening watching a travel DVD about English villages that Dave surprised me with.

The video was hilarious (not intentionally). In one village by the sea, the tide would come and flood what looked to outsiders like a parking lot (or "car park" as they'd say). Rather than putting a sign up for visitors alerting them that it wasn't a car park, they instead just let people park there then gathered to laugh at them once the tide came in and visitors returned to find their cars underwater. They even took photos of the distressed car-owners as they struggled to move their cars, and then posted all the photos in the local pub....like a "wall of mockery." They interviewed one toothless nasty person from this village, who was like "ahh...we sympathize with the visitors, it's a tough thing..." Well, then how bout this. PUT UP A SIGN! How about doing something to stop it from happening, rather than just taking photos and laughing? Answer: it's more fun to mock. Dave called it Schadenfreude Village. In fact, every village they featured had a subtle (or not so subtle) "damn tourists" subtext. And while it was all obviously scripted, the villagers couldn't even pretend they were speaking extemporaneously...they'd insert pauses where they shouldn't be, stumble over their words, or speak all their lines in one breath: "You (pause) should-go-see-Aunt-Madge-she (very quickly, then followed by awkward pause) will set you up with a nice (long pause) pint." Anyway, it was very funny.

So, that's the story of David and Terri Days.

Since Last Time...

We've been busy, and so have had little time to blog. One of the fun things we had going on was bringing our nephew, Nick, to the slotcar track at Dave's favorite hobby store. Nick had a great time racing his slotcar, and we had a great time too. Nick is some kind of slotcar wizard. Neither Dave nor I were able to beat him in a race (and believe me, we tried...none of this "oh, let the kid win" stuff), and eventually the guy running the place gave Nick a more difficult track because Nick had so clearly mastered the track on which he started. And even with the more difficult track he figured that out pretty quickly too. There's skill to the slotcars...you have to ease up on the handle things (you can see this in the bottom photo) around the corners or else your car will go shooting off the track like a freaking bullet. So the trick is to keep the car going as fast as it can, but also to stay on the track. The cars we were using go about 80 miles per hour, but there are specialty-built ones that go well over 100...which is insane. After slotcars we went to the military museum...somewhere. I don't really know where it is ~ I'm a girl. That's Dave's kind of stuff, and I basically just went along to take photos. And finally we went on the trolley over by Lake Harriet. A really full day of various vehicle-oriented fun! We love spending time with Nick. He is such a sweet, smart, patient, and pleasant young man.

~

Other than that, there's been Dave's job search. He has an interview on Wednesday, but not for a teaching job. I don't know how I feel about that. Maybe that's a good thing? I mean, perhaps being a teacher is just more hassle than it's worth, especiallys since one could do many other (far easier) things and get paid more money...and not have teenagers swearing at you, parents blaming you because their student doesn't do their homework (yes...some parents do believe that teachers are merely hired parent-surrogates), and dealing with almost criminally insane administrators. Maybe THAT'S why the average career-span of a teacher is a mere 5 years ~ work constantly, little pay, and treated like poo. But on the other hand, Dave went through considerable time, sacrifice and money to switch careers and pursue teaching, and I'd hate for him to give it up so soon. He does have the "calling." And maybe there IS some magical school where he'll be treated as the well-educated, dedicated professional he is. Maybe he can find that school and be happy there. It could be just around the corner. So I have mixed feelings about him interviewing for non-teaching positions. But, goldangnabit, I also want to move...NOW! So I guess wherever the money is coming from, maybe that's ok for now.

~

As for me, I have been writing. I'm stuck in the revision whirlpool, however. I keep revising the same things over and over and over. Then I say "I promise next session I'll move forward" but then the next session I read over what I revised the previous day and see all kinds of little things that could be improved. The other day I spent 2 hours revising a single paragraph. At that point, it's not even "revising" anymore. Does this kind of nit-picking make the novel better? Well...yes, I do believe it does! A novel is nothing more than the sum of its parts, so each sentence needs to be improved if it can be. But it's also making it nearly impossible for me to actually finish the BIG revisions that are still awaiting my attention. They're like "hello! Over here in chapter 21! We've got faulty character development going on, so maybe you want to stop fretting over subject-verb agreement in that single chapter 3 sentence. We've got plot holes to fill! How about spending a little time on that, lady?" I need to pull myself away from this charybdis and move forward toward bigger revisions.

~

Finally, we decided to head to Chicago for a week this summer. Yay! Even though suddenly one of us is without a job, we're STILL going to take a vacation. Take that! Take that, unemployment! We're going on vacation anyway. Neener, neener, neener! So what if you suddenly tanked our new home-buying and new car-buying plans. You can't keep us down! Maybe we'll get on Oprah and that will be the day she doles out both new homes and new cars to everyone in the audience! Maybe if we spend some time around her studio, telling passers-by our story, one of her producers will go "they're the face of this horrible economy!" and have us come on her show...which will somehow result in our own reality TV show! Ok, that would be pretty boring...pretty much just us going to Target, working at computers, and periodically getting up to go look in the fridge. So maybe we'll have our own talk show instead ~ I have ideas for that! And then while I'm on her show, I can slip her the MS of my novel and she'll LOVE it and make it the first in her "Unpublished Book Club" series, and then it will be made into a movie starting Toni Colette and Conan O'Brien in his first film role. And even if none of that happens, I hear Chicago has good pizza and a couple museums, so we're bound to at least have fun.