Mondays

Every Sunday night, I get this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach because the next day is Monday. I admit it - I just don't like Mondays. Possible reasons include:

• I get really sad after a weekend of spending every second with Dan that I can't do that anymore, and have to wait a whole 5 days until I can again.
• I don't get to sleep in.
• I like my job, but I think holidays are still probably better.
• Traffic is always unpredictable on Mondays, and there seem to be more cops out.

I actually really dislike this about myself. I really WANT to like Mondays. Mostly because I don't want them to feel sad and unloved. Perhaps I just need to remember that I'm seriously so blessed. So, here's a list of things I love about Mondays:

• The mail comes! To this day, that little kid part of me that gets excited to get the mail -even though I know the most exciting thing will probably be that I'm pre-approved for the Kansas Homeowner's Mortgage credit card - gets a little sad when I involuntarily reach for my mailbox key while walking in on Sundays.
• Give me an F! Give me an H! Give me an E!
• I don't have to worry about Monday coming - it's already here.
• I get to listen to my John Adams book on CD.
• I can buy avocados if I want (and why wouldn't I?).
• I can go to lunch with my awesome co-workers.
• I can look around my cube at my fax from my future self, pictures, and penguin of death/pig of happiness cards.

In other news, this was our first really relaxing weekend since probably before we got engaged. No traveling, no visitors, no organizing our apartment (all of which we love, especially the organizing - hurrah for alphebetized spices!)...it was glorious. On Friday, we went to the Mann and had a picnic with the Babbels, Dan's wonderful mission presidents who happen to live in the area and were going the same night we were. They played the glorious Pictures at an Exhibition, which was truly phenomenal - oh, the brass and percussion at the end! The harmonies! The clarity of tone! If that weren't enough, the spectacular Leila Josefowicz performed one of my very favorite violin pieces, the Mendelssohn violin concerto. Very nearly flawless.

We slept in on Saturday and then got up and made a ridiculously awesome brunch (pancakes with berries/walnuts, cheesy hash browns, zucchini/basil frittata, vanilla/pear/berry muffins...I should really just start a sidebar of all our cooking adventures). We sat around and napped for a while (I never could nap before we got married, ever, but it seems like we catnap all the time now) and then decided we'd use our free movie tickets!

Sidenote: several weeks ago, we were at our local Superfresh (which I typically avoid at all costs in favor of Reading Terminal and TJ's, but sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures) and they were having a General Mills sale where if you bought $35 worth of GMI products, you'd get 2 free movie tickets. I didn't even consider it at first, thinking to myself, "There is no way we could possibly buy $35 worth of General Mills products, and even if we could, there is no way I am keeping $35 worth of General Mills products in our big-for-the-city-but-still-small kitchen." Dan, however, got all excited and thought we should definitely do it. Now though I work for The General, I'm kind of picky about which products of ours I'll actually put into my body. When we realized that we already had about $15 worth of Yoplait (I literally only eat one flavor of yogurts in all the world of yogurt - Yoplait Original Red Raspberry - not Light, which tastes like aspartame -, with occasional exceptions made for Yoplait Original Cherry. I've finally come to terms with the fact that I'm weird about food.) which was on sale for $0.50 compared to its everyday retail of $1.09, we decided maybe we should just go for it. So we stocked up on Honey Nut/Multigrain Cheerios. With a couple boxes of Trix thrown in for Dan.

Anyway, I digress. The movie tickets. So we decided to see our very first IMAX by way of The Alps. Some of the camera work was truly spectacular, and it was even cooler to feel surrounded by these majestic mountains. While it made me even more terrified of doing something like that, Dan felt some of the lure. Umm...

After that, we put our feet in the water of Logan Square with all the little kids. We absolutely adore community things like that, where everyone is just together and happy and nice. It was so relaxing. We went home and changed and went to dinner at La Croix in honor of our upcoming 2-month anniversary, as our wonderful Lizzy had given us a gift card there for our wedding gift. She wanted to give us an "experience" rather than a "thing," and experience it was! The service was stately, and they gave us little petit fours at the end with to-go muffins and made a little Tiffany-box cake in honor of the occasion (they asked if there was one when we made the reservation).

Sunday, Dan was sustained as Elders' Quorum 1st Counselor, and I was sustained as seminary teacher. In addition to my Primary chorister calling. Whoo boy. This will be awesome, but boy will it be work. For those unaware, in our church, we each have certain "callings," or responsibilities to which we attend. For Dan, that means being one of two "counselors" to the president of the Elders' Quorum, the men's group (counterpart to the Relief Society, the women's group). As for me, I've been teaching the children (the Primary) music, and come September, will be teaching daily religion classes to the youth. Early religion classes. As in at 6:30 every weekday morning, they will come to our home and we (clearly if I'm getting up that early, so is Dan :) and he's sweet enough to want to help) will attempt to teach them about the gospel. Yikes. But cool. Now I just need to inform my manager that I might need to leave a little early to make my new bedtime of 4:30pm.

Oh, and I chopped my hair off.