Hallelujah, indeed

The Messiah and Philly have always been connected in my mind, as our annual stake performance of it took my deep and abiding love for the oratorio to new heights. This just takes it to a while new level. Seriously, why didn't they do this while we were there??

Also, I love the Phillies shirts, dancing toddlers, and Penn vocal groups in the background. :)

End of the Beginning

Today is the official day of our move from Philadelphia. Paired with Dan's brother's wedding in Utah last week, his graduation and his other brother's first baby arriving the week before, our one-year anniversary, and me finishing up work, the last couple of weeks have kind of left me gasping for air. But this morning, as I drove my last drive to work along my beautiful routes, I was just calm, and felt a sweet peace. With slightly wet eyes, I drove past City Hall, the Masonic Temple, St. Peter's cathedral, the Free Library, the Franklin Institute, Logan Circle, the Rodin Museum, the PMA, up Kelly Drive beside Boathouse Row, and so many other lovely, lovely places all shining in the beautiful Philadelphia morning. We ADORE this city, and I love that just about each day, I stumble across something new, something beautifully new, a wonderful gem. I can't wait to come back and go to all the places that I still haven't been able to visit in almost seven years, just because there are too many.

Moving is just absolutely loathsome. Really, truly dreadful. But I have been grateful over the past few days for the many perfect angels and the sweet experiences we've had because of it. Three friends decided to just come over on Friday and help us pack up our (surprisingly enormous amount of) stuff. It was truly incredible to me how much we had in our not-that-big apartment, especially our kitchen. We'll just call it a testament to my organizational skills. In any case, we were so blessed by these people who helped pack, load, unload, keep sane, etc., without whom it would never have gotten done. I am also so very grateful for our wonderful South Philadelphia branch. We (unfortunately) haven't talked about it much on this blog, but words don't totally express how much we love our branch. The people there are such treasures, so sincere, so kind, so loving, so familial.

Yesterday felt like a perfect sendoff largely because of how wonderful church was, and that we got to have a special experience by speaking and sharing our love for them. It was topped off by spending the afternoon with one of our favorite branch families, followed by dinner with Dan's incredible mission president and his wife who are blessedly in our stake, and then a second dessert with our wonderful, wonderful landlords. I am so glad Philly is getting a temple because she and her people deserve it.

We've had so many miracles in the last few days, mostly delivered by other people, but just to recount one of the many, many stories of help we've received, I called our landlady before putting out desk on craigslist to ask if she maybe just wanted it. She told me not to worry about having to do anything with it and that I could just leave it. She asked if we wanted it again after our long trip this summer*, and that they could hang onto it until then if we wanted. I told her not to worry about it. BUT if and only if she had space that they were not using at all and if it was no hassle, we had a TV that could use a storage spot for the summer, because it might not fit in our last car load. She said no worries at all, and that we could just leave it there and they'd store it in their basement. I told her that we could bring it out there (especially since we were planning on dropping by that night, anyway), but she said really to not worry about it and that we had enough to do. She said that they were going to do a bit of renovation on the apartment, anyway, and that we could just leave anything we wanted to keep but for which we didn't have room, leave a note with our names, and that they'd have someone bring it up to their basement for the summer. WHAT?? This is our LANDLADY, people. As in, the person with whom most people have monthly spats and who usually refuses to fix apartmental problems and who, if you're my friend's landlady, complains when her final month's check is just a couple of days late because she was in finals and graduating and just totally forgot, and was immediately sent when she realized it and still charged a late fee even though for the previous months, she paid a lump sum four months in advance (at which point the landlady said that made it more difficult for her...ridiculous). This is that person that usually gets mad at you for forgetting something in your emptied apartment. She actually told us we could just LEAVE our extra stuff and not have to move it anywhere, that they would take care of and store it for us, and that we could retrieve it anytime we wanted. At this point I basically started jumping up and down in ecstasy and called my mom and almost fainted from relief.

In any case, the point of this is that a) we love Philadelphia and its people, b) we're so very, very grateful for their kindness to us, and c) we're gonna miss this place. Dearly. We love you, Philly.

*Oh, uh, yeah. We're going to Europe, India, and South America this summer as a sort of last hurrah-this-may-be-the-last-pre-children-large-chunk-of-time-in-which-neither-of-us-is-working-or-in-school. And the recession is making plane tickets uber-cheap.

Three Down

I live in Philadelphia, where I enjoyed Games 1 & 2 of the World Series. Dan & I spent a lovely weekend in southwestern Florida, where we energetically watched Games 3 & 4. This morning, Dan flew home, but I am still in FL for a work meeting until Wednesday. So I'll watch Game 5 here.

Clearly I am very much hopeful and excited for tonight's game to be the last, even though I'm still in the reverse state from where my beloved Phils are playing. If (if if if highly-unlikely if) they must return to Tampa to shut out the Rays there, I will be back in Philly. Cruel. I'm totally bitter that I haven't been able to be in Philly for ANY of the games to experience the excitement there. At least I can have Dan report back tonight.

And can we please just talk about the amazingness of the last two games?? What??? Moyer, Rollins, Howard, Werth, Bartlett, Blanton...holy heck. Game 3 = nail-bitingly incredible. Game 4 = YEE-AH!! Special shout-out to my wonderful and patient husband for explaining the ins-and-outs of baseball to his I-grew-up-watching-Pete-Sampras-and-Steffi-Graf wife.

Pointing to left field (or right, or center...) for tonight.

The Holy City

Q: Which is God's favorite city?

A: Philadelphia!!

A temple and the World Series all in fewer than 2 weeks?? The righteous truly are blessed! ;)

Somewhat tangentially, I do love how the entire city rallies behind its sports teams. Dan & I have discussed how we think it's great that Philly only has one of many rally-worthy things, such as a baseball/football/basketball/hockey team (though we wish it had more than one airport). This means that pretty much everyone in the city loves the team in question, with no division amongst the members.

That also means that the city goes absolutely nuts any time one of those teams wins. Take last night, for instance - I was told (since a) we had gone to bed after the 6th inning so we wouldn't be exhausted for seminary and b) I don't wake up for anything) by Dan that the noise after the game was unbelievable - yelling, crying, fireworks (sounding like they were right in our parking lot, in fact), and general exuberance, preventing him from falling back asleep for the duration of it.

PHILLY!!!!!!!

Man I love this city

So I have this...quirk? gift? weirdness?...where I tend to really adore wherever I happen to be living at the moment. Before my family moved to Utah, I was so in love with Alabama and swore I would never leave. But then I adored Utah (and you'd pretty much have to tie me to a tractor trailer and drag me there to get me to live in Alabama again) and then Philly and then France, etc. etc. I'm typically fairly convinced that my place is better than other places in the same grouping (e.g. Philly > NYC, Lyon > Paris :)).

So there are these two dueling forces in me. One, the rational one, the one that understands and knows me, says that I'll love wherever we live in the future and will be convinced it's the best ever. The other one, the one that IS the one that the first one knows, is convinced there is no place better than Philly.

On that note, fall is one of my very favorite seasons in Philly and I'm so excited for it. Some reasons why:

a) The weather! I pretty much keeled over from joy and joyfulness today when I looked at weather.com and EVERY. SINGLE. day on the 10-day forecast showed a high temperature of 70-75 degrees for the most part and again EVERY SINGLE day was sunny, oh beautiful glorious sun. (Cleary I had to embed this in my memory.)

b) Everyone's outside again! I love watching the runners by Boathouse Row and going to Reading Terminal and Washington Square (way cooler than Rittenhouse).

c) I think everyone's in a happier mood when it's so lovely out. I actually think people in Philly are incredibly kind and I love how real they are - there's absolutely no pretense. But I think they get even nicer at this time of year. Case in point:

1) A couple of weeks ago, I was at Reading Terminal buying some produce. I was waiting for Dan to meet me there, so I figured while I was waiting, I'd wander over to the cheese shop. Now, I've bought cheese from here, I don't know, maybe three or four times. In any case, I had an idea for dinner that night and it called for Havarti so I was just going to use whatever was on hand, but I figured since I was there, I might as well get Havarti. So I taste it and like it so he's cutting me off some when he (Robert) says that they had already closed down the credit card machine for the day (it was just before closing time). I realized I had literally not one dollar bill with me, which was problematic. He told me that it was fine and that I could just bring it to him tomorrow. I tell him we're going on a trip the next day (why I was buying produce the day before leaving on a trip is only explainable by the celetial quality of nectarines) so he says it's fine, and that I could just bring it the next time I was there, he sees me there all the time. (Um, how nice?!) So I tell him thank you and he wraps it up and weighs it and it comes up to about $4 and he just hands it to me and says "Don't worry about it, it's a gift - enjoy your trip!" Um. He gave me CHEESE. For FREE.

2) The people at the Free Library are the nicest people on earth. Period. Not to mention its utterly awesome history.

3) Except for possibly the people who work at Trader Joe's. I think they're in a deadlock competition for Nicest Slash Most Helpful Service Providers of the Century.

4) We had a little incident with getting our (awesome and totally worth it, but easy for me to say because I wasn't involved in the situation) couch into our apartment. Long story short (that omits the part where the guy who brought it just left it in the doorway after trying to push it through multiple times and putting several holes in the wall but actually I just told you all of that anyway so I guess this really isn't the short version), we had to hoist it over the balcony with ropes. Dan and two of our incredible friends helped out, but it got stuck on the balcony of the floor below us. So they were trying to hold it in place while pushing it out to get it over. Then a guy calls up from the street (after many business suit-types had passed by) and asks if they need any help. They kinda look at each other and are like, yeah, actually, we do. So he comes up through the propped open door, tattoos and multiple canister-piercings and all, and helps pull the couch over the balcony. Just because. People are awesome.

Anyway, this has turned into a why-people are nice post. I'm okay with that.

Come Again Another Day

On Sunday, we decided it would be fun to take a little stroll down to Penn’s Landing. We both absolutely adore wandering through Old City and Society Hill, and it was the perfect lazy afternoon for a walk. We walked past all the cute old townhomes, speed-walk-raced a horse carriage up Lombard, and said hello to the church where Joseph Smith preached.

So here we are on a quiet Sabbath, just wandering around (still in our respective skirts/dress pants, mind you) when all of a sudden, I feel a raindrop. We ignore it, thinking it would just sprinkle a little. And then they sky opened. Without notice, it just started pouring. So our umbrella-less selves quickly ducked under a tree, and when that didn’t really do anything, we huddled under a teeny Old City awning…well, it’s more of a 6-inch overhang than an awning.

So here we are, hugging this random wall, when (how this was even possible, I don’t know) it starts to rain EVEN harder. So we climb up on the steps to stand directly in front of the door to sneak a couple extra inches of coverage. We’re just chatting while watching the rain when all of a sudden, the door flies open behind us. We turn abruptly to find a nice, middle-aged woman framed in the opening. We hastily (and flustered-ly, in my case) explain how we were just trying to take refuge from the downpour, did she mind if strangers just invaded her doorstep and passed the time there? Luckily, she was nice enough to not mind, and we turned back to the wetness.

Since it was raining so unbelievably hard, it couldn’t possibly last very long, right? Um, yeah. About that. Forty-five minutes later, we were STILL on this random woman’s doorstep. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for running about in a drizzle, especially when clothed in pajamas and/or my ladybug galoshes. But when in a skirt and dressy shoes and when it is pouring buckets upon buckets of water, yeah, not so much. So Dan finally suggests that maybe we should just ask if we could possibly borrow an umbrella. I laugh this off, thinking it absurd. But when the rain seriously didn’t even slow down, I figured, hey, why not?

So yeah. We knocked on a random woman’s door to ask to borrow an umbrella. The best part was that she actually asked us to hold on while she went to check (she didn’t actually live there – she was visiting her son), and came back with her son, her husbands, and not one, but TWO umbrellas in tow. They were seriously the nicest people – they asked if we wanted to come in to dry off, told us to keep the umbrellas as long as we needed, and told us we should come over some time, as he had just moved to the neighborhood from Brooklyn Heights. Clearly we will be taking them some sort of sweet treat in honor of their newfound status of Nicest People on the Planet.

And then we came home to find a hole in our guest room ceiling with water gushing through. Yay, rain!

Philly Driving

We really adore Philadelphia. There are so many things about it that make us extraordinarily happy, such as Boathouse Row, Reading Terminal, Scannicchio's, etc. Philly driving, however, tends to make me want to stick a fork in my ear and pulverize my left brain, the part that is rational and wants people to drive in straight lines and not stop in the middle of a single-lane road and use turn signals. For instance, here are some things that have happened in the last, I am not even kidding you, 12 hours.

• This morning, as I was leaving for work, this man was pulling out of a parking spot in my lot. Now granted, it was a kind of tight spot, but presumably, if he's parked there, he must do it relatively regularly (considering it's a private lot). But he decided to turn slightly to get around the brick wall...very very very slowly. But okay, the brick wall is kind of intimidating, so all right, take your time. But then he stopped. In front of the gate. And didn't do anything. And continued to stand still. Not moving. For FIVE MINUTES. He just stood there! In case I wasn't clear, he continued to sit in his car unmovingly and not exiting through the gate. And then when I opened the gate from behind him since he wasn't, and he inched forward to the gate (was he scared of it?) and then nosed his hood through and then stood there again. Even though there was NO ONCOMING TRAFFIC. AHHHGG.




• Yesterday, I was driving home from West Philly down South Street and I got to the 15th block (the same one where a guy rear-ended me and we got to witness a heroin addict jump on random cars and lie down in the middle of the road, and where, in a separate incident, a guy tried to climb into my car and started beating my windows when I wouldn't let him...but that's a subject for another post) and there was not one or two or three or four but FIVE buses parked in the middle of this single-lane road completely stopped with a random white blinky light on top. Mind you, this was not in the middle of the day for a potential school trip, but rather at ten-thirty at night. What were they doing there? No idea. How do people get through there? They don't.

• Each day, I take Lincoln Drive to work. It's a super curvy and beautiful road that goes through parts of Fairmount Park. The cars in the morning tend to drive between 25 to 40 miles over the speed limit since it's a 25 zone and they drive it each and every day. There are also an abundance of blind turns so you really have no idea what's waiting for you around the bend. This morning it was a pair of geese just strolling along. The funniest part was that they didn't actually CROSS the road. Instead, they just hung out in the middle of it walking right along the white dividing line, going along their merry way. The best part was that it completely halted traffic as drivers waited for the geese to finish their morning promenade. It was rather cute.

Those are just the semi-unusual happenings - completely disregarding the normal throw-your-hazards-on-in-the-middle-of-the-street-and-leave-your-car-ness. (Which I was once encouraged to do. By a police officer.) It's going to be tough driving anywhere else - if I go on a trip, it's always so liberating to come back to Philly and feel like I speed and run blatantly red lights and park illegally again. :)

Yeh, Morph It!

Subtitle: Ode to Sme and Sleigh

My sister and her friend (slash mine!) came to visit last Thursday night. They were on Spring Break from UVA/William & Mary, respectively. So most collegiate Spring Breakers can be found bikini-clad (or less) on the shores of Cancun and the like. For these two, Spring Break involved no boys, no booze, and no boorishness (okay, I just needed a 3rd "b"...so I like alliteration, sue me). Instead, they traveled to visit quite possibly the most fully-clothed people on the planet - the AMISH!

The Amish are cool for a number of reasons:

a) Many of them live in Pennsylvania.
b) They have cute homemade dresses and bonnets.
c) They have the best jam and ice cream known to mankind. MMM
d) Amish children are particularly adorable in the aforementioned dresses and bonnets.
e) They ride in buggies.

So Pri and Ash spent a couple of delightful nights in a cutecutecute little house in Amishland (aka Lancaster...LENKester, not LAN-CAS-TER), complete with Amish quilt and Amish fudge and Amish crackers waiting for them upon arrival, all for $79 a night (Dan and I fully intend to take a weekend trip there this summer). After traversing the Amish countryside they came to Philadelphia for a night. Yay!

Philadelphia is also cool for a number of reasons:
a) It is in Pennsylvania, thus sharing land with the Amish.
b) It serves as the home to the Philadelphia Orchestra.
c) There are tons of super awesome theaters and restaurants and museums, etc.
d) Penn.
d) Scannicchio's!

Scannicchio's is a remarkably wonderfully fantastic little gem that Kelly and I discovered a year and a half ago when we were on a quest for an authentic South Philly Itailian restaurant. Dan & I have since made it a habit to take every single visitor there. After just a few visits, our waiter remembered what I order every time (eggplant rollantini) and always welcomes us "back." We mentioned to the hostess the last time we were there that we had gotten engaged over the holidays, and she promptly congratulated us about 14 times, which was also the first and last thing she said to us this time. :)

Anyway, needless to say, it was glorious. Dan very wonderfully accompanied us even though he had a midterm and a mega-enormous project due the next day. Since I know you're dying to know the details of our food extravaganza, we ordered the stuffed whole artichoke (a new experience for the Virginians...mmm garlic) and bruschetta for appetizers, and tried the eggplant, penne alla vodka, and fettucini alfredo with chicken for entrees. Then dessert (even though we were all beyond bursting...except ash...): we got the peanut butter tartufo. mmm. The best part is that it is so perfectly cut and all cute (it looks like a cut apple) and I told them we were there for Priya's birthday (this week) and the brought it out with a candle with "Happy Birthday" written in caramel all along the sides. Oh, and Mark (the waiter) sang with us. It was super cute, and very delicious.

So then we went on a little tour of Philadelphia, and Ashleigh has decided to move here. Glad you loved it, Ash. :) Philly misses you.

Thanks for visiting, girls! And happy birthday, sis!

(If you're wondering about the title, we had a little fun that night at MorphThing.)

La Neige

Philadelphia doesn'treally believe in plowing the roads when it snows, and the roads I take to work are pretty windy. Which means that if it does snow, we get to work from home! I was starting to get worried that the season would pass by without such a treasure, but right now, a glorious 4" of the white stuff is lying outside my door.

Plus, the snow just makes it feel all warm and cozy and inviting inside.

I'm kinda glad Philly hasn't taken a page from Salt Lake's book and actually figured out how to make the city still work during bad weather.

I love the snow.