This morning Lena turned the key in her little Civic and, for the last time, pulled out of the Georgia driveway that for nearly two years has threatened to rip off her bumper with the slightest angle miscalculation. If she had left during the evening, she would have used the North Star as her guide. Well, either Polaris or the unruly GPS that’s duck taped to her dashboard.

My roommie former roommie is moving in pursuit of new career opportunities and a whole lot of happiness.

I know she’ll find it.

Last night we went to a lovely going away dinner with old friends and brand new (to this world) friends.

Lena jokes that years from now she wants to live in an apartment above my garage and be known as “Crazy Aunt Lena.” You know what? I think this is a fantastic idea. She held a two-week-old infant last night and, while she was reluctant at first, turns out to have an elbow built for baby cradling.

In my mind, she will be the aunt of my 2.5 children, serve as a surrogate mother in baby yoga classes, and teach them to eat and love vegetables at a much younger age than she managed to convince their mother of the same notion.

Lena and I have been pals for a very long time. If you read this blog frequently, you’ve probably noticed that she’s one of its main features.

Every once in a while I’m reminded just how long we’ve been friends. We’re not exactly on par with married couples who celebrate their 40th, 50th or 60th wedding anniversaries, but we’ve had a few milestones.

For instance, I was clicking around in my Twitter app the other day and came upon the very first direct message I sent through what was then a fairly new social media platform. In April 2009, I was living in London and wrote to Lena who was living in New York saying, “I miss your face…and I think this Twitter thing could get addicting!”

Well, Twitter has since been incorporated into nearly every media outlet in existence, drives commerce, highlights trends and is all around influential. I’d say my prediction was correct. I hope that my ability to forecast is as good tonight as it was three years ago. That’s because this is my message for this evening:

“I miss your face…and I think we’ll live in the same ZIP code again, someday!”

• Tags
• friends
• moving
• jobs
• Social media
• driving

It’s somewhere between Lexington, Kentucky, and Savannah, Georgia, by way of  Shenzhen, China; Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong; and Anchorage, Alaska.

Tomorrow I will become the proud owner of a brand spankin’ new iPad, which I have been stalking on UPS.com since I placed my Apple order.

I’ve been collecting gift cards for the iPad since my birthday last November, and I grew my collection (and savings) through additional Christmas gifts. In the end, I had quite a stash.

When Apple announced the iPad to the media through one of its brilliant marketing schemes, my coworkers began teasing me about whether it was time to finally thaw out my gift cards. My officemates, Travis and Darren, each own an iPad: version I and version II, respectively. They have kindly and consistently listened to me whine as months went by without a new iPad release. I was determined to purchase an iPad right after a new version came out, so during the interim winter months my prepaid plastic was snugly situated between a rump roast from the Swanson family farm and a bag of green beans my kitchen freezer.

My friend Matt was in town a couple weeks ago, and we deliberated the merits of the iPad during dinner. He argued that a Macbook Air would be equally functional and portable, but in the end the iPad won out because – frankly – it fits in my purse.

And now my future iPad is an Internet sensation! Okay, that’s not true, but my cousin-in-law, Mike, runs his own technology consulting business and mentioned it on his blog. His post titled The New iPad offers advice for potential buyers, and he used me as an example for an entire demographic.

What size should I get? Apple offers the iPad in three sizes 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. To answer this question I am going to describe three different types of people.

…

My wife’s cousin Laura

Laura is in her mid 20s and will heavily use her iPad. She will do a little bit of everything and she travels back and forth from Georgia to Minnesota to visit family. She would benefit from some additional space but she’s on a bit of a budget so the best iPad for her would be the 32GB.

He’s so kind to include me in his post.

No, really. This is the company bio: “Mike Pahl is a nice guy that is enthusiastic about technology, based in the Twin Cities.”

David chose to point out that his gifts contributed to .222222222222222222222… of the purchase price of my iPad. Apparently some people in this world enjoy doing math and using the phrase “point two repeating.” Hmmm…

Anyway, I can’t wait to start blogging  — hopefully more consistently — on my new tablet.

• Tags
• iPad
• coworkers
• technology
• friends
• family
• Apple

Yesterday the cutest little save-the-date postcard showed up in my mailbox. My pals Steph and Erik are getting married in Minnesota in June, and Steph is tackling loads of wedding planning tasks in addition to finishing grad school, prepping for life as a foreign service officer and generally acting as a super human. You go girl. 

This postcard directs people to Steph and Erik’s wedding website, on which I make an appearance.

As a bridesmaid, I’ve known the couple’s upcoming wedding day for a while now, but the date that really stuck in my head was November 1: the deadline for ordering my bridesmaid dress FROM GEORGIA.

I made the deadline, but only by visiting three bridal shops, getting measured three times by three different people with three different results, and calling my mom to whine about the curse of the voluptuous Samuelson hips. I was not pleased when after the first round of measurements, I came home to order my dress online and found out that my bust and waist proportions fit nicely into my normal size category and my hip measurements bumped me up by four sizes.

Four. Vier. Quatre. Cuatro. 

And to keep the Spanish going, that was NO BUENO.

Luckily, it all worked out. I ordered what I truly think will be the right size. Also, I’m mentally prepared to fast for the month of May if need be.

Now, here’s insider scoop:

When Steph’s website was in its early stages of development she used this image for my profile. It perfectly depicts the seriousness of our youth and was taken when we were on our “big girl trip” to Duluth after high school graduation but before the first (scary) college days. We look absolutely cartoonish, and I love it.

In my bridesmaid bio, among other things, Steph wrote:

Laura’s taught Steph some of the finer points of MN farm-living, humoring her every spring in their annual search for new kittens and explaining to Steph that the smell of manure in the air is not ’gross.’

I’d like to qualify this statement by saying that I’m not some kind of super freak who thinks poo in the air smells good. Rather, I would tell her to breathe through her mouth and insist that matters could be worse: hogs and turkeys. Enough said.

Finally, I’m wondering, what’s the standard procedure for calling shotgun on groomsmen? I’d like dibs on the tallest one. All the bridesmaids are about the same height, except for Ms. Ruud who is very Ruud-like and an example of good things comin’ in small packages. If all the bridesmaids are the same height, but I will undoubtedly wear the highest heals, that makes perfect sense, right?

• Tags
• Wedding
• bridesmaid
• planning
• friends

My coworker Travis recently asked me if David and I were high school sweethearts. Just moments before this question, I introduced Travis to a Design*Sponge article on Susan and William Brinson, high school sweethearts who jointly attended the Savannah College of Art and Design. Writer Amy Azzarito featured the Brinsons as “just one of those couples that creatively speak the same language.” The article is titled He Said/She Said: Designing Together because the Mr. and the Mrs. each had a chance to answer Amy’s questions about their joint projects and deeply intertwined lives.

David and I constantly recall ways that our lives were connected growing up even though, as I told Travis, we were not high school sweethearts. We also don’t speak the same language like the Brinsons. I speak liberal arts, literature and linguistics while he speaks motors, mechanics and math. This fact happens to work in my favor today because you’re about to get the “she said” version of our story, my friends. Some of these events are a factor of our long-time friendship but many more are a result of us growing up in the same small town. Since I highly doubt David will write a blog to counter my argument here, feel free to find my facts 100 percent accurate.

My first distinct memory of David is from elementary school: conger in your mind an idyllic scene of children out to recess standing near a playground. This is, of course, where my memory takes place but the circumstances were not quite so ideal.

My earliest recollection is actually of David kissing my friend Maggie on the playground. I was one of the girls who formed a circle around the couple, a term best used lightly in this case. All of the girls in the huddle held their mouths agape and eyes wide at this public (school) display of affection. I was not going out with anyone at that time, but I don’t recall being jealous of Maggie and her micro beau. Instead, I remember thinking that David was too short to be my boyfriend anyway. The belief that I need to be taller than the men I court was instilled in me by a long line of long-legged Swanson and Samuelson women and would haunt me for years to come. Luckily, time and puberty did David a few favors and he’s now a little taller than me when I wear flats. I prefer heels, but relationships are about compromise, after all.

Another memory I like to bring up with David is how we ALMOST went to prom together junior year but instead he asked one of his McDonald’s coworkers and repented later. His date proceeded to wear a Playboy bunny necklace to our signature formal event. I went with a genuinely nice guy who we both still speak with today and who I probably know better now than when we sat next to each other in chemistry class. To remedy to his faux pas, David asked me to go to senior prom 11 months in advance only to cancel the engagement because he charmed another girl into being his real girlfriend. I completely understood that he needed to go to the dance with the girl he was dating and appreciated that he found the strength to be upfront with me and discuss the issue through an intimate conversation on MSN Messenger. Somehow, even with this incredible let down, I allowed him to continue speaking to me. And I went stag to the prom.

David’s band Pyrrhic Victory also played in my garage for my 18th birthday party. The band name was inspired by a lesson on the Romans in humanities class, and I hesitantly agreed to let them perform. David had decreed like Caesar himself that I was to have a party whether I wanted one or not because the band needed an audience and my friends would do.

I had a dynamite group of girl friends in high school and the five of us usually hung out with David and his best bud. It took a 5:2 ratio to wrangle their joint machismo into order, but the effort was rewarded because David had the “good house” with a pool table, TV and dartboard in a parent-free land known as the basement. The boys must have had some other redeeming if not appealing qualities back then, but their practical jokes were perturbing. For some reason I was always the target of car wars. Thanks to David and his cronies my Corsica was Saran wrapped in the high school parking lot and slathered in sour kraut, eggs, mayo, dog food, cereal and packing peanuts on multiple occasions. On one instance my car was attacked because I canceled plans with him to go on a date. Can we say “jealousy?”

The problem with David’s technique was that I always knew who did the damage and who to call when I needed help at the car wash. My girlfriends and I, on the other hand, successfully doused the inside of David’s car with a restaurant-sized box of white rice and a nearly toxic bottle of cheap perfume without him finding out for years. We were supposedly the nice girls who would never think of doing a thing like that.

David and I weren’t always so mean to each other and did a pretty good job of entertaining ourselves in the metropolis that is Cannon Falls. Our five-year high school class reunion is coming up this month, and I can’t wait to get the scoop from David on our peers’ lives.

We must be one of many couples who have paired up since the halls of CFHS or who can still claim high school sweetheart status. Much like David and I, my friend Kates is in a relationship with one of our classmates even though the two didn’t date in high school. I guess that’s a family tradition since her parents both graduated from CFHS but also didn’t know each other when they were kiddos. Oh, now that I think about it, the same is true for my parents.

Now, let me distract you from matrimonial presumptions with this:

David sent me flowers earlier this week for no real reason other than that he still likes me despite my incessant teasing. Oh happy day!

• Tags
• relationships
• high school
• friends
• flowers
• history

Three hours. Five minutes. Twenty-four seconds.

Now that’s a quality Skype call with a friend on the opposite side of the world. Steph stayed up until 2:15 in the morning Hong Kong time to chat with me about work, her wedding and our wishes for the future. It’s now about 2:30 p.m. for me, and I’m thinking I should stay in my pajamas for the rest of the day. Don’t judge. 

• Tags
• friends
• traveling

I took the first real vacation of my adult “working girl” life from July 1-10. I anxiously awaited the opportunity to fly up to Minnesota and replicate the summer break I took for granted each year I was in school. The trip was a perfect opportunity for me to recharge, cool off and reconnect with friends and family. The vacation was packed with events, but I found myself nixing some of the activity ideas I had brainstormed before the trip. I needed some downtime to unwind so the drive-in movie, for example, will have to wait until next summer.

Some of the activities that kept me hustling and bustling were:

• A shopping day with mom
• Overly-indulgent meals and refreshing drinks
• Relaxing by the lake
• Hiking the Mississippi River valley
• A stop at the local winery
• Cruising in the dune buggy and VW Beetle
• Biking on the local trail
• An outdoor concert
• A motorcycle ride
• Pampering pedicures
• Traditional fireworks at the Cannon Valley Fair
• Parades with tractors, trucks and trailers galore
• Family dinners, brunches, picnics and barbecues
• A classic car show
• A stroll and dinner in St. Anthony Main
• A refreshing trip to the swimming pool
• Catching up with old friends

And now to compare with what I’ve done since returning to Savannah:

• Arrive home from the airport at nearly 2 a.m. (It’s impossible for me to go through an entire trip with no flight delays, cancellations or lost baggage, I swear!)
• Work 
• Unpack
• Laundry
• Pay bills
• Take out the trash
• Dishes
• Grocery shopping

Why is it that necessary daily tasks seem so much more mundane and disheartening after a trip?

Oh. I suppose it’s because the chores affirm that old saying: “The vacation is over.”

• Tags
• vacation
• minnesota
• minneapolis
• relaxation
• family
• friends