The Smoothie Diaries: Drop Everything

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I didn't look the lady in the eye when I handed her the reciept for her smoothie and said, "I am very sorry. I dropped your recipt on the floor. Do you still want it?" She gave me a look. Not "The Glare". But definitely a look. When I worked yesterday I dropped everything.

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How to Get Enough Sleep

 


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I need nine hours of sleep to function. I have mentioned this before, but never posted a full post about it. To be honest, it is only over the past two years that I have finally figured out my optimum number of hours. When I say "optimum" I mean that that is the amount of sleep I need in order for me to be efficient, aware and at my best physically (no head-aches, drowsiness or body fatigue). How did I figure this out? Read on...

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Three Things: Easy Breakfast Recipes

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Last week's edition of my Three Things Series was about insecurities. What a downer, Lucy Rose. Let's pick up the pep here, Lucy Rose. So this week I thought I would just share some of the breakfast foods that I have been enjoying lately. I am not a foodie. I like food, but I do not devote much thought or planning to it. I find a thing I like and keep making it until I stop liking it. 

This week I share three extremely simple recipes which miraculously include three celebrity foods (see if you can spot them!). I say miraculous because I am never a person who is particularly up on trends. 

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The Smoothie Diaries: Dealing With Radioactivity

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I call it The Glare. The Glare is the technique some customers use in order to punish me, the unaccommodating grocery store employee. It consists of pursing the lips, raising the eyebrows and directing radioactive heat from one's pupils directly onto my face. It is generally accompanied by a pointed silence and walking away without saying "thank you". It is pretty effective 
at making me feel like a complete loser. 

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Milwaukee Art Museum Tour

Sunset Landscape (Coucher de soleil à Barbizon) Thomas Rousseau

When Sheldon and I came out of the Milwaukee Art Museum into the normal world again we felt saturated. After having spent three hours combing through gallery after gallery of images it was like my eyes had been reprogrammed to see every little thing as a piece of art.

Romantic Getaway

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We are escaping to Wisconsin. Yes, we have killed all the buffalo here in Illinois. Our meat supply is running low so we are moving on. Just kidding. I am in an Urban Studies class in which we have been talking about the concepts of hunting, gathering and subsistence farming. Anyway…we are going to Milwaukee in order to rest. I asked Sheldon the other day if he could recall the last full day we have had in which neither of us have had work. The answer? Our honeymoon. 

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Three Things: Insecurities

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This week the shell covering my body, which protects me from harsh words or feelings of worthlessness, was softened, like how fingernails get soft in the shower. Since my defences were down some bad stuff crept in and wreaked havoc. 

The Smoothie Diaries: The Beauty in Accuracy

 


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Working in food service requires a number of skills: people pleasing, efficiency and multitasking are the main ones. But I am proud of a more obscure skill: I can exact right amount of smoothie. When I make a smoothie there is nothing left over in the blender after I have poured it. This is the king of my smoothie bar accomplishments. I have perfected the ratio of banana to grape to apple so that if a customer orders a sixteen ounce kale smoothie -- I make sixteen ounces of smoothie. 
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Life Without a Smart Phone

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On Saturday I proudly proclaimed my indifference to the pull of the internet. I told you how living without it makes me holier than all the internet-addicted suckers out there. But now for the truth. I miss my Smart Phone. A lot.I have been sorely tempted to just go buy a glossy, flat new phone. It would fit so perfectly in my hand. Stroke the screen and tiny app nuggets appear like fairies. Touch one and it jiggles cheerily. Colours and animation burst from the screen. I am enchanted.

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Life With No Internet

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Did you know that Sheldon and I don't have internet? At the beginning of our marriage we decided to see how long we could survive without it. Our main thought behind the decision was to save money, but I also wanted to cut down on the time I spend on the internet. It can be tricky to manage, but I really like having no internet. Here are some reasons why...

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Three Things: Bryan Stevenson's Lecture

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As soon as our guest lecturer finished we rose to our feet and applauded furiously. It was clear to everyone in that room that we were standing in the presence of a great man. Bryan Stevenson is an attorney who fought to free many unjustly convicted criminals. He is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. He is also a professor of law at New York University School of Law. He came to speak for over an hour to anyone on campus who wanted to listen. The hall was packed with professors, students and people from the area. This is a little outside of what I usually blog about, but I want to share three of the things that he taught us about seeking justice. I took the lettering from my notes during the lecture. As I finish my last year of college and think about my life after school his message comes as a challenge to the way I will build my adult life. 

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The Smoothie Diaries: Bad Mood

 

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Friendliness is my smoothie bar trademark. Yeah. People call up and say, “Can you have The Friendly Smoothie Lady make my spinach smoothie? I want all her good vibes to sprinkle onto it and make me have a great day.” 

Ok. So maybe they don’t do that. And, no, I am not the only nice smoothie lady at the smoothie bar. But it is part of my personal smoothie philosophy to be kind to the customers. 

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I Love Chicago

 

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Sheldon and I are falling in love with the city of Chicago. We have been there twice in three weeks in order to visit a friend. As Sheldon drove down Lake Shore Drive and the lake was on our left and the city on our right I peered into apartment windows. I caught glimpses of people on their phones, families around a TV and fabulous furnishings. I started to picture what our life would be like if we lived in the city. 

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It is so easy to glamourise the city. As a person who lives in a suburban area I come to the city feeling possibilities. I am on the lookout for a cool cafe to blog from, a shop I want to hunt around in or a pocket of intrigue to explore. Everything has the flavour of adventure. 

But as I watched the people from our car window (which does not open anymore and makes our non-airconditioned car rather more uncomfortable) I notice a girl with her backpack. She is walking home from work or school. She is not looking around, because she knows where she is and it is the same scenery she sees every day. 

Another young woman walks by. Although she adds to the scenery with her 50s style red dress and sunglasses against the brick building, she too has no interest in the faux-Gothic church or the towering apartment building. She is looking at her phone. 

These indifferent ladies remind me that if I lived in the city according to my latest fantasy, I would grow to perceive it as normal. Soon it would not be the place of adventure that it is now — it would be my neighbourhood. Yes, I would have flashes of delight when the light changed or snow fell. Those shifts would cause me to appreciate it again. 

The same is true in Wheaton. I don’t see the alley of trees I walk down for class or the spacious lawn in front of Blanchard Hall as a tourist. Those are just the places where my life has played out over the last three years. That is where I sat with Sheldon and Chris one night and read through the entirety of The Four Quartets. That is where I take most of my English courses. That is where the guy I try to avoid lives. That is my favourite thrift store. 

So as I pine for the city and delight in our brief visits I am trying not to think, “If I lived in the city my life would be way cooler.” My life would still be a mix of work and leisure. I would still have good days and bad, just like I do in Wheaton. 

Why I Fell In Love With My Husband

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“No greater love than he who gives the last bite of his donut to his wife.” These are the words Jesus spoke in his famous Sermon on the Pastry. Just kidding. Jesus probably had no idea that donuts were going to be a thing. But this is one of the biggest ways that Sheldon shows me his selfless love. Perhaps you already knew that I am a dedicated donut devotee. These are some important donut related events in the history of Sheldon and Lucy Rose. 

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I started attending the same church as Sheldon early on in our dating and I have often joked that I keep coming just for the donuts that are served during the 9:30 AM Bible Study (not true of course).

Sheldon once bought me a donut after I failed my driver’s test. 

We hadn’t been able to see one another all day, but finally had an hour to spend together late in the evening. We went to a park in the dark and Sheldon bought me a donut. 

Once Sheldon ate a huge chocolate donut in front of me during one of my donut fasts. It was because the library was giving away free ones at the end of the night. He had to eat it quickly so I would not reach over and commandeer it. 

We ordered hundreds of donuts for out wedding. When the actual event came along, we only got one bite apiece! Oh, well. I hope everyone else enjoyed them!

On our honey moon we drove two hours and finally hit a Dunkin Donuts. I was feeling carsick after having driven over the winding Wisconsin roads. But I determinedly ate a white-frosted long john  anyway. 

We comforted ourselves on the way home from the funeral of our dear friend by silently consuming two donuts and a glass of milk. Sheldon chose the better donut, but let me take frequent bites of his. 

We spent the morning doing lawn work together today for an older lady I do odd jobs for. We toiled for two hours in our matching family reunion shirts. At the end tired and hungry we drove home and picked up two donuts on the way. We just finished eating them propped up on pillows in our sunny bed and drinking coffee from the pot we bought on our honeymoon. As always, Sheldon offered me the last bite of his donut — a gesture which never fails to remind me of Sheldon’s infinite love for me. The Sheldon’s small gestures of thoughtfulness won my heart in the first place. When he offers the last bite of his donut it shows that a) he knows me very well, he knows how important donuts are to me and b) it shows that he is willing to give up his own pleasure to make me happy. 

Three Things: College Trends

 

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It is week two of classes and I have already found things that bug me. No, I am not going around searching for annoying habits of my peers! But when one spends as much time in the presence of such a homogenous band of peers, one tends to notice the trends. What follows are three trends I have observed here on my college campus. They are harmless, granted, but they just somehow annoy me. 

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1. Short hair all around the head except for the very top of the head. 
In the immortal words of my Czech/Polish friend Daniel: What is the heck? Why are the youths doing this disservice to their heads? Why do they appear to think this actually looks good? It is like they have buzzed their entire heads and then been like, "Uh. I wish I still had some longer hairs." So they put a longer toupee top! I believe this obsession with Toupee Hair is a throwback to the 1950s gone wrong. It is as though these young gentlemen were trying to pay tribute to studs like Marlon Brando or James Dean. With the exception that they look terrible. Please, Guys, just stop doing this to your hair. Bring back a different terrible hair trend. I would even take the mullet or the ducktail over this monstrosity.

2. Water bottles with every sticker you got over the summer stuck on them.
I looked around my Christian Thought class this afternoon and noticed at least four people had taken out a ginormous plastic water bottle and placed it onto their tiny fold-out desk. Plastered all over the bottle and obscuring the brightly coloured plastic were stickers: camp logo stickers, weird sayings stickers, evangelistic outreach ministry stickers, "I climbed a mountain/ran a race"stickers, etc. So many. I guess this trend is sort of in line with the old campaign button trends or the sticking stickers on your guitar case or patches on the sleeves of your denim jacket. But for some reason it irritates me. Perhaps because I rarely receive stickers. I guess I am not involved enough, or at least not involved with enough outdoorsy sticker-dispensing activities.

3. Dressing like you are on a yacht even though you are not
OK. You have seen it, right? Guys who are wearing leather boat shoes and a crisp short sleeve shirt tucked into their pastel coloured short-shorts. I would be like, "OK. Fine" if these guys were ON BOATS. I would even be OK if these guys were NEAR WATER. But they are in Wheaton. The closest body of water is a marsh. Why do they insist like dressing like wealthy yacht owners in their early 60s? Their clothing says, "I am a man of leisure. I wear clothing to reflect my lifestyle of ease and opulence. Later today would you like me to show you some photos of a boat I found on Pinterest that I would like to own someday?"

Now that I have gotten all that angst out of my system I feel better. But I realise that this post is very hater-y. Just like the haters who are gonna hate, hate, hate as in Taylor Swift's song "Shake It Off'". I am sorry I have let you down, Taylor, and let my negativity pour out onto the interwebs. But to any Toupee Haired People, to any Sticker Hoarders and Faux Yacht Owners reading this post I would like to advise you to "Shake it off".