icy beach etc etc

saturday night we met my parents and my grandmother at marcos bistro in grand rapids to celebrate my birthday.  we hotwired a deal on a plush hyatt hotel room and decided to hit the beach sunday morning since the snow has finally let up long enough for us to make it to the west side of the state.

we had hoped the weather forecast of 55 degrees would prove correct (i know, foolish of us right?) but we still had our coats packed and enjoyed the sun while the chilly wind swept over the beach.  steve tested the icy water, and decided we probably shouldn't try swimming (ahahahahah).

on the whole we had a very fun weekend catching up with pals on friday, stuffing our tummies with family on saturday, and braving the cold in the name of vitamin D on sunday.

and now that's it's monday we actually HAVE gotten some of that 55 degree weather!  happy week starter!

back from the lull!

enjoy these belated valentines day images... jeff's chain is counting down the days to our wedding

hi self, welcome back to the blog!

for those of you who have missed me, i can promise i have not been blowing off blogging for no good reason.  family guy reruns are a very good reason thank you very much.  well, at least they are when you've actually been stretched thin with too much to do.  so what have we been up to lately?

things are changing a lot around my workplace and as a result i have a significantly greater workload.  high hopes this won't keep me from blogging too much in the future, but a reasonably demanding job is actually quite a time suck.

planning a wedding is a task and a half.  particularly while planning on being a bridesmaid in two weddings, a guest at three more, planning an international vacay, and existing as the point of contact for everyone who is planning parties related to these weddings.

also somewhere in there we're fitting in a cross country move and related job hunt.  which honestly is becoming more of a stress reliever than stress producer given michigan's cruel persistence of mega-freezing temperatures.  science has confirmed it:  michigan's winter 2014 officially sucks the most.

on the plus side:  i finally replaced my battery charger for my DSLR so with any luck there might be more pictures coming to pretty this place up.  i'm going to do my best to keep pre-blogging when i can to try and spread the fun out over several posts for y'all.

now re-reading this it's occurred to me... not much is new (well my boss is new, but she's great).  i hate when people bemoan how busy they are, so let's call it a day.

xoxoxo

PS like the heart garland on our mantle?  it's easy to make - check out my post here.

free zine!!

hello my dearests, happy wednesday!

it would be disingenuous of me if i didn't confess that this winter has gotten pretty hard on me lately.  while we're doing our best to stay positive and keep the chin up these days, the past few weeks haven't been too great.

fortunately, i've found that busying myself with creative pursuits does wonders for my state of mind.  case in point: i'm making a zine!  (click here if you're unfamiliar with the term).  if you would like a copy, email your mailing address to beckykovats {at} gmail.com.  it's free!  it's fun!  it's art (sort of)!  and who doesn't like getting snail mail from your friendly frozen blogger friend?

stay sane, y'all!

PS if you've already requested a zine on instagram, i will be in touch.

PPS for more info on the zine and future issues check out www.nervousystems.blogspot.com.

all kinds of count downs

photos are from the week before last when we ventured out into the cold for roughly seven minutes before our ears started to freeze.

chugging on to february and it's still cold.  i've found a lot of freedom from frustration by no longer allowing myself to feel entitled to doing things.  is that sad?  probably.  whatever, it makes the serendipitous moments of entertainment all the more enjoyable for now.  besides, in-climate weather apparently cut the chicago murder rate in half briefly.  frosty silver lining?

the groundhog saw his shadow in pennsylvania a couple days ago, which in these parts usually signifies roughly 12 more weeks of winter. still, when "leaving the house for reasons other than sustainable income and survival nourishment" is a rare treat, and when you find yourself saying "goodness me, eighteen degrees has never felt so warm," you start to look for light at the end of the tunnel.

having perfected the art of making chili, and having knitted enough things to start googling carpel tunnel syndrome, i'm thinking it might be time to make an excess of decorative paper count-down chains.  we've got so much (matrimony) to look forward to, and hey, all the trees look dead already!  when life hands you frozen lemons make kindergarten crafts (and a supplementary lemon drop will probably take the edge off too).

so how much paper are we going to need?  hmmm... let's make a list of the biggies:

sarah's bachelorette party in san diego: 87 days

paige's wedding in iron mountain:  95 days

sarah's wedding in ann arbor:  137 days

[insert ambiguous number here to signify our move]

our wedding in gull lake:  221 days

our honeymoon in greece: 224 days

hope everyone else has fun on the horizon!

over the river and through the woods

merry christmas eve everyone!!

have you notice that i'm obsessed with the holidays yet?

at first, christmas landing on a wednesday seemed like a big fat pain.  now that the time has come around, i'm loving it!  it's like a hanukkah-lenght christmas celebration!  weeks of christmas is definitely more fun than just one day.  last weekend we partied with my half of the family and next weekend we get to do it again with steve's!

we both got extra days off work this week (sadly they don't overlap) so we're going to pack in all the holiday cheer we can between our family sandwich.  i couldn't be more excited about spending christmas morning with steve and bert.  even though i know i'll just be playing santa for myself, i can't wait to stuff our stockings, play some carols, and curl up with claymation christmas specials and some form of breakfast casserole before we head to my aunt's for christmas dinner.

last year on christmas eve, steve and i marinaded, broiled, and topped with pan-fried onions two incredibly delicious steaks while we played christmas carols in the basement of his fraternity's empty shared senior house.  we've decided to make our christmas eve steak night a new tradition.  

it's pretty great to have so much love coming from all directions while we start our new little family... new traditions are the name of the game now that everyone's merging families this year!  i'm sure glad ours is as delicious as boursin smothered beef.

merry christmas to all and to all a goodnight!  and happy holidays and mini-vacations for those who do not celebrate christmas!

xoxo-ho-ho-ho

word count: 36,443

insta-dump and fupdates (aka fun updates)

hello hello blogland!

we got blasted with a LOT of snow over the weekend.  those of you from pleasant homelands where weather minimally impacts your life may not be aware, but when the multiple feet of snow hit michigan it actually severely impacts day to day life.

more specifically it turns us into homebodies, which may not sound like a big deal to some of you, but steve and i are antsy folks; we get a pretty irked when we're all cooped up.  on the one hand it means our holiday decorating is totally off the chain and steve has turned into a magical housekeeping fairy.  on the other hand, it is pretty unappealing when the balance of life is reduced to jobs and stress-cleaning.

the bright silver lining to everything, however, is the exciting news about our upcoming relocation (it's hard to be TOO mad at the snow when i might be spending my next few winters in the desert).  as usual our specific information is limited, but at the moment it's terribly fun to speculate whether our new home will be defined by surfers, starbucks, mountains or cacti, and it's definitely reassuring to have a mental picture of our extremely irregular 2014 timeline.

to add to the fun my boss is leaving (apparently i'm a rough person to supervise... everyone keeps quitting the job of 'becky's boss') at the turn of the new year.  there's no question about it-- the stir crazy is here, change is coming, and i can't wait!

here's to the start of many insane weeks ahead.  happy tuesday y'all!

word count:  36,443

it's the most wonderful (cold) time of the year

happy december (again) everyone!

we're getting in the seasonal spirit these days!  steve and i both LOVE christmas, and our place is as festive as our budget and tree-toppling cat will allow.  we are still busy bees these days, no less in honor of holiday time, but it seems like we're chugging toward a pretty awesome year the closer we get to 2014.

our landlords are offering a prize for the best decorated porch.  it's on neighbors.

we've hit a few wedding planning milestones this weekend, and we headed back to portage to celebrate steve's mom's birthday, and to get my childhood bedroom emptied out enough so my parents can work on converting it into something else.  i stumbled across enough old evidence from my creative high school days, i'm hoping to share some of it as soon as i get a chance.

for now, we're operating in future-tense mode: planning is the key word for the next couple weeks.  with any luck, we might know where we'll be moving soonISH, and then the world might start blurring from spinning a little too fast.  hope everyone is having as much fun as we are getting in the holiday spirit!

word count: 36, 443

well it's winter now

steve apparently got fed up with the black garbage bags of dirty laundry that have been sitting in our bedroom since we moved (what gives bebay?  don't you like that living-in-a-landfill look?)

so the big news is:  we're officially completely moved in!  (well, unless you count the contents of my plastic drawers and the bike basket full of odds and ends... i'm not a great unpacker.  sue me.)

our weekend was, as usual, packed (we went to see our old high school's musical in honor of my former teacher's retirement.  those auditorium seats were pretty surreal, let me tell you).  we also humiliated ourselves at football (by "we" i mean brady hoke and devin gardner mostly), played with my parent's dog, and reunited with some more college friends (they keep showing back up here like we live in a tourist town or something... wait we totally live in a tourist town).

we're busy in a good way right now, while we get ourselves settled in for winter (and while work keeps me going like a mad lady).  i'm looking forward to premiering my hopefully attractive christmas stockings, which i am knitting for me steve and bert.  we're also gearing up for the thanksgiving/steve's birthday/anniversary madness that rolls around this time of year.  on the whole, great things around here.  just not a lot of time to talk about them on the blog unfortunately.

oh and also, it snowed.  i'm not that into it.

word count: 33,709

the winds of change

well it's officially too cold to go to work without a jacket anymore, and let me tell you that is the opposite of awesome.

autumn is so bittersweet.  a warm sunny fall day in michigan is as close to perfect as this place gets, but they are few and far between the cold, rain/snow mix days that remind you winter is a six to eight month season round these parts.  on saturday we got one of the nuggets of indian summer and we tried to stay outside as long as we could until we met up with my family to celebrate my grandma's birthday.

with the official end of summer over the weekend, it feels like everything has switched gears entirely.  it's hard not to notice the seasonal changes when hoards of college students are constantly around.  now is the time when the huge outdoor parties begin to shrink indoors.  people are more fashionable now until they have to begin hiding under layers of wool and down-filled parkas.  i can't say i'm excited for the freezing weather ahead, but with a few exceptions, now until christmas is typically a time of year that completely flies by.  perhaps its the inclusion of steve's birthday right around thanksgiving, or the fact that our dating-anniversary falls between thanksgiving and christmas, but we rarely get a chance to come up for air until the new year once october rolls around.

through all this, the thing i'm trying to focus on most is getting back at that dusty word document known as my work-in-progress.  though the thrill hasn't quite worn off of getting engaged and moving in together, the novelty of it all doesn't quite clog up my brain as much as it had been doing.  now that the weather is taking it's uglier turn, i'm hoping it will be easier to stay busy with indoor projects like my writing.  a busy life is a recipe for writers block, but i'm optimistic that the holiday stress will seem small compared to all the madness we've been through lately.

word count: 25,024

back at last!

after a flat tire in north carolina and some EXTREMELY nasty weather through the mountains, we are finally back home safe.  i have some photos to sort through and touch up from our trip, but in the meantime, I was featured in a guest post over at my amiga Alyssa's blog Glitter & Gapske.  Head over and check it out!

bits and pieces (snow and cats)

so we are literally buried in snow right now.  like dig your car out to get to work, dodge falling trees, and let jesus take the wheel when you're driving, buried in snow.  the photos are misleadingly tame looking.  this is some extreme IRT weather.

as a result steve and i were cooped up inside last night so we ordered in delivery for dinner and i busted out the sewing machine steve bought me for christmas.  bert had an absolute field day and would not let me get at my pretty linen fabric until i distracted him with the elastic.  i'll post more about the skirt i made soon, but i want to shorten it a bit first.

speaking of honeybooboobear (ok i give my cat creepy nicknames) he and his bff are about to be separated.  my sister and roommate is moving across the country next week and bert is about to be very lonely (and me too)! my sister's cat erwin is bert's homeboy and boyfriend.  hopefully steve and i can shake off the snow and move somewhere where they can be reunited for play dates more easily.

no we don't live in siberia

one of my favorite ways to get through the miserable freezing unpleasantry that is winter has always been going to the beach on lake michigan.  it is so beautiful and peaceful to see the snow and ice along the shore, covering the pier.

surprisingly we weren't the only ones out there!  it was a really rejuvenating weekend trip... and... my good ol car hit the big milestone turn over of 100,000 miles!  we have a lot of great memories with this old girl, but there probably won't be too many more (i'm shopping around).

hope everyone had a as great a weekend refresher as we did!

photo recap