Posts from — March 2009

For the first month or so after we got married, Brian and I had a habit of elbowing each other and saying, “Hey, you know what?… We’re married.” The novelty of that hasn’t quite worn off, but now we’ve moved on to a new catchphrase: “Hey, you know what? We live here.”

We are officially residents of Kailua, Hawaii. We signed the lease on our place last week and have been just tickled pink with it (one of us is pinker than the other).

Sometimes we just need to lie on the living room floor and love our new apartment

After more than a year of separations, cross-country/cross-continent moves and stints of living out of a suitcase, we are finally going to have a real home. Together. I won’t even know what to do with all that time I used to spend pining. Some ideas:

1. Painting our awesome apartment
2. Refurbishing furniture and being generally crafty with decorating
3. Using every single kitchen gadget, utensil and dish we got for our wedding
4. Planting vegetables and herbs in boxes on the lanai and trying not to kill them (this is where Brian comes in)
5. Grilling every kind of fish and crustacean we can get our hands on (our first culinary experiment with shark went swimmingly… tee hee)
6. Becoming masters of urban composting
7. Finally printing, framing and hanging photos of our friends and family from the last five years
8. Turning our second bedroom into a sweet-tastic office, silkscreening studio and guest room

Oh, you want to see photos of where you’ll be staying when you come visit? If you insist.

Front door: Soon our New Orleans flag will be proudly waving there 

Kitchen: Flat-top range and a dishwasher? Could life get any better?

Living room/dining room: Where our dining table, sectional sofa and future flat-screen TV (the first TV I will have ever bought myself after years of using hand-me-downs) will reside

Living room looking out onto the lanai: We’ll be leaving that door open a lot to let in the ocean breeze

Lanai: Brian contemplates where the grill and the hammock will go

Master bedroom: Large closet and a door out onto the lanai

Master bathroom: It’s not huge, but it has two sinks, so I am stoked

Since we found the place so early in our week-long stay, we decided to get a jump-start on painting before our furniture arrives. We discovered there is a Hardware Hawaii just down the street from us (a fact that made Brian downright giddy), so we picked out some colors, bought supplies and got to work. Gray-blue for the master bedroom, warm cream for most of the living room and kitchen and dark red for two small accent walls in the living room. We’re still accepting suggestions for the bathrooms, the hallway and the office.

I am an artiste 

I graciously allow Brian to do the meticulous ceiling work

It looks as though a terrible crime were committed in our living room

Awesome! Our landlady was a little skeptical of the red, but she relented, saying red is a “good Chinese color”… and then later asking us if we will paint over it before we move

The finished product in the living room (and our new sofa in boxes)

This is what the sofa will look like when it’s put together…oooh (minus the pillows)

Look at that beautiful masking…

Victory! Our first meal in our new place, courtesy of Chef Papa John

“So how’s married life?”

This is a question Brian and I seem to be getting a lot, and I’m not sure how to answer it yet. I’m pretty sure, “Oh, you know, we lived with a college buddy of ours in New Orleans for the first month of being married and then drove our stuff 2,000 miles to spend a month in San Diego before going to Virginia for two months and then moving to Hawaii. Just your standard newlywed couple stuff… I won’t bore you with the details,” is not exactly what normal people say. But then, when have we ever been normal?

It was Mardi Gras. Mustaches and silly hats are almost required. 

We’re going through some pretty major life changes right now, so I guess it’s fitting that No Dowry is going to evolve right along with us. I’ve given it a lot of thought, and although I started this blog to record the journey of planning a wedding without selling my soul or my firstborn, I’d like to think our wedding day won’t be the happiest day of our lives and that this is just the beginning of the journey.

I have loved keeping this blog over the course of the last year. It’s an amazing way for me to process what’s going on in my life and keep in touch with everyone from Lil Laverne (hi, Mom) to friends scattered across the country. I hope y’all have enjoyed reading and will continue to follow my shenanigans as a, ahem, Navy wife (yeah, yeah, laugh it up).

The Short Version of What’s Going On

1. Gypsy Travels: Leaving the South

If I haven’t told you my new mailing address, it’s because I don’t have one yet. We left New Orleans on Friday, February 27 and drove like crazy to make it to San Diego late on Sunday, March 1. It wasn’t the most relaxing road trip we’ve ever taken, but it also didn’t result in a flipped car and a trip to the ER, so I count it as a victory (read more about the trip in Brian’s blog).

It was unbelievably hard to leave our friends and New Orleans again. We keep leaving (this is the third time I’ve moved away) and we keep coming back, and dammit, the next time we move back, it’s for good. There are a lot of amazing places to live, and we’ve been fortunate enough to have tried out a good number of them, but everywhere we go, we compare it to New Orleans. No place has the food, the drinks, the people or the culture quite right in comparison, and we can’t think of anywhere else we want to settle down. You’d better believe we’ll be invading the Dirty South again in a few years, buying a kickass house with a big porch and a roomy yard for crawfish boils and eventually raising a couple of loud, crafty, costume-party-loving hapa kids.

Breakin’ it down in the S. Liberty house for our going-away/Rubik’s cube party

2. Gypsy Travels: Moving to Hawaii

Until we move back to NOLA, I am stoked to live in Hawaii. Brian transfers to a new ship based in Pearl Harbor in May, and we are on Oahu right now house hunting. My mom was born here, her parents and their parents grew up here, and we have tons of aunties and uncles and cousins scattered throughout the islands. I have wanted to live here since I was a little girl, and the Navy, in a strange, out-of-character move, has granted my wish. I will spend the next year and a half picking up hula again and spending as much time as I can swimming in the Pacific.

Where we’re staying at the moment (Bellows Air Force Base): the view out the back window…

…and the front

We arrived on Friday, looked at a bunch of apartments right away and found the perfect one on our second day. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a big lanai (which we’ve learned is a back porch/balcony area) where we can grill and grow vegetables, tons of storage space and our trifecta of perfection: dishwasher, washer and dryer. It’s also in the center of Kailua, within walking distance of coffee shops, restaurants, bars, grocery stores and the beach. Oh, and a karaoke bar. We already checked it out, and though it did not have “The Humpty Dance,” it did provide “Shoop,” “Baby Got Back” and “Bust a Move.” Sold.

Our friend Heather and I made Salt ‘n’ Pepa proud

We got the apartment almost solely because I am hapa and remind our landlady of her daughter (this is the second time my hapaness has gotten me an apartment– Melia and I shamelessly milked it in San Francisco when we discovered our property manager had a half-Japanese son) and because Brian is an adorable Navy boy who can charm any Chinese auntie.

The complex where we will be living has a KOI POND… for serious

This is going to be sweet.

3. Being a Navy Housewife

OK, not a housewife. I’m taking my sweet Interweb-based job with me so I can continue to work from home, God willing, but we are getting pretty darn domestic. I am positively giddy at the thought of using all of the awesome kitchen toys we got as wedding presents (Salad spinner? Pastry blender? KitchenAid mixer?!), and we’re already planning on going all ReadyMade on our new place. The words “aluminum-lined planter boxes” may or may not have come up in conversation. We might have to give in and buy a Wii, if only to remind ourselves that we are not too old to trash-talk while duking it out on Mario Cart.

Brian hearts mattress shopping

This is all new territory, and it’s a little scary, but mostly just exciting. We’re almost real grown ups! (Bob keeps telling me that if I use the term “grown up,” I am not one yet. Whatever.) I’ll post pictures of our new place later this week, which I hope will inspire you to come visit as soon as possible. Those mai tais aren’t going to drink themselves, people.