Feeling At Home

Our first full day with Maggie was, well, typical. Since I've known this cat for almost eleven years, there is not much she can do that would surprise me. For example, I remembered this morning that Maggie has no concept of the weekend as she came into our room at 5:30 a.m. meowing as loud as she could as if to say, "OK, I get it that I live here now, but don't forget that I eat breakfast on a strict schedule." Still wanting Justin to fall in love with her, I jumped out of bed as fast as I could to get her out of our room before she woke him up. Thank goodness she got a full belly and went right back to sleep. She has found a couple of spots under our bed where she likes to snooze. I think she likes it under there because it is dark, cool, and strangely quiet. I have thought ever since we moved in here that our bedroom must be in a whole other building because you can walk from the main area of the apartment into the bedroom and feel like you just entered a tranquil paradise because it seems so quiet. Anyway, Maggie also got a sense of her surroundings this morning. We opened our patio door and bedroom windows to let some air in, and normally she loves to lay in front of any screen where outside air is coming in, but she kept hearing people in neighboring apartments and would growl as low and long as she could and run underneath the bed. Ten minutes later she would come out and try looking out the window again, only to be spooked and return to her haven. I'm sure this new place will just take some getting used to for her. Other than those adventures, she has spent the day sleeping, exploring the apartment, enjoying some baked chicken that we had for dinner, and now she is snoring away in front of me on the computer desk. Enjoy the photos of her getting used to her new home:

Do you think this is her way of saying that she'll help out with the laundry next Sunday?

Helping me blog.

Showing off her belly. She only does this when she is really comfortable so hopefully that means that she really likes it here!

A New Roommate

Today, I snatched my wonderful (yet capricious) cat from my sister's condo, packed up her food bowls and litterbox, and moved her twenty minutes away to her new home--our apartment! After a few weeks of convincing Justin that I need (not just want) Maggie to come live with us, he finally caved. While I don't feel he is 100% on board with the idea--he actually asked me how much longer I thought it was going to live--she is here to stay. Besides, after the move, I don't think she will ever get back into her cat carrier.

I arrived at Jessica's to a happy kitty. Maggie was lounging around the house, smelling the breeze coming in the deck door, sprawling out on top of a desk, and meowing at my heels for a good head-scratch. Twenty minutes into the visit, I was forcing her head into a cage while she was contracting every claw and digging them into my arms. She isn't one to just go into a small cell that she knows will carry her to some God-awful place. After several failed attempts and a loss of blood on Jessica's part, we dropped her head-first into the cat carrier, loaded her into the backseat of my car and began the journey.

From the horrendous sounds coming from her mouth, you would have thought I was taking her to some pet cemetery to bury her alive. I'm sure her low, screeching meows were part fear, part nerves, and part pain from that not-so-conventional entrance into the cat carrier. I glanced into the backseat at one point and swear I saw foam coming from her mouth which made me think she was having some kind of feline heart attack or stroke and that the trip was actually killing her. I then realized she was uncharacteristically drooling like crazy and panting like a dog. Once at my apartment, Jess and I took her inside, opened the carrier, wiped the drool from her chin, and let her out to explore her new home. I then realized that she had done something that she has never done in her almost eleven years of life...she pooped in the carrier. Maggie is the cleanest cat you will ever come across in your life, but I guess I literally scared the, well, crap out of her.

I fully expected her to find our bed, crawl underneath it, and stay there for a few days. Well, she did just that, but only stayed there for a few minutes:


She came out and continued to pant and sweat for a good half an hour before finally realizing that the torture was over and this was, in fact, her new home. Now, about five hours into the move, she's doing well. She ate her dinner, used the litterbox (thank goodness), and has made herself right at home.


I think she has now gone off to find a good spot to sleep away the awful day she had. And I think Justin will learn to love her. He will at least love that I have something new to point my camera at, and I will love the fact that I have someone to talk to (other than myself) while Justin is at work. Welcome home, Maggie!

Nostalgia

Yesterday, I took ten of my yearbook students to Journalism Day at Ball State. J-Day is a one-day workshop for high school journalism students and is put on by the BSU Journalism Workshops office, my former place of employment for over three years while I was a budding college student once upon a time.

Being on Ball State's campus as an alumna was definitely a strange experience. Once I started the familiar walk to Emens Auditorium for the opening session, I was acutely more aware a few things: the wedding ring on my finger, the fact that I have a real-world job with a salary, and, well, the numerous pounds I've put on since my early days of college since I was huffing and puffing my way down McKinley with ten teenagers in tow. But it was a fantastic day. The weather was sunny, which made campus look beautiful, and I think the kids really enjoyed the experience. I know I was happy enough to get away from 50+ freshmen (who are fumbling through a To Kill A Mockingbird unit and a 4-6 page research paper) with their ninety-seven questions they have each day.

I was able to visit with my former co-workers and my old boss while I was there. I saw some former classmates who are now married and real-live teachers like I am. We reminisced about our glory days and of course shared similar "teaching-makes-me-age-ten-years-a-day-and-wouldn't-you-give-anything-just-to-be-back-here" stories. But to be honest, I'm happy where I am in life. Of course there are those times when I long for cancelled classes, a wasted afternoon of pranking co-workers in the office, and a great night at Dill Street with my friends, but I think if you had a great college experience, you are supposed to miss it. That part of your life is supposed to be fun and sloppy and fresh and poignant and life-changing. And it was all of that for me. But this time in my life is so much more. I have an unbelievably wonderful husband, I've traded campus housing for a great apartment, I have a job that, on most days, I really don't mind to go to that much, and I still have a phenomenal family and amazing friends. While my college days were stereotypically some of the best days of my life, my current days are just as fun and fresh and poignant, as I'm sure the days to come will be.

I'm Not Tyler Perry

I don't ever claim to be a typical 1950s wife. Number one example: I don't skip in the door after school, put on an apron, and proceed to fix a gourmet dinner for my waiting and hungry husband. The only nights that Justin and I eat dinner together are Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday and the routine usually goes like this: I get home from school (except Sunday of course), start asking Justin around 4 p.m. when he wants to have dinner, start begging him at 5 p.m. if we can start dinner, go into the kitchen around 5:30 or 6 when he is finally hungry and I put some kind of meat product in a pot/skillet/baking dish and start cooking it. I then maliciously go over to the computer and start doing something for school and let Justin finish the rest of the dinner. I think he has caught onto this game.

Unlike me, though, Justin is Mr. Experiment in the kitchen. He's slightly obsessed with the Food Network and secretly idolizes Tyler Florence and Guy Fieri. Thank goodness for this. I am a creature of habit and would really be OK with eating the same thing for dinner for a couple of weeks straight. I think I have made a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch for the past 13 days. But Justin is always looking for new recipes and meals he can add his own touch to. I honestly think that if we were quarantined in our apartment for a month, we could survive on recipes that he would come up with based on what food is in the freezer and in the back of the cabinets.

Tonight, we planned to have hamburgers. I knew this would be all his doing so I didn't even try my start-dinner-and-run-away-sneak-attack. He started making the patties with different spices flying everywhere. He looked like a chemist trying for the Nobel prize. I feel this is where I should mention my habit of being a backseat chef. While I was on the couch organizing my English 9 vocabulary binder, I couldn't help but to question the temperature of the skillet since I heard very loud sizzling like he was burning the hamburgers right to the core. He is the one that burnt bacon one Sunday morning and our apartment smelled like charred pig for a week. But he kept insisting it was OK and I finally accepted the fact that he probably knew what he was doing and that these burgers would probably turn out better than the ones he made a month ago that were completely raw in the center. I'm still thankful that dinner didn't land us both in the emergency room with E-coli.

When it was precisely time to eat, and I say precisely because apparently there is a fine art to how many minutes to cook each patty on each side, I prepared my hamburger bun (I'm a plain Miracle Whip kind of girl; Justin likes Miracle Whip and ketchup), put the perfectly browned patty with cheese oozing out of it on my plate and proceeded to the dining room. Oh wait. I meant that I proceeded to the TV trays in the living room since our dining room still functions as a catch-all with no table and chairs. Anyway, I was nervous to bite into Justin's latest concoction on my plate. Either it would be like last time and I would sink my teeth into the raw innards of a cow, or it would be good. It was the latter. It really was one of the best hamburgers I've ever had in my life. It tasted a bit like my mom's used to and a little like a Five Guys burger. So when we both finished the last bites of our respective Nobel prize-worthy hamburgers, I tried to give him a compliment, but I think it turned into an insult. The exchange went like this:

Me: "You're a regular Tyler Perry aren't you?"

Justin (confused): "I'm Tyler Florence. I'm not Tyler Perry."

Me: "Right. That's it. Will you let me take a picture with you and the other two hamburgers?"

Justin: "You want to blog about this, don't you?"

Me: "Yeah. You can put a hat on in the picture if you want."

Justin (insulted that I thought he might look better in a hat than his disheveled hair): "Thanks, babe. Don't forget to mention that in your blog."

Oops. However, if this dinner is any preview on how our marriage will be, I'll be happy to have Justin experiment more often in the kitchen. And thankfully for him, I may be able to clutter our spare bedroom to the ceiling, but I can't stand a messy or dirty kitchen...so I cleaned up. Check him out with his awesome creations:

Spare Change

Recently I decided to clean out our coat closet. Having a ground-level apartment gives us the advantage of a larger coat closet since the closet consists of the entire area underneath the stairs of the apartment above us. I should also mention that having a ground-level apartment also gives us the wonderful background noise of the four children that live above us that scream, run, bounce 7 basketballs at a time, and from what we can gather, throw each other into walls and down the stairs all day and night. But back to the closet. As I was rearranging the several empty boxes that occupy the back of the closet (yes I said empty...Justin refuses to throw away any box that any appliance or electronic device came in), I came across the object that I loathed the most in our apartment--the larger than life plastic Budweiser piggy bank. While we aren't usually ones to carry cash on us, and thus have spare change, I thought that there has to be a better way for two married adults to collect the leftovers from a dollar bill. I scrounged through some boxes from my parent's house and found some empty Ball jars and a great idea came to mind. I dumped out the contents of the ugly Budweiser piggy bank and sorted through the coins, lint, and Chuck E. Cheese tokens, putting quarters in one Ball jar, dimes in another, and so on. I decided to display our makeshift savings account on the kitchen counter and call it our "Next Disney World Vacation Fund."


While we were just at the happiest place on earth six months ago for our honeymoon, we are itching to get back. Going to Disney was the best decision for our honeymoon and we had an amazing time. We hope to make it a family tradition and become that annoying family in the airport that talks about how many times we've been to see Mickey and about the best-kept secrets of Disney while first-time travelers to Disney World look at us like we are insane and need to get a life.

As you can see from above, we need a few more quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies to make our next trip a reality, but we continue to save little by little and keep our spirits up by savoring 30-second Disney commercials on TV and our own videos from our honeymoon, like the one below. Being that it was my first time at Disney, and my first time on the teacups, Justin was sure to make it a memorable one. Next trip I'll remember to not let him have the wheel.

We've Only Just Begun

I've had the idea to start this blog for about two weeks. However, I feel that I have a weird obession with the meaning of numbers, so my obsessive-compulsive mind wouldn't let me start the blog on an insignificant date, which is why I waited until today. Since my ultimate goal for this blog is to document the life that I have with Justin, I thought starting the blog on our six month wedding anniversary would not make me lose sleep over the fact that I started the blog on a random day. Crazy, I know.

Like I said, the idea for the blog came a couple of weeks ago when I was watching Oprah and Justin overheard the story about the woman that writes Dooce, a blog she started that now makes thousands of dollars in advertisements each month. The popularity of her blog allowed her husband to quit his job and work from home with her and help manage the blog that now supports their entire family. Once Justin heard that, I think the conversation went like this:

Justin: "What!? She makes enough money by just blogging that her husband got to quit his job?"

Me: "Yep."

Justin: "Why don't you do something like that? Get started."

Me: "Sure, babe. I'll fit that in while writing my best-seller."

Justin: "Ok."

Only he was serious. While my expectation for this blog isn't to make millions, the more I thought about the idea of starting a blog, the more I liked it. I've tried to keep a journal more times than I can count and failed miserably each time. It's the time that it takes to write in the journal and the inevitable mistake that I would make while writing in ink that would make that obsessive-compulsive mind of mine rip out the page in the journal and start over so that each page was perfect in spelling, grammar, and handwriting. Thank goodness that typing allows for instant revision and no need for me to obsess over the fact that I'm having a bad penmanship day.

I'm hoping that this blog allows for us to document every important moment in our lives, whether the moments be completely boring or utterly exhilarating. I hope that it pushes us to take more photos, create more memories, and I hope it gives us a way to look back in a year, ten years, or twenty years on how we began our lives together as Mr. and Mrs. Leavell.

Oh and that reminds me--the reason for the title. Being an English teacher, the title had to be creative, and surprisingly, it came to me quickly. There was no better place to look for inspiration than to our last name. In the six months that I've officially been a Leavell, the name has had some instances of entertainment for me. If you ask my principal, he swears we pronounce it wrong (it's pronounced "level") and that it should be pronounced "lah-vell", which I think makes us sound French. Perhaps if we are rich one day and have a mansion, that's the pronunciation we'll go with. There was also the time in class when one of my students learned of my new last name and said, "Hey Mrs. Leavell, if you have a baby and it's a boy, you should name him Laser." He then erupted in a fit of laughter like that was the most clever idea in the world. So when deciding on the title of the blog, the first idea that came to mind was the phrase "on the level." I knew it meant something about being honest so I looked it up and found that it is a term from Freemasonry which uses stonecutting and the tools of that trade as metaphors for moral qualities. Some definitions for the phrase include "straightforward" and "sincere". I also read another definition that said the phrase meant "being as one should be--truthful". The idea for this blog is to be nothing but straightforward, sincere, and truthful, so using the play on words and replacing "level" with our last name, the name of the blog was born.

Since I imagine that I will almost always be the sole author of this blog (Justin gets anxiety over writing a personal message in a Hallmark card), I'm excited about the outlet it will provide for me to write about anything and everything in our lives. At least it will give me something to do on a Saturday night while Justin is at work instead of cleaning out the area under the bathroom sink.

So in order to meet my original goal of starting this blog on a meaningful day, I better post before it hits midnight. In honor of the day, enjoy a few of my favorite wedding photos.