Moving & Melrose Place & meeting babies 👶

Hi friends!

How are you? I hope you’re doing well! As I begin to write this, I am sitting in my new office, surrounded by white walls and cardboard boxes. I have books on my shelves and clothing hung up, which feels good, but I think I am suffering from decorator’s block when it comes to the walls. I was just so set up in my old office, and the shape of this room is different, more square, and that’s throwing me off. (You can see a tour of my old office–with photos!–here).

I’ve always thought moving house was such a ridiculously surreal endeavor. You go from living in the same place for years, settled into your daily routine, and then one day, you’re suddenly living somewhere else and everything is different and you’re never, ever going back to that old place. It’s psychologically and emotionally disturbing, and I think that’s what really causes most of the stress around moving. As many problems as we had with our old place (and oh, there was a laundry list), we had also developed ways of coping with them. They were familiar problems, which was some level of comfort, in its own fucked up way. Now we have new problems, which may not be as big, but when we encounter them, there is PANIC! Oh my God, what do we do?! Will it be this way FOREVER? Did we make a huge, expensive mistake???

For example, on moving day, we unexpectedly had to get rid of our couch because it turned out that the way our front door is angled and the way the hallway is set, it literally could not fit through our door. 😭 That was painful, and expensive. We had splurged on an extra deep couch at Crate & Barrel after our wedding, using gifts from our friends and family to pay for it, and that kind of made it sentimental to me, even though the cushions were always shedding feathers and it had kind of lost its shape and was getting a bit musty. A friend of a friend who we once had a lavish meal with at Night + Market Song in Silverlake and then never saw again called it “a total stoner couch.” It was great for binge watching. Some of my favorite people in this world have spent the night on that couch! RIP, Old Gray Couch From Crate & Barrel! Welcome in, New Gray Couch From Bob’s!

Of course, in the meantime, while we wait for our new couch to be delivered, we don’t have a decent place to curl up, relax, and watch our shows. We have one comfortable armchair, and several hard plastic dining chairs, so we have basically been switching off who gets to be comfortable episode by episode. I feel like we’re living in a sad bachelor’s apartment!

That said, despite a few hiccups, I do really like our new place. It’s massive. My husband Ross and I are horribly uncouth and used to be able to yell out to each other from one end of the apartment to the other–no longer! And it’s in a much more walkable area of our neighborhood, which is delightful. We’ve been walking to get dinner nearly every night, and there’s a coffee shop around the corner with delicious almond croissants. There are palm trees right outside our bedroom windows and some other kind of leafy trees outside our office windows and a hummingbird who occasionally visits them. There are lovely hardwood floors and our very own washer/dryer and a walk-in closet in the bedroom. Our last place was also a 3BR 2BA, but the closets were tiny. I can’t tell you how I’ve missed having a place to dump our giant box of Christmas decorations. 

Let’s get into some things:

- In the U.S., we had an extended weekend through this past Monday, Memorial Day. If you got the day off, how was your long weekend? Mine was pretty good! On Friday, Ross and I went shopping for a new couch at Bob’s, followed by some more furniture shopping at Ikea, and we didn’t even fight! I guess we really are an old married couple now. He pointed out jars to me (I told him I wanted to buy some cheap jars to mix salad dressing in), and I waited while he ate a $0.75 hot dog. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

On Saturday, Ross built some Ikea furniture while I “helped”... by mostly staying out of the way, lol. He ended up getting a last minute invite to be a plus one at a wedding reception, so he put on one of the ties I bought him for Christmas a few years ago and I stupidly said, “I like that tie! Uh, I mean, it looks great on you!” Do you ever compliment your partner on things you bought for them? I feel like that’s very Libra/airhead rising.

Then, on Sunday, we drove out to the beach ‘burbs to visit my dear, dear friends and their 10! Day! Old! Baby!!!!! I brought these blueberry oatmeal muffins because I read that oatmeal is good for breastfeeding/chest feeding and I figured with all the dinner deliveries from friends and family, they could use something for breakfast, too, especially something handheld. Also, Sally’s Baking Addiction never misses. I also got to hold a baby for the first time ever!! I don’t have a lot of experience with babies, but this one was so sweet and chill. He just loved laying on his mama’s chest. When he was in my arms, he just looked up at me and made little wrinkly faces and we all wondered aloud who he would be when he grows up. Amazing. Life is really lifening, y’all!

Finally, on Monday, Ross and his CrossFit friends did the “Murph” workout in the morning (iykyk) and I met up with them for brunch at our usual spot, followed by drinks at our slightly-less-usual Mexican spot (okay, fine, it was Salazar). I hadn’t been to Salazar in a minute, but they had SO many signs up instructing people NOT to pet a stray cat, I was highly disappointed that we never saw this cat! Salazar is an entirely outdoor restaurant where people bring their dogs, and it was crowded for Memorial Day, so I’m not entirely shocked that a cat wouldn’t want to be there at that time. But still, they literally had six signs at the entrance about not petting this cat, PLUS they had left out bowls of food and water for it! Talk about mixed messages, bro!

And then we went home, and there was a chicken in our parking garage that Ross had to carefully avoid while parking. I guess she was a neighbor? Fascinating. I’ll keep you posted on any chicken developments!

For dinner that night, I made a Mediterranean orzo salad very loosely based on this Pioneer Woman recipe. Instead of grape tomatoes, I used sundried tomatoes, and I added a diced orange bell pepper and raw zucchini. I love using raw zucchini in chopped salads, I think it holds up so much better than cucumber. I left out the kalamata olives (Ross is an olive hater), and added some fresh chopped dill. Served it all with some Beyond bratwursts with well-sauteed onions. Quite tasty and 100% vegetarian, too!

- Melrose Place (Paramount+) and Bitchslap (anywhere you get podcasts). I have raved in here many times about how much I enjoy Rachel Fisher and Desi Jedeikin’s true crime/old Hollywood history podcast Hollywood Crime Scene. I find their episodes to be funny yet incredibly well-researched, which is kind of my sweet spot for true crime. I also like that they don’t waste any time at the beginning of their episodes shooting the shit and just get right into the stories. They have an awesome Patreon for HCS with tons of bonus content, including recaps of ‘90s sensual thrillers, and early ‘00s reality shows like Rock of Love and The Ashlee Simpson Show. I recently started getting super into listening to their recap episodes over even their true crime eps. There is something so soothing about listening to them tell you exactly what happened, scene by scene, in, say, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. It’s almost like listening to an audiobook, but I can pay less attention, which makes it perfect for throwing on while I am cooking or cleaning or, most recently, packing or unpacking.

Well, just in the last couple weeks, I discovered that Rachel and Desi have been creating even MORE content in the form of another podcast, Bitchslap, on which they are recapping primetime soaps, starting with the iconic Melrose Place. I’ve never watched Melrose Place before, and I started listening to their episodes without having seen it. Finally, after I got to about episode 19 in the first season, I decided to jump in and actually watch an episode, which was pretty funny, since I had an idea in my head of what the characters looked like, and they did not match (was not expecting Jane’s blonde bowl cut for sure!). Rachel and Desi are just so thorough with their recaps that I now hop between watching the show and listening to them recap it, and I don’t feel like I miss anything.

I know that most of Melrose Place is filmed on sets, and like 90% of those sets are their neighborhood bar Shooters (oh my God, why are they always at Shooters?! It looks so lame!). But still, it’s been fun to get a little peek into the culture of 1990s Los Angeles: Rhonda teaching her cardio-funk aerobics, Jane’s hideous eggplant-colored fashion dee-signs, Alison cooking low-fat turkey tetrazzini (barf), Jake being the requisite bad boy literally just because he owns a motorcycle. I know this might be tedious to people living outside of Los Angeles, but Melrose Place also suffers from particularly bad “city math,” as I like to call it–the way these people ping-pong across the city is completely unrealistic! At the beach in the morning, downtown for lunch, Malibu for dinner, WeHo for drinks. It might be technically possible, but no true Angelino would ever do that, because you would spend the whole day in your car!

At any rate, I am just starting to get into some of the drama and more interesting story lines, so maybe I’ll give you an update on how it’s going later on, when I finally turn into this.

- Bridgerton, season three (Netflix). It’s been a fucking age and a half since the last season of Bridgerton, and I had forgotten all the siblings’ names! To be fair, there are eight of them, which is ridiculous. Imagine choosing to be outnumbered four to one by children in your own home? We know from season one that they are aware of the pull-out method in Victorian England! WILD!

I am seriously annoyed that they broke this season up into two parts, and left us on such a cliffhanger at the end of part one. This isn’t The Circle, bitch! You don’t have to manipulate us into continuing to watch! I’m very much enjoying the A-plot of this season (Penelope and Colin), but the other plots feel a little thin (Francesca finding a fellow introvert, Benedict finding a new friend with benedicts benefits, Eloise befriending Cressida Cowper–although I do always enjoy Cressida’s hair). 

Alright gang, that’s about it for me for this week!

If you have a second, I’d love it if you’d like or comment on this post–just click this link to go to the post page.

Until next time—don’t pet the cat!

Love,

Liz

XOXO