Date: September 18th, 2011
Ahh, "married" life. For the past nine months, the unofficial hubby and I have been basking in the glow of my completed project. The story after the story is what we did in the days and weeks after the project wrapped up. For about the first week I did all of the most comfortable, familiar, easy things that I knew of. Included below is a partial list:
- Eat Velveeta macaroni and cheese
- Nap on the couch with the sun shining down on my face
- Watch 27 hours of DVRed television
- Wrestle a bear
- Make a snow angel in my driveway
- Go for a pleasant camel ride
Of course, those are only the least epic things I did after the project wrapped up. I don't want to scare you all away with the sheer awesomeness of my post-project activities. I tease, but the truth is that life is 100-million-thousand-billion times more amazing since starting the project. I spent a year in Being Joyful Boot Camp. I reminded myself that being bad at things can still be fun. I stretched myself beyond what I thought I could do. And most sappily, but importantly, I found the love of my life somewhere in the rubble of my 17th variation on children's art projects.
A lot of things have happened since the project, but one thing that has remained constant is that both the unofficial hubby and I tend to notice the beauty in the world a lot more than before the project started. There has been a near constant refrain of "oh, hey, I've never done that before" for the past nine months. Seeing how much we were still experiencing, just because we approach the world differently now than before, we decided it seemed silly not to continue sharing the adventures.
That will not take the form of a new, structured project cause, well, it was, like insanely expensive. I mean, I flew to California, drove to Washington DC, went to Chicago for a weekend, went to DC again, drove to Tennessee and flew to Vegas, all in one year. And that doesn't count all the admission fees, short drives and souvenir costs (which I fully acknowledge to be frivolous). In short, the daily new experience model is best left as an amazing series of memories.
Instead we're going to take a slightly less frenzied approach and just do awesome thing on the "when we freaking feel like it" schedule. I'm guessing, since we have the "oh neat, that was a new experience" epiphany about once every two weeks, it'll be on that frequency. Hopefully the entries will be as enjoyable as they were last year. I'm sure they'll be just as fun to experience and capture. So, without further ado, here's what we did for the past nine months.
