A confession: Leandra and I are boring. Sometimes. It’s not that we want to be (at all!) but I suppose that, like most everyone else, we’re creatures of habit… oftentimes uninteresting habits. For as much as we love taking adventures, reading about adventures, and dreaming about adventures, sometimes we’re bad at being adventurous. We don’t just gravitate towards Barnes and Noble– no, we also have our favorite table at Barnes and Noble. And we have our “regular” drinks. I have the same bowl of unsweetened oatmeal and blueberries for breakfast every morning. I’ll admit that I like some of those things to be boring and predictable (okay, I like ALL of those things for good reason!). But we both know that sometimes it’s good to shake things up and do something completely unplanned.

So, as we were driving back from Chicago at 11:30pm on Monday, and we saw a billboard that proclaimed, “Your Life-Changing Jackpot Awaits”, we both knew that we had to pull over and see the self-proclaimed Mecca of Southwest Michigan casinos: Four Winds. Okay, so it was more the promise of coffee and a leg-stretch instead of the life-changing jackpot that lured us off I-94 and down the long winding lane through the trees. Either way, we parked, got our tres chic “age-verified” wristbands, walked down the long hall lined with shops to where Wristband Man said there was complimentary coffee (!), and sat our oh-so-adventuresome selves down at the 2-penny slots. A half-hour and a few dollars later, we picked our sufficiently-caffeinated (or was it adrenaline?) selves up and headed back on our way, rolling into our place at 3am.

The only evidence we have of this random blip in our week? This crappy picture I took on my phone. It’s the perfect “I went to Four Winds and all I got was this lousy picture” kind of picture.

The best part about our little trip wasn’t the coffee, that’s for sure. Or the fact that we had a chance at a life-changing-jackpot (Is that even possible with the 2 penny slots?!). It was the fact that we got to wake up yesterday, find our empty Four Winds cups in the car, and feel good because we made a boring drive into an interesting story. And that’s one strike against our-sometimes-uninteresting-lives.

How much exactly did we “donate” to the casino? I’ll just say that we could have spent that much ordering our favorite drinks at our regular coffee shop. With a size upgrade. Or two. And that comes out to exactly “not too much”.

We spent a lovely spring evening with Haley and Matt in Chicago yesterday, walking, talking, eating, taxi-ing, laughing, and yes, taking photographs. Doesn’t this picture just make you smile? It does for us.

I’ll be the other hand that always holds the line
Connectin’ in between your sweet heart and mine
I’m strung out on that wire

And I’ll be on the other end, To hear you when you call
Angel, you were born to fly, If you get too high
I’ll catch you when you fall
I’ll catch you when you fall

“When You Come Back Down”

Nickel Creek

If you follow us on Twitter, you’ll know that our last few weeks have involved long drives in the car just to have warm sunshine on our faces, homemade cinnamon rolls, a trip to Chicago to see Justin & Mary Marantz’s Spread the Love tour, quite a few “business meetings,” and lots and lots of hot drinks. You see, these last few weeks we’ve spent most of our time working on this little business of ours, instead of working in it. We’ve filled up countless notebook pages with ideas, goals, notes from speakers and books, designs for blogs and boxes and business cards, not to mention a few love notes interspersed in the middle of it all. With fewer weddings, we’ve been looking forward in terms of months and years, not weeks. We’ve been obsessed with the “big picture” so that when we start concentrating on the details, we’ll know so much more how it all fits together.

We’ve not stopped taking pictures during this process, even though there are no brides or grooms involved, and even though they’re with our phones. We just wanted to document a few of the little details from our life for the past few weeks.

A few explanations: since we don’t have kids or pets, the closest thing we have to a “dependent” is our little basil plant that sits in our kitchen window. The smell of fresh basil makes us think of warm afternoons. The cinnamon rolls were made almost entirely after midnight last Saturday, and we spent the time we waited for them to rise dreaming about the future, talking over the many notes we’ve taken, and laughing in between yawns. And they were worth it when they finally came out of the oven at 3 am. So worth it. The bottom right snapshot is a little peek at the new face of our business, which we’ll be unveiling as soon as we possibly can! With those changes, we’ll also be blogging more often. Whether its about kisses or cinnamon rolls or books that inspire us…you’ll be seeing more of us.

We feel so fortunate to be a part of your lives, whether its because we’ve photographed you or just by being faces on your computer screen, and we’re so excited to move into these new changes with you all! Thank you, thank you, thank you for taking an interest in our lives and our work, and thank you for sticking around even though we barely showed ourselves in the last 3 weeks. We truly appreciate it.