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While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Mount Rushmore closed, Thomas Jefferson hangs his granite head in shame

October 3, 2013 by heidi 1 Comment

Last week my Oma left Buffalo with a group of senior citizens on a trip to Mount Rushmore.

She has been more excited about this adventure than for anything in the last umpteen years. It was her first big getaway since my Opa died in January. She had to fight to secure a seat on the bus because the trip sold out within weeks of being announced.

One of her friends fell ill and turned her spot over to Oma. It was a bittersweet turn of events, but Oma was grateful for her friend’s ticket. (This woman had also recently lost her husband,  so she knew how important the trip was to Oma, who for the last seven years cared for my grandfather 24 HOURS A DAY.)

This Mount Rushmore journey was a BIG DEAL.

[Read more…]

Pug worries, or what to do when your dog starts having seizures

August 6, 2013 by heidi 36 Comments

When Cubbie was a younger pug, I took him everywhere I went. He was my constant companion, a rotund, game-for-anything, kindhearted creature with an infectious grunt.

I took him to bars. I took him to restaurants. I took him to stores that were cool with dogs. I took him to ice cream shops that were cool with pugs. Each week for four years, I took him to the bank to make a deposit and get a bone. At the mere mention of the word bank, he’d pounce off the couch, run for the door and hop into the passenger seat of my car. It was our Monday morning ritual.

I took him to our wedding. I dressed him in a tuxedo and a top hat. I tied a little white pillow to his back and asked him to carry our rings. He obliged, as he obliges to most things most of the time.

I took him to the top of a mountain in Colorado and to the bottom of a valley in Idaho. I took him to Graceland. I took him to Chicago. I took him to the Oregon Coast and let him run without a leash into the Pacific Ocean, the memory of which is so fresh in my mind I can still smell the salt on his fur as I smuggled him past the front desk in a no-dogs-allowed hotel.

I can still see the wild look in his eyes when, after spending three weeks on the road, sleeping in a tent with me, I let him crash on a pillow in a queen-sized bed. King Cub.

[Read more…]

Pregnancy Confession No. 4

March 5, 2011 by heidi 10 Comments

[I've always loved dogs more than babies.]

I'm an unabashed dog lover.

When I see one, my heart leaps. I get younger. My mind quiets.
My instinct is to nuzzle the dog. To let the dog nuzzle me.
I know not all dogs are people-lovers, as all people are not dog-lovers.
But it doesn't matter. I turn to mush. Dog putty.

I want to curl up in a ball on the floor,
surrounded by fur and paws and dog saliva
and not communicate with people.
I know this sounds disgusting to non-dog lovers, but it's how I feel.

Give me a yellow tennis ball and a chocolate lab
and I'll be out of your hair for hours.

My affection for dogs is pure and addictive.
I'm like a boy at a monster movie,
cupping a supersize Coke, guzzling and burping.

No need to come up for air.
In the presence of dogs, I boil down to my purest self.

Most four-legged animals make me feel this way.

I wish I could say the same for babies.

Babies and I operate on a different level.

My insides don't turn to apple sauce and cherry cobbler
in the company of babies.

It's an honest admission from a pregnant woman.

I'd rather watch a two-hour Discovery Channel documentary
on the mating habits of otters
than tune into some TLC reality show
about 25 screaming kids and their tummy-tucked mother.

[Read more…]

Over the meadow and through kitchens

November 14, 2010 by heidi 10 Comments

Phantom truck on road in the Redwoods

I had what I call a dreamer’s dream Friday night.

When I woke up I felt younger and lighter. I woke up with twitchy toes and messy hair. I woke up craving apple pie and hot chocolate with small marshmallows.

I tried to dream it again last night. I closed my eyes and breathed as deep as the ocean. I remembered giant falling leaves and twisting roads, green hills and amber sunsets. I remembered the way the wind felt, the smell of strangers’ kitchens. I remembered plaid curtains and blue tiled countertops. I willed these things back into my head thinking I could create a sequel last night.

But dreams don’t work that way, which is what makes them so seductive and intoxicating.

You can’t buy your dreams on iTunes. You can’t press repeat, or burn ’em on a disc and listen to ’em on your way to work. They happen and then they’re gone.

Like a fire in my head, they spark and sizzle and pop and crackle.

Usually, I wake up feeling like a film reel is burning in my brain. Pictures and people start vanishing. Scenes start unfurling and disintegrating. Feelings I felt so intensely in the dream linger like an ember and then flicker out.

Regarding this, I say, appreciate your subconscious. It’s a fascinating galaxy. For some of us it’s the only place where we lose control. I’m addicted to dreaming, in particular lucid dreams, of which I have many.

Like a sinner who becomes a born-again Christian, I was an insomniac before I became a lucid dreamer.

I’m not sure if Friday night’s dream was lucid. I don’t recall directing it or realizing (as I often do) that I was dreaming. I only recall the wild ride, the hills and the kitchens.

I was on a bicycle.

I was riding with a a group of unidentifiable girlfriends. I feel like two of them were my sisters and one was my best friend, but I’m not sure. I know they were all women I was comfortable with and that we were all on bicycles. The bicycles were connected. Picture a freakishly long tandem bicycle. A bicycle for eight.

We were riding in what appeared to be Upstate New York. The leaves were changing. We were in the country. The sun was an hour away from setting, casting everything in a warm red glow. The wind was at our backs. The terrain was rolling and looked insurmountable, but we rode it effortlessly as if uphills were downhills.

We were all laughing.

The road was twisty and topsy-turvy, endless in its curves and lined with the tallest trees you’ve ever seen.

Maybe we were in Oregon.

As we continued on, storybook houses began to crop up on hilltops.

The houses were perfect triangles with red brick chimneys billowing smoke that smelled like pine logs. They had cobblestone driveways and well-tended gardens. They had bird feeders and painted mailboxes.

Some houses were white with blue shutters and others were blue with white shutters.

Upon approaching each house, the front door would swing open and we’d ride straight into the house, right into the kitchen.

The kitchens would smell like cakes and cookies and pies. Plump women in aprons would feed us as we pedaled past as if there were no obstacles at all, as if the road cut a path clear through the kitchen and out through the back door.

We never got off our bicycles and we never stopped moving. And as quickly as we entered the house, we just as quickly departed, our wheels hitting the pavement outside, sending us into a valley and up another hill, where we would enter another house, the front door flying open on its hinge.

Each house would smell better than the last.

Sometimes we’d come across children dancing, or a couple sitting at a table talking, or a woman bent over a sewing machine or a man adjusting his tie in the reflection of his microwave. Sometimes the house would be empty.

We were welcomed like old friends in each house we entered, as if the homeowners had been waiting for us. We were spoon fed sweet potato yams and wrapped in knitted scarves. If there was music on, we boogied on our bikes. If we interrupted a game of Trivial Pursuit, we played and always won.

Yet we never stayed for very long. After we’d taken in all we could take in, the back door would swing open, our bikes would jolt forward and we’d heartily wave goodbye.

Even though it was pointless, we never stopped pedaling. There was no tension on our bike chains. We were powered by some otherworldly force, as if we we were airborne, like Elliot riding with E.T. in our basket, flying by the light of the moon.

I wish I could tell you when we stopped moving, but I don’t think we ever did.

I don’t think our bikes had brakes.

—

PS. Photo by Howard Ignatius.

A maiden changes her name

July 30, 2010 by heidi 20 Comments

I didn’t know I was attached to my last name until it came time to change it.

It’s this way with most things, isn’t it?

I’ve been married for 318 days, 315 of which I’ve been Heidi Kurpiela, a name that I’ve pronounced two different ways my entire life: Ker-peel-ya and Ker-peel-a.

I always give people these two options when they ask me how to pronounce it. I’m not sure which is right and which is wrong and it doesn’t much matter as long as you spell it with a “pie” and say it with a “peel.”

Kurpiela is a German name with Polish origins, the result of blurring boundaries between two countries from which my people hail. Other than my Dad’s immediate family, I have no known relatives with this last name in the United States. Three years ago, Facebook introduced me to a whole new brood of Kurpielas in Canada, but after sending a series of messages back and forth with one of them, I’ve yet to find a common ancestor.

This is unfortunate considering how much I love Canada.

[Read more…]

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K

February 8, 2010 by heidi 3 Comments

gas gift card receipts

I found these yellow receipts a couple weeks ago stuffed in a paper bag in my car’s glovebox. I was so totally confused as to where they came from that I stared at them for a minute, studying the name of the convenient store –– Circle K. And then I started laughing because my favorite movie quote involves a Circle K (and the late great George Carlin).

[Read more…]

The unbearable lightness of being (with Joe)

December 1, 2009 by heidi 9 Comments

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I wrote this the day I returned from my honeymoon and never posted it. It’s for you romantics.

…

It was important to Joe that we go on our honeymoon the day after our wedding. One momentous thing followed by another momentous thing. Wedding then honeymoon. No lag time between. He called it “getting shot out of a cannon.” There would be immense build up, followed by drunken well wishes and champagne toasts, culminating in a spark that when lit would launch us into the autumn horizon like a rocket, propelled by a combustible mixture of red wine and roses that no amount of romantic lollygagging through Upstate New York could or would encumber.

So here I am at 3 p.m. on September 25. Back in Florida. Back on my couch with the pug by my side and Joe asleep in the bedroom after insisting he cover most of the 23-hour drive from Buffalo to St. Petersburg himself.

We had built fires in the woods near Montréal, Québec, ferried our car from Plattsburgh, N.Y. to Burlington, V.T., purchased armfuls of produce on the side of the road and then washed it all down with champagne beside a waterfall. When Joe suggested we drive straight through the night, I didn’t protest. What was one more adventure in the month of September? We were in such a bliss bubble on our drive home that even a blown tire in West Virginia seemed cute. Well, to me anyway.

All the clichés about time and how fast it goes are true. I didn’t fully grasp that until now. Sometimes when you step outside of your body and take a second to swallow a moment, you can see the slow-motion passage of time. One fat molecule freeing itself from another fat molecule like liquid taffy. Gelatinous time.

About two months ago, Joe turned to me and asked, “You wont get depressed when the wedding’s over, right?”

“Depressed? No. I’m looking forward to getting my life back.”

I was up to my waist in wedding planning and work. Luggage-sized bags had formed under my eyes and inside these hollow caves I carried a never-ending to-do list of tasks.

“OK,” he said, smiling, knowing full well I was full of shit. “Just checking.”

Three months have passed since that conversation and now I’m doing laundry and unpacking suitcases, giggling to myself as I separate the various memories from the last three weeks into a cardboard box that I will save forever. Wistful already.

Despite getting only two hours of sleep last night, the bags under my eyes are gone and in their place is something new. I can’t really describe it because part of me thinks it’s purely psychological, although Joe, in his usual Joe-way, tried to describe it three nights ago in Cooperstown, N.Y.

“You look wife-like,” he said.

“Wife-like? Oh God. Really?”

“Why are you acting like it’s an insult?”

“I don’t know. Because wife-like sounds so matronly.”

“Well, if matronly is beautiful. You look matronly.”

I think it was then that I blushed, and when I blushed the space under my eyes filled with something warm and dewy. I noticed it this morning when I walked into the bathroom and saw that he had unpacked all the hotel toiletries we collected on our honeymoon and arranged them on the vanity as if we were still on vacation.

When I said yes.

October 17, 2009 by heidi 19 Comments

 
Watch The Joe Proposal in People & Blogs  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Joe’s dad gave us his camera card last weekend so we could import some of his wedding photos. While we were browsing through pictures we found a VIDEO of Joe’s proposal at our housewarming party a year ago. Baffled, we watched the video and squealed with nervous delight as I stood – at the urging of Joe – in the middle of our living room and obliviously thanked everyone for attending our party. Of course almost everyone in that room knew what was coming except me. How they all managed to keep their mouths shut I’ll never know. How I, a journalist with extraordinarily perceptive spidey senses, managed to not figure out it I’ll never know.

It was without a doubt, the greatest surprise of my life.

Have you ever been so surprised your heart falls out out of your chest and flops like a fish on the floor? Have you ever been so shocked you lose all ability to express yourself? The muscles in your face and the chemicals in your brain fail to communicate, or they simply communicate too much, causing what country folks refer to as a deer-in-headlights reaction? If you’ve ever been there, you know what I mean.

I witnessed this first hand when my mother threw my father a surprise 50th birthday party last December in North Collins. My sisters and I were all there, hiding in the shadows of a banquet hall, waiting for our father to walk unknowingly into his own belated birthday party, a party he thought was for my mother’s 2nd cousin. PK and I of course flew from Florida to be there and I swear when we ran out screaming “SURPRISE,” my father looked like he was going to faint. 

Joe and I rarely talked about marriage during our courtship. We started dating in March. Got an apartment together in November and bought a house one year later. We weren’t the kind of couple that fantasized about our wedding. We never tossed around dates or looked at engagement rings. I never told him whether I preferred one cut of diamond over another and he never asked. There were other less serious things to do and talk about, so instead we did and talked about those things.

Until Nov. 22, 2008, when Joe pulled out his great-grandmother’s wedding ring and asked me to marry him in front of everyone we knew. It was better this way. I trust my gut better than I trust any other part my body, so when I said yes I meant it. 

His parents were in the living room too that night and apparently someone recorded the whole thing. We had no clue the video existed until three nights ago. I hope you find it as suspenseful as we do!

—

In other news …

  • Remember Ricci and Mbaye? They’re getting married Dec. 12, 2009 in Dakar, Senegal. Way to go, R&M!
  • Tomorrow Joe’s brother Phil, Terrence Duncan and Alex Pickett will embark on a one-month, cross-country documentary filmmaking project. For all the wildly creative and inspiring details, visit routesmusic.com. Way to go, PTA!

Grounded

October 3, 2009 by heidi 9 Comments

IMG_1192

Always a procrastinator, I wrote my wedding vows on the day of my wedding on two sheets of complimentary stationary provided by The Inn at Holiday Valley while my bridesmaids got their hair done at the School House Salon in Ellicottville, N.Y.

IMG_1221

Here they are (unedited):

10 promises to Joe by Heidi

1. I promise to always let you keep our house temperature below 76 degrees.

2. I promise to always make you turkey or tuna sammies for lunch, depending on your preference, and in the event that we’re all out of tuna, I promise to buy you your favorite diet tuna.

3. I promise to keep the house adequately stocked with Timmy Ho’s coffee.

4. I promise to always dance Cubbie when you play his favorite song on your guitar.

5. I promise to always dance on your feet to slow Phish songs.

6. I promise to always sing back-up vocals to your made-up songs.

7. I promise to let you watch ESPN Sports Center after you get home from work and even though Keith Olbermann irritates me, I’ll let you watch MSNBC during dinner – and while I’m at it, I promise to never nag you about the chicken and ketchup you always drop on the carpet.

8. I promise to always wait for you at the top of hills when we take the olympic route on bike rides.

9. I promise to always listen to the first drafts of all your stories.

10. I promise to be a good sport – a better sport – when you win our Rummy games.

IMG_1247

Joe, 

You are the best thing to ever happen to me. You keep me grounded, you keep me laughing and you keep me guessing. I love your quirks, your spontaneity and your predictability. I love that you tell me I’m beautiful and fresh-faced in the morning, even when I know I’m anything but. I love your open mind, your open heart and your wit. I love that when I complain about my hair growing into a mullet, you trim it for me with the kitchen scissors. 

I love our pancake breakfasts and 20-mile bike rides, our evening card games and Wipe-Out/Take-Out nights. You make me a better person. A lighter person. 

I give you this ring and promise with all my heart to be yours forever. Whatever adventures lie before us will be a riot no doubt. There’s no one else I want in my corner. I love you so much.

——


PS. When we were on our honeymoon in Upstate NY, we took at least three dozen photographs using the camera’s self-timer option as we jumped off a giant concrete fire pit in the woods in the middle of Saranac Lake. On Day 7, we paid $25 for a rented canoe, paddled out to our own private island in the Adirondack Mountains, feasted on a picnic lunch of fat deli sammies and cold Labatt Blue and freestyle jumped off boulders all day. Although our aerobic photo shoot lasted for one solid hour of hilariousness, it resulted in moderate calf pain and tender ankles. Joe paid for several poor landings the next day while summiting Whiteface Mountain.


Debauchery, bug infestations & Quality Inns

September 10, 2009 by heidi 8 Comments

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Before I was pulled  on stage during my bachelorette party at Club Nautico Cabaret, and before my hand was physically grabbed and shoved down this queen’s bedazzled corset, PK and I battled an ant infestation in my car.

We were gussied up and about to go out for my second bachelorette party this year when my sister yelled from the driveway, “HEID. YOU’VE GOT A SERIOUS BUG PROBLEM IN YOUR CAR.”

Of course. Last month we gassed the house for termites and $900 later my car is crawling with ants. And when I say crawling. I mean CRAWLING. The seats, the floor, the side door pocket, CRAWLING with ants. Not only was it crawling with ants, there was a mound of ants on the floor, erupting. ERUPTING.

ant_colony135

Rather than waste time screaming over this disgusting and poorly timed infestation – because of course we were already late for my bachelorette party at Leilani’s – PK ran to get me the hose and together we blasted the inside of my car with a pressure so fierce the ants had no choice but to begin fleeing in a mass exodus up the hose, up my legs and eventually my arms. 

“THEY’RE ON ME! THEY’RE F*#@#% on me!” I screamed as I started rolling ants off my arms and legs.

“Drop the hose” PK yelled. “DROP THE HOSE.”

It was around this time that my bubbly neighbor Sherry ambled over to tell PK and I how adorable we looked in our clubbing attire, only to see me leaping like a gazelle across the front lawn, killing ants on my legs.

“I’ve got an ant infestation in the car!” I screamed.

“Do you want a bomb?” She asked. 

“You have BUG BOMBS just lying around?” 

“Yeah, I’ve got a bunch in the shed. Let me grab you one.”

So Sherry grabbed a bug bomb, PK tossed the hose, I ran my legs and arms under bath water, ran outside refreshed and ready to party, detonated the bomb in my car and shut the door, forcing us to take PK’s shiteous car to the club.

Kudos to Leilani, for organizing a perfectly hilarious evening of rom-com watching, quality snacking and drag queen groping. It was a brilliant bachelorette party and I’m forever grateful for what I can only describe as the most epic MOOBS encounter of my life. Let’s not forget how poetically I waxed on the topic of MOOBS seven months ago?

We got back to the house around 2:45 a.m. PK’s flight was at 7, which meant I had three hours to sleep before leaving for the airport. 

But then Joe’s bachelor party rolled into the house at 5 a.m…

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I took this photo at 5:30 a.m. The two men shall remain anonymous. 

—

Ed. note: I meant to post this Sunday morning from the car wash, where I was sitting waiting for dead bugs to be vacuumed from my car.  I meant to finish it, but now I don’t feel like it. I’m tired and lazy right now, so up it goes – as is. It’s 2 a.m. Thursday and Joe and I are at a Quality Inn somewhere near the Virginia border. I used my AAA discount to get us a nice room with a fridge for $65. The pug, who we smuggled in, is snoring next to me. Joe is a bit cranky from driving 900 miles and I’m warm and toasty from a long, hot motel bath. After spending the day writing an A&E cover story from the passenger seat of of a Honda Accord, I needed to soak my brain but good.

Anyway. We’re heading to Buffalo in the morning for Part II of our pre-wedding road trip.

BTW: OUR WEDDING IS IN THREE DAYS, and other than the titillating excitement of that, I’m fiending for tomorrow’s continental breakfast. 

Photo 188

Here we are. Me, the pug & Joe at 2:06 a.m. in Mt. Airy, N.C., Andy Griffith’s hometown. Before I go, I leave you with one Joe-ism:

Ten seconds ago, I turned to my soon-to-be-husband and asked: “If I get up in time for the continental breakfast, would you like me to get you anything?”

“Yes,” he replied. “A chocolate muffin.”

“A chocolate muffin?”

“Yes. Not a chocolate chip muffin, but an all-chocolate muffin?”

“What do you think this place is? A french patisserie?

“Hey,” he says. “This place is called The Quality Inn, not the half-assed in.”

—

PS. I set my new manicure on fire over the weekend. Apparently acrylic nails are highly flammable.  

 

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Reading material

Wild by Cheryl Strayed Travels with Charley Home Game bossypants just kids the time travelers wife Boys Life The-Liars-Club My Uncle Oswald Stephen King On Writing

Me.

Heidi K

Joe.

Joe on guitar

Henry.

henry as werewolf

Chip.

Chippy in a cupboard

Buzzy.

Buzzy

Why Lance?

This blog is named after my old friend Sarah's manifestation of a dreamy Wyoming cowboy named Lance, because the word blog sounds like something that comes out of a person's nose.

About me

I'm a journalist who spends my Mondays through Fridays writing other people's stories, a chronic procrastinator who needs structure. I once quit my job to write a book and like most writers, I made up excuses why I couldn't keep at it.

My boyfriend fiancé husband Joe likes to sleep in late on the weekends, but since we have a kid now that happens less than he'd like.

Before Henry and Chip, I used to spend my mornings browsing celebrity tabloid websites while our dog snored under the covers. Now I hide my computer in spots my feral children can't reach because everything I own is now broken, stained or peed on.

I created Lance in an attempt to better spend my free time. I thought it might jump start a second attempt at writing a novel.

It hasn't. And my free time is gone.

But I'm still here writing.

I'm 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 and I've yet to get caught up in something else, which is kind of a big deal for a chronic procrastinator.

How I met Joe

If you're new here and looking for nirvana, read this post.

And if that’s not enough…

heidikurpiela.com

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