Dress for Success

At work today I ate lunch with a crowd I don't normally run with.  I didn't have a choice; they invited me to lunch and I didn't have an excuse to say no since it was actually at the office.

During the awkward phase at the beginning of lunch, someone mentions my engagement ring.  This sparks a frenzy and they start asking tons of questions.  How'd he do it--at the beach--When did this happen?--Easter--Did you help pick out the ring?--No, it's a family heirloom--What's your dress going to look like?--

And that's the one that stopped me short.  My dress?  You mean I have to pick out a dress to wear at my wedding?  I said, "I honestly have no idea!"  I've never claimed to be a girl who had the whole wedding planned and just needed to snag a man; I've never envisioned a single detail about my future wedding until this past week or so.  J knows this, he's comfortable with it; he knows the thought of getting into nitty gritty details right now would make me break out into a sweat.  We're taking it slooooow with the planning.  Why is that so hard for people?

Apparently my "no idea" about my future dress compelled one of the ladies I was sitting with to offer me her wedding dress...to borrow...if I got "in a pinch."  Mind you, I believe we've spoken twice before today.  I was both flattered and mortified.

So I now have a goal.  The next X amount of months of my life will be dedicated to not ever having to entertain the thought of borrowing a dress from a 45 year old woman who is about 5 inches shorter than me and about 50 pounds heavier. 

For Joanna: How Mary Saved Us From a Rattler

About ten or fifteen minutes before J proposed on Easter, we came across quite a shock.  

Seashore is a very heavily wooded area, even though I only seem to take pictures of the beaches.  The part that we were walking on was a fairly narrow path (one person + one dog wide).  Since it's so close to our beach, Mary was running freely off her leash.  She'd go splash off to the side of the path in an unseen body of water...and then she'd come ZOOOOOMing past us...it's what she does every single time we go.   Nothing new.

But this past week, We come around a bend (why do all good stories involve coming around a bend?) in the path and there she is, just frozen.  She was staring very intently at a patch of brush.  Not.moving.a.muscle. It was so odd to me to see her like that, but J knew the look immediately.  She was alerting.  "What's she looking at?" he wondered aloud as he pushed past Leo and me.  As we start to near the bush in question, something...jumps...and scurries off the path.  I figured it was a frog.  Why?  Self preservation.

When we are standing directly beside Mary, we follow her gaze to a small brush clearing, about 4 feet away from us, and I see, no joke, a rattlesnake slowly raise it's tail.  If it weren't absolutely terrifying it would have been comical because it was exactly like a movie, like a nightmare...seeing and hearing that tail rattling like that was dead on what I would've expected.  I remember thinking, "Huh...they really do that!"  But luckily for me, I was having that strange thought as I was running away from the snake...Leo in a chokehold (hey, he's a city boy).  Only when we were far enough away did I start ranting about how we almost died and Mary had saved us.  What a good Tennessee girl she was!  (NOTE: the rattlesnake picture from above is from Wikipedia.  We didn't get any pictures, naturally!)

If Mary hadn't been so dang country, there's a good chance that I could've stepped on it, or Leo could have, or one, both, or all four of us could've gotten bitten repeatedly and immediately poisoned to death...and while we lay dying from rattlesnake venom gotten attacked by tarantulas and rabid bats simultaneously.  So let's just say Mary got loads of treats that night.  But since we treat the babies equally, Leo got some to match.

Oh...and we ran into this gem too.  Apparently the snakes were loving the weather. 

First Gifts

Last night we went to dinner with J's parents and his grandparents.  I know I've talked about them before...in their 90s, they're well past their 70th anniversary.  They're quite amazing.

When we showed up last night, I have to admit that until then, nothing's really changed for us yet.  Other than having a sparkly ring on my hand, it's been life as normal.  So when Grams and Gramps announce it's time for a toast and whip out a bottle of Moet, they toasted to the many happy years in store for us.  And when we were getting ready to leave for dinner, Grams walks over to me and tells me that when any of their grandchildren get engaged to be married, she likes to give them something from their many years together.

She handed me a folded over piece of tissue paper and when I opened it, I saw two dainty white linen tea towels with scalloped edges...embroidered with tiny little flowers.  Very beautiful.  I was just getting ready to open my mouth about how much I loved them, she said, "Those were a gift to me at my bridal shower.  In 1938."  And that's when the waterworks began.

Can't yet find the words

I've been writing and then rewriting "the perfect summary."  I keep deleting it.  Let's just say it starts with this: 

Then this:

Add in a little of this:

And a splash of this:

And finally...this:

I'm working on the less hyphenated version, but for now...this will have to do.

Dinner for 8

Thursday night after I got home from the gym, J and I slowly started to make dinner.  He prepares the food for the grill, I saute the veggies...  In the middle of snapping the end off a green bean, someone knocked on our door.  Amidst the dogs barking their heads off, I peeped through the peephole and saw it was one of our first floor neighbors.  (The neighbor that we weren't entirely sure liked us as much as his roommate).

 

Of course we welcomed him in, the perfect host and hostess that we are (flashback: me, in sweaty gymclothes with a tousled ponytail.  J: I'll just say thank goodness he had pants on).  What happened next is kind of blurry in my memory due to hunger pains and the fact that I'd ceased reading New Moon just long enough to make some green beans.  Neighbor Jeremy, who we'll now call Jer (that's for you, Gib), starts talking about grilling and grills and can we grill and do we have a grill and you get the picture.  It ended up with J telling Jer that yes we have a grill, and it's on, and we're getting ready to throw a few steaks on it now.  Jer says something to the tune of "Do you mind if we grilled some veggies on it?"  He says he's got food downstairs and that they'll bring it up.  I say, "Sure."  I didn't catch his use of plural pronouns.

 

So he left, and J and I were just as confused as we'd been when we opened the door to see a guy who hasn't necessarily expressed his love for us yet.  Five minutes later he and a girl showed up with 2 grocery bags of food, a huge bowl of potato salad, 2 boxes of Boca burgers, and an unopened bottle of Southern Comfort.  Five minutes after that, three of his friends showed up at our door with beer.  Five minutes after that, one last straggler shows up.  Total: 8 people.

 

In what might've seemed like an act of antisocial behavior, J and I sat at our dining room table and ate our dinners while our neighbor and his posse hijacked our balcony.  They were drinking beer, they were laughing, they were not at all acting like this was an odd situation.  Our dining room table is right by one of J's fishtanks so two of NeighborFriends came to look at it.  They're a married couple.  They have African Cichlids too.  The talked with us for quite a while about it.  They also have a new puppy that they rescued.  Ok, we like them.

 

Flash forward two hours.  All 8 of us are standing in our kitchen (which makes me laugh because my old kitchen had a max occupancy of 1.4 people) laughing at one of J's animated stories, as Mary and Leo entertain us all.  Turns out 2 of NeighborFriends work with Jer at the Botanical Gardens and they offer some advise on our budding herb garden on the balcony.  They loved the dogs.  Showered them with love and treats.  And all in all, when it was all said and done we had a lot of fun with them**.  We joked afterwards about why anyone would invite friends over for a cookout if you don't have access to a grill.  Totally random and spontaneous.  And it completely made me appreciate how clean our place was.

 

After all, you just never know when you're going to host someone else's dinner party.

 

**The married couple had a friend in town.  An extremely tall girl, like towered above the rest of us.  At one point when we were all in the kitchen, she bent over and then slowly crumpled to the floor.  It was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen...don't think I've ever seen anyone faint before***.  I gave her some water, someone reached into our cabinet and handed her a bowl.  I'm assuming it was her for to puke in, which hello, gross.  She just sat there saying she thought she'd been food poisoned (she ate a veggie burger) and how she then said it was sun poisoning.  It was very odd.  And she didn't even want to leave then either; they stayed another hour.  Her friend's husband said later that "Guess the air's thinner up there."  I said, "Where?  Here on the 3rd floor?" and he goes, "No, when you're 6 foot 7."

 

***Retraction: sophomore year in college J-Gib fainted due to a massive allergic reaction to amoxicillin.  That day took 9 years off my life.

 

In need of a new camera

When I upgraded last year and bought my dear sweet huge-screened lover, my Mac, I unknowingly took two or three steps back technology-wise as well.

For one, my newish printer does not communicate with Slim Charles (click here for a short summary on my computer's namesake).  So when I do all these great creative graphic design things...they can be emailed to you to print out yourself.  Thank you clients!  No, seriously.  J inherited said printer and uses it to print out crossword puzzles.

Secondly, my camera doesn't speak to the Mac.  Why?  Nothing having to do with the fact I got my camera like a billion years ago (I think it's the first model of the digital Elph).  The screen on it is maybe a 1 inch by 1 inch square.  I love my camera, it's treated me well and it's been reliable.  BUT--what good is it to me now?  Which is why for the better part of the last year I've relied on my friends to take pictures for me.  And they'll gladly do it, but I never seem to see any of those pictures afterwards.  So this past year of my life basically doesn't exist.

When my parents were here visiting, I think we took maybe 2 pictures with J's camera, but since it takes me way longer to figure out how to upload pictures on his computer, I figured it'd be easier to ask my parents to send theirs over.  So far, this is all they sent, a pic of J touching a squirrel monkey through the glass at the zoo.  I think once I get through a few upcoming expenses, I'll be investing in a new camera to get me to through the next 10 years.

April Fool, Chicken Little, and a blood-sucker to boot

Just a few things:

1) Today is Leo's fifth birthday.  He's my little April Fool.  Hard to believe, but yes, five years old. For your enjoyment, here is a picture of him totally loving his bed being surrounded by three of J's duffel bags that were filled with dirty clothes the day we moved in together.  Oh Leo, you are the living end, pet.

2)  Not sure if anyone read the news about the sky falling Sunday night in Virginia.  Or was it a meteor?  Or a UFO?  Or a rocket from Russia?  We don't know either.  J and our friend Bob were out on our balcony and heard the boom (which I think the experts have said it was a sonic boom either way...the cause is what's unknown) but I was having dinner across the bridge with friends.  It's been all the hype this week and I felt so left out for not having seen/heard it.

3) I watched Twilight last night.  J had one of his buddies over and I was trying to give them some privacy so I confined myself to my office.  Two hours later, I emerged, glossy-eyed, and totally in love.  Jamie & Lauren: I'll be buying the books ASAP.  I started my next conversation with J, "Soo, how do you feel about...vampires...?"