Back From the Dead

As Britney Spears would say, "Hey y'all!" Man alive am I tired!! I don't think I've ever been this tired in my life. I imagine it's a small fraction of what new parents feel, only if you're a new parent, I feel like you get to sit more. My new job has me working late, working at home, AND working on my feet quite a bit. Needless to say I come home so exhausted each day, and of course too exhausted to blog. Then I had a ton of family drama, and blogging seemed...selfish. But now the fam's doing better and I'm getting into more of a routine with work. So, back to blogging more regularly. I can't quite promise my regular features quite yet, because I barely even have time to check the blogs I love, let alone put together a weekly roundup, but I'm hoping that in a couple of weeks, I'll be able to get back to dancing on Fridays.

In the mean time, I do have some wedding planning news. For one thing, A.P. and I have begun to rethink our original excuse to get people to show up for the surprise wedding. Because there's no way I can have a new job and plan a wedding in a short enough amount of time to pull off the engagement party pretense. So we came up with a new idea, and one that I think will serve us better in the long run. Here's the thing, the surprise wedding thing was something A.P. always liked, but he was always worried about making sure his family was going to come in town from Florida. He was really worried they wouldn't come into town for an engagement party, especially his one brother who is a bit cash poor these days with a new baby and a new dream job for which he had to take a slight pay cut. So here is the new plan: have a slightly longer engagement, and plan on marrying in spring. Then, have a fake wedding reflected on the invitation, get everyone in town for said fake wedding, and actually get married at the rehearsal dinner the night before. This way, his family will for sure be in town, I still get my surprise wedding, and yeah, I'm still happy, and he's happier. I think it will be better this way, too. We have also been tossing around the idea of having a relaxed "after-party" the next night (the night we would have as our supposed wedding night) at our place. So it's like a fun-filled, surprise wedding weekend. Plus we get to hang with our friends and family and enjoy a bunch of time with them. The more I think about it, the happier I am about the whole thing. I feel more confident that we won't be excluding A.P.'s family in any way, and I envision this awesome, super-chill, wedding weekend wherein I wear a pretty dress, and jeans. Does it get any better than that?

So we've thought that part out, but now we need to figure out other details, like a date, and an idea of what our budget will be. I gave A.P. the old stack of wedding mags, the binder I started keeping with crap I picked up at the Bridal Expo, and had sent to me because I signed up for The Knot (ughh...what a mistake that was), and a wedding planning book I picked up at a book fair that is really ridiculous because it actually says on the checklist of important wedding things that you need to hire a wedding planner, but it has good budget sheets and flower lists and sort of helpful stuff for A.P. to look over. Then I gave him a stack of post-its and told him to get to marking that text and finding things he likes. Then I told him that our deadline for picking a date, narrowing down a budget (or at least figuring out what we want to save on and what we want to splurge on), and him looking at the mags was end of next week. He says he resents the fact that I am ordering him to look at magazines, but let's face it people, A.P. is A.P. I love him, but if I didn't put a deadline on it, it would never get done. Instead, the whitest white boy would download rap music and read his econ blogs. Instead I told him that he should look at it this way: there are tons of magazines and blogs and books, and I, in the past few months, have narrowed it down for him to these few resources. I made his life easier by doing more than half of the work for him. That sounds nice, right? Engagement has made me a nicer significant other. : O )

Life Gets in the Way

Hi all! I just wanted to apologize for my lack of posting. Besides this month being a whirlwind of adventure (new job! vacation! engagement! vacation again!), I've had some family stuff going on lately. I started my new job a few weeks ago and have been insanely stressed and busy with that, and then my brother landed in the hospital. Plus, someone at my new job got me sick, so I have a miserable cold, too. Anyway, this week my brother is getting out, and I'm going to try to catch up on my work this weekend, since I'm sick and not leaving the house. I'm hoping to be back to blogging next week, but I have to take it day by day.

I miss you all! And I miss writing and posting here. If you can believe it, I think I've been more stressed because I haven't been writing. I haven't read any blogs, and barely any gossip (if you can believe that, too), and A.P. and I haven't had a chance to put any thought into the wedding at all. But I'm hoping that this week will lead back into some normalcy and I'll get back into my regular routines.

Anyway, I didn't want you all to think that like many blogs out there, I had given up. It's just been an incredibly stressful past month and a half, and it seems to be neverending. I promise once I find the end of this tunnel, I'll be back and blogging like before! See you guys (hopefully very) soon!

Fantasy vs. Reality

Ho-hum. I'm so overwhelmed with how fast-paced my life has been the past few weeks. It's lightening up, but it's going to take a while before I feel completely comfortable again. New jobs will do that to you, it seems. I'm still getting used to the new job, and I'm especially still getting used to being engaged. I still say boyfriend (I kind of hate the word fiance) and I still don't really tell people unless they ask. Why? Because then I have to answer questions I don't have the answers to, like when we're getting married and where and how and what kind of dress I want to wear.

You would think a girl who's had a wedding planning blog would be more excited about, you know, planning a wedding! But the truth is, I really am not too psyched at all. I was thinking about it and wondering why it is I feel that way. I've loved writing this blog and I've loved putting together ideas and starting to figure out what our wedding would look like, so why am I so resistant to start FINALLY planning our wedding? I think it's because that means it's no longer a fun thing to fantasize about, but instead more shit I have to do. I have a list the size of my ass (read: big) of things to do already with this new job, and now we have to plan a wedding? I know in a month or so when I'm more settled into my job, we'll really start planning, but for now, I'm just enjoying wearing the ring and smiling knowing we're getting married. Is that so wrong?

Ummm...AWKWARD

First off, thanks to everyone for the well wishes and congratulations! I'm sorry I haven't been posting a ton the past couple of weeks. In addition to my vacation with A.P., I was in Colorado this past weekend. But I'm back to my normal routine and will hopefully be posting my same 2-4 times a week. Yay! I've missed blogging and reading blogs so much! And while you would think that today's post would be about wedding planning, it's not. Prepare yourselves for some serious awkwardness...

So before I met A.P., I dated...a lot. I met people out and about, through friends, and online. My friends used to tease me about dating so much and having dates with multiple guys at the same time, and I would always say, "Don't hate the player, hate the game!" And I meant it. Though I'm happy as a clam to have my beloved A.P. and only him, and also though I'm happy to get married soon, I am sooooooooo glad that I dated a bunch before I met the man I am officially going to marry. But the problem with dating a lot is that there are a lot of men you dated or went out on dates with wandering the city's streets. Or in my case, possibly working at my new job.

After completing all my training the past few weeks, I finally started my new job this week, and have been busy getting acclimated and getting to know my coworkers, specifically one, we'll call him Douchey LaRue (because he was a bit of a d-bag), who I need to coordinate with a lot. When I got there and met him, he did seem kind of familiar, and I started really thinking about it. I came to the conclusion that he might be this guy I had a HORRIBLE date with three years ago before I met A.P. There are some details that I remember about this guy, and so far they are all aligning with the details I'm learning about Douchey LaRue. People, I am kind of freaking out! I love this job...and this is a place I could work forever and retire from! I don't want to say anything, because it's a bit, you know, AWKWARD AS HELL! Thank goodness there was no lovin' of any kind involved, because that would be really bad, but still the date itself was pretty awful.

So here's my dilemma: Should I confront the guy? Or should I continue to pretend like I'm a complete retard and oblivious to the fact that this guy and I went out on a date and he was a total douchebag? Advice, please!

Finally...I Get to the Damn Point!

I feel like I've been slamming you all with big news, lately: a new job, vacation, and now this. But this news, this news is actually relevant to this blog. It's actually what this whole blog has been about from the beginning...A.P. and I are engaged! Yay! It happened on our trip to Tennessee, specifically this past Friday. We are very, very excited! And because A.P. is a man with a plan, the moment was documented, and now I'm sharing (including actual pictures of us! Wow...weird.). We're still in the process of telling people, so not everybody knows. We're hoping to have that all taken care of by the end of the week, but man alive, I get tired of being on the phone and telling the same story over and over again. Geesh.

So, here's the story...with pictures!

We were driving through the Smoky National Park, specifically on Newfound Gap Road, which connects North Carolina to Tennessee through the park. We got to Newfound Gap and it was, ahem, too "Smoky" to see a damn thing, so we drove back. Along the way there are all kinds of little places to stop, park, get out, and hike around and check things out. So we kept stopping at these little streams and taking pictures. We stopped at this one stream and A.P. said, "Let's set the camera up and take a picture of both of us." I kind of knew something was up...why you ask? Because my dumb ass accidentally found the ring before we even left on vacation. Oops. But honestly, I didn't know if he was for sure going to ask. I thought he was kind of winging it, but turns out, everyone knew except me: my family, my friends, his family, his coworkers. So, we set the camera up and take one picture:


Not too pretty. It looks like we're fighting, but actually I thought the camera went off, and then I realized it hadn't, so I was trying to get A.P. back in position. Then we took another picture:


Much better. But A.P. didn't like it. He wanted to take another:


Much, MUCH better. I loved this one, so I thought we were done. But he goes, "Let's take one more." So I set up the camera again, and this happened:


In record time (because he wanted to get it in the picture), he got down on one knee, shoved the ring on my finger and blurted out, "Marty, will you marry me?" The joke is, he said it so fast, I don't really know what I agreed to. Of course the camera went off while he was in the middle of getting down on one knee, so it looks like he's falling or I'm helping him up the rock, or who knows what, but WE know what this picture is all about.

Then we hugged and kissed and were happy. Then we took post-happiness pictures. I like this picture because it was after we left the "engagement site" and had moved on to another little stream. In a quick moment, I whipped out the camera and snapped off this picture as I told A.P., "One more...it's all about the ring." He's laughing, which is a rarity in a lot of our pictures (he's usually got his "I'm a serious man" face on).


Then as we were driving away, and stopped at yet another park and take pictures site, we saw a rainbow! Because when you're engaged, everything comes up puppies and rainbows! (Seriously, on the drive back home we saw a puggle puppy!)


We haven't set a date, we haven't talked about anything yet, so please don't bombard me with questions about all that wedding business quite yet (ironic on a wedding planning blog, I know), because I'll look stupid with my lack of answers. For now, A.P. and I are having a great time making jokes about future husbands and wives, and what I really agreed to when I said yes. (Burping for life!! Dog poop on the carpet!!!) I'm happy I was in a pretty place, and wearing plaid (which if you know me at all, you know I love) and jeans. I'm happy that we get to share the rest of our lives together and that we get to keep having fun (hopefully). Yay!