back from the lull!

enjoy these belated valentines day images... jeff's chain is counting down the days to our wedding

hi self, welcome back to the blog!

for those of you who have missed me, i can promise i have not been blowing off blogging for no good reason.  family guy reruns are a very good reason thank you very much.  well, at least they are when you've actually been stretched thin with too much to do.  so what have we been up to lately?

things are changing a lot around my workplace and as a result i have a significantly greater workload.  high hopes this won't keep me from blogging too much in the future, but a reasonably demanding job is actually quite a time suck.

planning a wedding is a task and a half.  particularly while planning on being a bridesmaid in two weddings, a guest at three more, planning an international vacay, and existing as the point of contact for everyone who is planning parties related to these weddings.

also somewhere in there we're fitting in a cross country move and related job hunt.  which honestly is becoming more of a stress reliever than stress producer given michigan's cruel persistence of mega-freezing temperatures.  science has confirmed it:  michigan's winter 2014 officially sucks the most.

on the plus side:  i finally replaced my battery charger for my DSLR so with any luck there might be more pictures coming to pretty this place up.  i'm going to do my best to keep pre-blogging when i can to try and spread the fun out over several posts for y'all.

now re-reading this it's occurred to me... not much is new (well my boss is new, but she's great).  i hate when people bemoan how busy they are, so let's call it a day.

xoxoxo

PS like the heart garland on our mantle?  it's easy to make - check out my post here.

blogging ahead

despite the fact that we bought this cake to celebrate bill knapps day, which was january 18th when we decided to eat bill knapps cake and nap, i'll post this picture in honor of national chocolate day today.

perhaps it was one of my mentally unarticulated goals for the new year to put a bit more priority back onto my blog.  i'm not sure.  but lately i've been feeling a real urge to get this place back on track.  my free time comes in sporadic bursts these days, and to be honest, we don't have a whole lot going on at the immediate moment.  i'm too chicken to head out for cute photos in the snow (in all fairness this is like super ultra mega cold snow).

if you wanted an accurate run down of our day to day activities you'd hear things like "doing a lot of laundry, but leaving it unfolded."  Or "watching netflix and cracking a beer."  Or "simultaneously doing dishes while cooking chili."  Or "petting the cat and talking to steve."

we're just not all that fascinating at the moment i suppose.  but that's ok, it means i finally have a chance to get my tush back here and blog!

but on that note, you may not see my word count sign offs as it will be impractical to reconcile with scheduled posts.  no worries, however, i'll be sure to keep you updated on my writerly exploits.

so now what?  i just told you how boring we are.  so let's look ahead!  tally ho!  i'm going to start pre-writing blog posts to keep this place fresh when i get busy again!  make ahead meals so to speak.  and to compound on the forward thinking most of these posts will be varieties of future plans!  we do have a wedding after all, and a lot more than that on the horizon as well!

it's the most wonderful (cold) time of the year

happy december (again) everyone!

we're getting in the seasonal spirit these days!  steve and i both LOVE christmas, and our place is as festive as our budget and tree-toppling cat will allow.  we are still busy bees these days, no less in honor of holiday time, but it seems like we're chugging toward a pretty awesome year the closer we get to 2014.

our landlords are offering a prize for the best decorated porch.  it's on neighbors.

we've hit a few wedding planning milestones this weekend, and we headed back to portage to celebrate steve's mom's birthday, and to get my childhood bedroom emptied out enough so my parents can work on converting it into something else.  i stumbled across enough old evidence from my creative high school days, i'm hoping to share some of it as soon as i get a chance.

for now, we're operating in future-tense mode: planning is the key word for the next couple weeks.  with any luck, we might know where we'll be moving soonISH, and then the world might start blurring from spinning a little too fast.  hope everyone is having as much fun as we are getting in the holiday spirit!

word count: 36, 443

a look at my to-do list

saugatuck selfies

in case you haven't noticed, i haven't been great about posting all the time lately.  since it's been a bit tough to stop by frequently to talk about what's going on, i figured i'd just present y'all with a little list of what you can expect to find me doing while i'm away from the blog these days.

1.  wedding planning.  specifically, we're starting to get down to the point where actual commitments have been made, which means the NEW commitments need to work with the OLD commitments.  i'm starting to feel like john nash in a beautiful mind, plotting the bizarre insane connections with string between flowers and bow ties and stemless martini glasses on a conspiracy theorist's basement wall collage.

2.  money planning.  seriously people,  no wonder we have worldwide financial crises.  cash feels like the least authentic form of currency in our world today.  i feel like i need a pirate map to figure out WHERE most of my money is between virtual wallet, checking accounts, growth saving, reserve savings, 401K, IRA, and each of the bloody credit cards.  actually we don't need a pirate map, we just need a home computer (which is supposed to arrive today, OMGOMGOMGOMG sweet panchen lama, i do believe i am mere hours away from a functioning macbook, be still my heart) and a serious sit-down with some file jackets and manilla envelopes.

3.  honeymoon planning.  ok, so we might have officially decided on our honeymoon destination and i might be pooping my pants about it a little bit.  i refuse to blog about it until the plane tickets are officially purchased, but the mind-blowing level of excellence is actually unreasonable.

4.  steve's birthday is friday, our four year anniversary is four weeks later and thanksgiving/christmas family festivities are filling in pretty much all of the blanks.  i'm pretty sure when 2014 hits we're both going to have full on psychogenic non-epileptic seizures.

on the plus side, planning extravagant events and travels is literally one of my very favorite things to do.  is it possible to have too much of a good thing?  eh, probably, but you can bet we're definitely having a lot of fun along the way.  hope everybody has as much to look forward to as we do (though i wouldn't wish the stress on anyone)!  happy tuesday!!

word count: 33,709

the weekend when we dressed up the cat and i forgot to take pictures of my sister

yes, as predicted we've hit the time of year when my independent productivity goes out the window.  maybe it's the time change, maybe it's steve and i's complete cabin fever with this weather.  maybe it's the limited computer access we have away from our jobs, maybe it's this wedding planning thing.  maybe it's the fact that work has woken up a little and i finally have deadlines again.

actually it is.  it's all those things.  and those things are all legitimate, valid, and real, which means i'm not feeling guilty that my blog is quiet, my draft is dusty, and this script i'm writing is still unfinished.  the script is easy, the draft is like my child, and here i am breathing a little life back into the blog.  we're still good.  we'll still get there.

ANYWAY HERE'S A SEGUE NOW.

last weekend steve and i were hosting my sister, who was in town from san diego, visiting friends and making wedding plans (for her wedding, not ours).  we had a fantastic time, failing to document any of it (well, unless you count an awkward selfie i took with a halloween decoration at the bar).  when we weren't hosting sarah we were hosting friends, and, retrospectively, we had an alarmingly and uncommonly social weekend.  one of steve's groomsmen from the other side of the state was in town, as was a good friend of ours who was back on a visit from law school.

we suffered to watch a sporting event that ought ne'er be spoken of again.  fortunately, as obnoxious as it sounds, when people weren't turning up at our door with champagne, we were racing to brunch, making dip, and staying up late.  it's taken a few days to get ourselves and our kitchen put back together (and we've been going to bed so early you'd think we remember world war two), but as we head toward the second half of this week, we might just have a few consecutive hours to get back in a groove before we face our next couple days off.

and, as the title and image suggest, we put clothes on bert this weekend.  apparently he is a success-vacuuming cheerleader, but he's almost cute enough to help us forget our shame.

word count: 33,365

fantastical possibilities

first off, allow me to apologize to all the lovely bloggers whose posts i've been missing lately.  things have simply been too crazy for me to spend a lot of time frolicking through the blogosphere.  what "things" none of you ask?  allow me to present them in list form:

1.  three. digit. page count.  ok, i know i talked about this one already, but next time you write 106 possibly coherently connected pages i'll let you tell me to shut up about it.  i'm damn proud of myself (proud enough to swear on this blog, which i try not to do).  i'm not sure if i'm proud just for the quantity of content alone, or the fact that a tiny quiet little part of me thinks some of it is actually sorta good.

2.  i'm planning a wedding.  it's rough.

3.  we're going through the necessary steps to get steve's car replaced (we're very lucky that my parents have been nice enough to hold onto my dad's old SUV for us to buy on the cheap).  the '95 monte carlo named herman simply doesn't get our vote of confidence to make it through another winter.

4.  wait, where are we going to be living in 8-12 months?  seattle?  charleston?  houston?  wait... MAUI might be an option?  what?!  could we really stand to live on an island 1/80th the size of michigan with roughly 2500 miles between us and the mainland?  could we stand to live with ourselves if we passed up the opportunity to move to freaking maui?  hold up self, this opportunity doesn't really even exist yet, but still.  all this madness makes it pretty hard to try and plan a honeymoon.  i don't even know what airport we'd leave from.  ugh.  first world problems times twelve.

5.  work is difficult.  sometimes i am given tasks that require taking information at face value and completing them without understanding why.  i am a stressed out, nervous wreck when this happens because i have no confidence that i am completing a task correctly unless i have a concept of how it fits into the larger goal at hand.  it's actually a fairly serious liability sometimes.

hope everyone is still rocking away.  doing my best to keep checking in.  we're hanging in there dreading looking forward to the upcoming holiday season, winter weather, and a whole lot of changes heading our way.  if we could just fast forward to thanksgiving 2014, i think we might actually get another couple days to relax.  any advice for trying to get through it?

word count:  32,035

werddings, merving, ermahgerd

i was originally going to blow you guys off again because our apartment still looks like this (above left... we fortunately do not have a horrifying pig-tailed woman lurking anywhere... that i know of).  however, since we have been without comcast all weekend, it feels wrong not to immediately hit up the blog with my new-found-non-3G-interwebs.

right now, adulthood feels like baptism by fire.  even though all i want to do is sit back and soak up the fun of moving in together and getting engaged we haven't a second to waste on such relaxation, unless we want to let our apartment turn into a more cluttered version of gollum's cave.  meanwhile, other obligations include: pinning down a wedding venue and date (merci parents for your patience and generosity), replacing steve's car (merci parents for your patience and generosity), getting ready for steve's trip to texas, getting ready for our trip to virginia for emily and colin's wedding, 

screw it, i'm not going to stress myself out further by putting my to-do list in writing.  that ain't my style.

because it is simply terrifying trying to write about everything going on right now, i'll instead compile a variety of pinteresty wedding photos that are on my do-not-want list.  perhaps this will evolve into a series of posts about things i don't want at my wedding.  i'll call it "she said no," or something.  we'll see.  it could just be sweaty shaking internet withdrawals that have me committing to something as hardcore as a blog series.

anyway, i apologize in advance for any silence that has happened here lately, or any silence from me that will happen round the blogosphere soon.  things are just plain hectic.  to amuse you, below are the photo-ops i will be banning from our wedding.

people might not understand how
happy we are if we don't write it down.

1.  crap written on chalkboards.  or scrabble tiles.  or pennant banners.

i'm pretty sure when i started elementary school back in 1995 chalkboards had long been obsolete.  adding text to photos also just seems so tumblr to me.  isn't a picture supposed to be worth a thousand words anyway?

2.  photos of our feet

i could tell you steve and i don't have the same size feet.  yes, i could tell you that, but it would be a lie.  unfortunately, this means we'll somehow have to remember our wedding without images highlighting our footwear.  i hope this is possible.

3.  the "american gothic"

this is a very popular photo pose i have seen and it has never made sense to me.  for the sake of brevity let's ignore the already very strange aspect of the raw meat and carrots, and focus on the "we are standing full frontal side by side with dead facial expressions."  nothing says love and life-long commitment like a combined mugshot.  alas, i'm going to have to pass on this one.

(ok, i suck at brevity, true story: when i pinned this image with a "wtf" caption the photographer commented on my pin: "Hi Becky, If you read their engagement post you'll see that she is a vegan and he is not. They even went to a party as Meat Man and Veggie Girl. :) It for sure has to do with their story." sorry for calling you out, mr. photographer, you seem like a very nice man and you are quite a talented photo-snapper.  but on top of the fact that i find it annoying when people choose to define themselves based on what they eat, i still think it's a ridiculous picture.  c'est la vie.)

hopefully this post doesn't read too snarky.  wedding and engagement photos are personal and if chalkboards, shoes, and dead-faces are your cup of tea, please don't think my opinion matters one fraction of an ounce (it doesn't).

ok, back to business.

word count: 21,046