brief fupdates and evidence we still exist

bachelorette selfie with my sister, only semi relevant, but you need a picture right?  there will be more eventually.

let's be honest here folks, things are currently rather surreal.

my name is going to be different in less than 18 days and between trying to finagle a new job and tie off all the pre-nuptial loose ends it just doesn't feel like i have much to blog.  things are simply too vague or surprise-inducing to announce to the internet right now, so i've obviously found solace about my bloggers-block in the form of a 1028 page novel and 6 seasons of jersey shore.  rest assured there will be much more to be said, some hopefully sooner than later, but should you be knee deep in concern for my absence from this blog, you can expect to see more around maybe halloween-time, when hopefully things reach some semblance of normal.

in the meantime, here are some fleeting thoughts about our new home and current conditions:

1.  cost of living differences between houston and ann arbor are blowing my mind.  gas is so cheap (not really a shocker), groceries are basically free compared to michigan, also there are forms of gainful employment here that render people more upbeat than the metro-detroit attitude of "you have a job, you thus have no right to complain about anything ever.  genocide?  deal with it.  you have a job.  be thankful."

2.  on the topic of the upbeat people of houston the friendly-factor is probably the biggest culture shock here.  people are just so darn nice.  i feel like an ice queen for not striking up a conversation with the cockroach i found in my dishwasher.  midwesterners have a much more "you do you" (thnx jwoww) attitude about what constitutes politeness.  probably because it's so cold you can't really be expected to leave your house to talk to anyone 8 months out of the year.

3.  also yes i found a cockroach in my dishwasher.  just a small one.  he was not the first.  there also aren't 8 months out of the year here where everything freezes and dies.  thus bugs.  they happen.  i'm learning to deal with this.

4.  on the topic of cold: it is not.  unless you're indoors because, wisely, everything is air conditioned to the max.  i am essentially in heaven.  i hate the cold.  cold ranks somewhere below human trafficking and somewhere above the big bang theory in terms of things i do not appreciate.  if you read this blog often, i would guess about 80% of its contents refer to my hatred of the cold.  i'm so pleased and warm and tan in houston.

5.  on that note, the locals here tend to think it's way too hot and they can't believe i think the weather here is a plus.  this, to me, is like whining about your broken laptop to a starving child.  you do not understand the suicide-inducing misery of months below 0 degrees fahrenheit.  seriously.  i don't like cold.

also there are little lizards all over the place in our apartment complex and i love them.  hopefully i will get to posting the rest of the pictures from our bachelor/bachelorette weekend very soon (thank you to my 10/10 maid of honor sister for taking pictures and also crafting hard).

there: we still exist. ta for now.

road-trip-to-texas instagrams

here are a few instagrams of the long haul south from ann arbor to houston.  it was a pretty spectacular time-- i just wish steve and i had been able to share a car so we could laugh at the same casino-nail-salon-gas-station-home-of-the-original-deep-fried-pie-on-a-stick and play lots of 20 questions with answer "nicholas cage."  still, we made our way down from michigan via champaign, IL - memphis, TN - shreveport, LA and voila home to houston! the apartment is almost clean enough to document and introduce to y'all!

yes, i say y'all now.  and even though i have more reason than i used to, i'm somehow more self conscious about it.  don't worry.  let's move on... y'all...

over the course of our road trip i have upped my "states visited" number from 39 to 42 (i had never previously been in arkansas, louisiana, or texas).  i'm comin' for you oklahoma, idaho, oregon, mississippi, north dakota, montana, alaska, and hawaii!!

settling in so far!  lots of fun ahead!

it's that time again

the time when i ignore blogging because my apartment looks like this, i'm officially unemployed, and we are leaving thursday to move ~1200 miles to houston, tx.  bert is already traumatized.

we're moving y'all

regular readers of this blog have probably seen more annoying ambiguous allusions to our future move than anyone should be expected to endure.  as we finally have 99% of our ducks in order, we're at last ready to make the announcement to anyone who doesn't yet know.

we're moving to texas!  more specifically, houston!  yeehaw!

i've visited 39 states in my life so far and texas is one of the 11 i've never seen before (though steve has already been there a number of times between boy scout stuff and his job).  we're both completely excited to head out on brand new exploits and we're slightly overwhelmed that it's happening only a month from now (yes, that's 2 months BEFORE we get married in michigan).

both steve and i have lived our entire lives in michigan, and it's hard to believe in just a few weeks we'll be packing everything up and setting up house in the bayou city.  i can barely sit still writing about it.

in honor of our future home here's a short list of some exciting things:

1.  i can officially cross "live in a place with palm trees" off my bucket list.

2.  last minute cruise parties from galveston.

3.  brasserie 19, underbelly, and whataburger, grits everywhere.  fish tacos.  normal tacos.  omg food.

4.  it probably doesn't get below -30 degrees all that often.  the same cannot be said for ann arbor.

5.  having a legitimate museum district and theater district

6.  access to new orleans (another place i've never been)

7.  the gerald d. hines waterwall + parks galore

but most exciting to me is simply being plunked in a completely new place, with completely new surroundings, completely new people, and completely new experiences to start exploring.  it's a big adventure we've got on our hands.  wish us luck and come for a visit; we can't wait!

#steveandbeckyselltheirstuff

in light of the fact that steve and i are, in fact, doing the moving, we have decided to get proactive and start sorting things for the pack-purge ritual.  notably, we have a lot of stuff we do not need to take with us while we try to stuff everything into a trailer and/or pod.

because we are secret hoarders we have decided that not everything in our piles of junk is worth immediately throwing into the garbage.  we've listed a number of items on craigslist, and have plenty of other stuff we're basically willing to give away to anyone who needs it.  feel free to take a look at anything below.  if you'd like to buy it, (or if you really really really want/need something and we know/like you it might be free) drop us a line and we can sort something out.  if you're not local, but willing to pay shipping hit us up too!

yellow table

coat rack

backpacks & travel bags

ceiling lamp

matching ceiling lamp 2

air mattress

20" tv

coffee maker

insta-dump and fupdates (aka fun updates)

hello hello blogland!

we got blasted with a LOT of snow over the weekend.  those of you from pleasant homelands where weather minimally impacts your life may not be aware, but when the multiple feet of snow hit michigan it actually severely impacts day to day life.

more specifically it turns us into homebodies, which may not sound like a big deal to some of you, but steve and i are antsy folks; we get a pretty irked when we're all cooped up.  on the one hand it means our holiday decorating is totally off the chain and steve has turned into a magical housekeeping fairy.  on the other hand, it is pretty unappealing when the balance of life is reduced to jobs and stress-cleaning.

the bright silver lining to everything, however, is the exciting news about our upcoming relocation (it's hard to be TOO mad at the snow when i might be spending my next few winters in the desert).  as usual our specific information is limited, but at the moment it's terribly fun to speculate whether our new home will be defined by surfers, starbucks, mountains or cacti, and it's definitely reassuring to have a mental picture of our extremely irregular 2014 timeline.

to add to the fun my boss is leaving (apparently i'm a rough person to supervise... everyone keeps quitting the job of 'becky's boss') at the turn of the new year.  there's no question about it-- the stir crazy is here, change is coming, and i can't wait!

here's to the start of many insane weeks ahead.  happy tuesday y'all!

word count:  36,443

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

decorating sneak peek

i actually DID blog yesterday, i swear.  i posted a creative writing piece that i immediately reverted to a draft when i decided i liked it enough to submit to a short prose competition.  as blogging counts as "self-publication" i decided i would take it down until i hear from the editor.  if you are a writer interested in entering check it out here.

in other news:

yesterday my cow skull arrived in a giant box stuffed full of shredded paper.  his name is jeff and he's already family.  if you have been following me on instagram, you're probably aware that life lately has been about decorating, decorating, and more decorating.  when moving, the options at hand include organizing, cleaning, unpacking, and decorating, so i obviously picked my favorite and am allowing the mess to slowly kill me inside.

side note:  the images in the bottom right picture were pages from old project portfolios that were being thrown away at my office.  i saved a couple more of these portfolios from being thrown away featuring sketches, floor plans, and elevations of other buildings.  after the interest i received when i posted the picture to instagram, i'm considering framing a few more for a giveaway on this blog.  good idea, bad idea?

also, this saturday we are touring wedding venues.  it's pretty mind-blowing having all this getting married stuff evolve into reality.

word count: 21,046

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

notes from the move

can we all just take a moment to admire the sheer manliness of my boyfriend in a dirty undershirt behind the wheel of a 14' truck?  ok thank you, now back to your regularly scheduled blog post...

moving pretty much defined our weekend, which was a bit sad because... well... busy-not-100%-play-filled weekend.  but we also ended sunday with an epic feeling of accomplishment because we successfully loaded, unloaded, and drove (or, for me, rode along in) the u-haul.  this was on top of moving me to steve's (he doesn't have room for my furniture, but somehow he found room for my hoarding problem) and cleaning every inch of my townhouse.

it's always a challenge to make it through the week when you work all weekend, but on top of that, friday can't come soon enough because i'm going to see my sister at last!  hoorah!  still, can't i just quit this rat race and move to key west to write my novel?  hemingway totally made it work, right?  (well, minus the whole philandering and suicide thing).

still, we're pretty proud of ourselves (though i suppose we still have the second half of the move left to go).

counting down the minutes to san diego!

hope everyone's week flies by (unless of course you have reason to savor this random tuesday)!

word count: 16,274

it's friday friday gotta get down on friday

why are you wondering which seat you can take?  just call shotgun like everyone else.

hello weekend!  i see you outside the window of my office there.  i can't wait to hang out with you in a few hours!

i am now residing in a preposterously humid basement with a broken ping pong table.  bert has come out of hiding twice so far, but i'm not optimistic for his psychological future.  that said, it's a really good feeling to have step one of the move complete.  steps 2 and 3 will be taking place this weekend with a uhaul for furniture and lots of cleaning products.

it is also worth noting that i am finally emotionally prepared to take the plunge and watch the third season of dowton abbey.  i caught on to the awesomeness of downton around the time PBS started airing season 2 here in the states.  naturally i binge watched the first season on netflix in 48 hours, and then immediately began scouring putlocker and sockshare for the second season.  however, when season 3 came out (in the UK that is, there was no way i was waiting until 2013), i watched the first episode and realized i could not deal with a week-long wait for the next piece of drama.  thus, i wrapped up my obsession in a neat little box, and saved it for later, allowing myself to gorge on nonstop marathons of merlin, shameless, and legend of the seeker.  

however, since i can't find easy access to deadwood on netflix or amazon prime, i think it may be time to dust off the box and find out what on earth happens before matthew crawley gets hit by a train.

yes i read spoilers.

i totally flipped to the end of every harry potter book before i finished them.

i live dangerously.

hope everyone has a spectacular weekend!

word count: 14,562

PS snape kills dumbledore.

the things we are doing

after weeks of wallowing in semi-stressful boredom and painfully oppressive routine, it suddenly feels like we're hitting the ground running with tons and tons of fun things to do and think about.  

past:

steve spent a couple days in pittsburgh for an orientation conference.  though he didn't need much orienting since he's been working for some time now, he did find out a lot more information about the future of his job.  we are definitely looking forward to all the things to come!

present:

right now the big move is occupying most of our thought-space.  today is the day we are moving me and bert into steve's for our temporary housing situation.  pros:  walk to work, amusing cat exploring new spaces... cons: walk to work in bad weather, filth.  mainly we just can't wait to get moved out of steve's and into OUR place.  note to self: go look at paint swatches.

near future:

the reality of my trip to san diego didn't really hit me when i booked the ticket, but now i am super super super excited to get on the plane and go!  can't wait to see my sister, play at the ocean, and let my parents spoil me rotten with brunch at the hotel del coronado!  thanks parents!  nom nom nom.

additionally, steve has a trip down to texas coming up for work  (can i come stevedore?  texas is one of the very few states i have not visited yet), and we just got our invitations in the mail for our lovely friends' wedding down in virginia!

oh and now that it's august, that means students are back in less than a month.  as an official townie these days (ugh what a horrific thing to identify as), i have a love-hate relationship with the masses of students, but on the whole i think their presence improves ann arbor immensely.  it also means my very own personal girl with a dragon tattoo, cha, will be back in les etats unis and we can finally have a raucous girl's night out.  hoorah!

happy thursday y'all!

word count: 13,260

the move has begun

i hope everyone's weekend was splendid!  ours, though light on the hardcore fun-having, was excellent and well-needed.  we relaxed a lot, made a huge dent in the packing process, and sunday evening steve flew to pittsburgh for a work conference, which meant i got to lie around in the bathtub and read chekhov.  the weekend was perfect balance of lazy and productive.

you'll probably be hearing about our moving attempts for quite a while here.  one of the glories of college-town living is the way property rentals tend only to be available at random staggered intervals in mid-august through early september.  this means that, although our lease does not start until august 15th, we have about 90 steps along the way to getting our asses moved in together.  my lease is up a week from tuesday, which means i'll get to endure temporary housing at steve's place (if you enjoy fear factor, you'll probably want to come back and read how that goes for me... fortunately steve is no longer living with the nuclear physicist who pooped his own pants while stone cold sober... i wish i was kidding).

for the most part i'm going to soak up all the bathwater i possibly can until steve comes home, while bert continues to enjoy himself exploring the newly-empty corners of the townhouse.

such as this one:

happy monday everyone!

word count: 9,669

instagram dump and a little extra

yesterday was officially steve's last day of college, which means we are now going head first into a whole new chapter... and we couldn't be more excited!!

the weather has FINALLY been warming up around here too (though the day i wore that shirtdress it ended up snowing and i had to change into something warmer on my lunch break... you can't really trust the weather around here until mid to late june).

right now we are playing chicken with this move to chicago because steve is currently competing in a staring contest with another company and we're daring them to make him an offer he can't refuse.  if they do we'll be stuck in michigan for at least another year (boo) but there would be some pretty excellent factors that would definitely make it worth our while (some logistical details i'll tell you about later and y'know top notch health insurance and dollah dollah bills).

suffice it to say we're totally looking forward to whatever we're doing... even though we STILL aren't positive what exactly that is.

 for now i'm just going to soak up the longest stretch of sunlight we've had since october, the very temporary free time steve actually has for the first time in years, and keep rocking out to this song because, frankly, it makes me feel like a total badass.

p.s. if anyone knew how many selfies i take at work i would get made fun of so much.