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

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

to get a life or to not get a life that is the question

from blogging, and from basic observation of self and surroundings, i've noticed that i tend to switch between two modes:  a.) too much going on to juggle it all and b.) bored, idle, and lazy.

now the self improvement police would inevitably argue that this observation calls for an overhaul of my organizational strategies, and an establishment of methods and routines that can always keep me occupied  without laboring me with episodes of stress.

shut up self improvement police, you don't know me.  step off.

this week has already guaranteed itself as a weird one since it is the first time i'm alone at steve's and my place.  so far it's way less awesome than being with steve at steve's and my place.  since his departure on sunday afternoon, i have watched the entire third season of downton abbey (good and all, but unfortunately too slow between all the moments of tragedy... let's be honest, who really cares about bates enough to make up for killing off sybil and matthew? not me).  

i have also let the apartment turn into a total and complete dump.  it's funny how long stretches of my free time all get filled up immediately, but the short breaks in between turn into completely useless dead time.  well, i suppose not completely useless.  i fixed our tub drain and cleaned bert's litter box.  i also "fixed" my laptop for about 24 hours by doing a system restore.  this clearly wasn't the way to go, because now the laptop can't boot up.  yay.  sadly, this means those pictures of chicago and san diego are going to stay floating around in the world of someday-i'll-post-them.

it's just one of those unpleasant times where life layers a heap of guilt and anxiety, about everything that isn't getting done, on top of what should be a nice quiet week.

and since i don't need an extra reminder of everything i'm not accomplishing, i'm not going to bother posting my word count.  i'm not even sure what it is because i lost a couple hundred words to a computer that won't turn on.  *mope*

this week though

it's been crazy short, but sometimes three days can really pack in a punch of junk.

my laptop won't connect to the internet anymore (it also hasn't been able to shut down properly for months... which is super).  we found a good way to replace it on the cheap, but in doing so we have a lot of annoying installation crap to go through and we're still doing battle with windows xp and our quest for an ethernet.

yesterday i forgot my phone at work when i left the office and this morning when i returned to the grid with phone and internet access i discovered that i had angered people by mixing up wednesday and thursday of this past week when scheduling life plans.

on the bright side we just started watching breaking bad, so there's lots of meth-cooking and murder to watch while i'm feeling stressed.

oh and bert smells weird, like he needs a bath or something, which should be pretty funny down the road.

weekend.  now.

word count:  screw that i'm busy with my first world problems.

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