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.

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

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.

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

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.