Tomorrow Is Another Day...

It's Friday and I'm Practically Famous!!

So, check out what came in the mail the other day:

It's my story!  In an actual, real life, published book!  A book that somebody in the world might have decided was worth the exchange of their very own hard earned money!  And for reasons that I cannot determine, but am no longer questioning, they placed my story in prime position at the very beginning of the book.  I've got to tell you, this is one of the most thrilling things that has ever happened to me.  I know it's a small journal, but even so, I took a risk that I was very uncomfortable with, allowing strangers to judge my work, and it truly paid off in the end.  So go, follow your dreams, you can do anything you want to do, the world is your oyster, blah blah blah...

Also, Colby is coming home today and I cannot wait to get home so that we can curl up on the couch together to watch our Lost marathon.   Tomorrow we need to go get photos taken and then get our paperwork in the mail for our new passports--my name has changed and Colby's was stolen a little while ago.  Of course, since we need them in just over 2 months, we're having to pay the inflated expedite charge, but it's worth it.  I'm sure that there's a possibility that our passports would actually be back within the 6 week time frame if we didn't expedite, but I'm just not willing to take that chance.

I'm going to be in Italy in 2 months!  Oh my gosh, my head just exploded from the excitement of it all.  I'm off to clean up the mess that a head explosion causes, but I hope you all have the happiest of happy weekends! 

Warning: Complaints Ahead

Friday cannot come soon enough.  This has been such a bizarre and looooong week.  And it's only Wednesday.

I've been slightly nauseous for the past two days, a feeling which seems to have left the building for now, but for all I know it could randomly return after I eat lunch.  Yesterday all I could choke down was half of a pasta salad for lunch and then some Goldfish for dinner.  I know this isn't exactly the makings of a nutritious diet, but the thought of eating anything else made me ill.

I'm so incredibly tired of Colby being away at his stupid class.  I know he's only been gone for 3 and a half weeks, which is nothing compared to the suckiness of four months that I'll have to deal with this summer, but according to his original schedule, he should have been home yesterday.  Unfortunately, the Air Force is incapable of planning anything accurately, so his return has been pushed back until Friday.  And who knows if he'll even be home then.  I'm so ready for him to be back that I won't even care when he turns the heat down to 63 and untucks the bedsheets at night.  Well, okay, that's not true.  But I promise that it will be at least three days before I start nagging that the house is an ice box and our bed looks like a cyclone ripped through.

The weather has only gotten more terrible as January has progressed and the days don't seem to be getting any longer.  On Monday I woke up to the sight of two inches of freshly fallen snow, which, oh how lovely, but then I had to navigate the teeny tiny levee road with NO guard rail as well as the one foot wide bridge across the river to get to the train station.  I have never, ever driven in snow, so I was having minor heart palpitations for the entire ten minute drive.  Then yesterday, when I woke up, I saw that the snow had melted, but refrozen during the night forming slick sheets of ice on the roads.  Since out tiny town apparently has no procedures in place to deal with icy roads, I opted to come into work later which meant taking the bus instead of the train.

Oh my God.  Next time, I'll just risk life and limb on the ice coated roads.

I used the handy trip planner on our transportation website and found the two buses I would need to catch to get from my train station to the bus tunnel in Seattle.  So, I slept in a little bit longer and then woke up and headed to the station a few minutes early since I didn't know how accurate the bus schedules were.

My bus showed up a couple of minutes early, saving me from another second in the wet, blustery weather, and we began our trip to the station where I would make my connection.  I was congratulating myself on trying new things and conquering new methods of transportation when we pulled up to a transit center and lo and behold, in front of us was another bus with the same number as the one I was supposed to have caught at the train station.  I piped up from my seat, asking the driver if this was the bus going to "Station X".

"Oh, no honey, you need to be on that bus in front of us that just left!"

I felt like crying as I dejectedly got off of the bus and went to sit and figure out my next move.  As the bus drove away I saw the critical detail that I had missed when I boarded--I was supposed to catch number "100", the bus I'd actually boarded?  "100A"  WHO DOES THAT!!!  What kind of person gives buses almost the exact same number, and then schedules them to arrive at their stops just minutes apart??  And then how on earth did bus "100" get ahead of us since it hadn't come yet when I was getting on bus "100A"??

These were the things I was thinking as I sat glowering on the cold metal bench, and then the snow started again and the wind started whipping through the bus "shelter".  Eventually I pulled out my phone (which, thank GOD for around the clock internet access) and found out that another bus would be coming soon that could take me to Kent and then Seattle.  As it turned out, the bus had even arrived at the transit center early, so I was able to board and sit in the comparable warmth as the snow continued to drift down around us.

I eventually made it to work, but by that time three hours had passed since the moment I left the comfort of my home.  I was exhausted, chilled to the bone, felt like I was going to throw up, and still had five hours of work in front of me.

Now it is Wednesday, and while there is no ice or snow to contend with, it is still COLD and WINDY and I will die if we ever live anywhere that this is the norm for winter weather.  But even with all of that grumping, there are still some nice things that have happened recently.  I know, shock!  Awe!  But I'm just really not in the right mood to give each wonderful occurrence its proper due, so I'm afraid the counterpoint to all of this negativity will just have to wait until tomorrow.

Maybe Baby, Maybe Not

When I was single, everyone was asking me if there was "anyone special" in my life.  When I was dating, everyone was asking about "the big question".  When I was engaged, everyone was asking about wedding plans and where our honeymoon would be.  Now that I'm married, I'm somewhat shocked to find that all of those cliches about baby pressure are surprisingly true.

It's only been two months since the wedding, and I've already had multiple people ask me if I am pregnant (because I was home sick with a stomach bug), whether I wanted to have kids soon, and when Colby and I were planning to start a family.  It seems as though everywhere I turn people are pregnant, having babies, or trying to get pregnant.  If one day could go by that I didn't have to think about BABIES, I would be a blissfully happy girl.

And a lot of the conflict I'm feeling stems from the fact that I do want babies.  If I woke up tomorrow and found out that I was pregnant, it wouldn't be the devastating discovery that it would have been five years ago.  I do want a family and I do want to eventually be a stay at home mom.  But while there are some days that I feel like, "Hey, babies sure are super cute, maybe that would be fun!" those days are by far outweighed by the days that I feel like, "Hey, babies sure are super cute, thank God I don't have one of those to deal with right now!"

I don't know why I'm feeling so overwhelmingly pressured about this.  It isn't as though my mom or Colby's mom is calling multiple times a week asking whether they'll get to meet their grandchildren before they die.  Colby seems perfectly happy with our mutual decision to wait until at least our next assignment before introducing miniature people into the world.  And for chrissake, did I mention yet that we've only been married for two months??

The only conclusion I can reach is that this pressure is spawned by my ridiculously competitive nature, which OH MY GOD, is not a reason to have kids.  I don't feel like I need to compete with other people specifically, but with Mother Nature and convention.  It's like the mentality of an 19th century Jane Austen heroine has been embedded in my brain.  I have my education, I've dabbled in the world outside of my parents' house, I've found my Captain Wentworth, and now it's time to start popping out babies.  I want to be the best at what I do, and if that means having babies is the customary next step after getting married, my brain is screaming at me to get busy woman, we don't have all day here!

On top of that, I have this horrible and unfounded fear that when we do decide to start trying for a baby, we'll find out that one or the other of us is not so well equipped in the fertilization department.  And what if it's too late at that point to do anything about it?  And then I spend the rest of my days wondering why I spent so much of my life trying SO HARD not to get pregnant when I could have been more effectively using my time.

(Right now, Colby is screaming into his pillow in terror.)

But the thing is, I want to be able to decide at the drop of the hat that I want to see the Vegas strip.  I want to be able to spend my money on frivolous shoes that I really, REALLY don't need and a new party dress that I'm sure to find an occasion to wear.  I want to be able to go out and get deliciously drunk and not worry about finding a babysitter.  I want to use our spare room as the exercise room, or guest room, or office, not as the nursery.  I don't want to spend my days listening to a screaming baby, disciplining a mischievous toddler, or grounding a rebellious teenager.  I don't want to get fat.

I know that I'm not ready for babies, so why is it that they invade my every thought?  Please tell me that this is perfectly normal and this too shall pass.  And how do I know when I really am ready to have a baby or when it's just a passing fancy that I will totally be over in a matter of days?

I swear.  If there is absolutely nothing going on in my life to angst over, I will turn anything into a total drama fest, won't I?

Two Sides to Every Coin

It's not that I'm in a bad mood.  In fact, I feel much more refreshed and positive than I did before the holidays and the week and a half break from work was just what the doctor ordered.  But it's like the universe WANTS me to be in a bad mood.  It keeps sneaking around, knocking over my sandcastles and kicking the sand in my face.  And I say to the universe, STOP IT ASSHOLE or I'm going to tell MOM!

Please allow me to present the evidence.

I've been working diligently to wrap up all of the loose ends from the wedding--selling my dress, changing my name legally and then following up on updating credit cards and the like.  So, I found what looked like a good website to list my dress, filled out the appropriate paperwork, sent in the pictures, and paid the $25 listing fee through PayPal.  Don't you just love PayPal?  Doesn't it make life so much easier? 

It turns out, no, PayPal is actually the devil, and the annoyance being caused by the fallout of that $25 listing fee is completely and entirely their fault and nothing to do with my inattention to detail.

Allow me to rewind a bit further.  Just before Christmas I decided to sell the iPod Touch that I got at my company Christmas party.  I already have an iPhone and an iPod Shuffle and Colby was fine with my old SanDisk MP3 player, so I figured an extra couple hundred dollars would be better in the end than another addition to my growing collection of Apple products.  So, I put it on Ebay, sold it for a tidy sum and then had to add a checking account to PayPal to accept the payment.

The catch is that my primary account is tied up to an old dead PayPal account that I couldn't figure out how to resurrect, so I just created a new one with my new email address many moons ago.  So, when I tried to add that checking account to my current PayPal account it wouldn't accept it and I had to use the account that I use to pay my car note each month.  No problem, right?  They deposited the money and I just moved it into my primary account.

So, back to the dress listing fee... can you see where this is going?  I've never had a checking account attached to this PayPal account before, and I've always just paid for things with my credit card.  So when I paid the listing fee, I just entered the appropriate amount, hit submit, confirmed it and that was it.  Except.  Apparently PayPal now defaults to my checking account.  The one with zero dollars in it right now.  Which means I got charged the $25 and then the additional $29 NSF fee.  Which is all incredibly annoying, because I DO have sufficient funds!  They are just located ELSEWHERE!

And doubly annoying, every single one of my accounts has an overdraft protection set up.  Except.  Not the one that I used to pay the listing fee.  ARGH!  So, essentially I paid over $50 to list my damn dress on one stupid website.  I was considering listing it on a second site for another $25 but now that I've already spent the money on overdraft fees I'm less willing to shell out the cash.

But if you want to buy my dress, know someone who would love to have my dress, or have a dress of your own to sell, go here.  It's a lovely, useful website and I don't blame them for my PayPal misfortune, I blame the universe.

Contrary to the current mischievous attitude of the universe, I had an amazingly easy time changing my name at the Social Security office over the holidays.  I checked, double checked, and triple checked that I had all of the proper paperwork, and after a 30 minute wait was helped by a very nice lady who changed my name within the span of about 5 minutes.  Fabulous!  Since that had been so easy and quick, we decided to take our chances immediately after at the DMV.  Once again, we only had to wait for 30 minutes before my number was called and I went about updating my Louisiana license with my old name to a Washington license with my new name. 

Except.  I love the picture on my Louisiana license.  It's actually a really good picture of me, smiling brightly, my eyes are open and shining, my hair looks kind of lovely.  It's not perfect, but for a DMV photo it looks like a Glamour shot.  So, of course I was let down by my new driver's license photo where my eyes look all squinty, my hair is flat and FAR too long, and my head looks to be approximately the size of a watermelon.  On top of that, I was far from the typical wife-to-be in that I never once practiced signing my new name.  I don't know, maybe it just felt too much like tempting fate.  I only tried signing it a couple of times post-wedding, so now the signature on my license looks like it was written by a monkey on an acid trip.  There aren't enough loops at the end and the letters are spaced out too far in some places or crammed too close together in others.  It's terrible.  If I ever get pulled over again, they'll probably give me a ticket for getting my drivers license under the influence.

Also annoying?  The fact that Colby is gone for the next few weeks, possibly month, and I have to come home to an empty house, with no dinner cooking on the stove and puppies romping playfully around the room.  It is a cold house, the puppies are still crying in their kennels, and dinner consists of chocolatey Special K and an apple or some pickles.  Yum.

But the good news is that he is not currently "Over There", he is in the continental United States at a class he has to attend, and for some reason they can't make that class be HERE.  And so, I am annoyed.

Let me tell you, a big shopping binge would REALLY help my attitude right now.  Stupid resolutions.

Oh my God.  I'm an addict, aren't I?

Holiday Post-Mortem

Ah Christmas, it seems as though it was oh so long ago.

Oh wait.  That's because IT WAS.  I just really don't understand why it's so hard for me to take the time to plug in the cord and download pictures from our cameras.  But anyway, I finally got around to it last night, so the time has come for my Christmas and New Year review.

As you may remember, I wasn't incredibly excited for the holidays this year.  I was coming off of the wedding high, I was going to be away from my family for Christmas for the first time, and I was skeptical about how fun Christmas could actually be with only two people participating in the festivities.  Let me tell you though, it was actually really fun!  So fun in fact that I lobbied hard to cancel on going over to a friend's house Christmas night because I was enjoying just being curled up in my pajamas on the couch watching Christmas movies.  From Colby, I got the fabulous Malan Breton bag from my Christmas wish list, as well as Ratatouille, which I'd never seen before but ended up loving.  I got Colby a Nikon D40 to replace his super busted, screen cracked, rubberbanded together digital camera, but because this is the way my life works, I ordered it a few weeks before Christmas with 4-6 day delivery and we got it on the 26th.

 
(Ack, it's me with no makeup!  Shield your eyes!  Except for the purse.  Would you look at the awesomeness of that purse?  I can fit a book, umbrella, huge wallet, and mountains of random crap in there and it still looks all shiny and beautiful and stylish.  Love it.)

So, in the end, yay Christmas.  Christmas, by the way is officially not over since we're still getting presents and cards in the mail almost every day.  So, this entry is still entirely relevant.

New Year's was pretty much a total blast.  I drank so many martinis and Mai Tais that I was practically swimming in rum and vodka.  But it was SUCH GOOD rum and vodka.  And I was still totally and completely able to stand on my own two feet when we went outside to watch the fireworks.  Which?  Sucked.  Apparently there was some kind of computer malfunction with the show, and so we stood there perplexed as the minutes ticked by without any booms and flashes, and then became even more disgruntled when all we saw were the fireworks pictured below.  A friend told me that eventually they got the show going manually and it got a little better, but by that point our friends were practically passed out on the street and we decided to go ahead and get them home.

As you can see from that last picture, when we got home I decided to not only feed the dogs, but sit on the floor and give them positive affirmations and encouragement as they ate.  I am the best drunk dog mom in the world.

Taking Care of Business

So, is anyone else as tired of seeing that whiny post down there as I am?  I wanted to post something this weekend to make it be gone, but before I knew what had hit me, it was Sunday night and I was falling asleep on the couch with a pounding headache.  But I'm here now!  And while I'm still feeling mucho exhaustion, I'm feeling much less Grinch-like.

Friday evening I left work a little early so we could go to Colby's work Christmas party.  I was a little Grinchy about that, because seriously, who wants to pay twenty five bucks for a crappy dinner and THEN find out that there's a cash bar?  Where's the Merry Christmas in that?  But there was a huge dessert spread, so I ate my weight in sugar cookies, chocolate candies, and cakes.

I slept like a log that night and didn't open my eyes until 11 o'clock on Saturday.  It was absolutely lovely.  I allowed myself a few hours of vegging out on the couch, and then we got busy cleaning out our kitchen cabinet hand-me-downs and replacing the contents with all of our shiny new wedding presents.

We just unloaded half a garage-full of furniture, clothes, and other random "stuff" to Salvation Army, and it looks like before the end of the year we'll have another quarter of the garage filled and ready to go.  I also designed our Christmas card on Saturday night and finalized our Christmas card list--I got it down under a hundred addresses, but just barely.

Sunday just about killed me again as we braved the shopping centers during the final days of the Christmas rush, but we got tons of fun new pressies for ourselves using gift cards and exchanging duplicate registry items and also got our Christmas shopping almost completely finished.  Colby just has to pick up a few gift cards tonight, and then the next few days will be devoted to wrapping and boxing up presents to ship out and getting the Christmas cards addressed and mailed out.

So, all in all, I feel much more ahead of the game this week than I did on Thursday, and now there are only four more wake-ups standing between me and an 11 day break from work.  Those four days just can't pass quickly enough!!

What's In a Name?

I knew that moving across the country and combining houses with my fiance would be a huge adjustment.  I knew that separating from the Air Force and finding a new job in a new place would be a challenge.  I knew that the stress of planning a wedding would probably get to me.

What I did not know is that giving up the name you've had for a quarter of a century and taking on a new one would be so incredibly difficult.

Not long ago Fraulein N asked me whether I would be changing my name or not.  Just a year ago, my answer would have been a resounding, "YES!"  Today my answer is still yes, but it's much more hesitant and conflicted in it's tone.

I've never doubted that when I got married I would do the traditional thing and take on the name of my husband.  There were a lot of reasons for this--my maiden name has caused me nothing but grief when it comes to filling out forms or doing anything else which requires me to give someone my last name, someday when we have children I want us to all have the same last name for our family unit, and then there's just the fact that it's traditional.  It's what's done.  And I am a fairly traditional girl through and through.

But I didn't realize how traumatic it would be to lose that silly little name that's been with me my whole life.  It makes me sad because after my generation is dead and gone, our family name will stop with us.  It makes me sad because all of the things that I've accomplished in my life have been as "Angela K".   Not to mention the fact that I've completely forgotten how cursive works and cannot for the life of me sign my new name without it looking like the work of a six year old on a sugar high.

I'm continuing to go by my maiden name until the week after Christmas, when I'll visit the social security office to have my name officially changed.  It's sort of like a mourning period I'm going through right now, giving myself a little more time with the name that has always caused me frustration before I bid it a fond adieu.  I've thought about keeping the "K" as a middle name, but I really love the middle name I was given at birth, and having four names to keep straight just seems like inviting complications.  I've tried using my new name socially, but until I get it legally changed, it just feels like I'm lying to people.

I did decide that for the story that should be published in the next few weeks and any possible future publications, I'm going to use the name "Angela K. B.".  I feel like I'm ready to let go of my name in all aspects except for that one.  The seven year old Angela K. dreamed of seeing her name in print someday, and I'm not willing to let her down.

So am I totally crazy and way over thinking this?  Is it really just a name, and I need to wind the heck down?  Or did other people out there go through this same adjustment period?  I'm so excited about being Colby's wife, and I'm so glad that we are a family now, but I don't want to ever forget that before anyone came along and swept me off my feet, I was my mother and father's daughter.

Various Non-Wedding Related Events

Well, I suppose since it has been a week and a half since the day I entered into wedded bliss, it's time to talk about something that is not the wedding.  I know, it hurts my heart too!

On a serious note, I would like to give my heartfelt thanks and adoration to all of you who read here, whether you are a commenter or a lurker.  Toward the end of November I began steeling myself for that inevitable troll-like comment from a passerby criticizing me for becoming so wedding obsessed.  I know that it was all wedding, all the time around here, and I was continually overwhelmed by all of the kind words, good wishes, and congratulatory emails that flooded in.  I even received wedding gifts from Sophie and Girl, Dislocated--gifts which we opened and scrunched our faces in confusion at the names on the packing slips until we got to the cards included, signed with their internet names.  If I were at all capable of crying while opening presents, that is when I would have cried huge, fat tears of gratitude.  However, gifts and crying just really don't correlate for me, so instead I kept remarking in awe that the INTERNET had bought me GIFTS.  And oh my heck, how I love the internet!

So really, thank you all from the very bottom of my Bridezilla heart.

But now!  For the aforementioned non-wedding related events!!  Colby's car got broken into!  We went to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra!  It snowed!  We have had a LOT of DVR'ed shows to catch up on!  We ate at a Moroccan restaurant!  With our fingers!  And possibly a transgendered belly dancer!  (Well, we didn't eat with the transgendered belly dancer, but she did dance around our table often enough that we were able to closely inspect the evidence.  Verdict?  The girls decided she was probably most definitely a natural born woman.  The guys were not convinced.  We don't make for a great jury.)  We received our official marriage license!  (Okay, that was wedding related.  So sue me.)  We bought our plane tickets for Italy, April 4th through the 20th!

All in all, aside from the theft related events, it's been a pretty great re-introduction to real life.  Now I'm just trying to wrap my mind around the fact that Christmas is 19 days away and I've only gotten 25% of my Christmas shopping done and haven't even thought about what to do for Christmas cards.  However, I did introduce Colby to the concept of the chocolate filled Advent calendar, so that's helping me keep Christmas tasks in full focus with the positive reinforcement of a daily chocolate morsel.

Coming Soon

Okay, I promise that I'll post some pictures tomorrow night when we get back home to the land of laptops and Internet connections.  Right now all I have is whatever pictures Carolyn took on her camera, but they're on my computer and I have to post from my phone, so there's a disconnect there.

Anyway, our wedding photographer offered us a free photo shoot in the French Quarter today, so we got to get all gussied up in our wedding finery again and I think we got some really amazing shots.  I'll definitely share when we get them from the photographer.  Tonight we had a good dinner at Nola.  It really couldn't compete with the deliciousness that was Restaurant August, but it definitely was nothing to sneeze at.

Tomorrow we're flying back home and it's back to real life and the old grind, so I'll catch ya on the flip side!

Argh!

I just typed a whole post about our Chef John Besh sighting at Restaurant August and our photo shoot in the French Quarter tomorrow and then Colby bumped my arm and the whole thing vanished.  So on that note I'm going to go eat leftover wedding cake and finish watching Cold Case.

So Much To Say So Little Time

Okay, well it's not so much time that's the problem so much as lack of a free Internet connection in our hotel room.   Thank goodness for my iPhone or NaBloPoMo would be a total bust.  Speaking of which, how adorable are Brittany and Caro for hacking into Typepad and posting for me last night after they got home from the reception?  And how much of a dork am I for posting first thing on my honeymoon?

Anyway we're in New Orleans now, after an amazingly wonderful wedding day and I can't wait to fill you in in on the details, but for now I'm going to go hang out with my hot husband for the rest of the evening.

Well, I'm married...

This would be Caro and Brittany posting on behalf of Angela as to fulfill her NaBloPoMo duties, which we THOUGHT she wouldn't get to, but clearly is so devoted to her blog that she would postpone her commitment as the new Mrs. B.

Needless to say, the wedding was gorgeous and we're sure ya'll will be hearing about it from her in days/posts to come!

We love you, Ang!

November 24, 2007

I'M MARRIED!!!