Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Germy germy

Y'all. I just woke up from one of those dreams. You know, the kind it isn't polite to talk about on the internets? I rolled over in bed but instead of seeing TheBoy's sleeping form I was confronted with the kleenex box and a pile of tissues. Then it hit me, oh yeah, I feel like crap! Also, of course TheBoy wouldn't be home (though I could have sworn it was his job to attend to my every need! no?), its a Tuesday morning and normal people go to work on Tuesdays. People with 102 degree temperatures and wicked sore throats do not.

I am maybe the world's worst sick person. I hate being around sick people, a fear that keeps me out of the doctor's office except for dire emergencies of migraines or when she's holding my prescription refills hostage. You know. So I would never in a million years admit to being sick if I didn't have to, and I can be as stubborn as a three year old on this. I'll admit to feeling "tired" or "cold" but never sick. I can go weeks like this. Case in point - last year I ignored the "touch of a cold" I had for so many weeks I ended up in the urgent care with Pneumonia. I'm just saying is all.

Sometimes my body takes matters into its own hands (er... so to speak) like it did yesterday afternoon. I have been feeling "tired" and a little "not well" for a couple weeks now but being the trooper that I am (in denial) I still have maintained my active schedule with the house and the commuting and all that. Until yesterday. All day at work I wasn't feeling right. On the way home I made TheBoy stop to get me a Red Bull since there was painting to be done and I couldn't let a little tiredness get in the way of an organized kitchen!

I should have known by the fact that I was unreasonably cold given the outside temperature, I maybe should have guessed by the headache I couldn't kick, or maybe the increasing soreness to my throat which was not going away despite all the water I had drank. But no, it wasn't until it was about 8:00 at night when I burst in to tears (hello three year old) for no apparent reason - "I don't know why I'm crying - I just don't feel good!" - that I had to admit, maybe, I was sick. Of course that Red Bull didn't help, and laying in bed wide awake at midnight with a fever and a wicked sore throat does nothing to improve the temper. I. HAD. STUFF. TO. DO!!!

My body and I disagree clearly. But today I'm trying to be the responsible adult and have resigned myself to a day of internets browsing and reading in bed. Me, the kleenex and the cat. I've justified it to myself because the only thing I hate worse than going to the doctor's (because there are SICK people there) is going into work only to hear the sniffles of a co-worker a few cubes over. I've been known to leave my bottle of Purell on someone's desk while they are in the restroom. I mean really? Can you just keep your germs at home and not bring them to work where they are recirculated through the entire building courtesy of the central air system? That'd be super.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Everything and Nothing

I FINALLY have my ring back. I swear I was without it almost as long as I was with it. It feels strange all over again. I was just getting used to the damn thing! Also, it’s official… I have the world’s teeniest fingers. We had the ring re-sized to a 4.25 and it still slides easily over my knuckle! But it fits WAY better y’all. I no longer am afraid to wash my hands for fear it might go sliding down the drain and I doubt I could fling it across a bar now, much to TheBoy’s relief I’m sure.

I think TheBoy and I are going to try and get a little engagement celebration time in this weekend because even though we’ve been engaged almost a month I still can not seem to bring myself to be properly excited about it. I even had the full on girl freak out cry fest in the car on the way home yesterday evening. Poor guy. It just seems like with all of my other friends who have gotten married there were lots of excitement and parties and congratulations and so on and with us… its more like, “oh, great news, about time” and that’s it.

And the worst part is that I totally get it! Because I sort of feel the same you know? It’s not like we sit at home and giggle to ourselves because we’re SO EXCITED we’re engaged. It’s more like something that was missing has finally snapped into place. But I guess deep down in some previously unacknowledged place I really would like to have some excitement and congratulations and parties. Because it just doesn’t feel… real. I guess. Anyway, maybe I’ll feel better once TheBoy and I have had a little mini-celebration. I certainly feel better now that I have my ring back! :D

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Throwing Stones (or how I almost became un-engaged)

As I was getting ready to leave work last Friday a friend suggested that I have a “glass or three of wine” over the weekend. Now I’m not sure if by “weekend” he meant the ENTIRE weekend or just that evening but… Being the good friend I am I took his words to heart and when the invitation for happy hour to celebrate a co-worker’s birthday arrived I promptly accepted.

AND I had my three glasses of wine. Or that’s as many as I’ll admit to anyway now that I know my mom reads this here blog. Hi Mom! Love you!

Ahem.

Let’s just say many, many hours passed and general good times were had by the birthday boy and all in attendance. There was laughing, there were stories told… And you RF’s of Tiffy KNOW how I get when I tell stories when there is wine involved. I should have been Italian I tell you what. Arms go flailing and there are re-enactments, sometimes I use voices. I do LOVE telling a good story.

I just realized that at this point in the story we need to have a little tangent. Hi, welcome to my disjointed blogging!

So when TheBoy and I started looking at rings several months ago every where we went we had my finger sized. We heard pretty much the same thing at every store. I was either a 4.75 or a 5 but I should go with a slightly larger size since a) I wanted a thicker band and b) once you get the engagement ring on with the wedding band the rings feel tighter together. Fair enough. So when it came time for TheBoy to order my ring he ordered it in a size 5. He proposed, I cried, we laughed, and I have been happily wearing that ring ever since.

Well except the ring was a little looser than I thought it ought to be. I mean it slipped quite easily over my knuckle. Also? It spins. Like all the way around my finger so that I am either wearing the stone between my ring finger and pinky (which is SO comfortable) or the stone is pointing in at my palm and I have nothing but a plain band showing on the outside. The later of those two things is very uncomfortable if you happen to sleep with your palm cupping your cheek. I’m just saying… People might tease you for having a square indent on your cheek.

So, after conferring with the interweb and many girlfriends I took myself and my loose, spinning ring over to the jeweler across the street from my office last week to see what could be done. I originally thought I would just have those bumps put in the bottom of the ring like Michele had in hers to stop the spinning. The lady there called them speed bumps which made me laugh. So the first thing she did was size the ring. I informed her it was a size 5, which she smiled at and sized my ring anyway. Guess what? Size 5.25. Actually she said it was BETWEEN a size 5.25 and a 5.5. Either way definitely not a 5. This was our first problem.

Clearly sensing that something was wrong here, or that I had no freaking idea what I was doing, the woman next decided she should measure my finger. You know, just to see. Y’all. She whipped out her little ring keychain looking thing and started slipping rings on and off my fingers like a maniac (clearly not her first time!) finally stopping trying to decide between two sizes. The tighter of the two was a size 4 and the looser a 4.25. I actually pulled that little key ring thing out of her hand and squinted at the sizes to make sure myself. HOW COULD THIS BE? Anyway, even if you guys are not math whizzes you can figure out that a size 5.25+ ring does not fit well on a size 4.25- finger. No wonder that damn thing was spinning.

So the speed bumps were clearly not the answer, the ring would need to be re-sized. The jeweler across the street quoted me a price but mentioned that if my fiancĂ© (!) wanted to take it back to where he bought it they would probably re-size it for free. As soon as I got back to the office I called TheBoy and informed him of the ginormousness of the ring and the teeniness of my fingers, to which he was surprised about the ring but not the fingers. And yes, he said, the place he bought the ring did say they would re-size it for free. Of course being the typical girl I am, I wanted to keep the ring just a wee bit longer so I told him we’d send it in “later” since it hadn’t really been THAT much of a problem.

So fast forward to last Friday night and my co-workers birthday and my glass or three of wine. And the stories. I was standing out on the patio talking to a friend about… something. Something that required hand gestures clearly, when all of a sudden I felt a strange lightness on my hand. OMG y’all the ring had gone flying! I immediately stopped talking and started peering into the dark shadowy puddles in the direction that I thought the ring must have gone praying to see something sparkly. Talk about insta-sober! About 42 hours later (or maybe 15 seconds, who knows) the guy I had been speaking with tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and there he is, HOLDING MY RING!

Y’all! I snatched that thing up so fast you’d have thought it was the last piece of food on a buffet line. No sooner had the words “Thank GOD, Please don’t tell TheBoy, he’ll KILL ME!” come out of my mouth then up pops that darn boy. Man if he doesn’t have the world’s worst timing. I may or may not have mentioned my less than stellar fibbing abilities before on this here blog? Well let’s just say they are NOT improved by wine. So of course I had to fumble through the whole story, trying to laugh it off.

“Ha Ha, I was just standing here and the ring FLEW off, but then co-worker found it over there by that empty keg, isn’t that HYSTERICAL?!?!? Honey??”

Ahem.

The ring went back to the jeweler to be sized first thing Monday morning.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Details, details

So. Heh. You guys are probably wanting some details and stuff huh? Like HOW we got engaged and WHEN and all that fun stuff? And also, like how the heck did this come about from the man who swore he’d never get hitched? Or along that vein, now it might all make sense why TheBoy and I bought a house together when I swore I wouldn’t so long as we weren’t married. Ahem.

So, let’s see… Around the time of our six year anniversary last June we started that same old conversation again about buying a house and THE FUTURE and so on and so forth. Only this time it had a slightly different ring to it. I’m not sure if it was the SIX YEARS or if it was the feeling of OMG we really should be homeowners or what but something was slightly different. Anyhow, to make an incredibly long, L-O-N-G, story short TheBoy finally conceded that marriage WAS a logical next step and I agreed that I would begin to look at houses. The rest, as they say, is history.

We began sort of looking at rings here and there and trying to figure out what sort of wedding we wanted. In August when we joined my parents in Lake Tahoe for a week we positively fell in love with being up there and realized that we are never happier than we are when we are at the lake. However, since we couldn’t possibly host a wedding on our ski boat, and Lake Shasta not exactly being a desirable vacation destination (Redding, CA is sort of… redneck, even for me), we started to look around more closely at the beautiful Lake Tahoe.

We fell in love with the first boat we set foot on and luckily for us our 7 year anniversary is a Friday next year AND the boat happens to be available for charter that night. SOLD! So we put a tentative hold on the boat / date that very day, BEFORE we were even engaged. TheBoy and I have never been anything but unconventional y’all. Cart before the horse and all that. I mean we are the couple who moved in together a mere five months after beginning dating, he quit college y’all! We had our first apartment alone by our first anniversary and have been trucking along quite nicely ever since. It seemed perfectly reasonable to plan our wedding before being engaged.

We had begun looking at houses before leaving for Tahoe but had been having some issues getting all of our financing in line. However, shortly after returning home (or right before we left I can’t recall) we found out we were all approved and we were ready to go. Once that green light flashed it was basically a blur. We put in a bid on a home we had been eyeing for months and was accepted with a two week close the next day. Ya’ll pretty much know the rest of THAT story. When we moved in we received two bottles of rather nice champagne as house warming gifts, one from our realtor and one from TheBoy’s mother. The one from our realtor we opened right away and the other was just sitting in the fridge waiting for a night that didn’t involve take-out or sweating or… something.

A couple weeks ago, September 14th to be exact, TheBoy and I got home from work and changed into our typical gruddy work on the house outfits. Y’all may recall this was the beginning of the painting of the house weekends. No? Well trust me. Anyhow, TheBoy opened the other bottle of champagne! I found this a little odd, celebrating painting, but I do love champagne! Really, there isn’t a great romantic grand gesture story… He asked me to marry him over some fantastic champagne, in the kitchen of the house we own together. I cried, as I am prone to do. He laughed at me, which he is prone to do. Then I laughed. We called our parents, ordered a pizza (which I now call our “engagement pizza” every time we order it) and started taping off walls.

It was… perfect. And I am perfectly happy.