PstLyfDiva

Earlier this year Christina and I were very upset that we needed to postpone our wedding.  Now it seems the universe knew something we didn't and was watching out for us.  As of last Friday we are once again a one income household.  Christina was laid-off from a not-so-well-conceived-community-attraction in order to be replaced by volunteers in hopes of saving money.  I don't see this working out well for them, but that is not mine to worry about.   The bright side is that we aren't about to host a large event when money just got tighter again.  We want nothing more than to be married, but it seems the universe in its infinite wisdom knew that October 2010 would not be the right time for us. 

A brighter event happens to be occurring on the night that would have been the eve of our wedding, Christina had a photograph selected for a juried show that has its opening reception that night.  I am beyond thrilled for her and am glad that she gets to shine that night, not have it be something important that she had to miss because of the rehearsal dinner.  My parents are visiting that weekend, so they will get a chance to see her in her element.  It totally escaped my mind, but that also means they will most likely meet Christina's mom and sister.  That eeks me out a bit.  My parents and her mother are on two totally different planets on every level.  Socioeconomics aside, my parents are fairly quiet manner-minded people....let's just leave it at her mom is not.  I'm slightly terrified at the thought of them meeting, but it has to happen sometime and apparently now is that time. 

Anyway...it seems the universe has a plan for us ahead and we are excited to see what is ahead.  We came across a poem recently that resonated with both of us, especially one stanza:

You are a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, the universe is unfolding as it should.~Max Erhman

My best friend and I have been friends since we were 16 years old.  We went to a very small private school and both different from the sea of students filled with Muffy and Buffy from the country club  Even though we each celebrated our own individualism we saw it as a negative in the other and did not like each other for almost the entire first school year together.  It made perfect sense in our hormone fueled adolescent brains.  Eventually we wound up at the same place and talked.  We became fast friends and now have been friends for more of lives than not.

 

She is beautiful, truly.  She is Chinese, English and Dutch which combines to make a gorgeous package of brown hair, light olive skin with light freckles and crystal blue almond shaped eyes.  She walks with the confidence of someone who knows that they are attractive, but is not conceited.  She is very into fashion and usually looks great in whatever she wears.  Though I do wish I could burn her Uggs. (Ha!)

 

We joke that we are sisters from another mister.  We share a wacky sense of humor, one where most people look at us like we are nuts when we find something amusing.  Over the years we have had long running jokes about freaky eggplants, snow-hoes, Cheerio-dust, saying the word rasPberry (the P is capitalized because it must be said with as much predominance as possible) among many other things.

 

 

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Yesterday (8/31/10)

 

12:30AM:                    Went to sleep after finishing Christina’s decorated robe

5:15AM:                      Alarm went off.  I was not happy about this.

5:30AM:                      Arrived at the gym with Christina and Raymond.  Still not happy about this

5:30AM-6:30AM:       Did weight/machines at the gym.  Was amused by some older women doing weights in their tennis

skirts.

6:35AM:                      Arrived back home and decide it is ok to sneak back in bed for a few minutes

7:35AM:                      Wake up and realize it was not in fact ok to get back in bed
 

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I fell so far behind I will grace the internet with not one, but two of my 30-Days today...please contain your excitement.

Love is...

…complicated

…simple

…challenging

…easy

 

Love is...

…not being able to sleep and nudging my love to roll over which she does gladly, so I can snuggle into the position that always lets me fall asleep right to sleep

…telling really stupid jokes and knowing that she loves me more for it

…singing silly songs together and each knowing our individual “parts” without ever having to designate it out loud

…her driving the Jeep with no A/C when she has a longer drive, because she doesn’t want me to get hot and mess up my cute outfit/hair/whatever is special that day

 

 

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I have put this one off for a while because I haven’t been on a normal schedule, but I now see that it appears that will last for a while so I might as well go ahead.  

 

Breakfast:        One String Cheese

Lunch:             Leftover turkey breast sandwich with lettuce and mayo on 12-grain bread

Dinner:            (will be) chicken salad picked up from The Fresh Market

Snack:             (will be) peaches and/or strawberries, maybe a couple of pieces of chocolate from the Russell Stover factory outlet we stopped at yesterday on the way home from AL

 

Drink:              Lots and lots of water – it really is my favorite drink as long as it tastes good, I taste mildew in water when others don’t taste anything, I discovered this past week that my father is the same way.

 

My days aren’t usually so veggie sparse, but I have been traveling for work, then was on vacation and just got back about 10pm last night, so I haven’t been to the grocery yet.  I have been on a diet recently and have lost 26lbs so far, my eating now is much different than the lazy eating I had fallen into over the last few years.

I have been beyond slack since moving my blog, but there is a meme going on right now that might just get me back in the groove of posting.  I'm not sure I can do the post a day for 30 days, but I think I can swing getting through the whole list.

( The meme is....... )

I'm sure I will be friend-locking most of these, so if you want to be added just let me know.

I've always imagined planning my wedding would be fun, a little stressful, but fun nonetheless.  Unfortunately it isn't, really not in the least bit.   I had one weekend of loftily planning things when I let myself dream too big and allowed people to convince me of things that I knew wouldn't be. 

But I am back in reality now.  

I know we don't have enough money to do the kind of wedding I want, I know my family won't help us, I know my mother isn't going to magically "come around" like everyone is saying she will.  My "too big" dreams were not anything opulent, just a cocktail party in a nice venue - not even a sit down meal.  But in order to do that my parents would have to help and everyone kept saying, "you are their daughter, of course they will help," I let myself get lulled into believing that, even though I have known for years that it wouldn't be so.  

We came up with the idea of having the reception at home in the backyard, but the more I think about it the more I think it isn't a good idea.  The yard needs MAJOR renovations.  Right now it is really horrible.  I think we could get that fine, but what if it rains?  We can't afford a large tent, if we could a venue wouldn't be an issue.  And heels in grass?  That is not a good combination.  We don't have room enough for people to sit.  And we haven't even started talking about the caterer and the food.  And while it may sound snobby, I don't want a Green Acres wedding.  I would love to have a swanky outdoor reception with Japanese lanterns and beautiful tables, but that isn't the kind of outdoor backyard reception we could swing. 

I'm frustrated, this isn't how it is supposed to be.

I have a dear friend who recently went back to school for the first time. C and I help him from time to time with studying, papers, etc for his more difficult classes, but never his required study skills class.Sometimes he shares fun things from that class, tonight he shared with me two online personality tests they had to take. Big surprise - I'm an INFJ.

I took a geek test and scored "Total Geek"....and the geeks shall inherit the earth.

And now, a literature survey:

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and bold those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Total:6

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy  
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 3

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total: 7

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (How is this separate from the Chronicles?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Total: 7

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (HURRAY!)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total: 7

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total: 3

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy x
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total: 4

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Total: 3

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total: 5

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total: 6

Grand Total: 51