Smoke and Ashes

At least we know it works...

I'm in a meeting and my blackberry rings. Caller ID says it's a 1-800 number. I hit ignore.

30 minutes later. Phone rings again.  Same 1-800 number. "hmm, maybe one of the Christmas presents I ordered has a shipping problem?" This time I answer it. Nope, it's ADT calling to alert me that the panic alarm has been set off at my house. "I'm at work," I explain. "Nobody is home."

He explains that they sent the police anyway to check things out, but they haven't heard back yet. 

30 minutes later. Phone rings. The owner of the dog walking company calls, and she explains that the dog walker walked out of the house, greeted by two cruisers and a paddy wagon, police officers with guns brandished telling her to get down on the ground. 

I think we just made the world's best impression on our new neighbors. I immediate email DLS and tell her we have a project for tomorrow night: baking cookies to leave on the door of our new neighbors explaining that we're not drug addicts or other form of criminal element ruining the neighborhood.

This is family love

I'm finally getting around to going through the professional wedding photos. Here's one of me and my 12 year old nephew, who is showing me nothing but love on my big day...

 

No rest for the weary

Friday we close on our new house, which means just as we recovered from the wedding, we get to embark in the fun-filled world of home repair projects, decorating, and painting.

Drove 17 hours to SC for Thanksgiving. Drove 17 hours back. I'm pretty much done with being in the car.

Career Advice

My friend has an assistant that she not-so-affectionately refers to as "the cyst".  Among her many complaints is that her assistant dresses completely inappropriately.   Previous conversations have included "if I can see the color of your underwear, that's probably not a good sign."

The most recent awkward conversation:

"On the continuum between stockings and fishnets, you're too close to fishnets"

And just when I thought it couldn't get any better...

No, this isn't the singer we hired to perform at our wedding. This is just our friend. You see, instead of hiring a band, we rented a sound system and plugged in an ipod. We also rented a microphone for toasts and the like. What do you get when you mix a microphone, self-selected music, and a whole bunch of drunk happy people? That's right - a karaoke wedding!

Today's Pick-Me-Up

I was having kind of a crappy day, but then my dad sent me this picture from the wedding and I couldn't help but smile. We had so much fun.

And the winner for pretentious d-bag of the year goes to....

This guy.

I mean, I like a nice SAT word here and there, but this guy needs a sound ass-whoopin. Plus, as my friend T says "he looks like the creepy guy from Charlie's Angels."

(Thanks Tboff, for the link)

Reconnecting with the pilgrims

In addition to being one of the most handsome men at our wedding, Jack took advantage of his trip to Plymouth for a little sight-seeing.

Since we don't have babies, we subject our dogs to Halloween

On the upside, unlike children, they don't grow up and yell at us for doing this to them.

So what if it has the charm of the Brady Bunch house?

This past weekend, DLS and I made an offer on a house. It's a split-level ranch, which I find to be totally and thoroughly without charm from the outside, but it has nice new floors, more than 2x the amount of room we have now, a yard, a driveway, and the lower level lends itself nicely to being rented out, which will come in handy when DLS is back in school and we're a one-income family. We went through what seems to be the requisite amount of angst with regards to the offer - it had been on the market for 36 days, had dropped the prices 3 times, and suddenly, the day we decide to make an offer, two other parties decide to get in the game. At the end of the day, we won though. So now it's on to the inspection, which is scheduled for Friday.

For those of you who aren't home owners, inspections are the most depressing part of buying a house. I think it was my friend N who put it best: "It's like someone pointing out every zit your prom date has" or something to that effect.

I've survived it once though; I'll survive it again. We all have zits, and DLS is handy with tools. Now I don't sleep at night because I wake up and start mentally arranging furniture and thinking of all the things we're going to do once we move in.

During the housing process, we saw a house on the exact opposite end of the charm spectrum. It was the most adorable house in all the land... the problem was, if we lived there, we probably wouldn't want to leave our house. It was in the least safe neighborhood of Roslindale - which is saying a lot. Too bad though - the kitchen alone was enough to convince us we had to have it. Thankfully reason prevailed.

Be on the lookout for "project charm" updates as we dive into the fun task of being the proud owners (assuming inspection/mortgage/closing goes well) of a new house.

Not just a clever title

One story into 60 Minutes, we pressed pause on the DVR to clean up from dinner and do a few errands. It was paused for about 20 minutes. At 7:50 pm, the following conversation takes place:

DLS says, "it must be almost over."

Me: "Well, the live version still has another 10 minutes."

DLS: "Oh, it's an hour long show?"

Me: "The name of the show *is* '60 Minutes'

At least she's pretty :)

In her defense, there is only so much room in her brain and studying genetics has claimed the vast majority of real estate. Speaking of real estate, the fact that we put an offer in on a house in Roslindale takes up the rest of the space.

On the housing update: of course a house that's been on the market for 36 days gets three offers, including ours, in one weekend. Our first offer is rejected and we're all told to bring our "best and final" by 11:00 am tomorrow. So, hopefully by lunchtime tomorrow, we'll know whether or not we've just bought a house. Wish us luck.

Yogurt Juice?

M has a baby who likes Gerber Yogurt Juice, which is potentially one of the most unappetizing names for any food product I've heard in awhile. As if the name itself wasn't bad enough, my college roommate's husband asks in all seriousness, "Is that the stuff that pools at the top of a container of yogurt?"

Wonderful way to wrap up the week

Around 3:30 am last night, I hear a faint beeping noise. I think to myself "oh wonderful, here we go again" because every time my upstairs neighbor goes away for long stretches, her security alarm somehow triggers. Upon further investigation, I realize it's not coming from upstairs, but rather, the basement.

I did not heed those instructional videos that they make you watch when you're a kid, telling you to test the door before you open it if you suspect there's a fire. If I had, it would have been cool to the touch, so I guess it didn't matter much (and thanks to Daffy, I know that under the bed is *not* the best place to hide, had there been an actual fire). I opened the basement door and was greeted by billowing black smoke. Nice. Considering we're selling our house so 90% of our earthly belongings (including the entire Crate and Barrel warehouse we received as wedding presents) are stashed in the basement to avoid clutter, I'm thinking this is not turning out well. There were no actual flames, just a lot of smoke from our ancient oil burner. I open the basement door and the back door, creating a nice cross breeze to air it all out, which had the unintended effect of setting off both alarms in the back stairway. While the basement alarm was audible from my second floor unit - enough to wake me up - it wasn't exactly loud or particularly bothersome. These alarms, however, were deafening. We are now the most popular people in our neighborhood at 4:00 am.

To make matters worse, now one of the alarms in addition to saying "warning: fire" is saying "warning: carbon monoxide. Not something to mess around with, we decide to call the fire department and have them come and check things out. DLS shows them to the basement to poke around, while I huddle under our down comforter, because naturally we've turned off the heat since the oil burner is the root of the problem and opened a bunch of windows to air out any potential deadly carbon monoxide.

The fire department gives us the all clear, and you think life would return to normal. Nope. We can't figure out how to get the alarms to stop screeching. The fire department says we need to call ADT. Only problem: I don't have ADT, and both my upstairs and downstairs neighbor are away. After a highly unproductive call with an ADT dispatcher and his supervisor (they don't see any alarms registering so can't turn anything off), it's now 4:30 and I've been listening to these damn alarms for an hour. DLS popped in some sound isolating headphones and headed back into the hallway, intent on just breaking them out of the damn ceiling. We managed to disconnect them without physically breaking them - a small victory in the course of a long night. We then donned our winter hats and an extra sweatshirt and headed back to bed.

Good times, people, good times.

My one nature photo

Normally, I'm philosophically opposed to nature photos by amateur photographers. I think they're boring. But, I'll make this one exception: we went to Montreal and Mont Tremblant, below, for our mini honeymoon. It definitely did not suck.

I survived!

Sorry for being MIA. The whole wedding/mini-honeymoon definitely cuts into quality blogging time, particularly since neither of us took any real time off from work. So, will write more when I have time to come up for air and maybe even post a picture or two, but since I've gotten a few emails, wanted to let you all know that not only did I survive - we had the greatest time ever. A couple wedding notes:

- It rained - nay, it was a monsoon - the day of the wedding. Everyone and their brother has offered up some version of "the wet knot ties tighter" or "it's good luck" which is really just a way of appeasing crazy brides who are distraught by things like the rain, but honestly, we couldn't have cared less. The rain did break for long enough for us to grab a few photos overlooking the beach, which is the only reason I really cared about the weather.

- About five minutes into the reception (well, cocktail hour more specifically) I knocked a glass of red wine out of my friend's hand and onto the bottom of my dress. What do I care? I'm not going to wear it again.

- We sure did turn our reception into a giant karaoke party. "Pour Some Sugar on Me" never sounded so sweet... pun intended.

- We ended up brewing our own beer as wedding favors (well, not really favors since we weren't allowed to bring alcohol onto the wedding site), so we put them in welcome bags.

- There wasn't a dry eye in the house. My brother in law - who has never cried at anything... ever - even shed a few tears. My sister, halfway through her toast, looked over and saw him crying, and it was so unnerving she completely lost her train of thought. There's a picture of it, but he's asked me to destroy it.

- Here' the biggest surprise: while we were totally on cloud 9 to be newlyweds, nobody warned us about post-wedding depression. On Sunday, the two of us were on the verge of tears all day as people filed out. I guess that's why people go on honeymoons right away so that they have something to distract them. DLS and I just went straight back to work. Every married person I mentioned it to immediately identified, which begs the question, "why doesn't anyone warn you?" I got oodles of unsolicited wedding advice, but not a word about post-wedding depression.

No pressure

Friend: Have you written your vows yet?

Me: Well, I have them in my head. I just need to put pen to paper and organize them a little.

Friend: You know that expectations are really, really high, right?

(PS: Wedding related posts will end soon. I promise. After all, Halloween is around the corner and Keela is going to be a bumble bee, and Lucy, who wakes up every single day between 5-5:30 am, if we're lucky, is going to be a rooster. You know that's good for at least a few photo posts.)

What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger

Less than a week away. In the past week, we've put our house under agreement, put an offer on a new house, lost the buyer for our condo at the last minute, lost the house we wanted to buy, and juggled a thousan and one little wedding details. On the upside, I'm very tan. Did you have any idea that spray tan had come so far? I'm legit brown. Tahitian-looking even. (Ok, maybe not Tahitian). I wish I could find a way to justify spray tanning every week.

Biting off as much as I can possibly chew

We're now in the final countdown to the wedding. Just to make things a little more interesting, Friday I signed an offer for our condo. That's right - nothing like getting hitched, selling a condo and buying a house all in a matter of weeks. One problem: the "buying a house" part hasn't exactly come to fruition yet. We've seen a few things we liked, but because the condo hadn't sold, we sort of stopped looking (it was too disheartening to keep seeing adorable places and then not be able to put an offer in). So now in the final days of wedding planning, house shopping has kicked into over drive.

If I appear a little out of sorts, at least you know why.

I am a 12 year old boy

Is it wrong that I giggled like crazy when I read this sign at Camp 4 in Yosemite (the traditional camp for rock climbers)?

 

As the sign indicated that using a poop tube can be mastered with practice, determination, and flexibility, I clearly could not master it. Imagine my relief then when I saw this:

What's the right answer to this question?

When your betrothed asks (as eagerly as possible over IM), "Are you excited to get your own headlamp?", is there a right answer?

Context: This weekend we're going camping to a to-be-determined destination. By TBD, I mean that I know, that DLS's best friend and her boyfriend - who gave us the trip as a wedding present - know, but all DLS knows is that we're getting on a plane at 6:15 on Friday night and coming back on the red eye Monday morning. She has accurately deduced that that means a west coast trip.

My biggest fear: I'm going into the wilderness with three of the most athletically-inclined, outdoorsy people on the planet. On any given weekend day, they'll bike ride 100 miles just for fun. On this trip, we're going rock climbing, and I've never been climbing outdoors. We're going hiking and my supraventricular tacacardia (sp?) kicks in after I climb a flight of stairs. Hopefully I will live through it all and blog on Monday with the results.

Home stretch

DLS and I are now just about a month away from the wedding.

The wedding planning process has taught me a lot and led to a lot of surprising behavior on my part.  A random sample:

• I have spent more than just a little time debating the merits of "Bubblegum Pink" vs. "Light Shrimp." (Editorial note: both are terrible, terrible names for colors)

• I now have an opinion about flowers that extends beyond "lilies give me migraines and should be banned not only from my wedding, but from this earth."

• If you spend the time to make an excel spreadsheet with the processional order, don't let anyone convince you that bringing your laptop to the "final details" planning meeting with the wedding coordinator is a bad idea. It's a brilliant idea. If you don't, you will spend 45 minutes trying to remember and then rehashing the same pros and cons you spent 3 hours discussing in the days leading up to the meeting.
  

• Never, ever go to Ikea to pick up trays for the centerpieces and vases for the station displays the weekend before labor day unless you want to do battle with the throngs of suburban families getting their kids' college dorms tricked out.
  

• Cherish the friends who set up conference bridges and send along "meeting minutes" complete with next steps and action items following a discussion about flower arrangements.

Other things that are terrible about PEI

Eating mussels plucked from the ocean that very same day for 4 cents a pound.

 

The dogs not having anything fun to do.

 

Yep, this vacation is real bad. And now we're going to subject ourselves to a lobster dinner. Terrible. Pity me.

Oh, how my vacations have changed

Just a year ago, the core team would go on vacation to exotic places like Portugal and Puerto Rico. We'd go to fancy restaurants and chic clubs. We'd wear snazzy outfits.  We would drink $15 martinis. In short, we'd be fabulous.

And now I do this.

 

I wouldn't trade chilling on the porch with M&Ks baby girl for anything in the world.

Take a gander at the reflection in the window. Our view from this house in Prince Edward Island really sucks.

Please, oh please, super size this one thing

As a general rule, I'm not a fan of American propensity to super size everything. I'd prefer to live in a land of smart cars and reasonably portioned meals versus a gluttony of Hummers and 8000 calorie meals for $8.99.

But, like everything else, there's always an exception that proves the rule...

I don't know if this is uniquely Canadian (I'm in PEI for the week on vacation), but the toilet paper rolls here are ridiculous. They're tiny. Miniscule. In a house of 8 women, these things don't stand a chance.

More from my very odd subconscious

I have weird dreams. Very, very weird dreams. Very, very weird dreams that often include big words that I would never use while conscious. Weird dreams that reference historical and literary figures I don't think about while conscious. Like the Kafka/transmogrify dream, last night I had a dream that DLS and I arrived home (only it wasn't our actual house, it was a brick Beacon Hill-like townhouse) and there were burglars in the house. A guy I went to college with was walking by and I made him go in with us to scare away the burglars. A sound strategy, no? I mean, it's always a good idea to go into a building that you suspect is occupied by potentially armed burglars.

We got into the house and it turned out they weren't really burglars, they were part of this cult-like organization - almost like vampires - that was focused on making the world beautiful (yet they were definitely bad, bad people). They then forced me to take some hallucinogenic drug, which was also comprised of blood from all the members of the group (gross, right?) They ordered me to describe what I was seeing. I went through a series of weird visuals, and when I finally said that I saw a butterfly, only it wasn't really a butterfly, but a woman with butterfly wings, then they knew the drug had taken effect and they essentially owned my ass after that point. (Incidentally, I recently saw someone who had a tattoo that was very similar to the butterfly lady, so it wasn't totally out of left field).

After coming out of the drug stupor, I sent a text message that said simply "SOS" to my best friend and to my parents, but the cult knew I did it - they knew everything I did - so then they decided to go after them too, which made me feel awful.

Then, just in case things weren't weird enough, we were in a big classroom like setting with a guy I work with, and he was working to pull together a powerpoint presentation (because who doesn't dream of assembling powerpoint decks??). He raised his hand and asked how long he should plan to allocate to developing the powerpoint, because essentially, we've adopted a Sartrism approach and that would take some time to work in. I don't event think Sartrism (ie Jean-Paul Satre) is a real word - and if it is, I'm hard pressed to determine how it could possibly be reflected in a powerpoint presentation about a clean tech company. Not one to let the possibility that I either made up a word or used a word incorrectly (I'm still recovering from the time I thought sycophant meant self-flatterer instead of kiss ass) I, of course, Googled "sartrism" this morning, and while I didn't come up with a straight up definition, there is a book called the Quintessence of Sartrism.

Anyway, long story short, I woke up with a massive headache and feeling very unsettled.

Whale Sighting

In preparation for the wedding, I took a chance on experimenting with spray tanning. A friend of mine who is pasty white does it on a regular basis and it always looks really natural -- they've come a long way since the "I got dipped in iodine" look from a few years ago.

That same friend also has no ass. I mention this because her size 0 jeans are constantly slipping down around her aforementioned lack-o-ass, revealing a nice whale's tail tanline. When going spray tanning, they tell you to wear whatever you're comfortable in - you could go naked as a baby or wear a ski parka, it's entirely up to you.

Now, this is where it might get into the arena of "too much information to share with the world wide web", particularly since my new boss decided to announce the existence of this blog at our last leadership summit, but since Tboff has been harrassing me for lack of posts, ill press ahead...

Following my friend's lead, I went the thong route but in an attempt to avoid the "visible from the jeans" "hey lady, nice white thong...oh wait that's bare skin" moment, I sort of hitched 'em down lower than normal. The net result; I now have a *gleaming* white strip -- gleaming in a way only an Irish ass can manage -- across my rear end. One word, people: classy.

What's the worst thing about your job?

From the mouth of a Physcian's Assistant:

"I hate the summer. It's ball-sweat season."

Because we thrive under pressure...

DLS and I have decided not just to get married in the fall, but to put the condo on the market and try to buy a house. I am now entirely prematurely gray, yet too poor to go get my hair colored.

Know your place, Auntie

This week, my 13 year old niece and 9 year old nephew are staying with DLS and I while they attend BC softball/baseball camp. Yesterday, I dropped Jack off to a sea of boys, ranging from 6-18. I figured I should stick around and wait for him to get settled, but as I approached the dugout, I got a look that very clearly said, "keep on walking lady."

Apparently, my window as the "cool auntie" has passed.