Quite the Quandary

Recently I have been put in a weird position. CP and I have a few events that we have to fly to in January and we have been purchasing airline tickets. My quandary was whether I should use my new last name (which isn’t official with any federal, state or local government agency) or my old last name. I would think that I wouldn’t hit any snags when changing my name, but I also am trying to just add CP’s last name onto my current name (for an annoying total of 4 names) instead of dropping my current last name.

I have heard that this can cause a nightmare, so I have to hope that the local Social Security office doesn’t have a problem with this…. Otherwise, I have heard that it sometimes takes a court order to change your name, and boy does that sound annoying!

Anyway, I ended up buying the plane tickets using my future last name. I sent off my request for our marriage certificate today and hope to make a trip down to the Social Security office during lunch one day in the near future. I hope that this is all figured out before mid-January, or else I see the airlines charging a bunch of fees to change the name on my ticket (grumble grumble).

In other news, CP has finally finished editing our pictures so expect to see a lot of animals on this blog in the coming days!!

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In a totally different topic, I recently came across a cooking blog called Our Best Bites. These people sure can make food look delicious! Despite the fact that CP and I want to continue losing weight, I am going to have to try to make their roll recipe this weekend to see if they are tasty and if I can make it without screwing it up. I’ll let you know if the results are good- and I will probably use the recipe for Thanksgiving dinner too!

I’m also thinking about making their pumpkin spice ice cream as CP and I received an ice cream maker attachment for the Kitchen Aid as a wedding gift….. :-)

Marriage shockers

Right before CP and I left for our honeymoon, we spent a quick weekend in NYC with friends. Our flight left from JFK Sunday morning anyway and we had a free hotel room for two nights, so why not get out of MA and start the honeymoon early?

After dinner on Saturday night, my friend CS met up with us at a bar that looks up at the Empire State Building.*

Anyway, we started drinking a bunch of wine and randomly, CS came out with two sad pieces of news about two of our friends.

The first? Our college friend, married two months after graduation to a guy that she dated throughout school, who became pregnant six months later. She and her husband have been together for 9 years and have three sons together. For me, they have been the "gold standard" for a marriage. Unfortunately, the news was that the husband cheated on my friend WITH A HOOKER. Not with a random woman at a bar, but a HOOKER. I can't decide which is worse. He could have developed feelings for the random woman, but the whole act of PAYING someone to have sex with them makes me feel ill too.

My friend is obviously devastated, but has decided to try to forgive her husband. I am not privy to her thoughts because this came out during my weekend wedding and we haven't had a chance to talk about it (I'm going to wait until she says something to me), but I can see why she is staying with him. They have three kids. She hasn't worked since taking maternity leave in 2001. She has become accustomed to the "lifestyle" that she leads as he has a good job. And according to CS, she still loves him.

I'm not sure that it would be my choice, but I also don't have kids with CP and I am in a different situation. However, how can you fully trust someone after that?

The other shocking news? Our other mutual friend's husband is gay. HUH???? According to CS, our friend knew about it BEFORE they got married. I'm not sure whether she thought that she could change him or what, but they have been married for probably 5 or 6 years now. They no longer have sex, but I guess that he does go outside their marriage at times. WHAT?!?

This news makes me sad as I don't understand why my friend would want to put herself in that position. She loves him dearly and I understand that....but then why not be best friends? Marriage is hard enough.....why add to the difficulty? Is she no longer interested in having kids?

Hearing these two pieces of news a week after my own marriage and as I was about to embark on my honeymoon was shocking. I had just been thinking about how lucky I was to not have any friends divorce when there is such a high divorce rate in this country. I still am trying to wrap my head around it.....


*By the way, if you live in New York City and haven't been to the La Quinta Inn rooftop bar (17 West 32nd Street)? It's got a great view and the drinks are cheap!

Halloween

How was everyone's Halloween? CP and I had an interesting day. Since we just got back from Africa we ran errands, edited pictures, and cleaned the house. Sounds like fun, huh? Around 4pm the trick-or-treaters started to ring the doorbell and I felt old. Why wasn't I wearing a fun costume and out drinking? I was home with all of the old people in my neighborhood, handing out candy. *sigh*

For the most part, the night went well. Most kids came up and said "trick-or-treat" and thanked us for the candy. Some tried to grab a whole bunch of candy and when I told them "just one," they audibly groaned. Brats! We are not here to solely fuel your sugar highs and stomach aches!*

Two teenage girls were dressed up in emo-like clothes, but I'm pretty sure that they were just their everyday clothes and didn't put forth an ounce of effort. The weirdest thing we saw? A man, probably about 45 years old or so, in a cat costume, that said "meow" as I opened the door. It was just.....odd. Turns out they have our wedding congratulations card from the Obamas too! I told them to just put it in our mailbox as we would really like it, but he seemed to want to drop it off himself. No need weirdo.

With 45 minutes left to go, CP and I were worried that we were going to run out of candy. We weren't around last year so we weren't sure how many kids to expect, but thankfully we had leftover candy from our out-of-town wedding bags! Red hots, Tootsie Pops and gum went into the candy bowl (remember CP was the one to buy everything for those oddly-packed bags). To our surprise, the kids were ecstatic to get GUM. Not Bubble Yum or something fun like that, but sugar free gum. Huh? Ummmm okay. We also stuck honey candy that we bought from a local store in the bowl just in case. I said that any kid that picked it up would probably end up egging our house- I mean ORGANIC candy on Halloween? Luckily, I think that only one or two kids picked them up. One kid's response? "What is this??" Exactly my little friend.

In the end, we had just enough candy.

It was a nice, relaxing weekend, coupled with an Eagles blowout against the Giants. Woo hoo!

What was your costume for Halloween?


*Writing this makes me feel old.

Day of questions

Today I am full of questions. I think that it is partly because I am still EXHAUSTED from a day of sheet rocking yesterday at a Habitat for Humanity home with coworkers. 8 hours of that can make a girl pretty tired! I think that it also because CP and I put off thinking about future stuff until after the hump of the wedding and honeymoon. Now that they are behind us, there is uncertainty in our lives once more. Or rather self-imposed uncertainty. We both have jobs that we could stay at and a landlord that loves us. However, I am unhappy with my job and we both are unhappy with where we live (me more so than CP).

I just don’t know where to even start. Do I look for jobs in CO? Boston? Abroad? Who wants someone like me with my experience? What am I qualified for? A JD is a general degree and I don’t know that the experiences that I am getting at my current job will be that marketable. What kind of job do I think will make me happy? Is CP going to take the GMATs? With CP thinking that his boss is going to pull him off his current job to have him work from home/ travel, is that going to make CP happy and thus ensure that he wants to stay in MA? Or will he still want to get his MBA? What do our future plans hold for having kids?

I was half expecting to have some of these conversations while on our honeymoon, but CP really didn’t want to talk about them. Which I understand (not wanting to think about real life while on our honeymoon), but it also would have been a nice time to flesh out some plans. Of which we have none.

I get excited for change, but only when I have concrete plans. Uncertainty (especially in a crappy job market) is not my cup of tea.

We are back!

Afternoon folks! CP and I are back from our African honeymoon with a crap load of pictures and videos. I am not allowed to release said pictures or videos until CP is done making them “perfect,” so you might have to wait a few more days. He’s so silly.

Needless to say, we had an AMAZING TIME and I can’t wait to tell you guys all about it! Now do I start to write my recaps or go through the 400+ blog posts you all wrote while I was gone??? :-)

If I had a time machine.....

Although our wedding weekend went GREAT, there are a few things that I would change if I could go back in time:

*Although we got a lot of compliments on the Inn, the owners were crazy. They constantly talked about money and then pulled weird things like only putting 50 plates out for the rehearsal dinner. Or doing the champagne toast Friday night, having some glasses of champagne leftover and instead of handing them out to people, they brought them back into the kitchen. There was still some champagne left in the bottles, so why wouldn’t they pour it? It’s not like they could keep the bottle to use it for later guests…AND my in laws had already paid for it. WTF? In addition, two hours before my wedding, I guess some random people stopped by the Inn wanting a drink. Instead of telling them that we had a wedding and that the Inn was closed for other business (we took up the entire Inn, another nearby hotel AND part of another nearby Inn), the owner allowed them to have drinks and sat and talked to them instead of helping with the set up. ???? If CP and I had it to do again, I think that we would have looked at other places to take over for the weekend….

*If we could have afforded a wedding coordinator, that would have been a helpful person to have. Even if it was just a wedding coordinator that came with the property or one the day-of. My mom ran around like a maniac, and CP did too. It would have been nicer to have both of them able to relax the day of the wedding.

*I wouldn’t have done the out of town bags. Yes it’s nice to give guests Gatorade, gum, snacks, etc. but it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

These are fairly minor changes though….at least in my mind. Despite the fact that the Inn owners were crazy, the only people that really knew what was going on were CP’s parents and my parents. So to our guests, it was pretty much a seamless weekend….and that’s what you want!

Overall it was one of the best weekends of my life. I simply couldn’t stop smiling the entire weekend….and I have continued to have a perma-grin on my face since then.

If I am still alive and I haven’t been abducted in Mozambique or South Africa, then I will let you guys know on Monday how the honeymoon went (and I promise no more wedding recaps!!!).

Looking back on our wedding, here are some decisions that we made that I thought turned out great:

*Spending time with friends and family the two days before everyone else arrived. I think they helped to keep me calm and collected and not worrying that everything was going to get done.

*Inviting all of our friend to the Inn Friday night. It was great to see almost all of our guests the night before the wedding. If CP and I had headed to our room for the night, I think that we both would have gotten nervous about the next day. Instead we were able to talk to friends that either flew or drove long distances and have all of our friends and family meet the night before the wedding to get to know each other.

*I am happy that we did not print out a menu for every guest. We didn’t even print out one large menu to put near the place cards. It simply wasn’t necessary. It would have been a waste of paper. I AM happy that we ended up doing programs. We used the same leaf stamp (bought at Michaels) as we used for the save the date cards, bought plain program paper at Staples, and voila! Now we have a program of our wedding for the rest of our lives.

*Our unity ceremony was a not a typical candle or sand ceremony. CP put thought into our plant ceremony and we had our officiant say a few words about having to nurture the plant, just as we would our marriage. We then put some soil and water on the plant and that was it. The best part about it was that the plant was a clipping from my great-grandmother’s Christmas Cactus so the plant has meaning to us. Hopefully we keep it alive!! Here is what the plant will look like when it blooms around Thanksgiving (and Easter I guess? So who knows why it is called a Christmas cactus??!!):

*Inviting our guests to a brunch on Sunday morning. Amazingly enough, I was wide awake and not hungover by 7:30 so we were there to greet our guests before they had to catch flights. It was fun to recap the wedding and to spend a few extra minutes with friends or family that we didn’t see too much of the night before.

*I’m glad that I didn’t go crazy by micro-managing our vendors. For the flowers? We told her our colors, said what flowers we didn’t want and let her do what she thought would look great. And you know what? My flowers were beautiful! Same with the guitarist for the ceremony. Would anyone REALLY care what was playing when people were sitting down? No. The only thing that I cared about was that “Here Comes the Bride” was played as I walked towards CP with my dad.

*Despite the fact that I had made the table cards, put together the guest book, went to all of the vendor meetings, etc., it was great as the bride to come down to the ceremony and gaze in wonder (and surprise! I didn’t plan an ugly wedding like in my nightmare a few months ago!) at the beautiful job the vendors did. Or when I walked into the tent for the reception, it was nice to see all of my little touches. I’m glad that I didn’t do a lot of DIY projects for the wedding as the few ones that we did, people did end up noticing.

*Not caring what people thought of us playing Beirut and Stump after the reception (especially in our wedding attire). There was nothing to do in that area of NH anyway, so why not spend more time with your friends and family?

*The weather was nice enough on Friday and Sunday so that guests were able to see WHY we picked the location that was so far away from civilization. The foliage was in its peak, guests saw bears, moose, turkeys and other wild animals, and the air was fresh.

Come back on Thursday. I have a few things that I would have changed….