Well it's about time.

I"ll start by telling you that yesterday was a terrible day all around. I won't make you miserable by listing all of the crappiness, but it was made a little better by eating a lovely dinner with my sister and brother in-law in Columbus last night. And then getting a great night's sleep. So!

Remember the exciting news I hinted at in my previous post? Well here it is. Are you ready?

Johnny and I are renting a house in Massillon, OH.

We have the keys and everything! Finally, after so many months of answering "We're not sure yet" we can give people a real, honest to goodness answer when they ask what our plans are! 

Really this house just fell into our laps at Johnny's family reunion a few weeks ago. His cousin's wife walked up to us and said, "Hey, heard you're looking for a place, I can hook you up, yo!" ... or something like that. Basically they own a house, they've rented it before, it has brand new carpet and cabinets and linoleum and a claw foot bath tub. It's not air conditioned but so what? It's only 10 minutes from Johnny's work and, as his cousin's wife is a bailiff, she's got major connections and said for me to shoot her my resume and she'll pass it around at work. There's a chance that I could keep my current job and work from home, but it's nice to have other options in case that one doesn't work out. 

No pictures of the kitchen because it's a giant mess right now. 

But that's my exciting news!! And the fact that my dad didn't make 'The Face' and start questioning my budget, the wisdom of this idea, whether we had really thought about it before making the decision, and then telling me I'm 25 and almost married and can make my own decisions (all of which usually tells me he thinks I'm making the wrong one) tells me that we have his blessing in this and I'm SOO glad! 

And now comes the work... over the next six weeks I will be packing up my apartment into boxes, filling up my car and driving to Massillon to toss it all into the house so that when the wedding comes all we have to get is my furniture and then most of the wedding money we're given will go to buying out my lease. But it will all be SO worth it!

I'm a Lazy Bum.

A. Okay, once again I suck at posting regularly. Life is just so much of the same right now that I really have nothing to post about and besides,
B. this ridiculous heat has made me extremely lethargic and I tend to come home and just lie on my couch watching stuff on Netflix after
C. my TEN HOUR workday. Yes. I now work 4x10s, at least for the remainder of the summer, and for some reason it has me completely whooped. However, it gives me Friday's off for cleaning unless I'm not home on Friday like this past weekend when I
D. drove up to Canton on Thursday to spend the weekend with Johnny because his aunt is literally in a coma on her deathbed. It's very reminiscent of my own mom's passing, everyone just sitting around, talking about old memories and just watching and waiting. So far they've been watching and waiting for almost a week and a half now.

This means that my apartment is a disaster, I'm tired, I admit I'm a bit lazy, and I'm seriously stressed. I'm just really good at hiding it.

One good thing that has happened lately is all the headway we're making with this whole wedding thing. Johnny and I finally hired a photographer, the invitations will be sent VERY soon, I'm in the middle of typing an address list for labels, I bought more fake flowers and a pair of shoes this past weekend, I've found a dress for the rehearsal I just need to buy it, I have my last fitting with my sister probably this weekend before my first of three bridal showers! Whoosh. That was a long sentence. There has also been an exciting development, but I won't share about that until all the details have been ironed out. :)

As I just said, my first shower is this weekend! Lately there have been all kinds of little things that have made this whole thing more and more real to me. In six and a half weeks I will become Mrs. Johnny Cross, move in with a man, eventually become a mother (not for a long while, though...) and it's all happening so quickly! Starting this weekend I have a shower every two weeks until the end of August, after which it is then only two weeks till the big day. There is still a lot to be done, I have to order flowers, figure decorations, budget for s'mores, find someone who will donate wood for the bonfire, get the invitations printed, labeled, stamped and sent, all of this not necessarily in that order. Then I get to handle the RSVP list and pray that only 150 of the 250 we're inviting respond! But in the meantime I sit here in my too warm apartment avoiding turning on the AC so I don't have an exorbitant electric bill and, I admit, putting off typing out addresses because it's just so much easier to be lazy!

I assume you've all heard The Lazy Song, by Bruno Mars? Most annoying song on the planet.

Ciao!

Most Likely to go on an Adventure.

I have become a total lameface in terms of posting. My most sincere apologies! I honestly don't have terribly much to write about, though, so for this post I will tell you about my adventure last Friday.

At my job, claims processors have two monitors. It's just the way it is. But when you're a temp you generally don't get two monitors (although the other two temps on my team had two...) so I still have one. And it's an ancient dino of a computer and monitor that I affectionately named Norman. On Thursday last week, someone from the Network Services Group (NSG) appeared looking for me to give me my new monitor! I was so stoked! They showed up just as my work day was ending so I made sure it was okay and then left.

Fast forward to Friday morning. I arrive to find... one monitor. A new, pretty flat screen monitor, but still only one. My dino was gone. So I go tell my coordinator, who tells the boss, who tells my coordinator to have me call my boss at a certain number. I do, and then my boss tells me to hike down to NSG and find some guy named Jason who is bald and supposed to give my monitor back. He gives me directions and off I go.

NSG is located on the far west side of the building on the third floor. I'm on the fourth floor on the eastern side of the middle section of the building... if that makes sense. So I hike down there with knees that are protesting loudly with each step and eventually find myself in a really sketch part of the building. It was dark down there, with no drop ceiling so you could see all the pipes and beams like you would in a warehouse. The walls of the cubicles are all taller than me and I have no idea if I'm even in the right place because we don't exactly label our departments.

So I'm standing there looking lost and confused and this girl is a few feet away from me holding a clipboard. She sees me and says, "Can I help you?" Not in a nice way, either, but rather with the look on her face that said "Who the heck are you?" I told her I was looking for Jason.

"Is he expecting you?"

Like he's the president or something. Seriously.

I tell her yes, because it's true, and she walks towards me and points down the aisle I'm standing partially in front of to a bald guy down the way. As I start walking down this dark aisle toward the four men sitting at the other end I take in my surroundings: there are computers and wires and techie stuff everywhere. Literally. But as I start walking down the guy called Jason looks over, points and says "You!" I'm startled, but just keep walking. "You're the monitor!" he says.

Why yes, Jason. Yes I am.

He gestures to the desk area to his left once I reach him. "There's your monitor." I look down to see a slightly older flat screen. My Norman was NOT a flat screen.

"Well, that's not my monitor," I stammer out. "I had an ancient big monitor, like from 1998. But I'll gladly take a flat screen."

He just sits and stares at the monitor for a moment, then asks "That's not your monitor? Was yours a flat screen?" I answer his questions and then he stands up, says something like "Hold on", and then walks away holding the monitor, leaving me alone in this big creepy aisle feeling awkward and trying to figure out if he wanted me to follow. A moment later he reappeared and motioned for me to follow.

So I follow him over toward the window where there is a huge cube of ancient monitors like Norman stacked on top of each other next to a stack of older flat screens, which is where he sets "my" monitor. Turning back toward me, he holds up one finger in the "one second" motion before disappearing into a room behind me.

Once again, me standing awkwardly where I clearly hear him having a perfectly normal and pleasant conversation with whoever was in that room. Seconds later he reappears holding a monitor identical to the one he had just tried to give me and says "Do you know how to hook it up?"

I stared at him stupidly. "I can't hook it up because I need a dual video card - "
"Yeah, but once you have that can you hook this up?"
"I think so - "
"Well if you need help just call down here and I'll come help."

And he walks away. Well, kind of. He takes a few steps and is then joined by the girl who was apparently an executive assistant in another life and they proceed to have some kind of conversation as they walk. stop. walk. stop. in front of me the whole way out of Mars - uh, I mean, NSG.

Then I made my escape before it became necessary to make like ET and phone home.

When I made it back to the comfort of claims-land, I went to talk to my coordinator.

Me: so, I went to NSG.
Her: What happened. (she said this very knowingly and somewhat cautiously...)

So I tell her the whole story and we laugh about how in NSG they apparently don't need to actually be able to talk. It was like being on a whole other planet.

And after all of this excitement I came to work on Tuesday and had to call NSG because for some ridiculous reason I couldn't log into my computer. It made me lose an hour of work as I sat on hold for almost a half hour playing games on my phone to pass the time. Thankfully the phone etiquette down in NSGland is significantly better than their in-person people skills.

I guess the moral to the story is, if you're getting your computer monitor back and they offer your a newer one, just take it and don't ask questions. Simple and classic.

So anyway, that was my adventure. Here's hoping sometime soon I get that dual video card so I can finally have two monitors! It'll make my day SO much easier.

Happy Belated 4th of July, folks!

Update: by the way, in reference to an earlier blog, Johnny's house now has water, thanks to Johnny and all of his hard labor. :)

A Whole Lotta Random

Guess who has two thumbs and, starting July 11th, will be working "summer hours" at her job which means working four 10hr days and getting Friday off?? This girl! I had no idea that this option was open to us, but it absolutely is and it means my life gets that much easier!

My job is boring. This is the downside of the above excitement.

So, if you boil whole wheat rotini and mix in melted butter, minced garlic, peas, salt and pepper you get basically the most amazing dinner ever. I would post a picture of it but it's really tasty and kind of gone...

Is there anyone else here who is stressed? Anyone? What's weird is that I feel stressed but I'm not entirely sure why... probably because my wedding to Johnny is in just over two months and there's still so much to be done. Yeah. That's why.

Now I get to spend my evening (before I do a hardcore workout) organizing and compiling addresses for my shower/wedding guests. Get excited... :-)

At the End of the Day...

This past weekend was an adventure. Let's just put it that way. It began normally enough, with me driving for what feels like forever through ridiculous weekend traffic heading straight for Byesville, OH, to attend the Friday night service at Shalom Baptist, the church of one of my best friends. This friend also happens to be a photographer as well as one of my bridesmaids. On Memorial Day weekend she took Johnny's and my engagement photos and, as this past Saturday was my family reunion, I was hoping to pick up the photos when I visited church. She promised to have them ready. And now Facebook has an entire album of nothing but pictures of me and my boy and I love it!

Anyway, I decided to stay for service (well, actually, I kind of had to since I was a little late and my friend was helping with children's church, but I also really enjoy listening to her dad's lessons because they're always super interesting) and it went a lot longer than I had thought and I had to bail in the middle in order to get to Canton in decent time.

Saturday begins as normal. We're both up by 9 since he had to be at work by 11 and I had the reunion at noon (he couldn't come because of work. More on that later) and he showers first. Then, when I'm in the shower and my hair is all lathered up and I'm soaping up the rest of me the water pressure suddenly begins to dwindle until, before long, there's nothing. At all. And I'm standing there freezing with my hair full of suds. So I'm given a gallon jug of water (COLD water) with which I rinse myself off, get dry, get presentable, and then Johnny gets to come and dump the cold water over my head repeatedly until all the suds are gone. Then we repeat, as I also needed to condition. I must say I was very thankful that Saturday was a fairly chilly day and required jeans since I didn't have a chance to shave... However, the upside is that this was a small glimpse into married life and depending on one another. It also reminded me strongly of being a little kid and my mom washing my hair in the bathtub and rinsing it by pouring a cup of water over my head. It always got soap in my eyes, and Saturday was no exception.

This little problem turned out to be the water pump. Johnny's house runs on well water and the pump decided to fail. Johnny and his dad (jokingly) blamed it all on me because I was in the shower when it happened. But then I (also jokingly) blamed it on Johnny, who turned on water somewhere else in the house while I was in the shower. Nothing was ever decided on this front.

Anywho, this meant that immediately following church on Sunday Johnny and I took a little trip to Sears to buy a new pump, which then Johnny spent the entire rest of the day installing. There was problem after problem. Something was leaking, and when he tightened it to stop the leakage the thing broke and we had to take a trip to Lowe's and Home Depot to buy a new one and then something else stripped the screw on some tube that lets air into the pump and so they just plugged the hole for now. So they still don't have water and Johnny gets to work on it again tomorrow before he goes to work. It's all so ridiculous, and I ended up spending quality time with Johnny's dad, whose bad back kept him from being able to help as much as he would have liked. My only job was to read my book when I wasn't running up and down the basement stairs to unplug and plug in the pump. Quite the adventure, and definitely one I don't want to relive. I think I can safely speak for Johnny and say he feels the same.

So that was my adventure. And the reunion was great fun and the engagement pictures turned out beautifully and now I just have to put in all the info to the various newspapers to announce it! And then in just over two months we'll be married. So insane!! Everything is going so fast!

Hope everyone's weekend was a little less eventful than mine!

UPDATE: I realized I never came back to Johnny not coming to the reunion! He DID come! When I arrived, after going to Walmart to print off all of the pictures so I came a little late, I parked the car and saw Johnny walking toward me! Apparently his boss at work gave him a very extended lunch break during which he was able to come eat with us. :D That's all!

I Have A List in My Head.

Who else (in Ohio...) is thrilled about this lovely, 70-some degree weather? It's seriously making my world, especially since it means I don't need to use my air conditioner, which saves my electric bill.

My dad called in and rented the tables, chairs, and tent for our reception. EEeeee! We decided on a tent because we wanted an outdoor reception and it would be really complicated to try having a secondary location just in case without having to pay another fee. So with the tent we can have our reception outside whether it's rain or shine! Johnny and I finally pared down the guest list with the help of his Aunt Nancy, who is very straightforward. "That person wouldn't come, don't bother". It was amusing and helped SO much, so, thank you Nancy!

We also watched a video that accompanies the book we're working through for counseling. It's called "Saving You Marriage Before It Starts", and it's a wonderful book and a slightly cheesy video... It was recorded in the early 90s (you can tell by the fashion, lol) and the couple who lead it are very aware that they're in front of a camera... but that really doesn't change the effectiveness. I'd recommend this book/video/workbook to any engaged, newly wed or even married for awhile couple. It's pretty phenom.

Anyway, things are falling into place and it feels like time goes flying by! Yesterday marks one year of dating for us, and it's now less than three months till the wedding.
I actually went to bed at 9:30pm last night. I felt like I was in elementary school because it was still light out! However, I got up today at 5am as usual and felt pretty darn great! Perhaps I should go to bed at 9:30 more often!

I hope you all have a glorious day!

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