supercheesegirl

My wonderful husband's first chapbook of poetry has just been published. If you are so inclined, you might consider purchasing one! (Sample poems are available on his website, if you want to check out his work.)

In case you didn't catch it on Facebook, we had an engagement photo shoot this week. The pictures are pretty amazing.

Transit strike over. It happened overnight, though, so I still got up at 5:30 and caught the 6:46 train. F is a good, good man: if he wakes up early he can't fall back to sleep, and thus he was up at 5:30 with me, but he wasn't even grumpy! He fixed breakfast for us while I was in the shower. There are a lot of people who would've been grumpy, but F was just good-naturedly sleepy. I'm a lucky woman. And tomorrow we get to sleep to our normal time and hopefully get back on jogging schedule!

This weekend F and I went down to Long Beach Island, NJ with my parents. It was lovely. We did some shopping, some reading, went up to the light house, went out for dinner, played some cards. F had never played progressive rummy before, and he concentrated very very hard. He did really well, too, but lost in the last hand of each game. I lost dreadfully, which is just what happens sometimes, with what was possibly a personal best score of 349+.

The house we stay at has an attached miniature golf course, which is now closed for the season, but we had the keys! So we had an epic minigolf battle. F won, but his game was much more consistent on the front nine--on the back nine, he got three holes-in-one, but also had a couple of rougher holes where he scored a 4. Final score was I think 41, F, 47, R. At least I acquitted myself decently.

On the way back we stopped at a farm stand on route 70 and got pumpkins, and then stopped at the Dairy Bar a little farther on route 70 and split a pumpkin custard. Yum.

It is getting to be very autumny here. F's new favorite sentence is "It's chilly." He says it often. This is going to be his first full winter in PA since he was in high school. He will be whiny, and understandably so. I promised to be patient with him. We need to buy him some thicker pants and more wintry sportcoats, perhaps some turtlenecks and things--all his business clothes were purchased with Florida or California in mind. Khaki sportcoats are nice, but just aren't going to cut it in PA past October. I suspect we need to make a signficant investment in wool and corduroy. F also needs some long underwear. He was whining that he gets cold on his ten-minute walk to work, and I told him that his legs would be warmer walking to work if he had some long underwear on under his khaki pants. He said he doesn't want to have to wear the long underwear under his pants all day. I may have told him to suck it up, or I may have said "welcome back to the northeast", but see, that's the sort of thing I'm not going to say anymore now that I've promised to be patient. Now I'll just buy him some long underwear and quietly put it with his pants. I'm going to work very hard to be sensitive and supportive.

Last night we made really good progress on our apartment. We got all the excess stuff out of the dining room. The dining room is now totally done. It is my favorite room in the apartment. We also cleared several boxes out of the living room, which made me really happy. The boxes mostly contained my knicknacks and little bookshelf treasures--F had already unpacked a lot of his treasures, so I'd been feeling underrepresented. Now no longer! So what if half my knicknacks are action figures and the rest are sheep? My stuff is awesome. F also hooked up his stereo and figured out how to hook up his big speakers without wires everywhere. He very deviously ran the speaker wire around the fireplace by tucking it into the crack between the brick and the wood. You can't tell at all that there's speaker wire there, and it hardly shows otherwise. He did a very good job. Then we listened to Tori Amos to test it out, and it was great. His big speakers sound good when you get them working.

Short term apartment projects:
- hanging the mirror above the fireplace
- figuring out where to hang all the family photos, possibly getting more frames
- getting a book stand for the proposal book
- putting out the Halloween decorations!!!!!!!

Long term projects include sanding and staining the dining room table, and sanding and painting/staining my desk. Those might wait until spring. We also need to organize the bookshelves in the office and unpack the very last of the books. That's more of a medium-term project. And then there's the junk closet, where we just stick everything we don't know what else to do with. There are two short bookshelves in there. (It's a pretty big junk closet.) Right now the plan is to keep them in there and unpack all the photo albums onto them. There are a lot of photo albums. But this is a long term project for sure, so we'll just have to see.

So, F moved in just over two months ago! Things have really been going well. Not that I'm surprised, but still.

The first week or so was difficult. F was dealing with being in a new place--a place with snow--and being around me all the time, plus not having any of his stuff. I was dealing with a drastic decrease in personal space and alone time plus F's entirely different style of kitchen-using. Most of that, we've gotten past or found a workaround.

It turns out that I seem to be a complete psycho about dishes for some reason--I never would have suspected ten years ago that I'd turn out to be a dish psycho. I mean, F willingly washes dishes, without even being prompted, even making statements like, "Boy, I'd better wash those" and then following up with dish-washing action, yet still, I am psycho about his STYLE of dishwashing. I think this might be related to the fact that all of my apartmental systems of doing things are in complete disarray now that he's here, which is normal and expected, and it's normal too that I be upset about all the upset, but for some reason I'm taking it out on the dishes. So now we have worked out a nice arrangement where F does more of the cooking and I do more of the dishes. I'm totally cool with that. Also, when F does the dishes, I do not watch.

Other difficulties for me have been F totally taking over my stuff that I love, like my car (he needs to drive to work), my computer, and my ipod (he couldn't update his ipod from my computer and anyway it's too small for audiobooks). Now, though, F's computer is all set up and has the internets, so he can download his darn podcasts to his own ipod and he can do his writing on his own computer and I can have mine back. So I am excited.

F has had his own difficulties, obviously, which he can talk about himself, but the commute is a big unlikeable thing. He used to walk 5 minutes to work and now he drives 50 minutes. Hence the gracious lending of my ipod, but it still sucks. The personal space issue and lack of his own stuff issue is also a problem, but we talked it over and had good communication that led to setting up his computer, which is awesome for many reasons. So, yay communication. Also, I keep making him hang out with my parents, who keep bestowing lovely dollar store holiday decorations upon us. They are entertained by how quickly F covers his horror with a smile and also by his sarcasm!

I am also finding out lots of fun new things about F. For example, he listens to NPR constantly. I'm beginning to suspect that he somehow gets NPR secret radio reception in his brain. Most of our conversations involve something F heard on NPR. However, I am discovering that NPR covers a lot of really interesting stories, so it's all good.

Also, F is just as much a list maker as I am! We have hours of fun. On Fridays, we email back and forth at work to compile a list of things to do over the weekend. Then we print it out and spend the weekend crossing things off. During the week we flip the list over (so as not to waste paper) and re-list everything we have to do and add new items. We get so much DONE!

We're also having a great time with cooking. Every week we make our grocery list and plan our meals for the week (see above RE list-making) and go to the store. We've been making really good food. This week we tried basa, which is a kind of fish. We cooked it in a tomato-pepper sauce which we made from scratch in the blender and then ate it with couscous and asparagus. I also made Stew, which involves a bunch of stuff getting thrown in the crockpot, so we're varying things up and doing meals that involve both high and low time investments. F tends to cook more veggies than I do, and more Mexican and spicier food, and I tend to cook more pasta, so we're expanding each other's repertoires. Now I can eat asparagus, zucchini, squash, green beans, AND snap peas. We keep staples in the kitchen, like potatoes and onions and basil, and when we throw together a meal we don't just take a Lean Cuisine out of the freezer, we actually cook something. I'm so happy with these developments in our diet.

Best of all is the part where I get to spend all my time with this awesome person. We take long walks, we cook, we watch TV, we read, we fall asleep together, and it's every single day and I hardly ever get sick of him (except when he talks about NPR too much). It's so nice! Even though there are many things in my life that aren't ideal right now, there is F, and so that stuff doesn't really matter.

F is in the air. He'll be landing in Philly around 11:00 PM. Sheets are changed, laundry is done, dishes are done. My apartment is totally clean. I am totally clean. My paper that's due for Monday night class is written. I think the only things left to do now are to rub on some lotion, cook some french toast, and then play Zelda all night until it's time to go to the airport. Goodbye, bachelorettedom!

The Proposal:

F's flight arrived in Philly around 4:30 PM on Tuesday 12/23. I met him at the airport, brought him home on the train, and we spent the evening relaxing. At one point, F claims that he needs to go out to my car--he says he hid something there the last time he was in town, which at first I completely don't believe, but he explains that he saw this perfect gift last time he was here and thought I'd find it for sure if he hid it in the house, so he found a secret spot in my car. I am gullible. He goes out to the car, where he secretly calls my parents and asks for their blessing. My mom is totally awesome, and doesn't let on a thing when I talk to her maybe an hour later. Instead, she tells me about how my dad spent like two hours at Home Depot buying this thing for the lawn that he's now assembling. Go Mom.

On Wednesday 12/24, I took the day off, we slept in a little bit, and then did fun holiday things. F had a lot of gifts to wrap, and I went to the grocery store and then baked yet another batch of cookies. In the early afternoon, F mentioned that he had one or two more gifts to pick up in my neighborhood (full of cute little stores and bakeries, FYI) and went for a walk. When he got back, I was finishing up the cookies. F took over in the kitchen for a bit and I tidied up the living room and put away the wrapping things; we had the holiday music on, and F popped into the room for a minute, said "This one broke!" and gave me half a cookie. I was so happy in that moment, just having F there and doing stupid domestic holiday things, that I burst into tears right there in the living room. F was very sweet about it.

A little while later, F told me that there was a poem he really wanted to read to me on Christmas Day, but he needed to check the book out of the library, which he couldn't do without me and my library card, so could we walk up to the library? I thought, You couldn't check out the book from your library before you left California?! But the cookies were done, and we had time before my parents were coming over for dinner, so I said sure. It's only maybe a ten-minute walk to the library in my neighborhood. We get to the library, and F says he doesn't want me to see the book he's getting, so I need to look at something else for a minute. Okay. He comes to get me, holding one hand behind his back, and says there's another book he wants me to look at. I turn to the shelf and I see...( Read more... )

F and I had the awesomest dinner tonight. F made caesar parmesan crusted chicken drumsticks, and then I made almond and parmesan asparagus that was so amazingly tasty. He sort of made up the chicken recipe and it worked so well! And I found the asparagus recipe on allrecipes.com and added garlic and pepper and it was excellent. Definitely have to make that again. Such a good dinner. A really good day, too. Yay.

I am having a spectacularly terrific birthday. I spent the day at the zoo with my mom. We saw the tiger and lions and giraffes and coatis and monkeys and meercats (Jess, they do have some at the Philly zoo!), and we rode on the ZooBalloon! And saw the bird show. Then I cut across four lanes of traffic and a trolley to make a possibly-illegal left out of the zoo parking lot, and we didn't die (although the trolley dinged at me--Mom said "F-ck him!"), and then we had delicious gelati from the farmers market in my neighborhood. When I got back to my apartment a little while ago, I was just in time to intercept the delivery of my birthday box from the mailman. F put together a really awesome, wonderful, romantic themed box of little presents. And while I was on the phone thanking him, Carlos left me a message singing Feliz Cumpleanos. :) And I got virtual LJ gifts! I'm having an absolutely wonderful day! Thank you for all your emails and comments and things. So happy. Yay!