70 Days To Go: The Big Reveal

All right, I've been hinting at some "big news." So. Ready? Here goes.

BAM: My husband-to-be has accepted a new job. In Chicago.

And he leaves in a week.

This all happened within the past few weeks - the interview, the offer, the decision, the informing of employers, family, and friends before any online reveal - all so fast. He starts the new job in a little over a week, and leaves in exactly a week, and then I won't see him for weeks and weeks and weeks.

See, I won't be moving until after the wedding. I'll be staying here in Mississippi, working, packing up the townhouse, taking care of the pets, wedding-planning, trying to figure out what my plan in the big city will be, and HOLY CRAP missing him.

I'm already anticipating the HOLY CRAP missing him. We went grocery shopping today and I was pointing out that he'll be out of the house before the milk expires, this is the last spinach we'll buy before he moves, that sort of thing.

"You can't get sentimental over everything about this," he said, eyeing the spinach.

"You'd be surprised," I replied, looking mournfully at the last spinach we'll ever buy together here.

It'd be tempting to romanticize a two month separation leading up to the wedding... except at this point in my life, I find nothing romantic about long distance. I know we can get through it, I'm not worried. I'm just spoiled. I like having him around.

Truthfully, though, there's so much more to be grateful for than stressed out about, so let's accentuate the crazy amounts of positive. Timing be damned, this opportunity is fabulous. There is so much excitement ahead it almost seems unfair. Also, though the separation from D won't be fun, I'm VERY grateful for the extra time I'll get with my friends-so-close-they're-family down here. I know it would be close to impossible for both of us plus the pets to drop everything and move our whole lives at once. Especially with a wedding on the horizon, taking place here. Staying here makes sense.

But HOLY CRAP. I'll miss him. (The spinach and I, we'll be really emotional.)

So, in summary: DOUBLE BAM. 2013 can now officially be summarized as THE YEAR OF MAKING DECISIONS (let's get married! we'll move to Chicago!) and 2014 will indeed be THE YEAR OF TAKING ACTION (taking vows! moving boxes!). I think the President recently said something similar. Sorry to steal your thunder, Obama.

Here's to health, sanity, and joy as we swiftly move from talking the talk to walking the walk, down the aisle, then driving up I-55, and moving ever more rapidly into the future.

PS There are a lot of little logistics sneaking up quickly, too, in light of all this... for example, we had to go ahead and get our marriage license. That's right, we're licensed to wed, and it was a bizarre experience just getting through that bit. I'll tell that story soon. 

Anniversaries

This past week marked two important anniversaries in my life.

September 30 marked the six-year anniversary for the fiancé and me. Six years since two friends who had been on a few dozen were-they-or-weren't-they-dates had a conversation that decided our new status was "officially together." (The conversation was immediately followed by me sending him a text while still sitting in his parking lot that night, which said something like "Don't get weird about this, okay?" His response was something along the lines of: "Wouldn't dream of it, doll. Won't get any weirder than I already am." Fair enough.)

A good visual representation of us.

Six years together, so far. Six years wherein we've laughed often, cried rarely, worn a lot of costumes, cooked, toasted, roasted, supported, traveled, lost grandparents and loved ones, gained friends and loved ones, and realized we want all the years ahead of us to be spent together, too. Which brings us to the next anniversary...

October 4 marked three years since I survived the car wreck that by all logic should have killed me. If you want to read the whole story, it's here. If you want the nutshell version, I was driving a Tahoe full of production equipment from Jackson to Memphis. While driving in the left lane to pass an eighteen-wheeler, a deer stepped directly in front of my car. At 70 MPH, I hit the deer. Then I was rear-ended by the eighteen-wheeler behind me, which spun me back into the right lane and directly into the path of the other eighteen-wheeler, the one I had been passing. That truck hit me, too, still at 70 MPH. The rear of the car was crushed, the front was ripped off, and here I still am today. Three years after three separate impacts -- deer, semi-truck, semi-truck -- any one of which could have meant the end of my story.

To the left, imagine where the front of the car used to be;
to the right, imagine where I was leaning against the airbag.

I could write again about my feelings from that night, all of my gratitude and fear and renewed sense of purpose, all of which is still true. But instead, on this third anniversary, I'm literally counting my blessings. Here are just a few of the things that have happened in the three years since the night I miraculously did not die:

• I've been more intentionally grateful, almost every day (I'm still only human)
• I learned that when the chips were down, I did, in fact, have the right people around me, thank God
• I made a career shift to allow for more writing time; I have since written six scripts, three novels, and two more children's books, so far. I have had two plays published - one I wrote pre-wreck, one I wrote post-wreck - which are now being performed, in real theaters, by real actors, in places I've never been. I no longer feel like a wannabe when I say "I'm a writer."
• New friends came into my life, and new theater projects, and the urban family for which I am so thankful continued to grow... and old-gold friendships are even more precious to me than once they were
• My first nephew was born, and I got to hold him while he was still tiny, and now he's walking; I shared wonderful mugs and glasses of coffee and wine (and mimosas) with my parents (and with the fiancé's parents), and appreciated them even more; I've been able to cheer on all of my siblings as their lives moved forward in amazing and sometimes surprising ways 
• I fell in love with Doctor Who. I know-- what took me so long?! 
• I took the fiancé out of the country for the first time-- just to Canada, but now that we know that we can, in fact, leave the country and be let back in despite his rouge-ish ways, we have bigger plans ahead
• I snuggled with Dov, survived all the attempts on my life by the world's largest cat, and fostered and found homes for a dozen rescue dogs (one of them still with us-- oops)
• I wore bridesmaid dresses in two of my best friends' weddings, and danced at several other weddings, one of them just a few days post-wreck and while still donning a neck brace, and not to be a broken record, but seriously: I have been reminded more times than I can count what an amazing collection of people fill my life, including that hilarious, protective, loyal, and loving best friend of mine...
• ...to whom I am now engaged. http:// hen we got engaged, and started planning our own wedding 

Those are just a few of the thousand good moments and milestones I've been blessed to experience in the past three years. There have been bad days, too; funerals, illnesses, setbacks. But to get through my own bad days, and to be there for my loved ones on their bad days, is another category of blessing. Some blessings feel brutal, but are blessings nonetheless.

I sometimes reference anniversaries pretty lightly. We all do. Forgetting an anniversary is one of the world's oldest jokes... and, in fact, this year the fiancé forgot ours for the first time ever, despite me tagging him in a Facebook status about it, which he liked (true story). I forgave him, largely because soon we'll have a new anniversary date, so the September 30 one will eventually fade away. Still, a year and a half from now, when the fiancé is "the husband" and we celebrate our first anniversary, we'll laugh together about how we'll actually have been together for nearly eight years at that point. Assuming he doesn't forget the new anniversary.

Sometimes anniversaries can seem a little arbitrary. But sometimes it's important to remember not only the date an anniversary marks, but also everything that has happened on all the days in between, and everything we survived to reach this day.

So here's to anniversaries, and not taking a single one of them for granted.

Cheers!

On Jury Duty, Meat Grinders, and Deadlines

This is from a bygone fictional era.

Remember when summer was a time of vacation, sunshine, a beautiful and all-consuming embrace of something called "break?"

Yeah, in Grownuplandia, it's more like vocation, stressful deadlines, and a relentless and all-consuming ongoing attempt to avoid going "broke."

I shouldn't complain, really; things are good. But every once in awhile, you need to let off some steam about the LITTLE THINGS that add up to BIG FRUSTRATION, and that's what this post is all about. Be warned!

So, life's a stubborn beastie, and thus despite the fact that I have all of these incredibly important personal goals (which, yeah, now include planning a wedding - see, this post is totally on-topic), the rest of the world around me refuses to take a chill pill. Life keeps barreling forward. This is not unexpected. But what I was unprepared for this summer is just how many ADDITIONAL, INSANELY MUNDANE things the universe was planning to toss my way, such as:

For realsies.

JURY DUTY. I've been pre-selected to sit on a jury next week. I have no idea what this means, other than unlike everyone else I know here, I don't get to call in and find out whether or not I need to show up (my paperwork says very specifically NOT to do that). I have to be at the courthouse, 30 minutes away, at 8AM on Monday or be found "in contempt."

Yay, civic duty that will suck up an indeterminate amount of time starting Monday!

I HATE THIS THING.
THIS THING IS TERRIBLE.

A MEAT GRINDER. Sounds sort of horror-film-y and interesting, right? WRONG. To make a painfully long story short, about a year ago I got a meat grinder from a credit card rewards program. To anyone who knows my dietary habits, that's a bit silly.

So I sold it on Amazon.com - to some psychopath in New York who insisted on returning it, despite there being nothing wrong with it, and sent me many nasty messages with ALL CAPS AND IN-COLOR BOLDED YELLING TEXT threatening bad feedback if I didn't accept the return and cover all shipping costs (plus return money + original shipping.)

So I was now $40 in the hole on this stupid free meat grinder. After letting it sit in its box for another six months, I decided to try selling it on ebay in May. All went well. Or so I thought. Now THIS buyer wants a return, but has USED THE FREAKING MEAT GRINDER. I will bore you no further with details, but suffice to say it's looking like I'll wind up losing about $75 on this stupid thing. And letting the second buyer just keep it. Meanwhile, this whole debacle has not only cost me $75 but also a ton of time - literally DOZENS of emails, plus a few post office trips. How did I get into this situation? Oh, right. Stupid credit rewards program. I should shred that credit card.. If only I had a meat grinder...

DEADLINES. Somehow, on all work fronts-- all of which were supposed to be relatively calmer, schedule-wise, over the summer --I've had multiple moderate-to-huge-deadlines for the past several weeks. Deadlines associated with clients means deadlines I have to meet, to avoid that aforementioned BROKE fear.

Which means my personal writing deadlines, from this blog to the current novel I'm working on to keeping up with my reading (since you can't be a great writer if you don't read - just ask Stephen King) all get shoved back. It also means turning down other things I'd like to be doing, and feeling generally at Stress Level 10.

All of these things led to last night, when I dragged The Fiance out to a nice restaurant-- not because that's a nice thing to do, but because I had a deadline to write a review of the place --only to find it closed due to some plumbing issue or something. So we went elsewhere, and while we waited on our entrees, in an attempt to explain my mood and be sweet about it, I told him:

"I'm feeling overwhelmed right now. I have all these deadlines and the jury duty and the stupid freaking meat grinder debacle, and I'm behind on emails and wedding planning and house stuff and everything else... the nice thing is, there are a million things stressing out - but you're not one of them. So thank you."

To which he raised an eyebrow and said: "Give me time."

Ooooh, buddy...

(Luckily, he then said the right and reassuring things; he just can't help saying something snarky first. It's like a disease. A communicable disease which I also have, but with me, it's like a chronic re-occurring condition-- with that guy, it's terminal.)

Anyway, thanks for indulging me in a little vent-sesh. Now it's back to the deadlines, which I've decided WILL include one more post this week/weekend before jury duty begins. Or in a fit of meat grinder madness, I shred a calendar.

xoxo...