Travel

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Ask Me Anything Answers, Part 5

I got so many wonderful, thought-provoking questions from lovely readers during NaBloPoMo, but I took a rather lengthy break from answering them and still have a few to address! 

Gigi of Gigi’s Ramblings asks:

A follow up to the How I Met My Husband – how long was the engagement? 

Once we got married, friends and family alike said, “FINALLY.” We met in fall of our junior year at college and fell in love rather quickly. We moved in together in two years later while I attended graduate school, and then moved together to a different state two years after that so my husband could start medical school. We finally got engaged in September of the second year of medical school, and then got married halfway through his final med school year. That’s seven years from meeting to marriage. Seven. Years.   

One of these days I should post about our engagement. And maybe I should post the story of my engagement ring, which is a “fake” family heirloom.

And, I’d love to hear about the wedding too. Based on the description of your dress at the college formal, I’m guessing that your wedding dress was pretty amazing too. 

My wedding was a dream wedding. My parents offered us a down payment on a house or a wedding, and we (I, probably) chose the wedding. I am cringing at that now, because WHAT A POOR FINANCIAL DECISION?! I suppose I was 25 at the time I (we?) made this decision, and should have been capable of making a wise choice. But looking back, WHAT was I thinking? And yet, it was a fairytale day and I have (mostly) wonderful memories and everything worked out okay and I don’t regret it.

We got married in my home state, in a space that has been special to me since I was very young, and which I had been able to share with my husband in the many years of our courtship. We had a fairly small wedding – I think we invited about 75 people, and I’m guessing about 50 were able to attend. We got married in a tiny, non-denominational church, its alter backed by enormous windows that overlooked the snow covered mountains. Then we had the reception in the restaurant of a ski lodge.

The food was spectacular. Our dinner menu included a make-your-own pasta bar, tiny shot glasses of perfect creamy butternut squash soup, and miniature Brie grilled cheese sandwiches. We had huckleberry mimosas and a candy bar at which guests could fill up their own favor bags. Nearly all of our college friends attended, which was special to us; my husband and I met at college and we had a very tight-knit group of friends that we shared. We spent the evening dancing together in a big happy group enfolded by warmth and candlelight while outside enormous snowflakes drifted down from the sky.

My dress was strapless, with a sweetheart neckline, a lace bodice, and a full, satin skirt with a long train. Do I have a photo of it? No one had iPhones back in 2008, so it seems unlikely… Oh, right. Our photographer gave us a big binder full of thumbnails of all the photos he took, so here are photos of a few of the thumbnails that at least give you at least a sense of the dress. I never had a “this is it!” moment with my dress, and in fact ended up working with the designer to create a custom dress that I loved by piecing together parts of other dresses. And then I got sick in the weeks leading up to the wedding and lost so much weight we had to do an emergency last minute fitting session and my dress was QUITE baggy in the boobage area. 

Looking back at these photos brings back some of the angst of the day. The person who did my makeup was running late, so we were late to the church and ran out of time to take proper photos. So I don’t really love ANY of the photos from that day. I’d wanted the kind of artsy pictures you often see of the dress hanging in gauzy light in front of a window, and pictures of the shoes and rings, and fun photos with the bridesmaids. But since we were so behind, all our photos took place in the basement of the church. I don’t know if you’ve been to many church fellowship halls, but they are not known for their beauty, and this one was no different. (My husband and his groomsmen got to take AMAZING photos outside the reception venue, and they are very cool and beautiful.) Also, while I had a hair trial with my stylist that went perfectly, something was wrong on the day of the wedding and she could NOT get a good curl in my hair. So when I look at photos, I haaaaaaaate my hair. Apparently I am still salty about wedding imperfections nearly fifteen years later. Obviously, none of it matters at ALL, then or now.

Here. Look at a slightly blurry photo of of a thumbnail of our cake. It was vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream (NO FONDANT) and huckleberry jam in between the layers. I loved it; my husband wasn’t as big a fan, unfortunately.

Much to my mother’s horror, the candles had real flames. Our best man gave his toast in front of that stone fireplace and as he talked, he kept backing closer and closer to the candles lined up on the stone, filling my head and my mother’s, I’m sure, with visions of imminent conflagration. He did not knock any of them over; there were no fires.

Another thing I loved about our wedding were the flowers. I adored my bouquet. Irises are my favorite flower, and it turned out exactly as I wanted it to. My bridesmaids each carried a bouquet of pure white flowers, each one chosen because that flower was special to that bridesmaid.

My something old was a handkerchief from my husband’s grandmother’s wedding. It was tucked into the wrap of the bouquet stems.
Roses, tulips, hydrangeas, and calla lilies.

Okay, that’s enough reminiscing about our really very magical wedding! On to the rest of the questions!

Any siblings? And are you close? 

I have one sibling, a younger brother. We love each other, and I enjoy his company, but I don’t know that we are “close.” He is six years my junior, which means that he was in middle school when I went to college. That’s a big gap. It also means that I perpetually think of him as my baby brother, with glasses that were too big for his face and skinny limbs and straw colored hair that stuck up on the top of his head. In reality, he is a six foot tall former soldier in his mid-thirties. He and his wife live four thousand miles away. We got to see them twice last year, which was wonderful. But it may be several years until we see them again. We never talk on the phone but we do text and email occasionally. (More about our relationship here.) He is in law enforcement, so he very patiently answers all the ridiculous questions about policing I come up with as I’m writing my silly murder mysteries. He is brilliant, hilarious, brave, and one of the most level-headed people I’ve ever met. 

Are you on Twitter? (Is this even a relevant question since Twitter seems to be in free fall as I type?) 

Technically, I am on Twitter. I have a Twitter account – one for this blog, one for the book blog – but I don’t really tweet. Twitter makes me VERY nervous, like I’m forever on the edges of a conversation other people are having. I do have a book-focused Instagram account, and I am more active there… but “more active” is not active active, if you know what I mean.

I know for this particular type of question the answer will vary (or, it would for me) depending on various factors. If money, school/work obligations, time, etc., were not obstacles where would you go for your dream trip/vacation?

If money/family/time were not obstacles, I would go on an extended trip to Europe with my husband and Carla. It would be so fun to rent a house in different countries for, say, a month, and then drive around to various cities in each country to really get a sense of what it’s like to live there. It has been my great good fortune to visit Europe several times and I love it and want to go back. There are a bunch of countries I’ve never visited, and a bunch that I would love to revisit, and old favorites (like France and Germany) that I have visited multiple times and still want to enjoy again.

Thanks for all the fun questions, Gigi! If anyone else has any questions or topics you want me to touch on, please feel free to ask me anything.

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Weigh In Wednesday (Post Not in Any Way Related to Weight)

My hands are still shaking from a horrendously embarrassing experience, so I am trying to distract myself with some fun and fluff. 

Oh, you want to share in my humiliation first? Okay. 

I texted the owner of The Kitten to see if Carla could come visit him (“him” meaning the kitten; the owner is a woman). I had recently put her number in my phone, at Carla’s request. She’d (the kitten owner, not Carla) texted me so I would have her number, and I’d added her to my contacts. I tend to add people to my phone as “FirstName LastName,” and then never include any other identifying details… and you are well aware that I have a terrible memory… so there are multiple people in my phone who are now complete mysteries to me. One of these days I should really go through my phone and delete those people. 

I clicked on the kitten owner’s name – noting briefly that there was no prior text from her; I must have deleted it – and texted her: Hi, this is Carla’s mom. Is there a good time for Carla to come visit The Kitten?

A few minutes later I got back a series of question marks. 

As you may have intuited from my expert foreshadowing, I texted THE WRONG PERSON. Apparently, I have two people with the same first name in my phone. A fact which I have long since forgotten. The one whose name popped up when I started the text was the wrong one. 

And I have NO IDEA WHO SHE IS. 

Is this an old work contact? Is this someone for whom I’ve done freelance work? Is she a fellow parent from Carla’s school? Is she a board member I’ve interviewed for a writing project? Is she someone I went to grad school with? Is she a friend of a friend I’d connected with at some point? Is she some sort of service provider I have employed at some point? ZERO IDEA. 

I typed back, So sorry! I must have the wrong number!

But what I REALLY should have typed back was, So sorry! I must have typed the wrong FirstName!

Because if she is in my phone, there is a real likelihood that we know each other, and have interacted via phone before. Which means that there is a real possibility that she is sitting there wondering a) why I am contacting her about a kitten she doesn’t know and b) why I am pretending it was a wrong number and c) why I haven’t asked her how her work/family/life is. 

But I have no idea who this person is, or why she is a contact in my phone. I even googled her and I swear I have never seen her before in my life. But she was in my phone. So we must have known each other at some point! 

All I can do is hope that this person has as terrible a memory as I do, and has long since removed me from her phone, and isn’t feeling hurt/miffed/weirded out by my faux pas. 

LET’S MOVE ON TO LESS HORRIFYING TOPICS.

I have some questions for you. 

Weigh In #1: What food do you hate, but wish you didn’t? While I am a very choosy eater, I don’t feel particularly bad about it most of the time. I eat enough of a variety of foods that I’m pretty confident I can go to any restaurant or any friend’s house and find something to eat. I’ve never once thought, “I wish I enjoyed lamb. Or beets.” But there are a few foods I hate that I really wish I didn’t. 

Tomatoes. I hate tomatoes so very, very much. But they are one of those wildly ubiquitous foods that show up all the time, in places expected and not. (I cannot tell you how frequently I have encountered tomatoes on a Caesar salad, when they have no place in a Caesar salad.) Life would be so much easier and more pleasant if I just liked tomatoes! Or could at least tolerate them! Even friends who kindly ask about food preferences before they invite us over sometimes have tomatoes in their offerings, and I am just so very weary of being that picky person who doesn’t like tomatoes. 

Oatmeal. I cannot bring myself to enjoy oatmeal. Outside of oatmeal cookies, which are the sole exception. But lots of people genuinely enjoy oatmeal, and it seems like such a hearty, healthful food. I really wish I liked it. 

Eggs. Outside of scrambled eggs – which, even then, I only like a specific way – I avidly dislike eggs in ALL FORMS. But they are versatile and easy and full of protein. I want to like them. 

Weigh In #2: What is the best seat on an airplane? I prefer the window, myself. I like being tucked in next to the wall, I like being able to look out during turbulence to reassure myself that we are not in fact falling out of the sky, I like being able to lean my head against a solid surface. But when I fly with my family, my husband is the one who gets the window (although sometimes he swaps with Carla) and I get the aisle. I do not care for the aisle, because it puts me in close proximity to people, and those people tend to be very oblivious to the boundary between their space in the aisle and my space in my actual seat. The only benefit to the aisle seat is easy access to bathroom breaks. But then again, you have to be the one to pop up and down while the middle- or window-seater squeezes past you to the bathroom. I still remember the time I flew and a woman in front of me refused to swap seats with her row-mate’s spouse, because the spouse was in a window seat. “I have a bum leg, and I prefer the aisle so I can stretch out my leg,” she said. But… you aren’t supposed to stretch your leg into the aisle, right??!?! Isn’t that a tripping hazard? Isn’t that begging for a new leg injury when the drinks cart slams into your shin? 

Weigh In #3: What is your worst time-wasting habit? I am already terrible about spending too much time on social media. But more recently, I have found new depths to my time wasting online, which is that I have gotten sucked into watching gender reveals on Instagram. There is literally nothing beneficial about this habit – except that I derive occasional joy from the rare parent that shows true, unbridled joy at the result. Okay, and usually only if that unbridled joy is coming from the male parent, and in response to a pink result. These videos are fascinating, though. There are a bunch that feature the same bearded guy, who must run some sort of company that offers and records these sorts of reveals. There are a bunch where the timing is off. There are a bunch where the couple have other children, some of whom seem very disaffected by the whole event. 

The worst – and most fascinating – ones are the ones where one parent is CLEARLY disappointed by the result. I am not faulting someone for being disappointed: when I was pregnant, I was SURE I was having a boy, and I pictured a tiny blond copy of my husband. I got very attached to this fantasy. When we found out that Carla was a girl, I was disappointed. I hope you know that not a single cell of my body is disappointed NOW, now that Carla is a real wonderful human and it has become clear to me that everything I love about her is completely unrelated to her sex. But I get the disappointment. What I find perplexing is recording that disappointment and then posting it for the world to see. Perplexing and fascinating.  

Anyway. That is how I have been wasting far too many minutes of my one wild and precious life lately. I blame spring break. 

Now it’s your turn. Please weigh in. 

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Skipping Dinners This Week Again, Due to Ongoing Ahhhhhhhhhh!

I continue to feel like a planet whirling so fast it is about to spin off its axis. The frigid vacuum of space sounds pretty pleasant right about now. I wouldn’t be able to breathe, but it would be so quiet. 

I had a meeting this morning about the school project I am working on. My project partner and I are so lucky a) to have each other (well. I am lucky to have her. Remains to be seen whether I will be useful for anything but flailing.) and b) that the previous head of this project has made herself available to us for questions and coaching. But today’s meeting was… well, let’s say it is A LARGE PART of why I am spinning so fast. It seemed like we would ask a question about how best to execute Task A. And we’d talk through it and get to the end, and then an unrelated topic would insinuate itself into the conversation briefly, and then, BAM, by the way, Unrelated Topic is actually crucial and you need to do it BEFORE you can execute Task A. Like, you’re digging away at this nice deep hole, and then when you get to the bottom, someone yells, “WAIT! You were supposed to dig to the left of this hole first!” So you go back and dig the new hole, but the dirt you displace from the new hole crumbles and fills up the hole you already dug, which you are now going to have to dig again, but in a slightly different way.

Funsies. 

Speaking of meetings! I met with my potential client yesterday. And by “client” I mean one organization, but multiple people. As I mentioned in my previous fret about this encounter, I had no idea what to wear. Not only have I had very very few business encounters since I left full-time work SIX YEARS AGO OMG, but I have also put on quite a lot of weight since then, rendering any very old, out-of-style business wear wholly unwearable. I have this beautiful cream silk blouse that I have kept all these years, so I tried it on, but my boobs kept trying to make a break for it. I figured that boob wrangling would add a layer of stress I didn’t need to my meeting, so I scrapped that idea.

I was to meet the client(s) for coffee, and my Fashionable Friend told me that I could wear jeans and a blouse or a nice sweater for that type of meeting. (Do you have a Fashionable Friend? She is very nice to have around. For lots of regular-friendshippy reasons, but also because she always knows the right answer to style questions.) So I found a nice top and a blazer and wore those with dark jeans and heels. It was the right call: the clients were wearing a range from jeans/leggings to dresses, so I felt nicely in the middle. And I was comfortable, and my boobs behaved themselves. 

The meeting itself was very nice. The organization is one I am familiar with and I love its mission and product. And the people were friendly and smart and totally the type of people I would want to be friends with. It was a little intimidating, being in a room with multiple people, unmasked. But the strangeness of that faded quickly. The single drink option during the meeting was coffee. Which, as you may recall, I do not drink. I am SURE I could have asked for some water, but by the time I had the opportunity, it would have been A Big Pain, so I just went with the coffee option. I AM BREEZY. By the way, not only was it coffee, it was black coffee, which I have never even tasted. And WOWZA did it ever go straight to my head! For a few deeply uncomfortable minutes, I felt sure I would throw up or pass out, which is surely not the best first impression to make upon potential clientele. You will be pleased to learn (as I was) that I neither vomited nor swooned, and made it through, hopefully leaving them with the feeling that I am friendly and competent and not a weird socially awkward mole who hasn’t been around people in two years. 

I am getting more and more excited about our upcoming travel. But oh Mylanta there is SO MUCH LAUNDRY. I wish people would just stop wearing clothing so that I can get allllllll the laundry done and folded. Then we can set aside the things we want to pack for the trip, and make do with whatever remains. 

Also, my husband – who is legitimately WILDY busy at work, and never gets home before seven anymore – did a couple loads of laundry over the weekend. I discovered today that he had left the clean clothes in the laundry basket. A, I appreciate that he did some laundry; that is awesome. And B, I am constantly leaving laundry in the basket, or on top of the guest room bed, sometimes for many many days. But it still made me feel betrayed and petulant. 

Speaking of betrayed and petulant: Poor deprived Carla wailed at me today that she has no clothes!!!! and I never do any laundry!!!! and look at her overflowing laundry basket!!!!! The same child who has an entire closet full of dresses, and an entire drawer full of jeans and corduroys that she begged me to buy for her at the beginning of the school year. 

What did she end up wearing? Leggings and a t-shirt. And because it is still chilly here, I dredged up a sweater for her to throw on top. 

WHERE are all her sweaters, I wonder? Perhaps in the overflowing laundry bin, which I must once again put through the wash. I did notice that the bottom drawer of her dresser doesn’t close all the way, and it seems to be because there are some shirts that have fallen back behind the drawer, into the empty space of the dresser. But I cannot for the life of me get to them! The dresser is bolted to the wall and the bottom of the dresser doesn’t have enough room for me stick even a pair of kitchen tongs under. I guess the shirts will stay there until we move someday? Or perhaps we will have to figure out how to take the drawer off its track? But who knows how many shirts and sweaters are hiding back there! 

I am stressing about the keeping-keto portion of our vacation. Part of me wants to just give it up and eat as though I am on vacation… but part of me is deeply reluctant to cede the small amount of ground I have gained. Fortunately, most restaurants (YES, we will be eating in restaurants!!! Ahhhhh!!!!) offer things like steak or salmon. I will simply have to resist things like mashed potatoes and baked potatoes and French fries and desserts. Sounds doable, if not fun, but I suspect my resolve may crumble when everyone else around me is eating something delicious that I “can’t” have. My biggest hurdle, I think, will be hamburgers. I LOVE a hamburger, and I LOVE a nice buttery toasty bun, and I LOVE ketchup, none of which are keto-friendly. Well. We’ll see how it goes. 

Speaking of keto, I have ZERO IDEA what we will eat for dinner this week. It seems wholly unfair to have to keep planning and preparing meals when I am already planning and preparing for a trip. Maybe we will do a stir fry, using one of the MANY delicious ideas you suggested on this post? Maybe a pizza night? Maybe… a salad? I feel like I have some veggies I want to use up before we leave. Some sort of… roasted veggies smorgasbord? 

This period of Too Much Too Much Ahhhhhhh! has served as a valuable reminder to me of just how critical my daily workout it. I am not winning any ab competitions or even doing any sort of visible toning (perhaps there is a LOT of tone beneath the fat and skin; hard to say), but working out is almost the only thing that makes me feel tethered to reality. Sweating for a half hour, grunting my way through a bunch of awful squats, hefting weights over my head, focusing only on the directions/encouragement of the coach while I grind out another rep – whatever it is, it helps my thoughts slow their frantic dash around my brain. (And I know I have recommended her before, but I just adore Lindsey of Nourish Move Love. She is extremely kind and supportive and offers tons of modifications if you don’t have weights/don’t want to bend your knees so deeply/don’t own a booty band. And she does all the exercises with you, panting and groaning over the tough parts, which makes it all seem doable.)

I am going to leave you with some flowers. As per Swistle, I did not wait until my previous flowers had perished to replace them. Instead, I bought a new bouquet and added it to the original group. Carla requested white tulips, so white tulips it is. 

Last week’s batch are definitely looking a little faded and saggy. But you know what? They have their own beauty despite their age. And they are still standing.