Moving. Again. Seriously. April 4, 2009

We’ve gone and done it again… we’re moving. The very thought of moving makes me nauseous, but this place was so cute we just couldn’t resist.

We currently live in a little triplex. Our unit is barely 500 sq ft, not including the laundry room. We pay more than you’d expect for it because we have a “yard” out back that consists of 3 narrow dirt-covered strips of land in a T shape. Plus we have a doggie door. It works out great for the pups, but there’s no enjoyment of the back yard. Plus, the pooches bring all of the dirt into the house with them no matter how many rugs we put down between the dog door and the carpeting…

Which brings us to the new place. The new place has a YARD. I don’t mean a patch of dirt… I mean a YARD. With GRASS. And a covered patio… and room for a garden… and a landlady who WANTS me to plant a garden.

Yard! Grass!

And inside? It

has hardwood floors, stainless appliances, a brand new washer/dryer, a remodeled bathroom and pretty white baseboards

It’s a tiny bit bigger than our place now… not by much, but the layout is much, much better. People will no longer have to walk through our bedroom to get to the bathroom. And we’ll actually have a hallway… a small one, but a hallway nonetheless.

At first, the idea of moving scared me. I love our neighbors so much. We’re like a little sorority… 4 of us and 4 dogs. It’s been wonderful. We’re like a little family. And in the building next to us is one of my absolute best friends… our living room windows look into her bedroom…

But that’s what’s great about the new place. It’s literally just 5 houses down from where we are now. So no, we won’t be sharing walls with the greatest neighbor ever, but we’ll still be so close. And now instead of having to tether the dogs out front when we hang out, they can all come hang out off-leash in our YARD.

Did I mention the yard? With a little dwarf lemon tree? And a pretty pink rose bush? And GRASS?

And we won’t be sharing any of our bedroom walls with the neighbors, which absolutely sucks about our current apt. The neighbor’s washer/dryer are against the bedroom wall where the head of our bed is. And our neighbor keeps late hours and does laundry in the middle of the night regularly.

PLUS, none of our windows look into other people’s windows. They all either face the yard or the quiet little side street.

And there’s even enough closet space for my YARN.

It’s just wonderful. We sign the lease next week and we move in May 1st.

Now we just have to pack. And them move 5 houses down. How the hell do you move 5 houses down? Does U-Haul charge by the yard instead of by the mile? Or should we just find some camels? The receptionist at our office said she moved from one NYC apt building to the one next door and she used a Radio Flyer wagon. If only we had a wagon… a really, really big wagon. That comes with 5 burly men (or women) to do all the heavy lifting.

Seriously… what’s the point of bubble-wrapping and box-taping when you’re just taking your stuff down the street?

I counted tonight, and my little plant that I shuffle around from one home to the next has moved 5 times in 8 years… this will make 6. That plant sure gets around.

An Open Letter to my Sister… March 26, 2009

Dear Jessica,

In a few weeks (okay, more like a month because I keep putting it off), you’re going to receive a save the date card for my wedding in October.  The actual invitations won’t be mailed for several months, but you’ll be receiving one of those as well.  It will be addressed to you and any guest you may wish to bring.

When these things come in the mail, I am begging you to pause for a moment to think about exactly what they mean before you disregard them.

Like it or not, I am your sister.  We’re related—neither of us has a choice in the matter.  We have a father in common—and grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.  For better or for worse, you are a part of me and I am a part of you.

Our father has been a real ass throughout our lives.  I hope you realize that you and Colt aren’t the only ones whose childhoods he skipped out on.  The only reason I ever got our father back at all was because he married your mother and settled into a new life that I could fit into more easily than the one he had before.  He didn’t have to work so hard because he could dump me on his new wife.

Our father hasn’t done very many things right in his life.  He was a terrible student, a hell-raising son, an awful husband and a seriously lousy father.  Still, he managed to do three things right—you, me and Colt. 

For that reason, on October 10^th, our father will walk me down the aisle.  Because if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here—I wouldn’t be the person I am, and I wouldn’t be settling down with the most wonderful partner in the world.

It was not my choice to miss out on your childhood.  I never would have chosen that in a million years.  Ask anyone who knows me—absolutely anyone—and they’ll tell you that I would have walked to the ends of the earth for ten minutes with you.  You are certainly old enough now to understand that sometimes the most crucial aspects of our lives are completely beyond our control.

So before you dismiss me—or my wedding—consider for a moment how it felt to be dismissed by our father.

I am reaching out to you, Jessica.  I want so desperately just to get to know you that I look in on your MySpace status every day.  (Don’t worry, you’ve blocked me so that’s all I can see.)  I get these tiny little glimpses of this beautiful girl I used to know… and I want so desperately to know more.  When you’re having a bad day, I want to hear about it.  When you’re hurting, I want to be there to offer a hug over a latte.  

Getting to know you is about as easy as chewing rocks.  I can’t keep grinding away forever—eventually, my teeth will fall out.

Please consider all of this.  Consider unblocking me from your life.  Consider being a part of my wedding day.  There’s a place next to me up there reserved just for my sister—just in case she ever decides she wants to be there.  Or, there’s a seat in the audience with your name on it—even in the back row if that’s where you want to be.  And you can sit at any table you want—as close or as far away from the family as you want to be.

Your sister will only get married once.  And after that, in a few years, I’ll start having kids and you’ll be an aunt.

Do you really want to miss out on that?  Because I sure as hell don’t want my future family to miss out on you.

All my love,

Molly

And Suddenly… March 22, 2009

We are in the midst of wedding planning craziness.

It’s not so bad this time.

We booked a photographer yesterday, and she is wonderful. She’s going to shoot an engagement session for us at a park in a few weeks, and I’m so excited that I had dreams about it all night last night. (After I spent an hour on the computer looking at fun dresses for the shoot.)

Today, we meet with a florist.

Yesterday, I tried on the first round of wedding dresses. It’s a bit surreal, stepping into a wedding dress. It’s one thing to see them on models in photos… entirely different to see how the actually do transform you. I fell in love with the first dress I tried on, but since I’ve only looked at one dress shop, I wasn’t ready to commit to it yet. (Allure Bridals 8550… can’t link to it because their site is silly, but you could look it up if you’re bored.) Then the photographer told me yesterday that she can’t count the number of times brides have told her that despite trying on a thousand dresses, they eventually went back to the first dress at the first shop.

Everything gets carried away so quickly… our small, inexpensive wedding has grown to several tens of thousands of dollars and 130 people… and yet, I don’t mind. Not really, anyway.

202 days to go.

Ten Things… January 29, 2009

Ten  things I need to do to this weekend to improve my mental health & overall happiness before Monday:

1. Hang the new picture in the bedroom.
2. Call cable company and get a DVR.
3. Go shoe shopping.  Buy new black shoes for work.  (With gift card!  And coupons!)  Get new dress socks for work.  Return brown shoes to DSW because heels are too freaking high for running around the office and I was under the influence of 30% off when I bought them.
4. Get rid of old shoes in closet.
5. Get rid of crappy acrylic yarn stashed all over the place, including in the garage so that I have room to…
6. Buy yarn & needles to start knitting February Lady sweater.  (At the Unwind Yarn’s sale on Sunday!)
7. Find two or three completely new recipes to cook for dinners next week.
8. Experiment with some great new dessert for Sunday’s L Word Extravaganza.
9. Go grocery shopping.
10. Make lentil soup recipe for lunches next week.

Three Dreams… January 26, 2009

Last night after consuming a few bottles of wine with a few good friends, I had three wedding dreams and a horribly interrupted night’s sleep.  If this is how it’s going to be for the next 9 months until the wedding, I’m going to need drugs.  Seriously.  Legal ones, but drugs nonetheless.

Dream Number One:

I’m dressed in my wedding dress, sitting alone in the backseat of the limo.  Things have been hurried and I’m running behind.  It’s an hour until the wedding ceremony is set to start.  All of a sudden, I realize that we never hired a photographer.  I start frantically flipping through my little wedding planning binder for photographers phone numbers and making one phone call after the next to no avail.  I start to cry a most pathetic cry.  I wake up.

Dream Number Two:

Our wedding reception is underway at a beach house on stilts.  In true SoCal fashion, there is an earthquake.  I crawl on my hands and knees to the front door to get out; all the while the ground is still shaking.  I make it outside and everyone gathers on the shore of the ocean, huddled in the dark.  I wake up.

Dream Number Three:

Again, the wedding reception is in full swing, and it’s more than halfway through the night.  Val has left already, and in the dream that is perfectly normal.  All of a sudden, I panic because Val is gone and I realize that we never had our first dance together or either of the father daughter dances.  I start getting really upset and disappointed when I realize that I am standing in the middle of the empty dance floor wearing nothing but a towel that just barely wraps around me.  I wake up.

Some things in these dreams are obvious, and some are not.  The dance floor in a towel is pretty obviously playing to vulnerability.  The fact that Val’s face was never seen in any of the three dreams seems a bit odd to me, but I’m probably overanalyzing it.  The earthquake?  I have no clue.  Instability, maybe?  But there’s really nothing unstable about the wedding right now.  It will happen… I have no doubt.  October 10^th.  There are $2,000 riding on it already…

Roly Poly… January 24, 2009

My little man is being so sweet tonight (he’s always sweet) that I just had to share his little pouty face with the world…

 

In his Dog Park XXL Sweatshirt

Contracts… January 23, 2009

I have the wedding contracts in my email inbox right now.  All I have to do is print them out, sign them and fax it all back in along with a nice chunk of a deposit.  As soon as I do, our October 10th wedding will be official. 

In true Molly fashion, I’ve already started designing the invitations.  (Hey, a graphic designer HAS to have the best invitations EVER, right?)

It’s all a bit bittersweet at the moment… although that could be the PMS talking.  I’m just a bit sad that I don’t have a sister to share all of this with.  I love that my brother will be up there with me, but brothers don’t care about the lace on your dress or what color the bridesmaids are going to wear.

And that’s the last time I’ll ever complain about my sister not being around.  I promise.  I’m done dwelling on it.  She thinks I wronged her somehow, and the only way to set things straight is to have a conversation with her… and she won’t let me have that conversation with her.  So I’m done.

And onto happier things… has everyone out there heard of Envelopments?  You can put together the most awesome invitations ever using the envelopments line.  Our invitations will be a combination of a beautiful textured red paper called Kimono Red, a metallic called Bronze (brings in our chocolate brown), and Ecru.  I can’t wait to get started on them, but I suppose we need to worry about the Save the Dates first, eh?  We’re planning to send those out around St. Patty’s day.

Any suggestions for creative wedding favors?

Starting Over from Scratch January 20, 2009

Ahh, wedding…

For a few weeks, the word “wedding” was equivalent to some of the nastier 4-letter words floating about the english language.  Fortunately, things have calmed down some. 

My mom and I got into quite the fight last week… she said some awful things that never should have been said, and I don’t really care to dwell on it beyond that.  She apologized, and believe me when I tell you that I don’t believe my mother has ever apologized before.

The fight with my mom came on the eve of Val’s parents offering to help with wedding costs, which essentially enables us to have a much nicer, much easier wedding than we’d originally envisioned.  Their suggestion was that we look into the location where Val’s sister was married two years ago.  It was both beautiful and affordable, so we jumped on the phone to find out about availability.  They didn’t have our July date, but they did have August 22nd.  

We were excited.  I was ecstatic.  It would be more the dream wedding day and less the mountain of stress that our original wedding plan had been shaping up to be.

And then Val’s sister called to say that she didn’t really want us having our wedding at the same location as her during the same time of year.  

You can probably imagine how well that went over with this redhead.  (Not so well.)

But in the end, it is all working out for the best.  We’ve visited 3 potential wedding locations so far, and we’ll visit two more tomorrow.  We decided to give ourselves some extra time, and so our July wedding that became an August wedding is now actually an October wedding.  Summer plans have all been tossed in favor of a whole new look and feel for Fall.  The wedding will be October 3rd or October 10th, depending on which location we choose.  Regardless of that, we will leave for our 7-night cruise of the Mexican Riviera on October 11th.

And so the wedding insanity has begin again.  Starting over has its benefits, though.  Somehow, looking at cakes this time around seems so much more real.

Our new colors are scarlet red, chocolate brown and ivory.  We have a total of 4 bridesmaids, one matron of honor, one man of honor and two ushers.  Two fathers to walk two brides down the aisle.  Two father daughter dances.  Two brides for one bridal dressing room.  

Hang in there, folks.  This is gonna get interesting.

Dream… December 14, 2008

I had a dream just now that my sister called me from the airport asking me where I was.  Apparently, I was supposed to have picked her up… only I didn’t know that I was supposed to have picked her up because I haven’t spoken to her in some crazy number of years that I’d rather forget.  So she is upset because I’m not there, and I am simultaneously trying to run out the front door and figure out where she is just as my cell phone is giving me the beep of the dead battery.  I start panicking even more because once my phone dies, she’ll have no way of reaching me and vice versa.

And then Twix woke us up wanting her breakfast.

It doesn’t take a genius to psychoanalyze that one, does it?

*sigh*

In other news, today is the day that we visit the location where he wedding will be.  My mom is coming along so she can see for herself, and we’ll take pictures and measurements and figure out exactly how many tables we can get in this place.

Yay for weddngs!

You know, I really wish I was rushing out the door to pick my forgotten sister up from the airport right now.

Couples Counseling November 29, 2008

Who knew planning a wedding was so… intense?  Certainly not me.  I absolutely know that I was not prepared to be assaulted with ideas flowing from my mother at a hundred miles an hour.  From the wedding march to the flamenco guitarists she wants to have during dinner, the woman is making me insane.

My boss told me that she and her husband ended up in therapy over their wedding planning efforts, and at this point, I am honestly not even remotely surprised.  Wedding planning is complicated and definitely not for the faint of heart.

In the end, I think everyone will be happy.  I hope.  

My mother keeps increasing the budget to accommodate her growing list of “we should do _____!” and “what if we _____?”

What we will have is a wedding for about 100.  An outdoor ceremony on July 25th with an indoor, evening reception.  Our colors are a light tangerine and a pale lime.  Bridesmaids will wear knee-length white summery dresses with tangerine colored satin sashes at the waist.  Both brides will wear flowy white wedding gowns.  I’m undecided on a veil, but my boss has offered me hers, so I’ll probably give it a shot.

Our goal for the overall feel of things is a back yard wedding… only not in a back yard.  We’ll likely have two caterers.  We want to have the taco people do the main entree, and then we’ll have someone else take care of the cocktail hour and the side dishes.

I realized sometime last week that I completely overlooked someone very important in my life for the maid of honor spot… my brother.  This is a non-traditional wedding, so who says I can’t have a best man?  I’m hoping I’ll see him today so I can ask him if he’ll do it.  I have two other bridesmaids as well.  One is a close friend, and one cousin.  It was hard to narrow it down because there are several other friends I would have loved to include.   Val’s matron of honor will be her sister, and bridesmaids will be two of her close cousins.

My mom spent $49 on bridal magazines on Wednesday night, and I bought a book on etiquette so that I can stop asking my (ex-wedding planner) boss 20 million questions every day.

We’re still working on flowers, linens, etc., but we’ll get there eventually.