Author Archives: Cindy

There will be no male strippers, thank you

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The week thus far:
* My car wouldn’t start yesterday morning. I’ve had it for nearly 4 years, and it has never, ever not started before. Dave finally managed to get it running, but it was making some weird rattling noise, unlike anything it has ever done. I wigged out. We took it to the dealership, and I’m waiting to find out how much this is going to cost to fix. My poor car. My poor little car that always runs perfectly, so I never take it in for tune-ups. I’m such an irresponsible car-owner. Cry!

* I can’t stop sniffling. I think I stirred up too much dust when I was trying to clean 2 nights ago. I took a decongestant, so now I’m sniffling slightly less, and I feel full-on stoned instead. I’m not sure which option is better, honestly.

* I forgot to mention last week that I sliced through the fingernail of my left index finger when I was chopping up turkey bacon to put in my omelet. It still hurts, and I’m basically waiting for the top half of my fingernail to fall off. Fun! It’s so gross, I wear a band-aid on it so no one (particularly me) has to see it. I have a feeling that I’m going to need one single acrylic fingernail for my wedding, and this pisses me off immensely.

* We had our cake-tasting last night. Hoo lordy, that was fun. Bring on the cake samples! Whee!

* The deck-building (courtesy of future brother-in-law Steve) is in full swing, and I have resigned myself to the fact that there is going to be dirt, as well as little muddy cat paw prints, all over the downstairs of our house. Every time I see the dirt, I give a little sigh of resignation instead of reaching for the broom, and every time, I die a tiny death. It’s killing me to leave the dirt there, but there’s no point in trying to clean it yet, when I know full well that more dirt is right behind it. In a couple of weeks, the deck will be built, so humans and felines alike will have a place to wipe their grubby little footsies before they enter our abode. Whee again!

* Tomorrow, I’m flying to Memphis for my bridal shower/bachelorette party. My girlfriends from college are throwing it for me, it should be a lot of fun. And since I couldn’t decide on a gift registry until recently (we just combined 2 households, we have too many dishes as it is, do I really have to go pick out a china pattern??), they’re making it a lingerie-themed shower. Translation: I’m going to Memphis congested & grumpy (see above), and I’ll come back hung over with a suitcase full of trashy underpants. Whee times three!!

Hope everyone has a happy Easter.

reading request

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Warning: More wedding stuff ahead. I feel bad about the fact that my brother is the only sibling of either Dave or I who isn’t involved in our wedding. My sister is my maid-of-honor, Dave’s brother is his best man, and my brother doesn’t have a “job” at all. There aren’t going to be enough people to require an usher, and I tend to think that most people are intelligent enough to figure out for themselves how to sign a guestbook. So, my sister suggested that perhaps I could have my brother do a reading.

Here’s the problem: I have no idea what on earth he could read. I thought of the love verse from 1st Corinthians in the Bible, but I think that’s totally overdone. Plus, I’m trying to keep the Bible/God/Jesus references to a minimum. I thought about maybe a poem, but my knowledge of poetry is limited at best, and honestly, every poem I can think of is so cheesy that it makes me cringe. So I’m putting out a request here: Any ideas? I’m guessing this is really going to be Sally’s forte, but I know a couple of you other girls who read this might have some suggestions. I need something that seems wedding-y (or at least has love-related overtones), but that won’t make me want to throw up and die. Translation: no Emily Dickinson. Help?

The Loud Catholics From South Louisiana & Their Progeny

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The wedding planning has started getting interesting. (Hmm, how many words with -ing suffixes can you fit in one sentence? I’m sure there’s a better way to say that, somehow.) First of all, it looks like a whole bunch of my relatives are planning to come – which is great, it just took me by surprise that so many of them would make an effort to fly across the country to be at my wedding. I guess I didn’t know how important I am. 🙂 A good number of them are in Texas, Georgia, Louisiana & North Carolina, so it’s not exactly a short trip. So that’s cool, although I had a temporary moment of panic when I realized that we may not have enough room for people to sit during the ceremony. But you know, the ceremony is 15 minutes long, so people can stand if they have to, and then there will be plenty of seating for the reception. No big deal. Take a deep breath, everything is fine.

Anyway, these relatives are all from my mom’s side of the family – my mom is one of 7 kids and my dad is an only child, so I have lots of aunts, uncles, & cousins (hi, Alphagal & SNG!) on my mom’s side, and none on my dad’s. So that works out fine, everyone already knows each other and it’s a really fun group. When I told my mom about everyone that was going to be at the wedding, all she said was, “poor Dave.” Later, when I got home from work and told Dave about everyone who was coming, he was really excited about it for the first few minutes. Then the reality started to sink in. He said, “Our wedding is going to be so loud, isn’t it?” Yes, sweetie, it will be. Sorry. It’s one of those things about growing up as one of 7 kids – if you want to be heard, you have to yell. Growing up as the offspring of one of these yellers, you have to be even louder. So I imagine that with everyone in one place, we’ll probably approach sonic boom level.

In other news, Dave’s dad is apparently coming over for our wedding, which came as a total surprise. He hasn’t ever been to the U.S. before, even though Dave has lived here for over 6 years, so we weren’t quite expecting him to show up now. It’s good news, I just worry that most Brits already think of Americans as generally being loud & obnoxious, and I fear that my family will at least fulfill the volume end of that stereotype. Oh well, hopefully we’ll all be loud and nice, or loud and fun, so at least the obnoxious part will be proven incorrect. Here’s hoping. And if all else fails, at least there’ll be an open bar.

starting a new routine

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Yesterday marked my very first day at the Giant Software Company. It looks like it’s going to be really good – I like the people on the team that I’ve met so far, my boss is really cool, and it involves lots of fun writing stuff, which I enjoy doing. So that’s good. Adjusting to office life again, however, is kicking my butt. I spent the last 6 months at my previous job working from home, which meant I’d usually roll out of bed around 9:00, work in my PJ’s for a couple of hours, then take a break for “lunch” (actually breakfast for me), and get dressed. Now, however, I’m up at 6 a.m., and putting my make-up on is something I do within the first half hour of being awake. I am so not used to this. My eyes ache from having gunk slapped on them from the second I wake up. And before any of you guys offer helpful suggestions: yes, I must wear make-up. I am a southern girl, and I was “brought up right,” and that means that I have not left the house without at least a little powder & mascara since I was 13 years old. Don’t waste your breath telling me that I look fine without it, I know better. I am a girly-girl, and I am proud of it.

Anyway, the point is: I’m tired. Really tired. The kind of tired where you go to bed at 9:30 at night, and you still feel beat the next morning. Dave and I are carpooling because he works less than a 1/2-mile away, and since we have to drive past our gym on our commute, we’re making an effort to keep our gym clothes in the car so we can stop & work out on our way home in the evenings. We didn’t go yesterday because I was so beat, and we needed groceries, so we just went to the store & headed home. But today, I am determined to go. We’ve been pretty lazy about it for the past couple of weeks, and my hope is that I’ll have more energy if I start working out regularly again. We’ll see.

Back to the work stuff: I have an officemate, who seems nice. She talks to herself about whatever it is that she’s working on, but I have been known to do the same thing on occasion, so it doesn’t bother me. I’m pretty good at tuning people out when I know they aren’t addressing me. I’m just grateful for the fact that I have an office and not a cubicle. And there’s free soda here, so I feel that I have officially found my Promised Land. Ah, diet coke, how do I love thee…

In other news, I’m getting married exactly 2 months from today. Yay!

Rocky V: A Critique

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We watched “Rocky V” over homemade turkey burgers (mmm, yum) last night, and here are my thoughts:

* The beginning was good, showing how Rocky was brain-damaged after getting the crap beaten out of him by the Russian guy. And it seemed realistic – I don’t know how any professional boxer can get punched in the head year after year and not have brain damage. But there were a few major plot inconsistencies between Rocky IV and Rocky V. In Rocky IV, they show his kid watching him fight the big Russian dude on TV, and the kid is maybe 6 years old. At the beginning of the 5th movie, Rocky gets home from Russia and the kid is now around 13 years old. What the hell? How long was he in Russia, anyway?
* I think Stallone made the “Godfather III” fatal mistake of casting his own real-life son as his son in the movie. I’m not saying that Sage Stallone is hopeless – I looked him up on IMDB, and apparently he’s also a writer and a director now; he could be brilliant for all I know. Much the same way that Sofia Coppola is. I’m just saying that neither one of them should act. Ever.
* Speaking of Coppola, Talia Shire starred in both “Godfather III” and “Rocky V” in 1990. Sister apparently had a rough year. Poor thing.
* The big up-and-coming fighter in this movie has a mullet. I know it was filmed in 1990, but come on. Interestingly enough, I looked up this actor (Tommy Morrison) on IMDB too, and it turns out that he really was a heavyweight boxer in real life. OK, maybe that explains his horrendous acting skills. (Although nothing can excuse the mullet.) His only other claim to fame, besides “Rocky V,” is that he was banned from boxing in 1996 because he tested HIV positive. Which I think would’ve made a way more interesting plot twist in this movie, had it been used. Sadly, it wasn’t.
* No inspirational training sequence. No cheesy Survivor theme song. No good.
* The big street fight at the end? Was so obviously filmed on a soundstage and not in some rough neighborhood in south Philadelphia. It looked like the background of a video game like “Mortal Kombat” or something. Lame.

Moral of the story: No matter what he does, or how bad the movies might be (“Over the Top,” anyone?), I will always love Sylvester Stallone, because I associate the Rocky movies (the first four, anyway) with my childhood. I have some kind of weird nostalgia-crush on the man, which I cannot explain. It’s the same reason that I will always love Harrison Ford, despite the fact that he’s now a bloated alcoholic who hasn’t made a single good movie since “The Fugitive,” and that was 12 years ago.

P.S. to Lauren – I really want to know who your boyfriend was in this movie. Was he the little street thuglet who beat up Rocky Jr. and took his lunch money? Or was he one of the random kids on the playground?

notes from the desk of the bored

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This week hasn’t exactly been action-packed. I’m still waiting for my new job to start, so I’ve been slothing around the house a lot. They’ve been showing all of the Rocky movies on AMC this week, and I’ve been watching them obsessively. I still cry when he wins at the end of “Rocky II” and says “Yo Adrian, I DID IT!!!” I also cry in the third one when Mickey dies. And again in the fourth one when Apollo Creed dies. It’s funny, I grew up on those movies, and I hate boxing in real life – probably because real boxers hardly ever bleed, and there are none of those cool punching sound effects. I’ve actually never seen “Rocky V” (I don’t know why, somehow I just missed that one), so I’ve decided that when they show it this week, I will watch it. I’m expecting it to be horrible, but I’m going to watch it anyway.

In other news…
* Steve is here, and he’s started working on our yard – there’s now a big mud pit where our deck used to be, because we’re going to get an all-new fancy deck that wraps around the side of the house. In fact, the guys are off getting price quotes on lumber as we speak.
* The guys go into abusive-brother mode a lot (no headlocks or anything, but lots of unnecessary mocking and name-calling), which is a side of Dave that I’ve never seen before. It’s funny for a while, then I just have to get out of the house or go hide in another room.
* I’ve been cooking a lot, which seems to take up an awful lot of time & energy when you’re feeding two grown men. On the plus side, they’re both pretty good about cleaning up the kitchen when I cook, so that’s cool. I’d much rather cook than clean.
* I’ve spent way too much time designing our wedding invitations. I want the damn things to be printed, addressed, stamped and mailed already. Sigh.
* Only 5 more days until I start my new job. Yay!

It's Friday!

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I feel like I need to write something new, so the depressing cat story won’t be the leading topic on my blog. Problem is, not a whole lot is going on. Steve, my future brother-in-law, didn’t arrive on Wednesday as planned (really long story), but he should be arriving at about 5 p.m. this evening. We were a little worried that he wasn’t going to make it here, but it looks like he’s on his way now, so that’s good.

Last night, Dave and I had dinner with a very nice couple who are old friends of his, and who I had never met before. I think this couple might possibly also be friends with Dave’s ex (they used to be, but there’s no real polite way to say, “So, do you still talk to so-and-so?” and not have it be a total conversation stopper). So going into it, I felt really self-conscious, like I was going to be closely scrutinized, and everything I said or did was going to be reported back to the ex. Not that I really care what the ex thinks of me. I’ve never met the woman, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m grateful that she’s gone, because I never would’ve met Dave otherwise. But still, there is some tiny little mean part of me that wants it to get back to her, like “Wow, Dave’s fiancee is so smart and funny and wonderful. He sure did upgrade!” It’s stupid and juvenile, I know. And as it turned out, dinner was fantastic. The food was great, the conversation flowed easily, and a good time was had by all. So there was no need to worry. Oh well.

That’s about it. It’s Friday, and my first week of unemployment has been mind-numbingly dull. I’ve been keeping myself busy doing stuff around the house, but still, I feel like a sloth. I know it’s strange, but I absolutely cannot wait to start my new job.