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Today is our second wedding anniversary. Wheee!

I would have something insightful to say, but I'm copping out again. This time it's because today has been completely insane for both of us, for work reasons. And we have a flight at 6 a.m. tomorrow, meaning we have to get up at some ungodly hour whose name I will not speak. (At least I'm all packed! The eeee! is not.) (But it's worth it, because we're traveling for [livejournal.com profile] vja2's wedding, hooray!)

Anyway. In lieu of anything insightful, I will share this talk by Joss Whedon:


Because I cannot explain how awesome the eeee! is. But when Joss Whedon talks about his father and step-father, he could be talking about the eeee! right there.
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The most startling thing about the first year of marriage was that I found myself watching American Idol. Before this year, I had never watched it, and generally ignored it when the eeee! was watching. But this winter I took a yoga class on Tuesdays, and I would get home from it around quarter to nine, with dinner almost ready and the eeee! lounging on the couch with a drink and yelling at American Idol on the television. And it was absolutely the best thing to come home to, AI and all, so I started watching it, too.

Happy Anniversary to Eli, my favorite person on this earth -- I'm looking forward to our next year around the sun together.
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Writing a research statement is much harder than I expected, so here's a bit of a break from it.


  1. Today we caulked around the front door (which is quite drafty in the winter) and one of the front windows. I really hope it helps. And it really felt like something an old, boring, married couple does on the weekends, which amused me.

  2. I don't mean to imply that my life is old or boring. In fact, it is immeasurably lovely right now.

  3. Even though I'm applying for jobs, and having (of course!) strange code problems at work. Aaargh.

  4. And even though we've been married for fifteen days and have already lost the marriage certificate. Ack!

  5. The eeee! is the only person I know who sees a strange charge on his credit card statement, calls the credit card, hears, "The charge is from Australia," and says, "Oh! Then that's legitimate." Hee.

  6. I will have pictures from Hawai'i online soon! Once I'm done writing up the past research part of my research statement.

  7. Oh! I read Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers, on the beach, and absolutely loved it. LOVED IT. Lord Peter Whimsy I wasn't much of a fan of, actually, but I loved Harriet Vane. So what are the other Sayers books I should pick up? And what about other books that are set at women's colleges before WWII? Between Gaudy Night and Daddy-Long-Legs, that's a setting I really adore.

  8. I'm going to Yom Kippur services with the eeee! tonight (and in return, he will be coming to Midnight Mass with me). I'm looking forward to it, because while I've been to seders and (my own) half-Jewish wedding, I've never been to any other Jewish services.

  9. I finally watched the Gilmore Girls premier, and . . . argh. Which is fine, because I don't have time to watch much TV anyways.


Now back to discussing the importance of the scatter! And selection biases in observational surveys! Sigh.

Right!

Sep. 15th, 2006 02:50 am
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Indeed! I am oddly wide awake after the bachelorette party, and the ringing in my ears from the music at the bars is not helping. Damn.

We have almost everything we need! The eeee! still had to get glasses for us to break, and I think he got some, but I haven't actually talked to him since this afternoon.

We have kosher wine, and it's a chianti -- so we have the Jewish wine from the Catholic country!

We have the good archival-quality pen for signing the ketubah!

We have a bag for putting the glasses in! It's an ivory satin-y bag that my mom used at her wedding to put cards in. She probably never, ever guessed that her daughter would be using that for the Jewish part of a Jewish-Catholic wedding. But that's where life went, and I'm really glad she found it.

Today (the 14th) is my dad's birthday! We had cake, but didn't manage to actually give him his presents. Alas. Hopefully tomorrow.

It's been gross and cold and overcast, but should be warm and clear on Saturday!

My grammar is currently at about a third-grade level! I'm going to bed now! In 36 hours I'll be married!
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Things here are going well. I'm not even going to bother listing the bad. (Well. I hope not. Provided nothing sets me off.)

1. The semester has started! I know I usually whine about this, and indeed I now have to fight for elevators, and I won't even bother going to Dominick's again until summertime. But it also means that lots of people are around -- including new postdocs and new grad students, which is exciting -- and there are lots of things going on.

2. Steelers! Yay!

3. I find myself identifying with and talking with the post-docs more than the young grad students. Maybe that's not all good, but I think it's a good sign that I'm comfortable talking about science with postdocs. After all, they will be my peers next year (aieee!).

4. Miss Manners was really awesome this week. I love it when rude people write in, convinced that they are right. Are they really that delusional? Or are those letters made up?

5. The eyebrow waxing didn't hurt nearly as much as I thought it would. It doesn't look all that different, although I suppose it is neater.

6. Work is going okay. And I think I broke the intrinsic float command in Fortran, which I'm oddly proud of.

7. Dude! I'm getting married a week from tomorrow! Aieee!
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I've had three wakeup calls today:

1. At 6:32 a.m., the eeee! returned from the Tom Waits concert he went to in Cleveland. I fell back asleep at some point after he told me that the concert didn't start until 1:20 a.m., and assured me that he stopped at a rest stop for a nap on the way home.

2. At 7:00 a.m. the alarm went off. I listened to the news and weather (none of which I can recall now), and then turned off the alarm. And, um, fell back asleep.

3. At 7:30 a.m., my cell phone rang. The organist for my wedding called to cancel, because that's the only weekend she can go to Chicago to see her dying friend. Or something like that. She's calling another organist for me, so hopefully I'll hear from someone later today.

I am remarkably calm about the organist cancelling less than 5 weeks before the wedding. (Hey, at least it's still a month away!) Clearly the best time to deliver bad news to me is at 7:30 a.m., because I'm not awake enough for it to all settle in.

Woo!

Jul. 24th, 2006 08:41 pm
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Today has been quite a productive day! In no particular order:

  1. I ordered the necklaces for the bridesmaids. Finally!

  2. Went to a campaign event/fundraiser for Rebekah Warren. That was quite fun -- I got to meet her, meet the owners of a local brewpub, and taste lots of crazy beers. I haven't been involved in local politics -- or many local affairs at all, really -- since 2004, and it was nice to go out and do something like that. I need to make that more of a priority.

  3. Our ketubah came! Okay, that was a productive thing we did last week, but still. Yay!

  4. Work was . . . okay. But at least I didn't make negative progress today.

  5. It was a beautiful day outside, and after coming home from the event it was still light enough to sit on the porch and do a crossword puzzle. I love summer.



And now I'm going to kick back and watch an episode of Scrubs or The Muppet Show. Even if I do some real work tonight, it would be great if all Mondays could be this nice.

Whoosh!

Jul. 17th, 2006 12:01 pm
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I have shoes for the wedding now! They're ivory and sparkly and the heel is wide and relatively low. And I found them in town, so I don't have to drive an hour to an upscale mall to search for them. Yay!

(Now I just have to get rid of my insane sandal tan.)

This glee over the shoes might be why I managed to set popcorn on fire at work this morning. It was only in the microwave for three minutes! Who knew? But there was a giant charred mass in the bag, and people could smell it down on the first floor -- I'm on the tenth floor.

About half the bag was salvageable, though, and hey, free entertainment for everyone!

Meanwhile, it's really damn hot here. I'm sure the rest of you in North America can sympathize.
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Today and this past weekend have been quite productive. Tiring, but productive. In no particular order, I:

  1. Made an eye doctor appointment. FINALLY. I last got new glasses 4 1/2 years ago, and lately I've noticed that I have vision problems when I'm tired. And the appointment is this Wednesday. Yay!

  2. Bought my ticket for my trip to Berkeley.

  3. Had lunch at Miss Saigon, which Beth has been raving about. And indeed, it was fantastic! Yum! I'll have to go there again, even though it's a bit out of the way for us.

  4. Found the (stupid!) bug in some code I've been working on.

  5. Watched Michigan tie Michigan State in hockey, AGAIN.

  6. Picked out a new toilet for the bathroom (with the eeee!).

  7. Again with the eeee!, picked out tile for the bathroom. The trend seems to be for textured, faux-stone vinyl tile, which we don't like. That means there aren't many clean, geometric designs for us to choose from. We easily settled on this, but in an ideal world we would get this ceramic tile. The picture does not do justice to the cobalt diamonds there.

  8. Made it out the door by 9:20 this morning! Woo!

  9. Further considered getting an iPod nano. I can get a student discount on it, which is small, but better than nothing.

  10. Finally bought the thank-you presents (a.k.a. alcohol) for people who've taken care of Doc for us recently.

  11. Ordered my wedding dress. Eeeeeeee!


That sums it all up here.
rms10: (lava)
I got an email reminder about the bridal show I'm going to this weekend, and among other things it said:
Bring your fiance - he'll love the GROOM'S ROOM ! Sponsored by The Club at Key Center. He can enjoy $1 soft drinks and drafts and 25 cent wings while he watches his favorite football game and get a Free Engagement Photo as well.


I want to go to the Groom's Room! Dollar drafts (which I'm sure will just be Bud Light, but still)? Football? Hello!

The eeee! isn't actually coming, and my mom and I hope to be done with the bridal show before the football starts, but we figured we could slip in and pretend we're looking for him. They don't have to know he's not there!

This whole bridal show thing is starting to give me a headache. On the plus side, there will be cake samples.
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We have finally set the date for the wedding -- September 16, 2006. Hooray! We had everything else ready -- the deacon and the rabbi were both free that day, and the reception hall we wanted was open -- but the priest we had to talk to about scheduling was in Rome. For two weeks. Aaaargh.

But. He's back! We have the church, the officiants, the hall, and my baptismal certificate is en route to the deacon. So we are not worrying about anything else until January, which is another cause to celebrate.

Meanwhile, we will be celebrating Thanksgiving with both of our families, here in Ann Arbor. This will be the first official meeting of the parents, and we're actually all looking forward to it. It might be because we're too busy worrying about the turkey to worry about our parents, but I really think they're going to get along well. I'm just really excited about bringing our families togther to celebrate Thanksgiving in our home -- it feels like a concrete step towards marriage.

No monkey!

Oct. 21st, 2005 10:59 am
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I bought Miss Manners on Painfully Proper Weddings soon after getting engaged, and it was a breath of fresh air after glancing at The Knot. No pressure about finding the perfect hairstyle, or about registering soon for gifts, and don't even get me started about TheKnot's etiquette quiz. (For starters, the correct answer to question one should be, "C, Say nothing and hope for the best. People will give what they want to give." According to their answers, I only got 75% on their etiquette quiz, which is bullshit.)

Anyway. The Miss Manners book is going to be incredibly helpful for keeping things simple, and she has the best letter ever about, um, unwanted guests:
DEAR MISS MANNERS -- I know columnists receive gag letters, but believe me, this is not one! The parents of one of our daughter's bridesmaids have a monkey which they are training to help care for a paraplegic. They take the animal with them when they go out. They have threatened not to attend the wedding because we did not include the monkey on their invitation.

I do not feel that a monkey belongs at as solemn an occasion as a wedding. It chatters continually and bangs around its cage. Also, there will be children in attendance, and I fear they will be bitten. I think what they are doing is admirable, but is it unreasonable to ask them to leave the monkey in the care of others on this special day? My daughter does not want it, either, but is reluctant to press the point because she wants to continue to be friends with the daughter and will have to see the parents on occasion. How can we graciously let them know our concerns?

GENTLE READER -- Well, let's see. Miss Manners has been riffling through the files she keeps right behind her august forehead, and has not succeeded in finding anything under Monkeys, Undesirable as Guests. But let's do a bit of cross-file checkig here. How about the rule saying that wedding guests may not bring along their own, uninvited guests? That should take care of it.

No?

All right, here's one under Animals, Working. It says that trained assistance animals, such as Seeing Eye dogs, may go anywhere their owners do. But this monkey is not yet trained and, not being in attendance on one of the guests, would be there in a social and not a working capacity.

You are quite right to suspect that monkeys who are solely out for a good time do not make ideals guests, althought Miss Manners wouldn't count on the children's not having a better time than they suspected possible. To inform the guests of your decision, you might adapt the general rule formed for excluding children -- "We are so sorry that we can't have your darling monkey, who would undoubtedly behave beautifully, but we feel we just can't make an exception because other people might want to bring theirs, who might not behave as well."


Hee! And no, the eeee!'s dog (our dog?) will not be at the wedding, and he will certainly not be the ring-bearer. It's alarming how many people have asked us that.
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Thank you all so much for your congratulations! The eeee!* and I are still walking around with big grins on our faces, and we both keep sneaking peeks at my ring. This is really happening! Yay!

Now, of course, comes the planning, and I hope hope hope to avoid being a Bridezilla in any way, shape, or form. We want to keep things as simple as possible, but things are complicated by the 200+ people on the guest list (I have a huge family), and by the sheer logistics of trying to plan an interfaith ceremony. A Jewish-Catholic interfaith ceremony. Aieee. From what we've read, the Catholic Church is actually quite accommodating for these things, and it'll be much harder to find a rabbi. I haven't heard back from the deacon at my parents' church, though, so who knows what we'll actually have to do**.

The nice thing about a year-long engagement is that it spaces out all the wedding planning -- we just have to worry about the ceremony and finding a reception place now. Everything else can wait until January. And while I'm not particularly looking forward to dress-shopping, my cousin owns a bridal shop nearby, so I'm not allowed to complain.

In other news, my brother called me to recommend an Ohio State student newspaper to me. I hardly read the Michigan student paper, what makes him think I'm interested in the Ohio State one?

* I promise I will not start referring to him as "the fianceeee!".
** All my friends who've been married in the Catholic Church keep warning me about the test each partner takes in the Pre-Cana classes, even though it doesn't sound that bad -- it's a bunch of yes/no questions about how you plan to handle finances, raise kids, etc., and they make you discuss any issues where you had different answers. I'm worried that with my home parish being my home parish, there will be some elaborate Pre-Cana program that involves a weekend retreat.

Aieeee!

Oct. 10th, 2005 08:19 pm
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Um, I mean, I have news.

Eli and I are engaged!

*dance*dance*dance*

We'd talked about this way back in early September when we were in Greece, and realized that neither of us wanted to wait an undetermined amount of time until I graduate -- we wanted to get married sooner than that. Next fall! And for the past month, it got harder and harder to not tell people we were planning this.

But last Wednesday, I got home from work to discover sauce bubbling on the stove. Not an uncommon occurrence here, and we had discussed having pasta for dinner that night. On the second trip into the kitchen, though, I noticed the homemade ravioli sitting on the drying rack. We always toast to something when we have a drink, so we opened a bottle of wine, he proposed, we laughed, I cried -- you know, the usual.

Eeeee! We're so excited, and our friends and family are so excited for us, which makes it even more fun. And here's the obligatory ring picture -- I pretty much picked it out, and we had it custom-made at a jewelry store in town. (I was worried that this was terribly unromantic, but when I told my parents, my mom said, "I picked out my ring," and my dad jumped in with, "If you're going to spend that much money, you need to make sure it's something she likes." Clearly I inherited my cold, practical side from them. Hee.)

In other news, my parents are coming up this weekend for the Penn State-Michigan game. My dad, a big Penn State fan, is already excited about Penn State beating Ohio State -- and not just because my brother goes to Ohio State. If Penn State beats Michigan, which is indeed likely, my dad will be insufferable.

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