Hum diddy hum hum - You're my blue skies, you're my sunny day

It's another Monday, and yet I don't have a "case of the Mondays" - oh, Office Space, you epitomize what's great in life - because yesterday I got the honor of taking part in such a beautiful wedding!!!

M&K had the perfect day to be married, complete with gorgeous skies, an idyllic woodland setting, sun, cool breezes, and a remote location to which all the guests miraculously found their way! Speaking of which, S and I got fairly lost, thanks to me not using the bride and groom's reccommended directions and googlemapsing lat minutes instead, and also, if I can be picky here, partially due to a navigator napping on the job when we started off past the freeway. But all went well - we arrived 90 minutes early, almost as planned, and the place looked perfect, with M&K super excited and looking dazzling!

Even the potential disasters ended up picture perfect, when the location's wedding coordinator for instance was unable to get in touch with the tech guy onsite and thought we wouldn't have music - yes, the music S and I specifically playlisted for the happy couple, and yes, the only music available for the whole event. But then lo and behold!, lovely Miss Coordinator ended up riding up on the site's golf cart within minutes of the reception's start with a useable iPod dock, and no one noticed any instrumental absences!

There were so many things to be thankful for - that so many family members were there, that such good friends met other good friends and got along together so well, that the photographer was simply priceless and such a pleasure to work with, and that S's haircut was such a big hit with the bride that she recommended he use me as his stylist from now on (I heartily agree - hee). Oh, and the vegetarian dish deliciousness, the sweet toast by an old highschool friend, and the best end to a wedding dinner imaginable in my esteem - an amazingly smooth cup of coffee for the addict, and leftovers for the wedding party to take home (the caterers must have gotten a sense of our penchant for food by the end of the evening!).

To the bride and groom, I couldn't be happier for you, and I couldn't think of anyone else better for either of you than each other. To the rest of the guests - woo hoo! I hope you had as much fun as I did, and it meant so much that you came out to celebrate.

Ah, love, true love, and marriage. They have convinced me to search high and low in the old apartment tonight to find that camera USB cord and fully document a wonderful yesterday...

The Wedding Countdown!!

So it's almost 3am, and in 5 hours I will be on the road to a really early dress rehearsal, well, actually, a regularly dressed-rehearsal of the wedding tomorrow. I am really excited to see the beautiful location, and to celebrate the upcoming big day for M&K!

Yesterday I had my final interview (2nd interview) for a job I have been interested in for a while, and I hope I get an offer. The thing with the prospects I have had is that they are all really different - international work versus virtually no commute, lots of writing versus lots of speaking/presentations, different public health focuses, everything. It's hard to know what to think of as a "pro" or a "con" to a particular position when they are really not able to be compared to one or another at the end of the day. I just wish for the best and think that if I get to move forward with any one opportunity that is very fortunate.

In a side note, since all things are the wedding this weekend, I am finishing up a playlist for the big day, I have noticed that a lot of songs I thought were lovely and appropriate are actually a bit sad/creepy when it comes to this type of music. I didn't realize for instance, that the beautiful song "Feels like home" (see those awkward moments in between 2:20-2:36) by Chantal Kreviazuk has lyrics in it like "a window breaks down a long, dark street/And a siren wails in the night." Not as sentimental as I remembered it from my adolescent days listening to the Dawson's Creek soundtrack - Ha. Also not as pleasant as they first appear - classical songs, that often get depressed or aggressive 3/4 of the way in.

Well, S's back from an insane middle of the night walk now, so it's time to get to snoozin.

Sweet dreams!

(By the way, best wedding song - EVER.)

Hopes, dreams, and sheep doggies

With life so up in the air and summer approaching, it's fun to think about some of the exciting times I'll be plunking into my wish list for the future, and by future, I don't mean this Friday, which still seems like an eternity all on its own. I mean events in life and accomplishments of the light-hearted kind that are a good 5-45 years away, but that tantalize me none-the-less.

The first of these is raising a puppy. Sure, I could convince a breeder or the SPCA that I am currently capable for caring for a young dog, as I starting out in work life hoping to travel, overtime it, and commute as much as is necessary. I am sure that in some kind of reality show set up, I might even win a challenge or two given the task of training a puppy to sit, stay, and refraining from chewing/barking/shedding/emitting puppiness, but it is not yet time. Also, there is the great puppy debate - S likes huskies, malamutes, and wolf-like creature's Ala Grimm's Fairy tales, and I like 100lb. plus floppy-eared beasts like English mastiffs and Bernese mountain dogs. Lately, though, I have been falling in love with the Old English Sheep Dog. Do you think this guy qualifies as a possible big, bad wolf for S?

I am hoping that within a few years, I will work out a career schedule that includes either the necessary flexible time or close proximity from home, not to mention a home with a yard (though the alley behind the row house does have trees to lift a leg to), in order to find an appropriate buddy for Oliver (like the shep!).

Next is travel! My gifted friend and his bros from Brown started a travel organization that plans to head to North Korea late summer, and I am beyond frustrated that I promised myself pre-trip announcement that I wanted to 1) save emergency fund money (seriously???!?) and 2) pay off one of my grad school loans straight up. I dream of doing a communist country circuit one of these days, including Cuba, China, and North Korea, but I don't honestly know when I will get another opportunity. Hopefully, and prayerfully, a thrifty lifestyle from now until August and getting one of those job-thingies might convince me to jump on a plane this time around (given that I've saved at least the loan money by then and can save the emergency money by December), but I doubt it. So here's to my tour in 2050, in addition to my necessary ventures to the Greek isles, to India a few more times, and as a victorious participant in the Amazing Race one of these days (a new promise I made to an old friend).

These I suppose are the 5-10 year dreams, spattered with some travel that may occur a little later than that, or in the case of the Amazing Race, only in the imagination.

The 10-45 year goals include:

Owning 1 home and never selling it
Children - conceiving, adopting, fostering, loving
Old white woman sports like boating, hiking, kayaking, and maybe golf
Public Health Mission trips to Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the US (it should stand for "us"!)
Art installations
Lots of gardening (File under 'Old white woman' section??)
Eating and sleeping well

And once I hit 70, all bets are off!

The house that Landlord VanDyke's son built

So if you ask family or friends of mine, they would probably agree that I am fairly consumed by a desire to get the rowhouse apartment all set up for move in, which will happen sometime, somewhere between July and August. Evidence of this is also written all over the blog (Note any previous post that occurred after I signed the lease, and I bet you will see 'row' and 'house' used in close promixity to one another).

Last weekend we put together the new bed, which left me triumphant with only a few scratches, and so far this week, despite work, torrential rain, and the multiple job interviews (one which which perhaps went a little wobbly today, but I am hoping I get a call back second chance at a second interview), I have still managed to complete a DIY project framing one of my mom's 1914 Vogue posters for a bathroom art piece, and, randomly acquired a hornbeam tree sapling for the back deck (City Parks and Rec was giving them away outside the downtown office building when I exited my interview mid-morning).

I expect that once I find my USB camera cord, and after the wedding of the century - aka my mom's! - I will start showing off what I have done to the place.

Heroes in the fight

..Or so says the cup that I am drinking coffee in currently - it's from NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and it is 2x the size of a regular mug, so there's the benefit in it of itself.

I am working on redoing the blog a little - see last post - in order to make it a more expressive place for me I suppose, but also to make it a bit more accessible. I edited a few former posts a bit and took out the Narrative post entirely, except for the title, to commemorate the day when I started writing what may well be the second book I have attempted to author, and the first I have begun to write in adulthood.

While I was typing away the original "Narrative 1 Bowie" it ended up being a good 7 full pages of text and I had delusions of grandeur as I imagined Stephen King critiquing my work and thinking it not too bad. After reading his books, I often think how amazing it would be to write like that, both talent-wise and as a profession, where you slowly go mad imagining false worlds and your boss - you - never has to tell you, "No, you can't say it that way," or "No, that absolutely can't happen," because it's fiction, and it can. Of course, there's always an editor in life I suppose. But at any rate, I always figured if I ever wrote a published book, it would be a non-fiction commentary sort of thing, based on the profession I was in or a life experience close to my field of work. Fiction would be so much more rich though. A fantasy lifestyle of waking up a 1 in the afternoon and with my "Heroes in the fight" mug, beginning to make up some BS that will pay the bills and take us all on a vacation when we re-read it. That'd be nice. Maybe I will have a mental break one of these days and start doing that.

Up!..

...Like the movie, minus the talking dog, plus a cat that attacks my toes in the morning and likes Mickey Mouse shaped ice cubes in his water bowl.

So as the title also implies, this week things of looking a bit up. There's beautiful weather outside and I am still riding off a high I got yesterday after suriving a terrible caffeine withdrawl headache and nursing myself back to health with plenty of 7-Eleven coffee and home improvement projects in the row house.

It was the Charles Village festival this weekend, which meant no sleeping in for the weary as jazz music started well before noon in the dell and the streets were combing with people trying to pick up funky art, clothes, and accessories from all the booths lining the stained glass encrusted street of southbound North Charles. I picked up a miniature flower vase that was really like a small beaker encased in a block of mahogany wood that the deal had repurposed from bits and pieces he got from a carpenter friend who had used the wood to build cabinets for the Smithsonian. So it's like a little piece of my childhood, now holding hopefully a little piece of nature once we move into the row house and I can buy (or snip from a rougue Wyman park area) a fresh bud of flowers to put on our pub table.

S enjoyed the festival by consuming sweet Italian sausage two days out of two, so in addition to my headache, there was also a pretty weighty stomach ache in the apartment this weekend. Only Oliver, the cat, surived unscathed.

I have been looking and somewhat keeping up with some southern belle blogs recently, which I find very interesting in that the majority of them, despite the different personalities of the girls that keep them, have tons of pictures of clothes, beautiful scenes, and of course the girls themselves. I guess this makes sense - it is their blog, their snippet of time and space to jazz up, but if got me wondering how many niched blogging communities there are out there, whether I should "join" one, and if so, where I would fit. Pretty much the story of my life otherwise - with friends, school, careers, church, political views, relationships, SES's, everything, I seem to mutate in and out of groups while maintaining a strong personal identity that is hopefully capatible with others but doesn't fit a comfortable mold. I think some of this might be a defense mechanism, a fear of getting too cozy with people and ideas, but elsewise I guess I prefer to sample a lot more than others, I'm not sure.

But returning to the postively-focused theme, I have two interviews this week for seemingly to really great positions, though they are quite different than the other. I am really hoping to fit in well with the second organization I meet up with this week, but am ideally hoping to have great interviews at both so that I have more options, just like in life. Wishful thinking, and I should be happy I have any prospects that work for the area I live in and the career choices on which I'd like to focus. Fingers crossed, though, I'd really like to sign onto something meaningful soon and start making a splash in whatever specific field I am in!

For now, I should focus on keeping up with the work I've got for at least the next month or so.

But..for the grand "Up!" finale - M&K are getting married this weekend!! What joy and bliss!!! On the scary list - I am giving the bride's side toast/speech, and short of a sweet little marriage blessing I picked up online and an idea to get K's his first Father's Day card ever, I am at a loss. I imagine myself burning the midnight oil on this one - literally - I imagine myself in the early 1800's with some parchment and a quill at a sewing desk or out in the barn as to not disturb those in the farm house, writing this masterpiece. Oh my, and up, up and away!

Off!

This is a blog post dedicated to being out of school, having taken the longest vacation (6 days - including two days of commencement activities, three weekend days, and one federal holiday = not actually a real vacation when I afford myself time) I have had in over a year, and having three jobs, none of which is permanent or full-time. Oh yeah, and the new cat, the old boyfriend, the semi-moved into apartment in a row house, the random affinity for leads without results, and the recurring crush on the man-boy I haven't spoken to since (junior year?) of high school.

What is this thing called being in one's early to mid-twenties? Really, I think the whole blog here is about the missteps, misinformation, and lack of real direction that I have during this time in my life. It's like we as a generation have everything at our fingertips and yet nothing at all. Some of us have husbands, babies, houses, but some of us only have the bags on our shoulder and the dreams in our heads.

I am the later, and the more happy for it, and grateful, but also the completely confused.