September 10th

First Comes Love

Then comes marriage.

Then comes trooping down to the real estate agent's office
To make an offer on a home. Not a house. A home.

I Love Backrubs and He Knows It

- My back hurts.

Fiance turns around and looks at me.

- Right here, on the lefthand side.

Fiance raises his eyebrows.

- Why are you looking at me like I'm totally milking this?
- No I'm not.
- Yes you are.
- No. I'm looking at you like it's quite unfortunate that your back hurts, but I think it's all a ploy.

Praying the New Hairstyle Will Get Him Laid

Sometime shortly after Fiance and I began to live in sin, we went to dinner with my parents. This isn't exactly a rare occurence and most people would probably not be very keen on how un-rare it is, but Fiance doesn't mind it one little bit. In fact, he likes my folks. They like him, too - probably more than they like me considering how many brilliant examples of adolescent stupidity I provided them with between the ages of, oh, 12 and 19. It's a miracle that my parents survived my teenage years and moreover did not end up paying millions of dollars in therapy for the things I put them through.

At the time of this particular dinner outing, Fiance and I were still in the process of unpacking my belongings and breaking down boxes and spending every penny we had between us on bookcases in which to store my approximately ten billion paperbacks. Naturally, the conversation tended to limp towards that ever-sensitive topic of The Move and it's evil twin: Change. Change from sleeping on the right-hand side of the bed to sleeping on the left-hand side. Change from eating mayonnaise on sandwiches to not purchasing mayonnaise because it has vinegar in it and DUH vinegar is a demon creation. Change from living 6500 miles away from your sweetheart to waking up less than 6.5 inches away from someone who takes snoring Very Seriously.

At some point in the conversation, my mother stood up on a soapbox and preached to us all of her opinions related to Change and the beast it could be. Specifically, she does not like the idea of women who enter into relationships determined to change a man into something he is not. This means that WOMEN, you are not to attempt to pry the remote control from the death-grip of a man - he was made that way and the detachment will not go well so BE YE WARNED. Also, it meant that I was not to try to convince Fiance that now that he's all growed up he maybe doesn't need to spike his hair anymore. As such, one of Fiance's favorite phrases this past year has been "Remember what your mother says about changing a man?!" He tends to follow this by telling me how beautiful I am and how I am certainly not made less stunning by standing next to an oaf who spikes his hair despite thirty years of life experience screaming at him to cut it out already.

Do you hear that sucking sound, Internet? That is the cosmos realigning because Fiance has realized that flattery? It will get him nowhere.

Four Little Words and One Big Answer

In a very small corner of the world on Friday night, one man proposed to one woman.

And she said yes!

Reason #67249 That Boyfriend Rocks

Last Sunday, he took me to see "Carmen," a French opera. We dressed up and then he showed his woman a good time =)

I love that man!

A Not-so-Mushy Birthday

In a past life, I was paid to wrap gifts. People actually dipped into their wallets in exchange for fancy paper with a bow slapped on top. Not only that, but sometimes if a husband forgot about Valentine's Day until 9pm on February 14th, he'd tip me. For saving his scrawny little a** from a whipping. Anyway, it was my first college job and looking back, wrapping gifts was the highlight of those first few collegiate semesters. It was one of my favorite things to do. Still is. In fact, I love gift-wrapping so much that when I saw a surprise birthday gift wrapped for me on the table last summer, my response was to flip out because SUCH BETRAYAL CANNOT BE TOLERATED!! HOW COULD YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT WRAPPING A GIFT WITHOUT ME?! HAS THIS RELATIONSHIP MEANT NOTHING TO YOU?!

Nowadays, I have learned the valuable lesson of assuming that when I find a wrapped gift on the table in the summertime, Boyfriend has nothing against me. He just means for me to open the damned thing and thank him for showing me a good time on my birthday.

Yesterday, Boyfriend turned 30 years old. This means that we are now in two separate decades of our lives. I am in the sexy-fox-twenties and he is in the old-fart-thirties. At least that's what we're calling them in the September household as of right this second. This birthday also means that Boyfriend got to walk around the office listening to every imaginable quip similar to "whew, that was a close one," even though he was born on an odd-numbered year and therefore being a Leap Year Baby was much much farther away than they know. And it also means that I was handed the opportunity to humiliate him on a silver platter. Yes, Internet, I took him to our night class and had them sing "Herzlich Gluckwunsch zum Gebortstag" (better known as "Happy Birthday") in German. Which, just for the record, is a song that probably sounds best without grunts, spitting, and frustratingly incomprehensible accents.

He ate it all up, and then ripped into the gift - a hand crafted wooden chess set. Which I got to wrap. And he got to open. Believe it or not, he didn't once flip out that I'd wrapped the thing waiting for him on the dining room table. Which is how I found out that, Yep!, wrapping a gift is still one of my favorite things to do. Happy Birthday, Boyfriend! I love you =)

Conversation Overheard Between Two People Seriously Considering Investing in Dentures

- The other day, I wrote about Valentine's Day on my blog. I wrote about how I screwed it up.
- Yeah?
- Yeah, and I mentioned that I would have semi-redeemed myself with a cute story about how we met each other, except that we met at work. I said you were up to your elbows in bike grease. So I might have exaggerated a little.
- I see. Just blowing a little grease out of proportion to suit your blogging needs.
- What? You say it like I live by lying through my teeth.
- No, honey. Someday when you're old, you won't have any teeth and then you won't have to lie through them.

How the Grinch Stole That One Day in February

I've been reading alot of blogs written by people who had amazing Valentine's Days. Apparently, around the blogosphere February 14th was filled with fancy schmancy dinners, outings to the spa, bouquets of flowers, alcoholic interludes, and the like. In the spirit of the day, many bloggers have been inviting fellow writers to tell romantic stories of their own.

In the spirit of such a lovey-dovey holiday, I thought I'd tell you how my Valentine's Day went as well. And then, I figured I'd follow that short paragraph up with a more romantic tale of how Boyfriend and I met. Then I realized CRAP! that I met Boyfriend at work when he was up to his elbows in bicycle gear grease. If that doesn't have ooh baby take me now written all over it then I don't know what does.

So Valentine's Day? Yeah, about that.

See, a few weeks ago, I started dropping not-so-subtle hints reminders that Valentine's Day was fast approaching and I began to ask what plans he had for the holiday. Boyfriend told me - and by this I mean he made perfectly clear - that he was purchasing tickets to an opera in March. I love just about any event that includes a performance and a stage, so I was thrilled. An opera! With a stage! And singing! As a date! For Valentine's! Yippee! I thought for a few days afterwards about what I should buy for Boyfriend. Before he told me about the opera tickets, we had discussed a simple weekend picnic and my uber-fantastic plan had been to wrap up a pair of kites. We both, after all, love to fly kites and it has been rather windy around here lately. Next to the opera tickets, however, two kites didn't sound like enough.

I know, dear Internet, that you're wondering how I got around the problem of how to make sure my gift to Boyfriend was equally as wonderful as his. And so, I'll tell you. When Boyfriend came through the door Wednesday evening with a romantic card and a small white ticket envelope, I returned the gesture with...absolutely nothing.

Zilch.

Nada.

Nyet.

Luckily, Boyfriend already knew I was the biggest loser the planet had ever encountered BEFORE he started dating me...

Keepin' That Cat in the Bag

Within the past six months, Boyfriend and I have spent a considerable amount of time discussing our future. In fact, these conversations are what spurred the very creation of this blog. One day, we realized that we would want to preserve aspects of our pre-married life together for our progeny to view down the road. A friend of mine once told me that one of the most enlightening experiences in her life was when she had the opportunity to read the love letters that each of her grandparents had saved in a chest at the end of their bed. Not only had she been given a glimpse into their adult lives, but she had seen some of their childhood and some of their pre-family memories and some of what had made them the grandparents she had known and loved. Boyfriend and I want to be able to give that gift to our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren one day. We want to show them that we were lovers as well as friends, children as well as (someday) parents, individuals as well as a couple.

Clearly, the development of this blog as a fulfillment of its original intention leaves something to be desired. It's, er, a work in progress.

What Boyfriend and I didn't count on when this blog was started was the sheer amount of Nothing that was going on in our lives. Lately, however, that seems to be changing. Sadly, I have been sworn to secrecy about this fact for the next four to six weeks. So expect some big news around then =) In the meantime, I'm sorry if my blogging continues to be very sparse. It's just that so much of our current lives revolve around this secret that it's difficult to mention any part of our lives without including this new dynamic.

Leave it to a Man to Remember

Last year, Boyfriend and I lived 6500 miles apart. He lived in a small apartment in southern California and I lived in a smaller apartment in southern France. This year, Boyfriend and I live about 6.5 millimeters from one another, which anybody knows is too close, and we fight about Monopoly.

Last year, I flew home for the holidays. Boyfriend picked me up from the airport in late December and drove over an hour to my parents' house so we could decorate the tree together. This year, we didn't fly anywhere. Our trip to Missouri was cancelled less than a week before our departure, so we drove up the coast of California. Eight hours in any car on one day = too many.

Last year, we stayed up past midnight on New Year's Eve. I had a splitting headache and we were awake four hours later so Boyfriend could drive me to the airport. And this year, we stayed up past midnight on New Year's Eve. I was tired and grouchy and my eyes were stinging and I was not a happy camper.

"But this year is better than last year," Boyfriend insisted.

Why?

Cuz last year when I was cuddled against him and falling asleep, he informs me, I was wearing underwear.