Things I have been doing instead of blogging, in no particular order:

1. Working like a fool.  Then, I’ve worked a little more.  When I’ve had some free time, I’ve relaxed by working a bit.  Are you sensing a pattern here?

2. Paying down wedding costs thanks to the above.  Those extra hours at work helped me afford my wedding dress.

3. Teaching a summer “super session” course.

4. Adjusting to new medicine for ovarian problems.  The last time I tried to take this medicine, I lasted four days.  I’m up to 30+ days so far without giving up.  Still having plenty of ugly side effects, but it is amazing how wanting to be able to have a biological child one day can encourage you to suck it up and just take the medicine.

5. Counting down the days until Paul moves here.  Today is four months until my wedding day… but only one month until Paul moves here.  YES!

6. Preparing Snuggles y Cuddles for the fact that, in a few months, there is going to be a new man of the house.  They do not seem to feel threatened by Paul’s impending arrival.

7. Contemplating wedding decisions.  I’m having trouble planning the reception due to a variety of factors mostly based around the fact that the place I had originally booked for my wedding reception is a no-go.

8. Trying to figure out ways to have a nice wedding without excessive costs.  I just can’t reconcile an expensive wedding with the fact that Paul and I may get to adopt a child one day.

9. Considering elopement.  Just kidding.  Not really.  Okay, I’m kidding.  Kinda.  (Dad, this is just a joke.)

10. Searching my house for spiders.  Three days ago, a spider bit me while I was asleep.  This means war.

What have you been up to?

I’ll be back soon to explain why I’ve been too busy to blog but in the meantime, I wanted to tell you the good news: while I was asleep this morning, Paul passed his interview with the US Embassy in London!  (The embassy suggests that you don’t publicly mention when your interview is, so that’s why I haven’t said anything about it coming up so soon!)  He was awarded the visa that allows him to move here and he can book his flight right away.  By law, he can move here 90 days before our wedding date so he will be arriving here in mid-June and will be here to stay.  Which means… we can go on real dates!  And act like a real couple!  And plan the wedding with each other in the same room!

YAY!

For Easter weekend, I headed straight to Memphis.  Three of my friends from college live there now, so I love getting to see all three of them in one visit.  Between the four of us, we did everything from going to Cracker Barrel for brunch, squeezing in tight fitting rooms to zip me into wedding dresses and, of course, talking our heads off.

(That’s Kelly in pink, me beside her, Christan next to me and Brandy in the yellow.)

My weekend with my friends was wonderful and still bittersweet at the same time.  I’m going through a situation in my personal life right now where I’m completely estranged (by my choice) from someone who I really, really don’t want to be estranged from at any time, but especially in the months leading up to my wedding.  The problems have been going on for over six months now and it has left me pretty quiet, as you’ve probably noticed.  And, well, defeated.  I feel very, very defeated.

For the last few months, I have put a lot of my life on hold hoping that things would get better and that I would feel like it was appropriate to ask the person to be a part of the important events happening in my life right now.  I’ve certainly tried to fix our relationship and I think the person has tried in their own way, but for various reasons that I don’t want to get into on a public blog, it just isn’t working for either of us.  Relationships are just hard, you know?

One of the biggest things I’ve been holding off on was looking for a wedding dress while I waited for things to get better.  Things have not gotten better, though, and I didn’t want to face it.  Luckily for me, my friends decided to help me face it.  A few weeks ago, my Knoxville-based bridesmaids gently prodded me into starting to look while we were together one night and, over Easter weekend, my Memphis-based bridesmaids took their turns helping me.  Then, this past weekend, Cate and I went and found the perfect dress which I’m planning to order as soon as I get paid this month.  Just thinking about how my friends have stepped in to try to help a painful situation be a little less painful has made me more grateful than ever for them.  I feel like they’ve kind of circled their wagons up around me and said “We’re not going to let the time leading up to your wedding be a bad memory for you.  We will help you make good memories.”

But the other thing that has made me thankful for them is that they’ve been willing to speak up when they’ve seen me be in the wrong about the situation, too.  The situation has caused me to feel a wide range of emotion — from sadness, to anxiety, to jealousy — and, more often than not, it has caused me to lash out in anger because I have no other way to express how deeply hurt I am by this relationship.  I hate what this situation has brought out in me and how I choose to react sometimes.  I will start thinking about how hurtful the situation has been and, before I even know it’s happening, I’m suddenly lashing out at the person or overeating my feelings of rejection.

Anger has never been a big part of my personality so I have been so surprised to see what control it has been able to have over me.  Sometimes, when the anger has welled up in me, I lash out towards the person who has hurt me because I want them to know and grasp how badly I am hurting so that they will change their behavior.  A few of my friends have happened to be near me when it has happened and have spoken up each time to say “You know, you really shouldn’t react that way” or “You’re better than that.  You can handle that better next time.”  I’m grateful for the fact that they’re not afraid to say things like that to me.  They agree that the events that have happened over the past six months have been profoundly hurtful in my life, but they also know that only I am responsible for how I react to the events.  It takes a lot of guts in a friendship to speak up like that, you know.

I am really disappointed that there is any bitter in the sweetness of the months leading up to my wedding.  But, if there is going to be bitter, I’m glad for friends who help take the edge off of it.

I’ve always enjoyed celebrating in style.

Happy Easter!

I have some thoughts for you.

1. Has anyone else realized that this Sunday will be April Fools Day?  It makes me want to go join a Baptist church really quickly so that I could pull the ultimate Sunday morning prank: announce, to the women’s Bible study, that Beth Moore is coming to speak at the church but that we don’t want them to publicize it in the community because Beth wants to have time to “take a picture with each one of them individually” and “spend a few minutes listening to each and every one of their life stories.”  Then, be all “Just kidding, everybody.”

2. Speaking of spiritual matters, I would like to ask you to consider joining me in prayer that the maxi dress remains in style for yet another summer.

3. Speaking of dresses, a couple of months ago, I won a free wedding dress of my choice from an online store (actually, one of my bridesmaids won the drawing and gave the prize to me).  I picked a dress and it arrived this week.   My boss and I shut the door to my office, closed the blinds and I tried on the dress only to discover I looked rather terrible in it.  So, I’m going to try to sell the dress since it’s brand new with tags attached and find a wedding dress that actually looks good on me.

4. Speaking of my boss, she is going to Dollywood today with her son.  I am jealous.  I serve as proof that you can take the girl out of the small country town, but you can’t take her love for Dollywood out of her.

5. Speaking of Dollywood, I miss the years I would buy a season pass for myself and MacKenzie and take her every chance I got.

6. Speaking of MacKenzie, I miss the fabulous five.  And my foster children.  And having children to take care of in the evenings after work.

7. Speaking of the evenings after work, last night I watched Sarah Palin’s Alaska on Netflix.  This brought me to two conclusions: 1. I need Paul to move here quickly so I can get a life and 2. I think Sarah Palin is really pretty.

8. Speaking of Paul, we’re waiting for the embassy to send him a letter saying “Here’s an interview time.”  The interview is the last thing he’ll do before moving here.

9. Speaking of the embassy, do you all remember the closing credits for the movie The Proposal?  The part where Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds are being interrogated by the immigration officer?  I kind of want to make a spoof of that with me and Paul to be shown at our wedding rehearsal.

10. Speaking of Sandra Bullock, I have started a new habit of laying in bed at night watching random clips from The Ellen Show on my iPhone (last night I watched one of Sandra Bullock on the show, which is what made me think of this).  You guys, I’m addicted; Ellen is hilarious and I love a good celebrity interview.  Still, the fact that my life has come to the point where I lay in bed at night watching YouTube videos might suggest that it’s time for Paul to move here.

I had a revelation the other day.

I was trying to figure out why I wasn’t inclined to blog as much lately.  Someone recently asked me if I’m no longer blogging as much now that I’m engaged.  I can totally see where they came up with that idea but, in reality, I actually have more free time right now in life than I’ve had in the last ten years or so.  Keep in mind that there is a five hour time difference between me and Paul; so, whenever I get off work, we have about thirty minutes to talk to each other before he has to head to bed in order to be able to get up early for work the next day.  Since I’m not fostering, I really don’t have anything else to do in the evenings other than read, work out, clean my house, etc.  So, why don’t I use that time to blog?

As silly as it will sound, I think one of the reasons (by far only one of many) was because I was so tired of my old pink and white polka dot theme.  Is that not the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard?  Ridiculous or not, I got so annoyed every time I would see it pop up but am not exactly technology-gifted enough to think I could change it on my own.  But this past weekend, in a burst of resolve, I decided that I wasn’t getting up from my desk until I had changed it.

The result?

IT’S A TECHNOLOGY MIRACLE.

Will this cute, new theme help me blog more?  Time will only tell.

While Paul is here visiting me this week, I thought it might be fun to take a look back at some of my favorite posts from recent years. This re-post, from July 2009, is something I wrote on my grandmother’s birthday a few years ago. Just the other day, I drove up to my grandparents’ house and we spent hours just talking to each other, having lunch, etc. I’m grateful for grandparents who invest in my life.

“Today is my grandmother’s birthday. I already know I’m in trouble for telling you that. It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t even read these words yet, seeing as I haven’t pressed “publish” so no one has even seen this other than me. She probably just knows I wrote those words and, ZAP!, I’m in trouble…”

Read the rest of this re-post here.

A very random list, just because it is Wednesday.

1. I sign nearly every one of my emails — personal and work — as “amy beth” (lowercase, no uppercase).  I’m not sure why I began doing it this way, but it’s stuck.

2. For the past 2.5 years, I had an average of three kids (fab five or foster kids) living in my home each night.  On an average, regular week of my current life, I see no humans from the time I leave work until the time I go back the next morning unless I make it a point to go walk around a store, go to the gym instead of working out at home, etc.  Mostly I just go home and be my myself — and, I’m genuinely not lonely.  So strange.

3. I talk aloud to my dogs (please see #2 above).

4. I really want to read the Hunger Games series, but I’m afraid they will scare me.  I scare easily, proven by the fact that the only horror movie I’ve ever seen is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

5. I hate buying shoes.  I just don’t get into having a bunch of pairs of shoes.

6. Speaking of shoes, one of Paul’s feet is three full sizes bigger than the other foot.  This means two things: that he walks with a pronounced limp (that I rarely notice anymore) and that he always has to buy two pairs of shoes when he needs a new pair of shoes.  So, he hates shoe shopping, too; you might say we’re a pair.

7. Did you catch that joke above?  Shoe shopping?  We’re a pair?  Just making sure.

8. One of the things I’m most looking forward to about being married is having someone to grocery shop for again.  When I had the fab five and the foster kids, one of my favorite things to do was go grocery shopping and come home with bags full of food to be able to feed them that week.  I think it might have been “single mother syndrome” but I never took it for granted that we had plenty of food for them each week, especially since some of them had come from backgrounds where there often wasn’t food on the able.  Because of that, it became a real joy to get to grocery shop for them each week and the habit stuck.  I can’t wait to have a reason to buy more than three bananas a week.

9. Most days, I wear only two pieces of make-up: Mac Studio Fix powder and blush.  Occasionally I get crazy and throw in some eyeliner.  The fact that I’m okay with wearing only two, maybe three types of make-up a day has caused me to question, on more than one occasion, if I really do share the same bloodline as my mother and her mother or if I might have been accidentally switched at birth.

10. I think, years ago, I mentioned on here that I don’t eat dressing on my salad.  Update: I now, occasionally, eat Caesar dressing in small quantities.  But, for the most part, I still like my salads dry.  Bonus: I have never, ever had ranch dressing.

Well, I spent my weekend dodging tornadoes whilst trying to orchestrate a wedding for 200 guests.  If you’re wondering, the dodging of the tornadoes was far easier than the orchestrating of the wedding but that’s all I have to say about that because the memory of trying to corral multiple flower girls whose first language is Spanish is still too fresh in my mind.  In case you were wondering, knowing the Spanish words for “hello” and “pencil sharpener” don’t really help when trying to get little girls to throw rose petals.

In case you missed it, my small town had a few tornadoes touch down on Friday and by “a few” I mean entire homes and businesses are gone.  I spent the day alternating between taking shelter in the hallway outside my office with various co-workers and trying to figure out how exactly I was going to get 61 people onto a boat for a rehearsal dinner cruise in the middle of this:

(photo taken by local resident)

Yeah.  That’s the street I live on.

I think the real highlight was when I went onto the boat before the guests to talk to the staff about whether it was wise for us to go ahead with the dinner cruise or not.  Right as the manager was assuring me that everything was going to be just fine, golf ball sized hail began hitting the boat and the captain came running through to tell us to get as far away from the windows as we could.  I spent the next seven minutes of my life standing in a boat that was swaying from side to side thinking about how I just wished I could be at Downton Abbey with Mr. Bates and Anna, maybe enjoying a crumpet or two.*

*I’m not entirely sure of what a crumpet actually is, but I know it is better than being on a boat in a hail storm while a tornado is touching down approximately eight miles away.

The rest of my weekend involved the actual wedding itself and then attending the dedication of my cousin Marisa’s baby and step-son the next day followed by lunch with her side of the family.  When I got home from the lunch yesterday afternoon, I made a half-hearted attempt at conversation with Paul over the phone before falling asleep on my couch at approximately 5:15 p.m.

What did you do this past weekend?