| Something pleasant…anything pleasant? |
[Oct. 13th, 2008|12:31 pm] |
Ok, so I was planning to talk all about the travesty that was the wedding Tanja and I went to on Saturday, or maybe the movie we went to see and the woman that got her face shoved into the ticket counter window….but the newest bit of news, my sister having to call the cops on her ex-husband yesterday and me being the only family member not told about it, has put me into a bad mood for some reason.
So, I seriously need to talk about something pleasant instead. Well, what perfect timing…Tanja just emailed me something that does make me smile. It's looking like we aren't going to be able to go see her parents for Christmas/New Years like we were talking about doing. Her parents just have some things going on that its not my place to talk about.
But we still want this to be a special holiday for the two of us together as its our first Christmas together (hell, we've already bought a crystal heart Christmas ournament to celebrate it being our first one together). And everybody knows that my own family is fucked up. So although it will probably piss them off, I'd rather not have this one with them.
Anyway, what Tanja just emailed me was a link to a log cabin we could rent out in the mountains of east TN. It looks very nice with a heart shaped Jacuzzi tub for two, big screen tv, pool table, wonderful views, hiking trails, etc. It'll be within easy driving distance, but still far enough away from everything.
It sounds wonderful, and the thought of spending the time alone with Tanja puts a serious smile on my face.
Happy Things:
Sundays….they are just repeatedly filled with fun over and over again. |
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| General Update |
[Sep. 30th, 2008|06:32 am] |
Let's try to make this a quick update. I've actually been trying to make a post for a while now, but can never seem to finish it because I get too wordy.
So, what's been going on? Well, the biggest thing that has happened recently would be Tanja's birthday. I can't remember if I talked about it at all on here before or not (probably not) and I'm too lazy to check. Tanja's birthday was two days before Krissi's (though the party for Krissi's was the Friday before both of their birthdays because she and Jerm were going on a cruise).
I kind of went overboard in dong Tanja's birthday….both in the gifts I got for her and helping out with the party. But come on, it was our first birthday together. I wanted to make it something special for the both of us. I actually had…wow 8? gifts for her. Yeah I think that's right. Don't get me wrong, they weren't all real nice things. Two were dvds that I bought for $5 each. One was a gag-gift that was like $2 or $3. But I also bought her a horse riding game for the Wii (she loves that game), a pair of green earrings, and a green necklace (I love her in green and she doesn't actually have much green jewelry), and a very unique piece of jewelry (murano glass jewelry is what she's always wearing), oh and a travel coffee mug that she had been eyeing at Starbucks the last time we were in there.
I'll admit that some of the gifts I gave her without wrapping. I can't remember what it was but about a week before her actual birthday she had a really bad day for some reason. I didn't find out how bad until I was already on my way to her place. I happened to have some of the gifts in my car. So I ended up giving her three of them to cheer her up (the Wii game, a movie, and the earrings). She loved them all (immediately putting on the earrings, then putting in the game and playing all night, with the only break being dinner when we watched the movie).
Then that weekend I surprised her with another gift in the middle of the day (the other dvd), just as something small to keep her excitement up (she was getting a little bit stressed over the party planning).
Then the morning of her birthday I surprised her by writing a message on her bathroom mirror in the steam from her shower and hanging the green silk bag the green necklace came in from the top of the mirror. Yeah, she really loved that surprise.
Then that evening I had planned out a very nice dinner for us…well, I'd actually planned to take her out for dinner. But she told me that day that she just wanted to eat my house. So, I scrambled and threw something together real quick. I bought some nice candleholders from Bed, Bath, and Beyond; a bottle of wine (Wild Horse Cabarnet I believe – mainly because of the Horse logo on it); and everything I needed for a new Italian pasta dish I found a recipe for (it actually turned out far spicier than I thought it would, but we both like spicy food so it was all good, and she absolutely loved the cheese rolls and spring vegetables I made with it).
And to greet her entering the door I had a little gift box with the unique necklace in it along with a birthday card (I normally would never get people birthday cards). The card was perfect! I spent a goodly amount of time picking it out and it was oh so perfect. She also loved what I wrote in it so much that she still has the card sitting on her nightstand. :)
Oh yeah, I completely forgot I actually got 11 gifts for her…but we don't need to talk about those. ;)
Anyways, we were celebrating her birthday in style for the whole week leading up to it. In addition, we had a huge party planned for the Friday following it.
Ok, I am going to go ahead and say that this party totally kicked assed. Regardless of anything else, every last person that was there had a ton of fun and are still talking about how great it was. That being said there were some negatives about it too.
Earlier when I started posting about the party, I kind of got bogged down in the negatives….it was too soon for me to talk about it calmly I think…..
Shit, I'm doing it again. Quick and simple: less than half the people who said they were going to be there showed up, most without bothering to call or email to say they couldn't make it. This left us with a ton of extra food and drinks that we spent a lot of money on and left Tanja feeling like the people who didn't show don't care anything about her.
And the other thing that was negative….well, that is between Tanja and I. I'll just say that I was upset enough about something she did that I couldn't even hold it together enough to hang out with my friends the next day to try out Rock Band 2 even though I wanted to. I had to make up an excuse about being tired and then go home for a while. Tanja and I have talked about it and its…ok now. I was just really upset at the time.
But let's get back to talking about how much fun the party was. It ended up being 15 peopl (Tanja and I included). We were renting out the club house room at Tanja's apartments' which is great. It has a little kitchen area, mens and womens restrooms, a couch, a tone of different chairs, three tables and a plasma tv. We also borrowed Jerm's Rock Band setup and had my Wii setup with Guitar Hero, Wii Fit, and Tanja's Horse Riding game (I told you she loves it).
We had the whole place decked out. We covered up all the windows with some decorative wall screens (night sky with stars and whatnot, really just something to put up so we didn't have people looking in at all our fun). And there was a huge Happy Birthday banner that we put up covering one huge bank of windows. All the tables were covered in black table clothes with different birthday table toppers in their center, along with some disco specific confetti spread out on them. We covered up all the ceiling lights with colored cellophane to give it some mood lighting (it worked wonderfully). From the chandelier in the center of the room we hung the disco mirror ball and we had little swirlly disco decorations hanging all around the room. The little bar segmenting off the kitchen area even had a disco themed banner along its edge.
Oh and I can't forget the posters Tanja put up. We had one on the main door to welcome everybody to the party (gold posterboard with fancy lettering and glued on glittery swirls). One that I used during the Birthday Trivia segment of the night, and then three more that she taped various pictures from her life on (the comments she wrote next to the pictures were hilarious).
It was perfect.
Food wise, we had two large trays of Panelli (sp?) brought in from Lonnie Tant's Italia Pizza Café (I can't say enough about how good their food is and how great it was to talk with Lonnie personally when we were planning the catering. He's just a great guy and very personable. Oh and they've recently upgrade to using an even better grade of all their cheeses, which is saying a hell of a lot considering the quality they were already using!) with accompanying garlic bread; miniature quiches; a huge salad; and the usual party foods such as cheese on crackers, chips and dip, etc.
Drink wise, well, we raided my supply of liquor (I hadn't been drinking it at all so why not). We had a huge bottle of Bacardi Rum (only little used previously), a bottle of Captain Morgans spiced rum (never opened), a bottle of Smirnof vodka, a bottle of Jose Quervo tequila (as well as some top shelf El Patron Anejo tequila that was only for the people we really like…I think Caroline was the only one who got to try any), half a bottle of gin, two different kinds of margarita mix; half a bottle of brandy, and more beer than we had any right to get (partial case of Heineken, new case of Samuel Adams Octoberfest, a six pack of a Summer Shandy beer Tanja likes, a six-pack of Wersteiner beer, as well as some Parot Bay wine cooler type drinks), and can't forget the Jaegermeister or the bags of jello shots that Ed and Sandy brought with them. Oh and various not alcoholic drinks. Yes, most of that was to mix with the alcohol, but aside from the sodas, orange juice, and red bull for that, we made sure to have plenty of bottled water and even made sure that people were drinking water while they were partaking of the other stuff.
With that long list, you may be thinking we were having a huge drunken party. But nobody got wasted. Nobody even got all that drunk. Speaking for myself, I can say that I only had a very mild buzz going after I fixed myself a gin-sour and there were no effects at all the next morning despite me having eaten nothing since breakfast that day and going on very little sleep.
What's really funny is that the thing that sticks out in my mind most as being fun at the party is the one thing I wasn't really looking forward to, the Birthday Trivia. Normally I can't stand being in front of a bunch of people and talking; but Tanja really wanted it and I can't say 'no' to her. We actually ran out of time and didn't plan out the questions like we were planning to. Instead, I just winged the whole thing. For the trivia on Tanja I didn't have much trouble coming up with questions (hahahha, I love the 500 point value question….mainly for people's reactions to what the correct answer was). For the other categories, 70's music and 70's movies/tv, I really didn't have any trouble….thanks to my mighty iPhone! 5 minutes before the party I googled 70's trivia on it and found a perfect page for each of them. When it came time to host the game show I just browsed back to the site and picked one out that would fit the right level of difficulty. I was having fun picking out the questions and a hell a lot of fun play acting to confuse people about which of the multiple choices I was saying was showing on the page as the correct answer and which ones I were making up completely out of the blue.
As a prize we gave away a double-shot bottle of Jaeger, though I really think Tanja's first thought on a prize would have elicited an even greater positive reaction. Teehee
I got a could video clips of people trying out the hoola hoop game in Wii Fit as was a general party pictures. Looking at them you can definitely tell everybody loved Rock Band. I was a little bit disappointed that there were no pictures of Tanja and I together, but I was the only one with a camera and really, most of the time we were both working the crowd separately. I don't know why but we were both working hard to make sure everybody was having a good time. I guess because there were so many different groups of people that didn't know each (Tanja's horse riding friends, people we both know from the Meetup groups, people from her work, and even her chiropractor showed up), we felt like we needed to do that to get them talking to each and enjoy the general party. It worked great. Like I said, everybody loved the party. We just didn't have much time together during it.
Its ok, we'd already had our own party with just the two of us.
At the end of the night, around 2am, I tucked Tanja into bed and then went right to work at cleaning the club room up. It had to be completely done by 10am that morning (apartment complex's policy). I kind of figured I wouldn't be able to pull myself out of bed early enough to get it done otherwise….and I needed some time to myself right then. Anyway, Tanja wanted me to preserve as much of the decorations as possible….which takes a lot of time. I was didn't get back to the apartment with everything cleanup up until after 5:30am. By which point I needed a shower before I could possibly think of laying down.
So, I was up until 6am….and then Tanja had to get up at 8 to be in time for a riding lesson with Ally at 10. I got up with her and got stuff ready to take down to my house, mainly just because I needed to return Rock Band to Jerm. He said he was going to get back from the cruise Saturday night and I was going to try to return it to their house before they got because I suspected they would buy Rock Band 2 on the drive home.
As it turns out, I was right about that, but Jerm was wrong about when they'd be back. They'd actually made it back Friday night like Krissi had thought they would. No big deal though. He had text messaged me that morning to find out when I could bring it down to them. I just had to wait for the leasing office to open so that I could return the clubhouse key to them and then I was heading down to Southaven/Horn Lake with Rock Band and a bunch of other stuff in my car.
After getting to Jerm and Krissi's house, I helped them setup the instruments again and even tried out a little bit of Rock Band 2 with them. It was a ton of fun; but my mind kept wandering and then John and Maddie came over which brought a pause to the game and just made me think of the party more. After a fairly short time, I had to bow out using lack of excuse and went back to my own house to….spend time with my cats I guess.
Eventually, Tanja called me back after her nap and I headed back to her place so we could talk.
Last week is kind of a blur to me. Tanja and I got back to acting normal relatively quickly, but then I came down with an illness. I can't remember when it started exactly, either Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, but it quickly worsened. I was so bad Thursday that I even had to bow out of seeing my friend Todd who was in from out of town. I wasn't sure if I could have any fun even with the distraction gaming with him and everybody would be; but I knew for sure that if I was that sick, I shouldn't be around Maddie and the coming twins. Pregnant women can't take very many medications, and I didn't want to risk getting her sick at all just so I could hang out with the people I've been missing far to much of lately.
It was even worse Friday, which is why I broke down and actually went to the doctor! Anybody that knows me would nearly die of shock from hearing that. Nobody was even pestering me to do it, I did it because I was feeling THAT badly. I could barely find the energy to get dressed and drag myself to her office which is only a couple miles down the street from my house.
She told me I had a sinus infection/flu. Not too good there. She gave me an antibiotic to take twice a day for 10 days and it seems to be working fairly well, though it took a couple days to kick in.
I was so sick that I had to miss out on yet another time with my friends. I just wasn't going to be up to hosting gaming at my house Saturday. So, I emailed Jerm (from my iPhone because my computer up and died on me that morning with a bad cpu or motherboard!) and he moved it to his place.
Friday night I had to spend alone because I didn't want to get Tanja sick. And Saturday, I think I did as little as possible until I got a call from Tanja who wanted to come over. Honestly, I wasn't feeling much up for company, but she was upset about some stuff and I wanted to be with her to comfort her. It was bad enough that I ran out and bought some flowers to cheer her up. I had it all setup for her to take a relaxing bubble bath by candlelight in my bathtub with the waterjets and speakers to play her Pavaroti music on. I also would cook dinner for her (I'd already started a fresh batch of focaccia bread).
It was late enough that she skipped on the bath that night, but she really appreciated the flowers and food. A candle-lit dinner would cheer anybody up. Wouldn't it?
Its funny, I really do thrive when I have somebody else that I can be taking care of. From the moment I heard she wasn't having a good day, I forgot about how badly I was feeling and only thought of what I could do to help her. My illness was completely forgotten (well, not completely, but at least I was distracted from its effects on me).
It was a good evening.
Sunday, we had to get some work done. Tanja agreed to redesign a website in exchange for riding lessons from a woman that was short listed to be in the Olympics for Dressage (the type of riding Tanja does). However, we'd been so wrapped up with other stuff going on in our lives that we hadn't done more than the initial layout design of the pages. Despite this, Tanja was promising to set it to go live on Oct 1.
Personally, I'd prefer more than 1 month to do a major site overhaul like we are doing, but that wasn't up to me. And I do enjoy doing this stuff. So, we spent 13 hours straight yesterday working on the website. Tanja decided that she wanted some significant changes done to the initial design I had come up with and then we had a bitch of a time populating it with the content for the homepage.
Yeah, that many hours and all we got finished was the homepage! But then, I've never been professionally trained in site design and I was doing most of the work. Tanja was giving suggestions and coming up with the content to add while I worked on the graphics and coding.
What we've got is pretty good I'd say (www.alrdressage.com/testing). But then I'm kind of biased.
Tonight, we'll be returning to my house and working on populating the rest of the pages with stuff. That shouldn't take nearly as much time, but I am still a little bit worried about how much time it will take. We'll see.
What else is going on in my life?
Well, shit continues to hit the fan with my sister and her divorce. I don't understand it at all, but her ex-husband continues to live in the same house with her and the kids even when he's pulling shit like busting into her room at night and yelling at her to stop using his bed (he gets it in the settlement) so that she has to pull it and the sheets out her room and toss it into the garage and then sleep on the floor. I borrowed Tanja's truck to help her get a new bed from Costco and he was yelling at her over the phone saying that she was there with another guy……Sorry that shit just pisses me off. Of course he wouldn't say one damn word to me when I was at their house dropping the bed off.
Also in family news, my mother's remaining dog has been diagnosed with a congenital heart disease and given an estimate of 1-2 years left. Which has sent my mother into a new depression where she says shit like how she's "surrounded only by death". Yeah, I'm not exaggerating there. What the hell do you say to that? She continues to refuse seek professional help when I try talking to her about it and is telling me that I don't care about her and that my family is of no importance to me any more (basically, she's being even more dramatic about the old nonsense about me abandoning her, now its just extended to the whole family).
I'm sorry, but I let myself be control by that shit for 30 years and I've had enough. I can and will have a balance between caring for my family, my friends, my love, and myself! And so should she. She needs to realize that. Its been far too long that she has focused only on the misery of herself.
On a more positive note, Tanja and I are going to be going to a wedding together…not our own just yet (despite Keli's helpful hints/attempts to get Tanja to move in with me). Somebody she knows from her chiropractor's office is getting married and she invited the two of us. It's going to be on Saturday Oct 11. So, I will miss gaming that weekend, but I think it will be a lot of fun. We are probably going to go shopping for a new suit for me to wear this weekend and maybe something new for her too. We'll see.
I'll also be missing gaming on the following Saturday. My older sister's in-laws are coming to town and they are having a cookout that Saturday afternoon. Particularly because Tanja and I may not be here for Christmas this year, I want to make an effort to be there at family gatherings like this. We'll see how it goes. Tanja still hasn't met my parents yet. So that will be a big deal I'm sure.
I think that's it. Damn, that wasn't a very short post at all, was it?
Oh well.
Happy Things:
"If I had a million dollars, I'd sell you for a monkey." What does that even mean? She'd sell me to a monkey? She'd sell me under the ruse of me actually being a monkey? Or is it that she'd sell me for the monkey that owns me and is too lazy to do the selling himself?
HAHAHA. Sorry, I'm sure that means nothing to you. But it just brings a huge smile to my face. I really do enjoy waking up to silliness such as that in the morning. :) |
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