Manual Updates in Chicagoland
I feel like nothing in my life is automated right now. All new all the time. Some excerpts for the log books:
I am at the point where I am at Steve's place pretty permanently now so its time to turn off the phone/internet at the condo and "gasp" I have to loose my old ameritech email address I have had since 1997. Sad. I don't use it so much, but I run a lot of newsletters there that have to be changed over now and I have to make sure I don't loose anything particularly good in the files or loose any contacts that may still use that old address. If you're reading this wondering how to contact me in the future, please use my yahoo.com address. It will be a few weeks before I have time to filter through all those emails though and get away from that monthly $75 bill. We also had to get my parents some new dial-up internet last night since they use my free DSL backup dial up plan that will be going away. And OMG! I can't believe I surfed the internet like that in 1997. Holy monkeys is that slow!
My brother has a girlfriend again and I'm not totally wild about her. Odd, I usually like his GFs, they're always cute and nice but there is something odd about this one. I am not sure what it is yet. I get a back country, rural, city hating kind of vibe from her. And in the current Obama democratic reform metropolis era we're in, I'm not sure why she thinks it's ok to make fun of other ethnic backgrounds that she goes to college with. Yes, she's in college, I think she's 23 and Scott is 31. Big age diff, but he doesn't seem to care. She's definitley naieve about a lot, including her financial expectations of the world (who Coach handbag collection as a student?) and she uses a whole language of words I don't understand (dirty rice?, is that rural speak or youngspeak?) but as per usual it's not my place to mention anything. I do want my brother to be happy, and he seems like he is, but I guess I just thought of him with a classier more worldly girl. Sigh...
My commute time has doubled with the metra, craptastic. I used to like the simplicity of walking out my door and to the train whenever I was ready and now I rush through everything at an anxious pace to get out the door at 7:30 am for an 8 am train and a 8:35 bus to get to work by 9 am. On the way home it gets better. The 121 only runs at rush hour, so if client rush work comes in at 5pm I get stuck taking the 151 or 157 busses which can take an hour to get to union station from michigan ave. Then IF you get there at the time of an express it's a 30 min train ride to the burbs, if not its a regular train 1 hour trip and another 20-30 min drive home from the station. Steve bears the brunt of this also being early to work after dropping me off and staying late every day until I call and say I will be at the train station. I get to work from home on Fridays, but since they laid off our work from home analyst here last week and gave out all his accounts to the 4 remaining ones, I am not sure doing that is a positive for my career. It's hard to stay in touch with management from home.
Living together is a challenge sometimes with commuication. Not a seriously diffcult one but here's an example. We have needed to clean Steve's garage since I met him. He had a 2 car garage with 1 car for 12 years so the old tires, old exaust pipes, mufflers, brakes, yard equipment, oil change equipment and a whole bunch of random garbage crept up. We smooshed it a bit to fit in my car a while ago but this weekend we finally did something about it. The thing was "clean the garage" meant 2 totally different things to both of us. I meant, take everthing out, put it on the driveway, put it back in better order and throw out stuff you don't want to put back in. He meant to take everything out, wash the floors and just put everything back somewhere. Ugh. We eventually did get everything washed and strategically placed and now have room to walk around the cars and got his old desk out of the loft used as a makeshift workbench.
Wedding planning is plugging along. I just have to say though I neevr though I would be spending $4K on flowers. Yes, it is exorbitant, yes I tried to cut back the quote, but we have a fancy shmancy florist that is actually very good and Steve's mom insisted on not cutting back and paying for things. I feel a bit guilty because its double what we budgeted for and somehow it is going to come up later that she paid all that for the flowers at our wedding. Especially if Steve's brother gets married and his GF wants flowers worth half that. I am wating for this to somehow backfire, but I couldn't keep pushing to pay for it myself when she called the florist and managed things from there. I am also alarmed that our small budget wedding is now near 23K in total overall cost. I'm not writing that to brag, I am writing it out of embarassment. We might have 75 people max but the cost of everything from the reception to the rehersal dinner to the brunch the day after has been quoted and the the total is alarming. I want people to be happy when they come to the wedding, but I also know they won't remember any of it a year after it happens. We're committed to all the decisions we've made, but I feel bad that my 15K goal went out the window despite a few good deals like buying a $200 dress and Steve finding a great deal on a very nice artcarved wedding band at James & Williams.
My blogging has lagged latley because we're a bit swamped at work. I have more clients now that the work at home analyst has been laid off and next month is big hell quarterly report month with the largest client. I am not sure how everything is going to get done at home and with the wedding when I am most likley going to be working looong hours. It's interesting trying to find time to get wedding stuff done, move my stuff to Steve's one car load at a time, have an overloaded workload and try and fix up Steve's place to eventually sell. Oh yea, and we're supposed to have *more* time together since we live together now. Sigh... I think eventually things will calm down but not for a while.
And lastly the other thing squarley on my mind latley is trying to loose weight before the wedding. Initially I did when we got engaged and I bought a dress that just *barely* fit me because I thought I would loose more weight before the wedding. Hmmm. That hasn't happened. I'm still about the same and skipping snacks or cutting back on calories is impossible when I am stressed out at work. I am beginning to get worried more and more about this because I only have 3 months left. While technically it is possible to loose another 10 lbs by then, I would be happy with 5. I just don't know where/when/how this is going to be possible.