Gene's wedding band

My wedding band got its own post, so i figure Gene's should, too....his ring came today (actually, it came last week, but it wasn't the right ring, so a lot of panic ensued, and it had to be sent back and rushed, so I guess I should say that the right ring came today!):

Love it! Can't wait to put it on his finger!!!

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eurochuck.

I have so many HAPPY things I wanted to write about (my bridal shower last weekend being the main one) but they are going to have to wait another day or so. Right now my focus is on the life changing piece of news I got just a couple of hours ago from gene.

In this very second I'm thankful for this little blog app on my phone. I'm lying here I'm bed and can't sleep because I'm just in so much shock. I'd call my friends to talk, but it's 1:30 in the morning, and I wouldn't want someone waking me up all hysterical and shit...

Anyway, turns out that gene has gotten orders to move to a base in England, and since we're getting married and all in, oh, 24 days, this obviously means that I'LL be moving to England, too. They are only giving us five months notice, so I'm already stressing about things like getting our things there (gene says the AF takes care of all of that), finding some sort of decent job, being so far away from my family, (okay, I'm stressing mostly about getting the dogs to England, since generally I know it typically takes 6 months to complete the requirements, and so we are technically already behind....)

Don't I already sound THRILLED!?!?!? (that's laced with HEAVY sarcasm, for those of you who don't know how much I love to use sarcasm....i find that it doesn't always translate well when typed, so I try to point it out when I can...Of course, I prefer to deliver my sarcasm-filled quips in person, cause I have great sarcastic tones and facial expressions...to make a long story short, you're really missing out by not actually hearing me say these things...but I digress.....)

Where was I? Oh, yeah...Europe.....I love Europe. I got to spend a large part of the summer backpacking all over the place when I was 19, and I thought it was incredible....however, I'm not just overjoyed about this move because it sort of interrupts my life plan (finishing school), which is something I've been working very hard on for the last couple of years. It's also pretty terrifying to think that I'll be in a foreign country (mom said "at least they speak English there!") with no family, no friends, no job (though I'm sure that part won't last terribly long).....and it's already scary enough to me that I'm about to be someones wife-now I'm going to be someones new wife, in a strange new place, with no friends and no nearby family and NO SEPHORA (really, England? You don't have SEPHORA?!?!?).

Gene is ecstatic about this move. Me? Not so much. I like being close to my family, and as much as I bitch about Cabot, it's my cozy little corner of the world where I feel relatively safe. Moving across an ocean is scary as hell to me - I mean, I moved to Orlando and hardly left the house except to go to work or to the mall because I was so terrified of getting lost an never finding my way home! Now you want me to live in a place where I'm expected to drive on the wrong side of the road? Calling it an adjustment is quite the understatement. Yes, I've always said i would someday like to live in Europe. SOMEDAY =
when I'm done with the crap I'd already started here in America. Way to come hard with the Bad timing, you order-giving jerks!

This isn't a two week vacation, or a summer with a backpack, getting drunk, seeing sites and sleeping in hostels. Nope! This is a 3 (or more) YEAR stint in jolly ol' England. Hey, don't just EASE me into the life of a military wife...no...just throw me right in!!!!! What? Were all the bases in...I dunno, AMERICA, completely full? Thanks, air force.

I'm sure this will all be one great big adventure, but for now, I'm just gonna sulk about it.

Cheerio, dammit!


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crappiest blog entry....ever.

so, a month has practically gone by (actually, almost exactly a month!), and i haven't posted anything on here. i guess i've been busy.....here's the cliffs notes version of what the hell has been going on.

Gene got home very late on the night of the 15th of January (i guess technically it was the morning of the 16th....), and things have just sort of been busy since then. I took an entire week off of work so that we could spend some time together and get re-adjusted or whatever, but to be honest, we were fine as soon as we saw each other at the airport. I didn't feel any of the awkwardness or uncertainty that I'd sort of previously feared, and I'm pretty sure the feeling was mutual. we were both just kind of instantly back where we left off, and everything just went pretty easily and naturally.

the first week he was home basically consisted of him being in a weird sleeping pattern and us eating at restaurants that he'd missed since he'd been gone. we went shopping quite a bit, spent some time with keira, went to see my parents......it was a busy week, basically.....

last weekend we went to dallas (technically frisco) to Ikea and bought some furniture, which was an absolutely mind-boggling experience - i'm obsessed with ikea, and while i realize that their stuff is mostly not going to last me for the next decade, i'm okay with it because its so affordable that i can buy it and when it gets scratched or breaks in half in 5 years, i won't cry about it. not to mention that if our tastes change in the next 2-3 years, we won't have any of that "WHAT THE HELL WERE WE THINKING" buyers remorse over our stuff, cause we can just toss it or move it to a spare room/sell it/toss it in a dumpster/leave it in somebody's yard as a weird prank and not feel any pain over it - anyway, we ended up with some awesome stuff, but let me tell you this: if you haven't been to an ikea store, and you ever plan on going to one, you need to make sure you have an entire day to devote to it - i'm serious - i thought "how long could this possibly take? 1 hour? 2 hours?" try 4 HOURS. four fucking hours to pick out 5 things. it was insane. i like to compare it to disneyworld, actually - for grown ups - its like, there's all this hype, and as you walk into this gigantic building, you feel your heart race....like a dream coming true....in fact, as we were eating breakfast (yeah, ikea has its own little restaurant), i got so excited i was bouncing in my chair, and staring at gene as if to say "PLEASE HURRY UP AND EAT THAT BACON!" - and then you're off - and it starts off all fast and furious, and everything is awesome and amazing, and you want to stop and look at and touch EVERYTHING, but then, an hour or so in, your knees start throbbing, your head starts spinning, and you're trying not to let the person you're with see you checking out the routes to the nearest exits.....

not to mention the drive to and from frisco isn't that fantastic (gene and i are both admittedly not into "long car trips")......

let see, what else has happened in the last month....

i finally (after a MONTH) got my engagement ring back - it had to be sent off to be resized, and i almost had my very first (okay, second) bridezilla moment over it....

we went to the races at oaklawn with my family last weekend....it was.....we'll say interesting.....

i've gotten FOUR snow days off of work, which is absolutely unbelievable and insane to me.

....i think those are all the highlights......

so now that gene is back and we're all settled into a normal routine again, i have to get back into wedding planning mode - i was SO far ahead at one point, but now i'm behind. I have to order more save the dates and get the ones i already have out by the end of this month - i gotta get bridesmaids dresses ordered, make gene pick out a suit for the guys, start looking for shoes, meet with the museum people again, start making decisions about the reception menu.....and thats just the top of the list - i don't know what i'd do without my mom - she's taken on so much of this responsibility, and i know that she's already got so much on her plate right now - hopefully neither one of us will implode between now and june 26th!

so that's the last month in a giant, confusing, mixed up shell. hopefully my next entry won't be so all over the place.

gene's got a blog....

my husband-to-be is now blogging....not sure if he will actually keep this up when he gets back over here to the USA, but if anyone is interested, here's a link!

Reader Meet Author

he can be a little pretentious about music, literature and beer.....but he's totally cute.

thanks, penguin!

so i mentioned previously something about sending care packages to gene all the time, and i did, but i guess i feel like i should mention all the nice things he did for me while he was deployed - for instance, the giant fortune cookie in the picture above - this was delivered to me last week, and it was seriously freaking HUGE and so cool and sweet......then, he contacted Cupcakes on Kavanaugh and special ordered these cupcakes for my birthday, and had my friend (thanks, kim killingsworth!) deliver them to me:

Breakfast of champions!!!!

he also sent a LOT of flowers - in fact, there is a joke around work that i don't have to buy flowers for the wedding because during his deployment, gene has sent me enough floral arrangements to cover the entire ceremony. every girl loves flowers, and i'm no exception - they would come at random, unexpected times - sometimes more than once a week - and while i hate that he's been deployed, i can honestly say that i will miss getting flowers when he comes back (because, lets face it, while i DO get flowers when he's here, they are pretty few and far between)

i always took pictures of them so that i could email them to him so he could see what he sent, so with the end of his deployment fast approaching, i kind of wanted to post an ode to my flowers...someone cue up some nat king cole music or something:

it's crazy to me that i have found someone who does so many thoughtful and sweet things for me. i know that these are all just "things," but the effort that they take (especially for someone in his position right now) are constant reminders of how lucky i am, and how much i truly am loved.

thanks, penguin.

4 more days

so, gene will officially be on his way back to the united states in four days. FOUR DAYS.

half a year has gone by since we've seen each other. HALF A YEAR!

when this all started, i remember thinking "oh shit. 6 months is a really long time," and yeah, it has been. it didn't "fly by" like people promised me it would, and even though i thought at first that yeah, he'd be gone for six months and then he'd come home and seamlessly fit back into the space he left, and everything would go back to the way it was before he left and we'd be all sunshine and cupcakes and happiness, i now have all these OTHER feelings about his return home.

i don't want to say we had a "perfect" relationship, but it was pretty effortless....and when i say "effortless" i don't mean that there was no work involved, because believe me, we've both had to do some work in the last 2+ years....but it was easy. it was natural. not to sound cheesy, but it seemed like this was meant to be. like we were each others complementing piece or whatever....so why wouldn't i think that this would be "simple"? that he would go, come home, and we'd pick up right where we left off??? now i say to myself, "oh, chuck...you have been SO naive...."

the deployment started off with me standing there in the airport, clutching onto him with a death grip that you can't even imagine, crying so hard i nearly threw up - i know that in my head i've altered how the events really went down, but in my memory, he literally had to pry me off of him so that he could get through security and make his flight - i remember riding down the escalator, BEYOND embarrassed that i had all this mascara streaming down my face, and getting all these sympathetic looks from little old ladies and their husbands - then driving myself home and sitting in my apartment, saying out loud "you're all by yourself now" - i mean, i realized then (like i do now) that im not literally all alone - i have my dogs, my family, my friends - but the person i'd hardly gone a day without seeing for 2 years - my very best friend on earth - had just been taken away from me, and it seemed really surreal....i knew from day one that if i got into a relationship with him, that this type of situation was probably (okay, DEFINITELY) going to happen, but it's still hard to deal with, even considering the 3 months i had to prepare myself - there was a short mourning period (like, seriously. very short. i cried for a few hours, then i tried my best to suck it up and put on a brave face - actually, i like to say that in the first few days of his deployment, i went through all the stages of grief: shock, denial, anger (which included me screaming obscenities every time i passed the air force base) & acceptance), and then i put my big girl panties on and decided that while i was very sad, i still have a life to live, and sitting around pulling the "look at me, the sad, lonely military bride-to-be whose fiance is in another country" card just really isn't my style. besides, time tends to go by even slower when you're wallowing in whatever it is thats bugging the shit out of you, so i tried to stay as positive as possible. i kind of threw myself into getting care packages together and focusing on things like planning the wedding and making sure that he knew that even though he was on the other side of the world (maybe not technically, but as far as i was concerned), that he was still a priority to me.

i think i did pretty well during the time he's been gone, but i haven't been perfect- i had some pretty good momentum out of the gate, but i did have my moments of emotional instability (that makes me sound NUTS, but it's truly the only way i can put it that does it justice), and i will now openly admit that i, on occasion, suffered some lapses into the "poor pitiful me" syndrome that i so desperately HATE, and the last few weeks - in all honesty - have just been filled with a depression i haven't felt in years. i feel like a terrible person because this should be the most exciting time i've had in months, but it's almost as if i'm just - i don't know - POISED for an anxiety attack. I mean, i've essentially spent the last six months living the life i did before i met gene - of course, there's not been any dating, and i'm not going out all the time, but i've readjusted to only worrying about myself on a daily basis. i haven't had a companion around. its just been ME....and while i realize that, at my core, i'm the exact same person i've always been, i do think that there have been some changes in me since he's been gone - changes that i've made perhaps unconsciously, and probably only as an adaptive thing, but changes nonetheless.

i walk around every day with these nagging worries that he will get off that airplane and not be the same person he was when he left. what if he doesn't like me anymore? what if we don't get along as well? what if the adjustments we've had to make over the last six months make it impossible for us to go back to the relationship we had before? what if we suddenly discover that all the things we thought were "cute" or "endearing" about each other before totally irritate the hell out of us now?

don't get me wrong, i'm glad he is coming home. i couldn't be happier. but the anxiety is real, and i can't pretend these concerns aren't there for me. the only way to talk myself down from the anxious hyperventilation that i'm constantly on the verge of is to focus on the positive stuff that i know hasn't changed, no matter what: i will be so happy to see him, to know that he's finally safe and in the same freaking zip code as me - and to be able to hug him and rub my face into his shoulder (i don't know why i do this, i just always have), and to finally be able to just sit on a couch with him and not do anything but just hang out together. I'll be glad to finally be able to pick up my phone and call him when i want to, and not have to wait for him to call me. i'll be glad to be in the same TIME ZONE!!!! i'll be happy to finally have a hand to hold again, and someone to cook for, and someone to laugh at the jokes that i don't get to make anymore because i'm the only one at the apartment (and, lets face it, regardless of the situation if you're talking to yourself making jokes AND laughing at them, you need help). it will be nice to smell him again (he always smells so nice), and to get/give kisses, and to have someone to go out to big, nice dinners with. these all seem like incredibly shallow things i guess, but those are the things i think about when i think about missing him - i miss our daily routines and all of our little moments together, and i'm just ready to get our normalcy back. we're a pair - a team - and everything seems off kilter when we aren't together.

plus, i'm really sick of taking the dogs out by myself.

a sweet surprise

gene has always been one of those "flower" guys - over the last couple of years, i've gotten lots of flowers from him, and most of the time they were for no reason at all - i love that about him - i mean, what girl isn't into getting flowers?

since he's been gone, of course i've been missing everything about him, and i think he senses it when we talk that i'm having a pretty hard time with this.  Yesterday, i got a special delivery....

it amazes me that he's halfway across the world, and has so much going on, and he still manages to do things like this for me.  Even with him gone, i realize a little more everyday how much i truly, absolutely love him, and how lucky i am to have found this incredible man to share my life with.  maybe there's some truth to that whole "absence makes the heart grow fonder" thing.... although i find it hard to believe that it's possible for me to  be fonder of him than i already AM!

baseball, beer, and bridesmaids? yup.

one of the biggest pains in my ass a far as wedding planning has gone is the rehearsal dinner - to me, its almost as important as my wedding day, and in a few ways, its MORE important - i feel like the rehearsal dinner is the time when, if your family and your groom's family aren't really acquainted, they GET acquainted,  and get familiar with each other before your "big day"(that was a little redundant, but oh well...) - at first, i wanted a traditional sit down dinner somewhere, but the more i got to thinking about it, the more i realized that it just wasn't our style - plus, most of the rehearsal dinner scenarios i'd looked into were really putting a strain on my budget AND nothing just felt quite "right," and most of the rehearsal dinners i've been to have just ended up being kind of awkward groups of people sitting at tables of four or six people, making small talk and just trying to get through a meal....i didn't want for there to be an obvious separation between our families at the rehearsal dinner, and definitely not at the wedding itself - i want our families to mingle and form friendships and really get to know one another and understand why gene and i love each others families so much - i racked my brain for a while for some neat, creative alternative, and all of a sudden one night while i was sitting at my parents house, a light bulb went off in my brain....

i suddenly had this thought about.....baseball?  weird thing to think of in the middle of talking about pink flowers, fondant, and string quartets, right? anyway,  my parents have had season tickets at autozone park - home of the memphis redbirds - for the last few years, and going to games is one of my favorite things to do in the summer (well, not really this summer since the heat is unbearable, but usually, im all about the baseball) - its a family thing, and just being in that atmosphere makes me really happy.  gene is a big baseball fan, so i knew he would be on board, even before i got his enthusiastic "YES" to my idea.....

it just so happened that the day after i had this great idea, mom and i were in memphis doing some wedding stuff and had a chance to stop by the park and take a look around - i didn't really expect for anyone to be available to actually seriously talk to, but to my surprise, an amazing usher at the park (who had just stopped to answer a "where is the...." question for us) led us to the event coordinator for the park AND the catering coordinator! they were amazing, and took us on a tour of 4 different areas where we could host my rehearsal dinner - the one i fell in love with (and mom loved it, too!) was the party suite - it has plenty of room for everyone to mix and mingle, 34 box seats, and is on the third base line - the view is incredible, and everything about this idea just felt "right" the second i stepped into that room - 

the only problem with the plan has been finding out the game schedule for next summer - while they can still have events at the park even when there's not a game, i really had my heart set on watching some baseball and giving everyone a little bit of entertainment that night - we finally got word today from the people at autozone park that there is, in fact, a game scheduled for the night of my rehearsal dinner!  i can barely contain my excitement, and as silly as it sounds, this very second i'm MORE excited about my rehearsal dinner than my actual wedding....

as for the food....they can cater pretty much anything there, but i figure if i'm having my rehearsal dinner at a baseball park, then i'm doing it right with the traditional baseball park foods - i never thought in a million years that i'd be having hot dogs, peanuts, beer and nachos at my rehearsal dinner, but now i cant picture it happening any other way. its going to be INCREDIBLE!

it feels like everything is really falling into place for our wedding.....i'm so incredibly lucky.

almost a month in....

gene has been gone for nearly a month now - in that time we've gotten to have just two 15 minute phone conversations, but we talk nearly every day through email and this weird military secure messenger thing. these six months are the reason i made the promise to myself years ago that i'd never date a man in the military, and if i did, i'd most certainly never fall in love with him, want to marry him, etc.... in my head, i guess it wasn't worth it or ideal to have someone you love so far away and almost completely inaccessible to you.  oops! guess i screwed THAT up!  in my defense, i didn't really know what he did until it was too late.....

i keep waiting on it to get easier, and i guess in some aspects it is - i've stopped coming home everyday and just waiting on him to show up.  i've now focused on keeping myself awake long enough every night to get to talk to him for a while on the messenger thing, so i'm constantly trying to figure out what time it is where he is, and how long i can talk to him while still getting enough sleep to make it through the next day.  it's this weird, uncomfortable kind of paranoia to know that there's no way i can get to him if i need to, and its a daily crappy realization to know that when those moments happen that i think of something funny to tell him about, or something i just want to say to him, i can't just pick up the phone and do it.  i realize now how i sometimes took his being right here all the time for granted, and every single time i take the trash out to the dumpster, i want to burst into tears (cause that was his job, obviously).  The couple of times he HAS gotten to call, i feel like an idiot because i don't really have anything to say thats exciting - i just make small talk, really, and then when we hang up the phone i think "wow. i bet he's glad he wasted that call on me" - i just tend to tell him everything in emails and messenger conversation, so by the time he does call, he already knows everything....

i'm also pretty frustrated that i've sent packages and mail to him and he still hasn't gotten any of them - i'm surprised by how long it takes mail to get to him, and also frustrated that the guy he shares a room/workspace with gets stuff like, all the time - i have to guess that his fiance/mom/friends started sending this stuff BEFORE he left....i would have done that, too if i'd known it would take weeks for packages to arrive......i feel like he's that kid at camp who never gets so much as a letter from his parents, while everyone else sits around with giant boxes of cookies from their moms.

trying to plan a wedding when your fiance is in another country far, far away isn't very fun either. i'm thinking that most brides might think that this is a perfect arrangement, because honestly, until he comes back every decision that has to be made will be made solely by ME, but i'm not a fan of not having his input on stuff, and sometimes having to wait for an email reply to a question isn't going to work out....hopefully he will be cool with all the things i decide in his absence.  

deployment

so on april fool's day this year, gene came home from work and asked "what would you do if i told you i was being deployed"?  - since it was april fool's day and all, i didn't believe him, but once i realized that he didn't even realize that it was april fool's day, and that he wasn't backing down off of what he had said,  i had no choice BUT to believe him.  Every day since then has just been this awful countdown in my head leading up to the day he was going to leave - that day just was yesterday.

the last week has been really emotional - every time someone would bring it up in conversation, i would have to stop myself from crying - and the last couple of days before he left, i seriously counted every single hour that we had left and i really couldn't even sleep.  

it was really awful taking him to the airport and having to walk away from him knowing that it would be the last time i would see him or got to hug or touch him for six months. its so strange to know that he's going to be halfway around the world from me, and there's nothing i can do about it -  he's assured me that where he is going is very safe, and that he'll come home in one piece, but it doesn't change the fact that i'm going to carry around this uneasy feeling until he's back home. 

in the last 2 years, there's rarely been a day that we haven't seen each other.  now, there's going to be 180 days when i don't see him, and while i'll be able to talk to him frequently, i'm sure there will be some days that go by that i don't get to.  i'm trying to stay as positive as i can - after all, there are people who get deployed for much, much longer and to much more dangerous areas, but its really hard to not feel incredibly selfish and sad about him being gone.  Even though i have a great support system here, it still feels like i'm alone, because my very best friend in the world - the person i love more than anything - has been shipped off to another country far, far away from me. 

i've tried to remember that six months in the grand scheme of things isn't THAT long - i've reminded myself that it was 3 months ago that he told me he'd be leaving, and how quickly that time has flown by.  i'm just looking forward to the days getting easier, and to time passing quickly.....and im glad that i have this wedding to plan to distract me and to keep some "happy" going on.....

please keep my future husband in your thoughts....

planning

last week mom and i spent two very busy days in memphis meeting possible vendors for the wedding - i feel a million times better after these meetings because i feel like my "vision" (and i use the term "vision" very loosely, since i essentially had ZERO ideas until this time last week!) for a wedding is finally taking shape, and it feels like i've found some people im very excited to work with, and that i know will work very hard to come through with all the things we are planning. 

so far we have only signed a contract with the photographer - we chose kevin barre, who gene and i had a chance to meet at a bridal fair back in the spring - and i couldn't be MORE excited about this choice.  the minute i saw his photos, i knew he was exactly who i was looking for, plus it feels like his personality is exactly the kind that ill need on my wedding day!  he has some great ideas and is very familiar with the where venue we are getting married, so i feel confident that the pictures from my wedding day will be amazing!!!!

we also talked to a few different florists and bakeries about the wedding  and while im pretty much 100% settled on who im going with for these things, we havent set anything in stone yet - i keep having this recurring nightmare where we call to officially book the people i want though, and theyve already been booked for my wedding day by someone else, so mom and i made a deal that we would have all the booking done by this wednesday.

it feels weird to go from not even having a "vision" to having this much work done as far as planning the wedding - and i was always a little worried that mom and i would argue over petty stuff, or that doing these appointments together would bring out our creative differences, but so far we seem to be on the same page about everything, and she seems just as pleased as i am with the people we are going to have working on the wedding with us.  i'm reminded at some point every day how awesome my mom is and how lucky in the mom lottery - she already has so much on her plate, but is still willing to do whatever i need or ask as far as the planning process, and without her helping me, id still be sitting around without a plan or any clear direction.  

....oh, and i currently own EVERY bridal magazine that has been in print since march, so if you see me in a bookstore or anywhere for that matter with a bridal magazine in my hand, remind me that i probably already have the same magazine at home already - ive bought 4 magazines twice, because i forgot i had them - i mean, lets be honest, all the bridal magazines kind of run together after a while....