Chomp!

Ahhh, summer. It's that time again!

When worlds collide

Tonight Fiancé and I have the apartment to ourselves after five days of house guests. Fiancé's mom (we'll call her MIL) is in town with her friend Julie to scout out restaurants for the grooms dinner. Our apartment is many things - it's cozy, it's in a great location, it's artsy, it's colorful. But it's not spacious. So after five days of company, and five days of nonstop restaurant reviewing, we're pretty content to be left to ourselves for a bit. MIL and Julie will be back again at the end of the week and will stay in town until next Tuesday, but for a few days we're breathing in the peace and quiet.

Mookie comes to visit on Thursday! It'll be an interesting weekend, since MIL will meet one of my parents for the first time. It could be the stuff of novels.

And I think it's going to rain today

I just ran outside to mail something, and it looks like the sky is going to open up at any second. The air smells like McDonald's, which is weird and probably not related to the coming storm.

Booked

I am halfway through Harry Potter and tempted to call in sick tomorrow to spend the day reading in bed :)

Just visiting

Today we had lunch with Fiancé's cousin, H, who has a new baby boy! He's so cute I couldn't take my eyes off him! Babies are so wonderful! I got to hold him for ages, until he started getting cranky and I handed him off to his mom.

When work and fun intersect

This morning I received an email notification about the availability of scholarships for an emergency preparedness conference for health educators in Chicago in September. I LOVE emergency preparedness! The topic has just recently come full blast across my radar screen. I'm so excited! It's one piece of my job that knocks my socks off :) Drama!!!!!!!!

Patience

This made me laugh but also made me a little sad. How useful would this have been a few years ago? SO useful. But I have absolutely no use for it now, which is great. But just the teeniest bit sad.

When I was single, I was consumed with the fear of never finding a husband. I should have just enjoyed my freedom, but most of the time I didn't. I blame this on myself, but on society as well. If people hadn't continually harassed me about settling down perhaps I would have been calmer. Now that I'm about to be married, I'm consumed with the fear of never having a baby. So I'm guessing that my childless days will go by in similar fashion.

A pair of them

I was wrong about the Brit. He's got a real life fiancée. She came to swing class last night.

He still hops around like a bunny on speed. She hops too, so at least they sort of fit together.

Good morning

I'm a Potter fan. I can't count myself an original Potter fan, because it took me until the first movie came out to actually read the first book. But since then I've been a faithful follower.

This morning, Fiancé woke me up at 7am to bestow upon me a hot-off-the-presses copy of the last HP book. Beats breakfast in bed any day. I've landed myself a pretty great guy.

Little orhpan Elle

Today almost my entire immediate family is flying to Germany. My mom, C, my two nieces, Jack, and TO. Mookie is staying stateside, but he's currently in Nevada racing cars.

I'm feeling a tad bit vulnerable.

Back where we started

Last night at swing class we did the awful inevitable: we switched partners. Several times. Which is supposedly great for learning, but totally sucks. I can't learn when I'm being swung around the room like a f*cking rag doll.

I'm spoiled, and I know it. Fiancé's a terrific dancer, and honestly with swing it's all the guy anyway - you just follow their lead.

There are some very funny characters in our swing class. There's a guy we've named the Brit (so named because he's a Brit). He says some really funny stuff and is generally very serious about swing class. He's getting married soon. Lots of people who take dance class are about to get hitched. But his fiancée is always "unable to make it." Which makes me wonder if the whole engagement thing is an elaborate ruse to disguise the fact that he's a normal guy with no extenuating circumstance who might actually like to dance. Or... maybe she's quite busy.

The Brit's got no lead. At all. And he kind of hops around a lot. And he tends to go nuts with the turns. Which is forgivable, except that he 1) is in position right by a set of open french doors leading outside and 2) comes to class schnockered. I can smell the alcohol wafting off of his sweaty skin, and I fear that at any moment I'm going to be flung out the open doors and down the stone steps.

I think a lot of people assume that a drink will take the edge off, making them better dancers because it relieves some of the anxiety. Which might be true. One drink. But this guy hits happy hour harder than a frat boy hits the keg at homecoming. I can speak from experience that drinking too much makes you a bad dancer - I always want to quit dancing once I get tipsy because I have no balance and I get the spins really easily from all the, well, spinning.

We continued to switch partners all night, with the followers (women) moving down one person to their left after each song. By the time I got back to Fiancé I was SO happy to see him. He looked pretty happy to see me too. We're used to each other, which makes a HUGE difference. And we're both pretty calm dancers who watch the footwork and focus on form. When we finally got to dance, it was like heaven. We kept our steps small and stayed close, and I whispered into his ear about the Brit being a boozer. He laughed, and it felt like coming home.

New Hampshire goddamn

My whole family (sans me of course, because I'm planning a wedding like it's a second full time job) is headed to Germany for six weeks. My sister has a nightmare passport story, which I thought I would share. She filed for her new passport in March, they leave on Thursday, and she just got her passport last night. Travelers beware. If your passport is about to expire, start the renewal process now.

Here is a copy of the email she sent telling us her horror story:

So Jack and I drove the hour and a half to Philadelphia and joined the line at 6:30am. There were already 40 people ahead of me. The people waiting in line with me were all very nice and we passed the 4 hours of wait time by playing fun games like "Guess where I would go if I had a passport" and "How many minutes until my plane is departing". We practically wrote a screenplay for that Fahrenheit 911 director to produce entitled "Expedite This." We swapped war stories of how many inconsistent directions we had been told over the past two weeks from the passport hotline. I bonded with the 20 other people whose passports were in the black hole office of New Hampshire.

But then at 2:55pm it all became worth it as I was handed my reissued passport with a slightly frazzled picture of me and my named spelled correctly (not everyone was as lucky at this stage and there were a few typos that had to be redone). I am happy to say that all the nice people waiting with me also got their passports today. I pretty much won the "most-wronged" contest because I had submitted my application the longest ago (March) and had traveled the furthest (from Austin). But I felt particularly bad for a woman who flew up from Miami, stayed in a hotel (costing her $700) and was flying back to Miami tonight to catch her plane to Ireland tomorrow. She had been saving for this trip for two years. She and her husband are taking their autistic daughter on a trip that the daughter requested. She got her passport and left with enough time to get to the airport for her flight home. She was right in front of me in line so we had a lot of time to bond. And P will be making it to Greece on Saturday and S will be able to attend her family reunion in Jamaica this weekend. B will be celebrating his 35th birthday at Hedonism in Jamaica where apparently everyone walks around naked all the time. (B won least sympathetic story. We told him he better come up with a new one before talking with the passport officials).

So all is well on this end and we will be traveling as planned on Thursday. If your passport expires within the next two years, I would go ahead and start the process tomorrow. And if you know of anyone else with a story like mine, tell them to go to Philly with or without an appt. When we get back, I will be starting a petition to remove New Hampshire from the union and I would appreciate everyone's support. I already have 20 signatures.

A sidewalk education

On Saturday night EC had a fire evacuation. Something to do with a water pipe. So about 200 EC summer students filed out in front of EC's main building. The incident happened around 2am. This was about the same time the bars were emptying out on the downtown street the College shares with the city.

Now, our LGBT population at EC is a bit higher than at most schools. This isn't something I often consciously think about - it just seems the norm to me, since that's the environment I'm in. One of tolerance and individuality.

The number of homophobic comments our students endured while gathered on that sidewalk was appalling. First off, the number of stupid drunk assholes who wanted to enter the building to use the ATM while the fire alarm was blaring and the strobes were flashing was a bit appalling in and of itself. They got belligerent when our student staff tried to stop them FOR THEIR OWN SAFETY. And then they turned into raging, raving bigots. Oh, and one guy tried to strangle Fiancé when he put himself between the drunkard and the door to the building, blocking the guy's entrance after he'd bullied and pushed past the student staff. That was appalling too.

I guess I knew that lots of people are homophobic. I just didn't believe it. Our sweet, kind, good natured students. They were so nice to everyone involved. They were so helpful. They usually are. They're good kids. They're good people. And they're just so sweet.

I wonder how often they're faced with unprovoked attacks because of who they are and how they look, or how they talk.

People disappoint me.

Almost out of battery power

That's not a metaphor, my laptop is actually starting to sound the warning signal. God, I don't want to get up to get the power cord.

I'm taking a week-long intensive class out in Milton Massachusetts. I leave the apartment at 7am everyday and don't come back until after 5pm. I stay up until the early morning writing research papers. The wedding plans are in a constant state of catch-up. We were traveling last weekend. I'm still settling in at Fiancé's. We have a to-do list this weekend that has erupted into hugeness while we weren't looking.

I am so tired of doing stuff. We are always doing something. I want to go to the beach, but that's not the kind of something we're always doing.

I miss my blog :(

College kids - gotta love 'em

Written someplace it shouldn't be in one of EC's main buildings:

Need weed
Need beer
Need mom
Hoes

I like that 'hoes' is simple enough to stand by itself as a statement.