The Trouble with Planning

My husband and I are likely to always have the same battle about planning. I am a planner, he is the anti-planner. Usually fine, we can likely find a happy medium but then there are those times when I insist on putting something on the books. Whether it be a trip to a far off place or a simple outing in town it requires a date and a calendar. I find myself currently resenting the universe when I finally get the man to put a date in stone and instead we miss something that might have been "epic."

Now let me be clear, I do not in any way begrudge the circumstances, I instead resent having to hear how, "this is why it is better not to make plans." While yes, it is a little frustrating to miss something, we cannot walk through our entire lives never making plans and expect to accomplish the things we wish to accomplish. I am all about spontaneity and fun but sometimes you need to at least plan the how to get to the place with the spontaneity and fun. In addition I find it wildly annoying that we can put a concert on the books months in advance but a play might make him die.

The Foo Fighters were doing an underground, super secret tour of Los Angeles. The only way you found out about the shows was through Twitter. Now the need to be a grown up and schedule meetings prevented me from attending any of the shows. Working prevented Chris from attending any of the shows as well. We finally make it up to Mammoth to ski and snowboard which is perfectly awesome and fun only to find out we were missing the very last of these underground shows. This made Chris quite smug in thinking if we hadn't made the plans to go to Mammoth we would have been free to go to the show. All of a sudden all the fun we were having snowboarding didn't matter as much as the fact we were missing the concert. I of course had to get in my little jab about the fact I could have gone one night without him and didn't to which he stuck out his tongue. All in all no one was really disappointed, we had a great time I just have to deal with the kid inside my husband who says we could have had a "once in a lifetime experience."

I found myself only slightly redeemed when we did miss one outing because we had another commitment. At first I was dealing with a very whiny, the other thing would be more fun, 5-year-old. But after we had a great time at our adult dinner I found out we had missed the most horrible night out, one of those ones that proves nothing good happens out after midnight. Aside from the fact the sober people ended up babysitters for the oh so inebriated "children" of the group, there was an hour long session at Jack in the Box which ended in a food fight and one person having a broken hand. Sounds like our calm dinner was the saner option. In Chris's defense, I have fully bitten him with the snow bug again and we have many more trips to Mammoth on the books. Maybe the planning/anti-planning is working itself out.

The Dreaded Name Change

There are probably very few men on the planet who can understand the torture of deciding what to do with your name once married. For many women this is a simple issue, one that does not even merit a second thought. For other women, like myself, it is an identity thing that required reflection and careful choosing. Lucky for me, I come from a multi-divorced family so very few people I associate with have my last name at all. Changing my name to reflect oneness with my new husband was an easy choice despite the fact it is better suited for a boy and not all attractive for a girl...Hacker. It does lend itself to a good fantasy football team name though, so I will focus on the positive.

Making the choice was the easy part and I even get to decide how to hyphenate because I can do whatever I want in the age of the "Equality of Names Act 2007," thank you California. This actually hugely worked to my benefit as I did not have to become a Witt Hacker and could do it the other way around. Now begins the arduous process of contacting every credit card company, every social networking site, changing the cell phone voicemail, the home voicemail, the email, the list goes on and on and on. Now all of these freaking things have different rules as to how you can change your name. For some you must wait until you have a photo ID, for others show your marriage certificate and for others still just write a letter. Believe it or not, the ones that I still have yet to change are the ones that require I write a letter. What is this, the prairie days? All the things keeping us connected and saving us time make any small change to your life a monumental undertaking.

In thinking ahead I decided to do everything at once. We were planning on moving, so I would do my big name change in conjunction with my, "guess what we moved announcement." Instead of making things simple, this apparently sends up multiple red flags of massive identity theft threats. Next thing you know all my alerts are letting me know someone must be stealing my name as we speak, not only the new one but the old one too. Sorting through that stack of mail took eons. Needless to say I think I am pretty close to fully transitioning to the Hacker-Witt of it all and I do think it was worth it.

Wedding Photos, the Dreaded Decision

So I am not sure how many of you out there have seen the movie "Beaches" or even the old front room of Gabby on Desperate Housewives, but these are the two walls that pop into my mind when I think of narassitic women who put large photos of themselves on their walls. Both these walls were done in retro Andy Warhol style photos, but large montages of just the face of these women. Now seriously, is that what you want in your house? Emphatically NO! But then on the flip side, you have just had these amazing photos taken of you, your hair is done, your make-up is fixed, there is photoshop correcting going on making your arms not look so pudgy, and let's be honest you love the dress and you NEVER, sans pretending to be the corpse bride at Halloween, get to wear it again. It makes sense you would like to display some of your better looking photos, even if they have been somewhat "enhanced." Hey, at least it's just the picture and not irreversible surgery.

I digress. Now you have all these blank walls in your new living room staring at you and the temptation is to fill them with photos or art...in my case mostly photos because I love Ansel Adams-y landscape, outdoorsy stuff. While it takes a bit for you to talk your insane husband out of hanging the Hollywood butt picture (thanks, Mom) in the middle of the living room over the ginormous TV, you are left with how big and where do you put a wedding photo? And what wedding photo? Just the two of you? That seems lame. Family shot? Well that would be easy if you came from the land of Ozzie and Harriet but with two sets of families on both sides along with remarriages, random brothers and sisters, etc, etc, etc, you would need a panorama shot that would look like a mural. Not to mention that it is physically IMPOSSIBLE for all those people to have their eyes open at exactly the same time.

I plow through the photos numerous times and pick a few shots to put up. I also have multi-window frames, and we now have professional shots of many of our friends and family. These seem like the perfect places for these photos and as long as I am not in them with the big cottonball dress, it isn't THAT obvious they are wedding photos. Technically they are RECEPTION photos. There, walls filled lots of smiling faces, everyone happy...great job. You have one of your first guests over. First words out of her mouth, "it's so funny how you have all these wedding photos everywhere." And here I thought I had done a good job. After she left I am running around staring at the photos. I swear there are only 3 of me in the dress...one of them a landscape shot. The rest are reception, rehearsal dinner and other people. I proceeded to throw my pride away and leave the photos up. It's our house anyway!

By the way, the butt picture has found an appropriate home in the bathroom, because really, where else do you hang an enlarged picture of an ass?

Packing

So you think you know your new husband, right? So you've been told girls are crazy and indecisive, right? I challenge both those assertions as proven by trying to pack and move together for the first time. Packing is complicated enough with one person, but with two you have compounded the problem exponentially. Now, mathematically I know that sentence makes no sense, as 1 to the second power is actually less than 1 multiplied by 2, but I am thinking it is an exponent more in line with the number of years you have lived in the place you are moving out of as stuff seems to breed other stuff.

Not only are you likely to have different opinions about what is valuable or not, you also seem to be married to a man who at one point says, "throw it all out," and then flips out every time you are getting rid of something...I refer to a dolphin statue. The conversation goes a little something like this:

"But you love dolphins."

"Yes, I do. But it just sits around catching dust and I am not attached to it."

"You can't throw it out because of me."

"I'm not, I am giving it away because I don't care about it enough to move it."

"You have to keep it."

"I don't want to keep it."

"Why are you keeping the other one then?"

Now how does one tactfully answer this question? You see I have gotten myself in a bit of a pickle at this point. I no longer care about the other dolphin statue because it is from an ex-boyfriend who, while we stayed friends at first, is now married and no longer allowed to speak to other girls. He kind of ceased to be important in my life at that point, thereby neither is the product of his trip to the Mall of America. The other statue is from the family of my college roommate and I love them so I love the nick knack. It is worth the dusting time, bubble wrap time, and general moving.

BUT, in order to say this I have to admit, aloud, I kept the old boyfriend statue all the way through our dating, engagement, and wedding and I am only getting rid of it now. Now in my defense, that wasn't a choice I made, it was simply that it sat on the top shelf of the book shelf and I NEVER even thought about it. It was just there...as proven by the dust so thick you had to use a chisel to chip it off. It was only because I was packing that I even took the time to think about the existence of the figurine and where it came from in the first place, making it of less value than the cost of the bubble wrap to secure it. So instead the conversation ends like this...

"Craig is having a hard time right now, he's likes the dolphins, will you just let him take it?"

That's right, I threw my friend under the bus. Thanks for taking the bullet, Craig.

Indecisive and crazy to be proven in the next post.

The Move...

Married life has been blissfully serene so far. While we didn't get to go on our honeymoon right away, I formed a sort of peace with the idea as it meant I got to begin playing house right away and what could be bad about that? Unfortunately the reality of what could be bad about that came crashing in pretty quickly...MOVING.

My new husband has a job not close to my/our current neighborhood. The commute was beginning to wear thin and with all the warnings of "make things simple" during the beginning of your marriage, this seemed like a bad combination. For example, the day we were leaving town to head up to our wedding (we live in the city, were married in the mountains) he worked his first 7pm to 7am shift. Not only did it take him 2 1/2 hours to get to work, it took him 3 hours to get home. To say he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown a few days before our wedding is an understatement. It was at that moment I decided apartment hunting was of top priority upon our return.

Begin apartment hunting for the first time in seven years and enter all the emotions of moving. I love my place, I don't want to leave, but close quarters leads to many things such as me thinking, if my husband talks to me one more time when I am writing I am going to rip his head off. Literally tripping over each other every time we head to the kitchen is not a fun way to spend a day. The pile of presents stacked in corner of our one bedroom apartment is pressed up against the heater, so we should move before it gets cold or we are the definition of a fire hazard.

Apartment hunting in the greater Los Angeles area is not a fun time. Let's not mention how far apart everything is in this city, let's just add that technically my husband would love for us to move to Orange County. While to many this might not sound like a big problem, I will liken it to him telling me we are moving to Oklahoma or a Manhattan girl being told she's going to Long Island. No matter how you cut it, I am a city girl. While I love the mountains, if we are moving to somewhere it should either be far out of civilization like Mammoth or Yellowstone or a city, NOT a suburb, I HATE the uniformity of suburbs, they just aren't for me. I love to visit them. I love my friends who live in them. But I don't choose to live in there. Full country or full city, no middle ground, make a choice.

So after the torturous task of narrowing down the options, we get to go search together on Thursday. I bring reinforcements in the form of our good friend Craig as he brings a guy perspective but also doesn't want to see me move to Orange County. Two guys performing a task they aren't fond of...I really didn't think this through. After the first apartment not only being rather blah I must endure the guys continually talking about how they have no idea if there is really enough room for our pet monkey in the place and what is the pet deposit policy anyway? Ugh!

We do go check out the one place in the OC that was, even I have to admit, nicer than the rest. Lucky for me there were multiple screaming babies on this particular day. So while the townhouse was mere minutes from Chris's job, the sheer thought of children was enough to force us back up to Long Beach.

This is the moment. This is the come to Jesus moment where you gave in and said...Long Beach is a pit, why would we go look there...only to arrive and find a sort of middle ground heaven you never knew existed. It is not perfect, it is not as close to the LA as I would like BUT it is new and pretty and feels like a city and has everything a girl could want. Am I giving up my principles? Not really, we're technically still in Los Angeles COUNTY. Do I love the area? Yeah, gotta admit I do. Am I happy that my new brother-in-law's only complaint about the area is that it was a bit too seedy late at night? Hell yeah! It's perfect! I think Brett would think West Hollywood is seedy, scary and strange too. Sounds like a perfect mix and a better commute. All in all I learned compromise isn't that bad and even if a place sounds horrible you won't know until you go. I can't wait to watch football at Hooters, walk to the movie theater, and sip fruity beverages by the pool. Did I mention I love the new apartment?