Thank to Marci, I’ve been tagged. But I cheated a bit. The rules were:

1. Open your 1st Photo folder.
2. Scroll to the 10th photo.
3. Post the photo and the story behind it.

The problem is, my photos are extremely organized. (I plagiarized up until here from Marci’s blog. Thanks mmmmmmmk.) The thing is I upload my photos from my camera every time I take a new picture, so I just went to the first folder that had ten pictures in it. This is what I got:

This picture was taken on maybe our second or third date. I can’t remember actually. Anyway, we’re standing in a fountain on Weber State’s campus. For this particular date we were on a photo scavenger hunt and I am sad that we were both thinner and prettier in this picture. Steve, we should look like that again. Red hair and all. I was so much hotter as a red head. Blonde hair blows.

That is all.

so attention deficit

I am so ADD today. This is stolen from my sister’s blog. I need a diversion.

Four shows I like to watch:

1. The Oscars

You would be so proud! Steve set up my TV so I could watch the Oscars on Sunday night. I have had basic cable for an entire week and have not been tempted to watch TV even one time.  Steve says it’s because I keep forgetting that I have TV now. I remember. I was once the biggest TV addict of all time. I just don’t want to turn it on.

Four things I am passionate about:

1. Going to the temple
2. Paying my tithing
3. Loyalty
4. Being more like Dr. Laura

Four words or phrases I say often:

1. Oh my.
2. Queso/Okay, so…
3. I’m going to die myself. (Steve loves this one.)
4. You think you’re better than me? (This one just won’t die.)

Four things I have learned from the past:

1. Most people don’t appreciate honesty as much as they claim.
2. A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter is not a nice person.
3. Everything I need to know in life I learned from Dr. Laura.
4. A person’s first response is what they truly feel. (I learned that from Julianne Moore in Laws of Attraction, sad to say.)

Four places I would love to go:

1. Mexico
2. Europe
3. New Zealand
4. Asia

Four things I did yesterday:

1. Went to work.
2. Paid a deposit for an awesome photographer.
3. Ate a metric ton of salad at Olive Garden.
4. Booked a free reception venue that is NOT the Church gym!

Four things you are looking forward to:

1. Getting married.
2. Having my own car again.
3. Getting married. Seriously.
4. My closing today being DONE.

Four things I love about winter:

1. Turtlenecks.

I hate winter.

Four things on my wish list:

1. To qualify for Medicaid/Medicare, whichever is the one that will pay down my medical bills.
2. Manage my anger/hurt feelings/annoyance better, or to stop holding grudges against people for everything possible.
3. To get a full night’s sleep, or to not wake up at 5 a.m. thinking about a wedding detail that needs to be done. I do realize I’m four months away and billions of people get engaged and plan their wedding in six weeks or less.
4. Inexpensive wedding flowers, decor, guestbooks, and a bounce house at my reception.

truth time

I love Steve. I seriously just love him.

Okay, yeah, this picture was taken a while ago (Steve’s company Christmas party, so sue me) but I love it.

I don’t know what makes me all loveish right now, but I am. To the point of not being able to sleep. This is  unfortunately being wasted because the dear Bear is absent right at the moment. Do I seriously not have anything better to blog about? Have I honestly become one of those girls? Heaven help us. I promise next blog will be all snarky and such, but for this blog I am just going to remind all of you that my fiance is the most kickawesome fella around and I feel grateful. Here is why:

1. He makes up words like kickawesome.
2. He encourages me on what seems to be a daily basis to write a book. Deep down I’ve felt for a long time like maybe I can. But that deep down part of me is slowly coming to the surface, thanks to our dear friend Papa Bear. The man instills so much confidence in me and makes me feel like if I really wanted to write a book, I could do it and it would be a bestseller. And I’ll tell him my ideas and he listens.
3. Kind of related. There’s something intensely powerful about somebody being proud of you and having undying faith in you. I don’t feel self-conscious. I have crazy ideas. I’m spontaneous. Impulsive, even. Steve either rolls with it or pulls on the reins. I love it when he does either.  It’s because of this that I don’t panic about saying the wrong thing. I don’t get (incredibly) scared to bring up sensitive topics. I just say things and he interprets them as snarky or jokey or not as intended, and it’s not a big deal. If I hurt his feelings, he says I hurt his feelings. I say sorry. He forgives. What the communication? Is this real life?
4. We have more fun than any two people have ever had. Sometimes we act like we’re seven: We’ll see a grocery cart in our neighbor’s yard and take it on a joy ride. Sometimes we act like we’re 77: We’ll come home, fix ourselves something to eat, sit on the couch, and nap. Sometimes he’ll read comics online and I’ll sit next to him and read Wallace Stegner out loud. (Another guy who just gets people.) Sometimes he’ll help me do laundry and sometimes we’ll play board games that we get in happy meals. Sometimes we think we’re hilarious and watch our movies and review them, one by one, and laugh at how funny we think we are.
5. On our second date (the one after setting my house on fire), we bought a table for my kitchen. The guy I bought it from thought we were an old married couple. That has been the nature of our relationship since Day One. It’s like we’ve been together FORRRRRRR-EVVVVAAAAAAR. I don’t believe in this concept of soulmates. But Steve and I probably were MFEO. That increases my loving feeling. I’ve got that loving feeling.
6. He made me dinner twice this week. (The other time we made dinner together. The other two nights we probably starved? I’m not sure…) This should be a lesson to every female in the whole world. If a boy decides on a whim to make you dinner, it is probably a good idea to marry him immediately. *
7. He comments on my blog. He has a blog. We have a blog together. For some reason, this is Big (with a capital B, that’s right). Remember Marci? Remember when a boy of significance would comment on one of our blogs and it was somehow a symbol of something supremely significant? This feels a lot like that to me but this time, the boy of significance isn’t a total humdiddly. (Yup, I gave birth to a word.)

I’m going to go to bed now for real and maybe sleep some. Steve, you are a top notch fella, my very best buddy, and I love you more than anything in the whole DANG WORLDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD! And I think you’re funny. And I have joe and turtlenecks in my heart for you.

But also for my blog. But it’s different.

* Or in my case, be engaged immediately and then wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait until your parents get home… and then marry him. In the meantime, all of your friends are going to meet, date, get engaged, and get married, and then ask you 25 times a week, “When are you guys FINALLY going to get married?” because they forget that you’re NOT seventy-seven and you haven’t been together forever like it feels to everyone. News flash. It really isn’t unheard of to date longer than six months to get married. We’re not breaking any records here. Obnoxious.

Ogden: The First Year

So yesterday marked my one year anniversary of living in the ghetto. Or should I say surviving it? Either way, this year has been a relatively tumultuous one, but fun. This year has presented itself in three phases, which I label appropriately after the nicknames given to my apartments:

The Brig

It was whilst living in the Brig that I found the good ol’ University 5th Ward and attended many Sunday Night Movies at a boy’s house with a bunch of people from the 5th and 12th wards. At the end of my first night at one of these festivities, the boy hosting the Sunday movie nights said, “It was nice to meet you, Brittany.” He gave me a hug. I had already discovered hugging people is very commonplace in the 5th and 12th wards. Not commonplace anywhere: After he hugged me, he looked me square in the eye and said, “I love you.”

That was different.

I also had many tumultuous moments regarding boys here. When I think about the Brig, I think about texting back and forth with Jonny, unwilling to give up on a relationship that probably should not have existed in the first place. I told Riley how crappy he was as a human being (I mean friend, how crappy he was as a friend–but really, I meant human being). I think about being phone dumped twice here. I found out my ex was getting married here, and cried into Gil’s shoulder about it here. All the other memories I have here were alone ones.

The Ghetto Meadows

I moved into the Ghetto Meadows because a boy I met at the Brig owned it. All of my memories here pretty much remind me of being sick. I got strep/mono/nobody knows what while I lived here. I went to the ER and had to get shots in my bum while I was here. I laid in bed for a week straight while I lived here.

I met Steve here, and that was a good time. Whenever I think of The Ghetto Meadows, I think about Stephen and how I almost burned down my precious condo there. How on our first date (before burning down the kitchen), Steve set up my bed, but before that I slept on a mattress on the floor in a pile of blankets. And then I think about how my finches died here. That was sad.

The Great White Ghetto

Ah, the Great White Ghetto. Tore out a kitchen and rebuilt it from the ground up here. As a result, I had my first experience with regular, run-of-the-mill consumer debt here. Freaked out about it here. I got engaged on the front porch of here. Freaked out about that here. I’m excited that when I drag Stephen kicking and screaming across the threshold, it’s going to be the threshold of the Great White Ghetto. I have had a whole bunch of really, really good memories here and I have a sneaky feeling that this place is going to be home to even more. Yay for that.

Happy birthday, Ogden. I think I just decided to finally have my housewarming party that I have been planning on doing since I moved to Ogden. You should come to that. I’m not going to say when it’s going to be because I’m not convinced I want to make dinner for… anyone.

take me to the movies

Steve suggested today that this happen. I like it. He likes it. We like each other. I like that he suggested it. We like movies. And I love Mannequin On the Move!

the daily steve

Okay, this is not going to be one of those daily things (as the title implies) because really, those daily “Here’s why my baby/boyfriend/girlfriend/fiance/husband/wife is so much better than yours!” things are exceptionally obnoxious. But today he deserves just a little extra credit because I was able to rinse my dishes in my own sink with my own running water and put them in my own dishwasher, all because of Steve’s hard work.

He was cutting my countertops out (using my couch as a sawhorse, to my dismay). He becomes lost in thought. He looks over at me sitting on the couch. “Yes?” I ask politely. He looks at me. A smirk. Sheepish. “I wasn’t looking at you, I was actually looking past you.” Thinks about it for a second. “But you are so beautiful.”

Anyway, I think he’s fun.

And apparently, he’s making me nicer. I like to say thank you, but on my first of many trips to Lowe’s today, I happened to notice that I was saying, “I appreciate it so much!” like 50,000 times. What in the world? This was above and beyond my typical, “Thanks!” (which I also added to me peppy “I appreciate it so much!”) This niceness fell flat and died a thousand deaths on my second trip to Lowe’s, when I quickly discovered that they only have one person staffing the whole store between 7:30 and 8:30. And then I complained loudly about the incompetency of the Lowe’s staff while standing behind two Lowe’s employees who refused to acknowledge my existence. Forget nice. I was *this* close to having a functioning dishwasher. There’s no such thing as nice at that point.

thundercats

My fiance is the funniest. For Valentines Day he made me dinner. (Those are actually two separate, unrelated thoughts.) Pork chops. Salad with feta. Bleu cheese. Shrimp cocktail. I don’t know what my weird relationship with cheese is all about but whatever. We also suffered through five whole minutes of “Year One.” The first five minutes of that movie was almost as awful as the first five minutes of “Don’t Mess with the Zohan.” Almost.

Good Valentines Day. Lots of porkchops and meat (we went to Soul & Bones in Ogden, which is not as good as Pat’s in SLC), lots of work got done on the kitchen, and absolutely no fluff. I did think it was cute he wore a freakishly red tie to church though. And I laughed so much the past couple of days.

Anyway, the only reason I’m writing right now is because I don’t feel like sleeping and I’m trying to keep my paws off the feta beckoning me from my fridge.

Okay bye.

for later

Last night, I was sitting at home waiting for Steve to come over after work as he usually does. I heard the knock on the door and was totally and completely taken by surprise when I opened the door to see my lovely, lovely boyfriend on one knee on my front porch, saying something beautiful which I couldn’t hear through my scattered train of thought, which as I recall went something like this: “Stephen, did you fall? Why are you on one knee? What are you holding? Is it a piece of garbage? Why is it sparkly? Is it a penny? Did you make a wish?” (Don’t fret–Steve told me what he actually said afterwards, and it was beautiful.)

The moral of the story is, I think I finally caught on to what was happening, which I believe was a bona fide marriage proposal (if it wasn’t, I’m going to feel soooooooooo sheepish!). I responded in the affirmative, naturally. (I mean, who wouldn’t? Steve is #1.) I am now an engaged person! I have a temp ring that is all intertwinety. No diamond on it, but it says “CTR” (Choose the Right) on it, which I think is fitting.

I don’t think it’s any secret that I procrastinate. To my credit, however, the work I do is always my best. The poor grades I got (and there were many) were almost always due to turning something in late and not because of poor quality work. This procrastination, or this late-blooming perfectionism as I have recently termed it, has evidently carried into other areas of my life as well, namely my relationship with Steve.

I made a lot of dumb decisions leading up to Steve’s appearance. I will not regale you with them all, especially since most of you know what they are. I am obviously much older than the median age of women who get married in Utah. It took me a long time to get here and a lot of procrastination. But I think the result—this perfect, loving relationship I have with this man who is straight out of a romantic comedy—was so very much worth waiting for.

I don’t know for sure how it was done. I don’t know at what point in my life I woke up and recognized that what I had been chasing my whole life and running away from at the same time was actually within my grasp. I think it must have been somewhere around August 24th. I was rattling off about bad dates and blogging with a complete stranger, and I looked across the picnic table at him and realized that Steve’s personality was a mirror image of mine. And I thought, “I could really go for that.”

Since then, I have had quite a few breakdowns. Thanks to Steve’s inability to take “no” or even “maybe not” for an answer, I am standing here today starting a life–officially–with the man who I have been taught my entire life to look for. This is the man who will still be opening doors and pulling my chair out for me when we’re 70 years old. This is the man who winks at me when our eyes meet across a crowded room. This is the man who, for the next lifetime and beyond, I promise to laugh at and occasionally apologize for his “old man” jokes. My fiance is the man who was once stopped by a woman who told him that she loved watching him and seeing how much he loves me. My fiance is the man who will always take care of me. He will always be there to tuck me in at night, to hold my hand through what will inevitably be multiple trips to the emergency room, to take my garbage out, and to pretend to think Seinfeld is really as funny as I think it is.

So yes, it was a long time coming. It was a lot of tagging along with married friends.  It was a lot of lonely, sad nights thinking why I wasn’t worthy of happiness. It was a lot of unlonely, happy nights thinking I didn’t need anybody to complete my life. Other times, I thought it was too late for me, and that I would never have this happiness that so many of my friends have. There were times I didn’t feel I deserved it. There were times I didn’t even want it. There were times that Steve and I were dating that I would put it off, terrified of this “too good to be true” idea that was happening to me. Deserving or not, ready or not, I can’t imagine anything more perfect and I’ll take it. I love you, Stephen.

And that is all.

dreams are good

This is the blog that I ended up with after I took all the bad stuff out of it. I have been having nightmares a lot lately though and anyone who has any suggestions on how to get them to stop would be my BFF forever.

Steve and I went to a little hole in the wall restaurant today and it was about the best thing I have ever tasted. It was seriously so good, I couldn’t even stand it. I might wake up with Hep-C tomorrow morning. I think probably the verdict will be: absolutely worth it.

it’s about time

I decided to post about my holidays, which seem forever ago. I mostly just hung out all week at my house and waited for Steve to tell me we had somewhere to be. Monday before Christmas we went to his mom and stepdad’s house and got a bunch of treats. Christmas Eve… I honestly don’t remember Christmas Eve happening. Give me a second.

Oh, right. On Christmas Eve we went down to the Gateway with the intention of looking at the lights on Temple Square. We went out to dinner, went to see Avatar (in 3D) and then forgot to go see the lights on Temple Square. Movies are more expensive if you travel to another city to see them. For the record, Avatar still really creeped me out. I thought it was pretty though, and it was kind of cool. But mostly I could never get over how creepy those people were and the little tentacles they hid inside their braids. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeird.

Christmas Day involved waking up and I don’t remember what else until it was time to go and meet Steve’s dad. This was… interesting. The man has made up a very colorful and exciting life for himself. End of story. It was a good time. Afterward, we went to Steve’s mom and stepdad’s house on Christmas and got fun presents and treats and dinner and things. Then we came home.

That was the Christmas portion of our program.

New Years Eve began with me waking up, getting ready to go, and dislocating my shoulder on the way out the door as I put my coat on. I guess it was about time for this to happen. It’s been a couple of years since my arm came out for no good reason (the last being the time it came out in the laundromat in Idaho and I said a bad word in front of a group of young children). This will make four times this has happened. This time, I was *this close* to having health insurance too. Such is life.

I am hoping that 2010 brings a health insurance plan and rotator cuff surgery. The ER doctor told me yesterday that next time it dislocates (I love that it’s “next time” and not “if it happens again”), I probably just want to put it back in myself. I thought that might be a good idea, considering the cost of a visit to the ER on zero health insurance. So I did some research on how it’s done. Then I watched this video. Then I showed Steve the video. We are both in agreement. Surgery sounds good. Real good. As wussy as I am… If a hockey player bawls like a baby doing it, we can be pretty confident that there is absolutely no way I’m doing that. This I might be able to handle.

At any rate, I happened to have my phone on me and called Steve to come rescue me. He was here in about two seconds and took me to the ER. Second ER trip of the year! Yay! I should seriously just learn how to shove that thing back in place, but seriously. It hurts like a mother. Anyway. So the rest of yesterday was full of nausea and snuggling and a superhero boyfriend. I feel weird typing about this because he’s right here reading it as I type it. So if he wants good things said about him he probably shouldn’t read as I blog.

Honestly though, it is possible that he is the best man ever. He held my hand in the ER and helped the nurses move me around to take X-rays. He wiped my face when I cried mascara all over it, and he didn’t even look at me weird when I cried uncontrollably every two seconds because I’m such a big wussy. All day yesterday he put in movies for me, buttoned my coat, took my socks off, put my socks on, tied my shoes, put on my gloves, put on my hat, and listened to me whine. I just don’t know quite what else to say about it. It’s pretty cool to have someone love you like that. And if he wasn’t such a manly man who would indubitably shove his own shoulder into place if the same thing were to happen to him, I hope he knows that I would do all of this stuff for him too. Short of watching them put an IV in his arm. I pass out when I see needles.

And yes, we brought in the New Year like old people do: sitting on my couch watching a movie. I think even we missed midnight by a few seconds. And I fell asleep immediately after. The end. And as for New Years Resolutions… one resolution I have is to actually make some this year. Those are forthcoming.