Pros:

• Life w/ WM
• Legitimize Charlie, Max & Ollie.
• A real anniversary
• I won’t be an unwed hobo
• He’ll stop asking me all the time to get married
• State-paid healthcare when I eventually get laid off
• I won’t be a chubby single woman
• I’m not getting any younger
• I can put the gory, creepy Netflix account in his name (He loves horror movies. The Netflix account is in my name. Therefore Netflix thinks I love the SAW series and that’s hard for me to swallow.)
• Our WoW guild and all of our neighbors already think we’re married.

Cons:

• G-D name change rigmarole AGAIN! Seriously. I still get mail with the Burbermille name.
• Planning a wedding, no matter how teeny, blows.
• If this fails, I am one step closer to becoming Dale Evans. (Did you know America’s cowboy sweetheart was married four times?)
• WM is a DB.
• I’ll be a chubby bride.
• This Doctor Who thing of his. And the zombie shows. And all the sci-fi he likes.

The list confirmed that my “yes” answer was a good one.

The image above is my doodle on the page, a (bad) recreation of the evil bride in Disney’s Haunted Mansion attraction at WDW. Yes, that’s an ax. I bet her handwriting is even worse than mine!

(Return of the ax murderer handwriting!)

Oh, the ring will come eventually, when I decide what the heck I want. But we’ve been wanting an iPad since the first one came out and even though we seriously, absolutely do NOT need one, I got tired of drooling for an object that people buy for toddlers.

The iPad is sweet. Oh so sweet. This is our Christmas gift to us.

**
Anyway, I’m off from the sloggy job today. Here’s the plan…

1) Vaccccuuumm*
2) Make cookie dough for Kristen’s cookie swap tomorrow.
3) Head to Best Buy and maybe Wegmans for lunch and eggnog if it’s not too crowded.
4) Bake six dozen cookies
5) Complete 2 loads of laundry.
6) Find a cute and jaunty way to print out the cookie recipe for the swap.

My “extra-credit” items –

Extra credit 1) Bake the sugar cut-out cookie dough that I have frozen.
Extra credit 2) Find a Christmas gift that’ll get to my Dad by, you know, Christmas.
Extra credit 3) Pick up the family cards at Hallmark. It’s in the same center as Best Buy and Wegmans.If I do this, I’ll reward myself with something at Starbucks.

*If you don’t know how to spell it and are too lazy to look it up, may as well make your mistake with wild abandon, right?

Just a nervous stammered yes from me to a question he asked a while ago. Gunshy, I demurred for a long time.

I demurred for too long. Because life is precious, but fleeting and all-too-short.

So I’m getting back on the bicycle-built-for-two with a silent prayer that we’ll do a better job at steering around the potholes that will undoubtedly crop up.

First point of order is a ring.

The first thing people do is look for a ring, so I’ve been rotating my current collection onto my ring finger. I’ve never ever been into gigantic bling. I want something small with a white gold or silver setting. It doesn’t even have to be a diamond. And I definitely don’t want it to break the bank.

Our second task is to choose a date. We’re talking about a simple courthouse ceremony in early July, with the required WDW honeymoon afterward.

Naturally, TheKnot.com has LOTS of ideas on their second weddings board, which I would have named FrayedKnot or RetiedKnot or WhyKnot.

Finally, I have to call E! about sponsoring the whole thing. I can guarantee we’ll last longer than 72 days.

Hey, at least the pets will be legitimate now!

Zuckerberg-approved.

But I can finally afford to take a class at Temple!

I’m playing with my theme today while I learn, so you’ll be seeing weirdness here today. Well, more weirdness than usual

I didn’t realize it until I was driving to Mom’s tonight. And that’s good — the fact that I haven’t been dwelling on/dreading this date for 3 weeks is good.

I now speak of my married days like one would speak of things they did in high school or college. Or band camp. Fondly, with a touch of incredulity that it even happened. So I guess that means I’ve closed the cover on that installment of my life. That white satin cover with navy blue ribbons.

There are now people at work who never knew me married. The divorce comes up from time to time, mostly because there are still businesses out there that insist on using the “Burbermille” last name I used to wear like a gigantic awkward accordion around my neck.

And people will inevitably still say, “Well, at least you didn’t have children.” When they say that, a piece of my heart breaks off and dies forever, and I want to flip them the bird. Instead, I realize they’re trying to be comforting. So I weakly smile and nod and say, “mmm…yes…I guess you’re right.”

There are songs that still stop me in my tracks. But I’ve stopped feeling guilty about mourning an old relationship while thoroughly enjoying a new one. As I look back on the beautiful tapestry of my life, I see that all of the threads blend to create beautiful colors. Without the red blending into blue, I’d lack that gorgeous purple.

I did drive by the old house a few weeks back after a visit to Mom’s. A birdie told me it was on the market earlier this year. I wanted to see if it had been sold and if the big apple tree in the back still existed. The tree was gone, which didn’t surprise me, as the hundreds of crabapples on the ground were really annoying. And there was a Little Tykes playground in the yard, so somebody else was living there. That cut me to the bone and for a good five minutes I raged inside…that should have been a playground that *I* bought for *my* children that should have played in that yard.

Then I realized that I went through a different sliding door and was never meant to have children play in that yard. And that’s okay. It really is.

I haven’t spoken to BvP since last July, but as always I wish him the best, wherever he has landed.

The phrase “It gets better” has been appropriated by a cause much larger than my own piddly life. But if I had a Tardis, I’d go back to the woman staring at the dark and tell her that it gets better.

It gets much, much, better.

1) Make two doc appointments: one for the eyes and one for the neglected thyroid. About the eyes: I think I haven’t had an eye appointment in 2 or 3 years. About the thyroid: I feel fine..light-years from how I felt on the levothyroxine last summer. But the worry of something being wrong is still in the back of my head. Could I feel even better than what I consider fine? I’m skipping my primary physician for this and going to a local doc that was recommended by two completely different people. I’d like to schedule both appointments for one day and just take off of work.

2) Wash, dry, fold AND PUT AWAY 2 loads of laundry.

3) Take two 20 minute walks.

4) Read up on data integrity. It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with databases. Time to brush up again.

5) Eat a salad every day. Not for the nutritional benefits, but to fill up on stuff other than Entenmann’s.

6) Figure out how much it would cost me to package and ship a pair of earrings to someone here in the US. This is the next step of my loooooong trek toward opening an Etsy shop. Pricing is my downfall. I never kept track of how much my beads and wire cost so it’s hard to approximate how much I should charge for things. But envelopes & shipping are pretty concrete costs.

What’s on your list?

However, my ability to wear hooker lovely high-heeled shoes without my arthritic toe* yelling at me for the next two days is slipping away with the rest of my 30s. So black flats it is for my day-to-day existence.

Which brings me to the beginning of my story. I was looking for boring-ass shoes when this glorious sight caught my eye. They were the tallest pair in the store, and when I saw them there, bathed by the spotlight, the beginning bars of “Welcome to the Jungle” twanged in my head.**

Whoa.

Oh my goodness. Aren’t they the most amazing, killer boots ever? Seeing these boots, knowing that they would NEVER work for me or my lifestyle was heartbreaking. It was like watching someone order breakfast at the Four Seasons while you’re stuck drinking a Boost.

So you ladies in your 20s…listen to your older blog sister Kim. You need to get these boots and wear them for me confidently. Be fierce while your body still allows you to be fierce.

Anyway, here’s what I ended up with:

(sigh)

If I can’t rock great shoes on a daily basis anymore, I can still pair black flats with colorful tights.

* I’m 99% sure Arthritic Toe came to be as a result of wearing hooker shoes all through my 20s and early 30s.

** Din-din-din-dindindin. Din-din-din-dindindin. Din din din dindindin din-din-din-din……

This is the official AP headline for the story about Taylor Swift’s quest to win as many awards for “smooching on the porch swing” songs as she can. I know this because many news outlets kept the same headline.

My list of grievances is only five bullet points long.

• Believe it or not, Taylor Swift is 21 years old. That makes her a woman.
• Jason Aldean is 34 years old. Very much a man.
• Blake Shelton is 35 years old. That makes him a man, not a boy.
• Brad Paisley is 38 years old. Man!
• Keith Urban is 43 years old. That makes him a man.

What’s wrong with calling ourselves by the adult terms we earned? I have no problem calling myself a woman and I’d hope that Keith Urban would call himself a man.

Tonight we’re converging upon a little Italian joint in Marlton to celebrate the beginning of year 39. /jackbenny Thirty-nine isn’t bugging me 1/10th as much as 35 did. I think I’m just coming to grips with windows closing and other ones opening.

For my present from WM I can choose either a Dremel for jewelry making or a Figureprint of my favorite World of Warcraft character. I’m on the fence, as always.

My year 39 resolution is to get back to writing and get back to the social media juju that I love, including this blog and Twitter. To that end, I signed up for an SEO class tomorrow night after work, and I’m going to WordCamp Philly 2011 on November 5th!

In other FANTASTIC news, WM finally got a teaching job! In a public school! Teaching social studies! For real, American money! This job came through just in time for us, because his 99 weeks of unemployment ended 2 weeks ago.

And that’s what I’m learning as I get older. That things don’t happen when I want them to happen, but they always happen just in time.

I used to cry maybe once a year. Now I’m lucky if I can get through a week without tearing up over something, be it an old song or NPR StoryCorps or the death of someone I DON’T KNOW. Or coming back from the store without toilet paper.

And I’m not depressed. While things could be better (please, someone…if you need a history teacher at your high school, WM needs to be a teacher at your high school. We’re approaching the 99 week threshold. Email me.) they’re certainly not bad.

I guess things are tugging at my heartstrings stronger than they did before. Or maybe the heartstrings just aren’t as taut as they used to be.

(sniff!)