Guess Who's Back?

Welcome back Blogging friends! Or should I be welcoming back MYSELF?! Boy has it been a wild 2 months. Can't believe so many things have happened and I haven't had a chance to blog about them and share with you all! First, lets recap the last 2 months: Got accepted to a new apartment, packed, moved, cleaned, started unpacking, decided to get married in 28 days, started planning wedding, left for 2 week (hellish) business trip in Sacramento, came home, got married, still unpacking!

Yup, that about sums up the last 2 months! A whirlwind of crazy and fun and so many emotions! I know I posted a quick blurb with some pics from the wedding, but other than that I haven't posted since we started the move! Here's a little run down on where I've been!

Let's start with the move! Oh the glorious move! So much packing, so much cleaning, so much stuff!! Where does it all come from?! And how does it all fit in one place but never the next? Packing was an adventure and moving took far longer than expected! We ran into every bump in the road that you can imagine! And after we got everything OUT, we still had to clean the old place! Even though we started moving on June 11th, we didn't get fully out of the old place and cleaned until the very last day of the month! We tried scheduling a walkthrough of the old place, and the complex wasn't willing to work with our schedules. Needless to say, they did the walkthrough on their own and are trying to vastly over charge us for "damages". I'm still working with them, over a month later, to get things resolved but am optimistic for a positive resolution soon.

The new apartment, is fun! Its bigger, 2 bathrooms, and has covered patio that has full paneling all around. It makes it easier to just put the dogs on the back patio and let them enjoy the sun and be outside. Its not a yard, but that is the goal for next summer! Hopefully things go our way next year! In the mean time, I'm still unpacking and trying to find homes for everything. Even though the place is larger, I feel like the amount of room there is to place thing is smaller. We don’t have drawers in the kitchen, except a couple small ones for utensils and dish rags, which means I don't have a home for my Tupperware right now. Its sort of all over the counters! I do love the layout of my kitchen though! It has a center bar area with the dishwasher and sink and small counter. I just envision how useful it will be when we have our annual Christmas Eve party! Or even better, the Halloween party we are having this year! FUN!

So in addition to the big move that didn't get finished until the last day of July, I spent the first two full weeks of August in Sacramento with a co-worker and my boss. Well, boss was only there the 1st week. We are doing some new work lately that required us to be onsite at a clients location and remeasure the whole building! THE WHOLE BUILDING!!! That included 8 standard floors, a basement, 2 penthouse/roof levels, and a whole new site plan that included renumbering their parking spaces and redrawing their parking boundary fence. It was a government building, where the immigration offices are located, and in many of the areas we went to we had to be escorted with people following us around as we did our measuring with laser devices. It was 10 hour days on site to get all the measurements we needed. And even then, we found we missed spots after we got back. It was rough, it made me want to cry, but all in all, it was a wild adventure! Some of the roughest days were when I had to go back to the hotel and work on stuff for my client back in Seattle, because I didn't have anyone who could do the work in my absence! It added 4-5 hours to my days sometimes. It was exhausting! As a bonus though, I did get a slight tan because of the heat and lounging by the pool and I got to drive over to Reno to visit my Grammy and my aunt. It was definitely good to see them. Especially since I decided a week before leaving to have my wedding a week after I got back, and my aunt wasn't going to make it. It was nice to see her and mini-celebrate with her!

So, wedding! A wedding that was planned for August 17th of 2013 wound up happening on August 25th of 2012! A Lot of factors went into making this decision. I started planting the seed in June with the Pre-Hubby that we should just get married in August. Small, simple, intimate, immediate family only. I was tired of the stress that was coming along with trying to plan a party for under 100 people without spending a fortune that we didn't have. Additionally, his Grandpa was having heart issues and had to have a triple bypass surgery. He tried acting tough, but you could see how worried he was that something was going to happen and Grandpa wouldn't make it. Regardless, he kept telling me to relax and keep planning what I wanted and we would find a way.

Midway through our move, we got a call that Grandpa had a heart attack and was back in the hospital. His Grandpa is as important to him as my Grampy was to me. And when we saw his grandpa a week after the heart attack, he just looked defeated. While we were, and still are, praying that Grandpa would be just fine, I could sense that Pre-Hubby wanted to make sure that his Grandpa got to see him get married. And heck, if he came through everything fine and lived long enough to see grandchildren, it would just be a bonus! Again, I mentioned we should just get married in August. We didn't have to have a big party, we were both worried about his Grandpa's health, and for my family that was out of town, we could get them over really quickly.

So, on Friday July 28th, on the 6:30am walk to the bus station so we could go to work, Pre-Hubby turned to me and asked "so, you think you could find a wedding dress in a month?" and the ball started rolling! Before I got to work at 7:30 we had picked a date, made a tentative plan, called my mom, called some of his family, and started the process of planning a wedding! I won't bore you with all the details (I'll save that for the Wedding Wednesday posts) but things got planned quick, family stepped in and helped wherever they could, and we wound up having the most amazing wedding, on the beach, at sunset, that I ever could have asked for. My dream sure came true! I had my family, my closest friends, and married the love of my life who is no longer Pre-Hubby, just Hubby (I call him Caveman)!

And now, I'm back at work. No honeymoon, that will wait until next year. While it didn't cost us an arm and a leg to get married, it did deplete all our extra savings. So, we have to save up to take a nice vacation to Florida next year! As you can imagine, the chaos of the last 2 months has not fared well with my Fitness goals. And I slipped WAY off the wagon. But knowing that all the stress that I would have endured for a year of planning is done and over, and I can just live my life every day with just normal day struggles, I'm at a better place to get back on board and "trim the fat"!

Fitness Friday will start back up tomorrow, where I will re-evaluate my goals. Getting married changed my outlook a lot on my fitness goals! Not sure why, but I feel like something just clicked in my brain! More on that tomorrow!

Savory Sunday will be back this week with a yummy new dish! I've been eating out FAR TOO often in recent weeks. With my kitchen almost in order after the move, its time to get my culinary skills to work by making up a delicious new treat!

And Wedding Wednesday! I wanted to share the wedding planning as it was happening, but we kept the whole thing a secret from everyone except immediately family. I'll spend a few weeks (maybe longer depending on how detailed I get) going through the different planning steps and how we wound up NOT going broke for our dream wedding!

Lots of rambling, lots of grammar errors, but lots of adventures! If you stuck around during the Hiatus - THANK YOU!! If you are just joining - WELCOME! I can't wait to get back into a normal blogging rhythm and sharing my many adventures with you all!

Peace and Good JuJu,
Holly