We bought a house!

As you may know, J & I will be moving this spring to Bryan/College Station for his job (which I have felt for some time to be the complete antithesis of Austin). We've been looking for a place to live, and were very anti-house buying until fairly recently. We went down on Monday because J had meetings, and I went around with our fabulous realtors looking at houses. Houses in our price range do NOT stay on the market for long in BCS (which will be a good thing when we're ready to move)... the only other house that had made the cut to go back to see was in contract 6 hours after I saw it (and after only 3 days on the market).

We made an offer on the house pictured below, which was just put on the market on Monday. We got the call on Tuesday morning that the buyers had agreed, and so we'll close on May 15. Crazy!

Check out our cute place by following the link below.



76 pictures
View Album at Shutterfly

I should be working on my proposal...

...and I am. But I also just found this link to our wedding photos on our photographer's blog!

It's a nice, concise view of our really perfect wedding, much more manageable than the 600+ photos on the other link.

Ok, back to work on my lit. review... I'm doing my proposal defense for my dissertation next Tuesday, so I should really get this finished, printed, bound, and distributed to my committee, stat. Think happy thoughts for me.

(Plus, the sooner I finish this, the sooner we can head over to Dog and Duck for some St. Patrick's shenanigans. We've been able to see the tent from our window and hear the many bands playing over there since early this morning. J is really itching to go get fish, chips & beer, not necessarily in that order.)

Two Scenes

[Scene 1: Thursday night-- interior of small condo. A couple prepares dinner together.]
M: So, I've noticed that you've been dressing up for work lately.
J: What do you mean?
M: Well, for example, you're wearing a belt and a button-up shirt today. You work at home.
J: Yeah, well, I just feel like I get more done when I get ready in the morning.
M: OK, that makes sense.


[Scene 2: Friday morning-- interior of small condo. MITSI walks into the living room, preparing to leave for the day. JOSH sits in his office chair, working at the computer. He is wearing only boxer shorts.]
M: Hmm. Casual Friday?

Home. Work.

So, it's been a very long time since I've blogged. I've been thinking about posting for some time, but then I get all caught up in feeling like I need to "backlog" all that's happened to me since last I wrote. Anyone who has ever skipped pages in their journal knows the feeling; you think that you'll come back to it, fill in the blanks. Surely you'd never forget those precious experiences! But inevitably, life happens. It brings you new adventures and additional things to write about and before you know it, you've abandoned the journal because it's all too much--there's too much to make up for.

So, with that in mind, I'm going to pick up my dusty little blog, give myself some grace for not writing for a long time, and pick up from here. But because I can't resist, I'll fill in some small (but important) details from the last few months:

1. I moved out of my South Congress single girl apartment where I had lived since coming to Austin, and moved into my beloved's downtown condo (which happens to be around 600 sq. feet). More on this to follow.
2. I took my qualifying exams for candidacy for my doctoral program, which are basically a comprehensive review of any/everything I've learned in grad school up until... last fall. There were two days of writing without any notes (I got 17 pages the first day and 13 the next). There were oral exams. There were citations written in the steam on the walls of my shower [i.e. Bandura, 1977, 1997; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001]. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
3. My beloved and I got married on New Year's Eve. It was beautiful, perfect, very "us," and exactly what we wanted. We danced in the New Year with our families and dear friends. I would have the exact same wedding over and over again if I could.

So now, I'm a blissful newlywed doctoral candidate living in a tiny condo downtown with my beloved and our playful pooch. Sounds like good times, huh?

OK, so back to the tiny condo. It's lovely, really, but has been a work in progress since J. bought it a few years ago. Whenever I [calmly and rationally] complain about some sort of tool or dirty item of clothing in the living room, I am frequently reminded that he lived here for a long time with no living room furniture, with his refrigerator in the living room, and with only a single pipe coming out from the wall in the kitchen under which to wash his dishes. This to me is the remodeling equivalent of, "In my day we walked seven miles to school, uphill both ways, in the snow, barefoot and naked, and we liked it." Needless to say, the anecdotes don't do much to sooth my [calm and rational] frustration.

However, as of this very day, in addition to the two of us living here, we now both work here. That's right. Both of us. Here. Living and working. In the tiny condo. With the tools (the tools were gone for about 3 days, but came back when the shower door needed to be installed). It's like one of those displays at IKEA--the "Living in X square feet" ones that are ever-so-much-fun. Except at IKEA they have someone who cleans their X square feet for them. And a lot fewer papers strewn all about. And all those handy IKEA organizers to put things in. And now that I think about it, never any dirty laundry (thus making the whole simulation very un-lifelike).

Anyhow, both of us are still alive and well at the end of this first work day. We both were even quite fruitful in our work efforts [I got my new dissertation direction approved by my committee chair, worked on gathering some data, and posted a blog. He made a lot of phone calls and worked on some forms with some sort of abbreviated names that are somewhat meaningless to me.] So, kudos to us. However, I'm skeptical of how long we're both going to be able to be productive here. Or how long it will be before the new file boxes in the living room make me as crazy as the tools do. Or when the symptoms of too-much-time-together may start to emerge. So, cross your fingers (and maybe pray for our respective sanities).

Thanks for checking in. :)

Body Language...

...speaks so loudly.

Wedding planning, made easy.

I can see how people go crazy and turn into Bride-zillas with all the planning and decision-making involved in the production of a wedding. Especially when one is trying to make all the "stakeholders" feel as though they're having their fair say in things. Thus far, most of our stakeholders have done a really good job of restraining themselves when I'm sure they'd love to jump in and plan the whole thing, and I appreciate that. There have been a handful of minor-ly stressful moments (mostly attributable to lack of sleep and/or overwhelmed-ness with other facets of life), but all in all, the planning is going, well, really well.

I got my dress (which is sort of hilarious, as I bought it without being positive about the size or the design... it fits perfectly and is so beautiful that I can't imagine a more perfect dress for me). That took... oh, about a week.

We booked the venue (one we found on the very first day of looking at venues, after deciding neither of us was really willing to convert to Catholicism in order to get married at Dubina). Granted, we booked it more than a month after we found it (we found it a couple of weeks before we were "technically" engaged), but anyway, that was pretty easy.

Actually, finding Josh turned out to be pretty easy, too. It seems crazy, and at our first pre-marital counseling session, our counselor (Jammin' Judy) even said, "So, realistically, how do you think it sounds when you tell me you've only known each other since April and now you're getting married?" Yeah, yeah, Judy; it sounds ridiculous. But like I've said before, I just "knew." Josh says he knew on date #2 (which, incidentally, was at Dubina, thus the desire to have the wedding there). In a recent de-briefing with Jenny, I said, "Jenny, we haven't even talked about what you think about Josh since you met him!" to which she replied, "Friend, we don't even have to. Of course he's great! I knew you were going to marry him after your first date!"

So, yeah, so this whole wedding/marriage/life-partner/teammate thing, well, so far, so good. :)



(PS- I have a beautiful new niece who is pretty much the cutest little snuggle bug of all time. Lexi-lou [actually, it's Lexi Suzanne] was born on 7-16 and she and momma are doing quite well, thank you very much.)

Extra, extra, somebody's getting married!!!

Yay! Josh and I are getting married! It's now officially official (though it's been unofficially official for at least a couple of weeks). I could go into lots of detail on the back story of how we met and fell in love, but for present purposes, I'll just give our engagement story. :)

So, Josh and I have known that we wanted to get married pretty much since we met. Actually, I knew on the second day we exchanged e-mails. But THAT is another story. So, we made a definite decision on the ring last Saturday and went ahead and bought it then. They needed to size it down for my tiny fingers and told us it would be ready on Tuesday afternoon. The original plan was to make sure the ring fit on Tuesday before it was shipped off to Josh's mom in New Mexico. With the ring out of sight/out of mind, Josh would get his wish of surprising me and officially/formally asking me to marry him. To me, he was [and is] my surprise, so I was sort of ambivalent about the whole surprise-official-proposal-business. Well, we both got exactly what we wanted (both in each other and in the proposal process).

So Monday afternoon, Josh called and told me that Kruger's called and that my ring wouldn't be ready until Wednesday morning. In another phone call, he told me that since my mom would be in town, his friend LyAnna had arranged a tour of the capitol dome for us Tuesday morning. The dome has been off-limits to visitors without special permission since 9/11. With the recent fiasco at the governor's mansion, we were told that it's strictly off-limits. So, the fact that we got to go up into the dome at all was pretty special (many thanks to Mark, the state trooper who came up on his day off to lead us up into the dome).

We met inside the capitol around 11:00 am, took the elevator up to the 4th floor, and then had to call for permission to go above that. Mark led us through a barred and locked door on the 5th floor and we began the twisty ascent upstairs. After climbing hundreds of stairs, we got to a small room at the top. If you've been in the capitol, you've probably seen the star with TEXAS surrounding it on the top of the dome. We were eye-level with that star. Above that, there is another windy staircase to the very top. Josh said, "I want to go all the way up. You coming with me, Babe?" I replied with some witty comment about descending into the tomb of Thutmoses the III and then having the electricity go out (in Egypt; yet another story), and that I was surely climbing all the way to the top of the capitol. Mom was complaining about her knee, and LyAnna claimed to be afraid of heights, so they stayed behind while J & I headed up together.

I was completely oblivious to even the thought that Josh would be asking me to marry him when we got up those stairs (probably because it was so hot and we'd been doing so much climbing). However, as soon as we got up, he turned me around, took my face in his hands and said, "OK, Babe, now it's just the two of us up here," and THAT'S when I realized what was going on.

I'll leave the details of that conversation between us...

However, I did, of course, say yes, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Please check out our photos on Picasa. We're very happy and excited! Thank you for all your well-wishes!