Tag Archives: weddings

I’m getting married tomorrow

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It’s so crazy that it’s finally upon us, but Calah and I are tying the knot tomorrow morning.

It’s been a long time coming, but to make our relationship official in the eyes of the law is something that’s long past due.

Covid has required us to delay, and our reception and our honeymoon are delayed still, but it’s nice to resolve one key step of the process.

I’m so lucky that Calah has agreed to married me–and continued to agree as she’s gotten to know me more and more through our 517 days of engagement.

Calah is special in a way that gives me faith in the future. Sounds dopey and extreme, I know, but I mean it.

Calah is a person who sees the world and acts on her desire to make it better.

She’s been a registered nurse for years, but she decided to go back to school for nurse practitioner. But rather than go for a masters, she is doing the doctorate of nursing practice. She has to do a study on a topic of her choice.

Covid took away her original subject: Dental hygiene in oldtimers. I probably got it wrong, but I think that’s what it had been.

She saw the healthcare system get overwhelmed and thought there had to be a better way. One day she said to me, “Wow, it’s been a long month today” or something to that effect.

What she’d meant is that the day she had had felt like a month. From there, she and I talked about how some hours feel longer than others and that the stressors and demands aren’t equal each hour of a day or in every work condition.

From there, her topic of addressing nursing stress in the workplace grew and grew.

I could go on and on about her project, but that’s not the point of this post. What I’m saying is that she saw a thing that is broken and didn’t just say what a shame it was took action and is taking action to resolve it at a systemic level. And she’s not discouraged by people who say it can never happen.

That’s the thing about Calah: She does cross-discipline impressive stuff because she doesn’t seem to know that it’s hard.

I’m lucky that she said yes when I asked her out in July of 2019.

Readers of this blog can thank her for my current 312-day posting streak because when I was feeling really down 300+ days ago and couldn’t even bring myself to post about the crossword, she told me to put something down after she got fed up with me being inconsolable. And that got me out of my funk.

I’m frazzled right now in anticipation of the wedding. I feel like there’s a lot left to do that I’ve forgotten but can’t figure out exactly what that is.

And with Calah spending the time up to the wedding away from me, I can only rely on her notes to make sure I don’t royally screw stuff up.

I’ll have more to share after the wedding, but I can’t wait till Sunday morning.

Quick update on my Indochino suits and DHL

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I had been tracking the progress of a couple suits I got from Indochino. It’s important that they arrive before the wedding, and if alterations are needed, it’s best I have them in my possession a week ago.

The suits shipped from China on Thursday last week. I watched as DHL tracking was slow to update no matter how many times I refreshed.

On July 27, I got my first update: The package arrived in the Cincinnati Hub and cleared customs.

But there it stayed.

Yesterday (by the time this posts), I saw another update: Shipment on hold.

I don’t want my shipment to be on hold. I want my suits! Calah wants me to have my suits!

So I took the advice of many redditors who had responded to other people who have had this issue, and I called DHL.

The number, appropriately, is 800-CALL-DHL.

I was given the option to have them call me back, but I found it suspicious that they didn’t tell me first how long I’d have to wait on hold.

I opted to wait.

Then I got the ringing tone and was connected to a person immediately. That was a relief.

The explanation I got was that the package was waiting for a connecting flight to Los Angeles, but all was still right because it wasn’t lost.

I shared that I had been hoping to get my suits today in case alterations were necessary, and the customer service person told me that while they don’t work on the weekend, she would tell them to get my suit to me on Monday.

I got a notification from DHL that the estimated delivery will be Monday!!!!

I’ll update you on what actually happens.

My essay for the $1000 to watch home improvement shows

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I wrote in my Spelling Bee post on Thursday that I was pretty certain I didn’t win the contest to get paid $1000 to watch home improvement shows. I wrote this as my submission essay on April 11, 2021.

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“You like home improvement, home improvement shows, and you like to write!” said my fiancee this morning as we drove around to scout out possible outdoor venues. “When we get home, write to them,” she insisted. So here I am, hammering away at my computer, in the living room of our 1+1, much-postponed wedding finally on the horizon.

In most aspects of my life, I like to take things that are distressed and make them shine. I do that in my professional life as an accountant who specializes in bringing startups from something cobbled together (think: Tarek El-Moussa saying, “This whole place has been trashed–and there’s no way this add-on is permitted.”) to being something investors care about (think: the end of every episode of every show in this list). In my personal life, I like to scope the free stuff section on craigslist and take pieces of furniture that look pretty grim (think: every kitchen that’s way too narrow and doesn’t have an island) and turn it into something usable (the end of every episode). I even document my progress in weekly installments on my ThatShipHasSunk blog.

After our wedding this summer, my fiancee and I will be looking to get out of this place where the kitchen drawers are much too tall and vertical blinds fall off when someone sneezes and where I have to stop in the middle of writing this to pull out the staple gun to fix an unsupported chipboard drawer bottom (sure, fixing stuff is fun, but having to do so because knives are falling into a cabinet isn’t). The shows we watch give us insight into what we can do and what we might want to do in a place of our own. We each like to cook and bake, so the kitchen ideas from all the shows give us inspiration on how to have a functioning kitchen where we can work in tandem. Also advice on how to structure our bedroom so that we can have the storage we want while keeping our shins free from bruises is never unappreciated.

“A website is offering $1,000 for someone to binge-watch home improvement shows,” I read to my fiancee as we took the turns of Mulholland Drive in her Nissan Versa, and I continued the CNN article my dad sent to me. “Really, do it.” As though I needed all the convincing.