October

October happens to be my favorite month of the year. October is the month when the weather starts to cool down and the leaves start to change colors. You can wear hoodies and jeans in October. I love hoodies and jeans.

October is also the month I was born…and who doesn’t like the month of their birthday? Aaron was born in October too; our birthdays are 16 days apart. I like to tease him that for 16 days he is five years older than I am. I think that’s hot. 🙂

This is only the second year that we have celebrated our birthdays as a couple. I don’t even remember what I got him last year. A shirt I think and something else that might have been lame. We were engaged then, and I was so nervous that he wouldn’t like what I got him. I hate picking out gifts for people. Unless it’s a baby outfit. Those are always fun to pick out.

Don’t get me wrong, I love giving gifts, it’s the picking it out part that sucks. And Aaron is not just “people”…he’s my husband! So his gifts have to be super awesome! It would be a lot easier if he would just give me list of things to buy…but where’s the fun in that? I am determined to surprise him with at least one thing. I’ll let you know how it goes after October 13th. 🙂

These are a few of my favorite things…

Aaron and I have decided that next time someone that is married asks us “How are you enjoying married life?” we are going to respond and then ask them the same question…

Just kidding. We don’t mind the question at all, but we do get it a lot three months into this whole marriage thing!

If you were going to ask, I will save you the time. Here is a list of my favorite things about being married:

1. Sex. Obviously.
2. I love sleeping next to him and waking up with him. It’s the most comfortable thing in the world.
3. Hanging out with Aaron at the end of a long day is always wonderful. We enjoy playing the Wii, watching Gilmore Girls (we’ve almost finished the series though and need a new show to become addicted to), watching movies, and playing with our fish Carl. Not so much playing with him I guess. But we talk to him a lot.
4. I never get tired of being with him. We are together a lot because we live together and work together and sleep together and eat together and so on. I am in the process of looking for a part-time job which will change that a little bit, but for now, we are together most of the time. I love it.
5. I like that I have 2 sets of parents now and more brothers and a sister-in-law and the cutest nephew ever. We love our families and neither of us have the “crazy in-laws” that you always hear about.
6. I love living in our apartment and cleaning it and buying things for it together. I know we promised a full tour. It’s coming soon!
7. I am learning to cook. This past week I have attempted to stray away from Chicken ______ because Aaron would eat chicken every day of his life if he could. My Betty Crocker Cookbook from Lisa Collier is my favorite kitchen thing ever. 🙂
8. I like that he helps me clean and cook and make the bed. I used to hate making the bed. It is so much easier with help. I could have used him all of those years growing up when I avoided it most days because I hated making the bed.
9. We are now on a monthly budget. Although it’s been a little difficult, it’s so fun to celebrate when something wasn’t as much as we thought it would be. Or when we find $350 in giftcards that we totally forgot about for 3 months. True story. I will admit that the grocery budget is not going well so far. It will definitely need to be reevaluated in October. Anyway, I love being organized, so the budget is great!
10. I am getting really excited for the holidays and our birthdays because we’re married and I’ve always thought it would be so fun and romantic to have a husband on my birthday and for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. And my sweet husband is taking me to the State Fair to see Chris Tomlin in concert for my birthday. Chris Tomlin is my favorite worship leader and worship music is my favorite music. I’m very excited. So that’s a good thing about being married too. 🙂

We’ll stop there although I could go on. As you can see, I highly recommend marriage. It’s awesome!

Hey, Aaron- what are your favorite things?

Harps and Darkness

Here is a fun newlywed story that happened fairly recently:

Back-story first: If you read Aaron’s last post, you know that we are pretty in love with our apartment. One thing that we did change about it was the master bedroom. In the apartment floor plan, the master bedroom had a bathroom connected to it. Although convenient, the bathroom was very small. The other bathroom was twice as big. So, we decided that even though the other bathroom was not connected to a bedroom, we would rather have more room. We made the switch. Therefore, if you want to sleep over at our house, you will have your very own bathroom in your room while we will have to take our clothes across the hall to take a shower.

Okay, now we fast forward to the night after our wedding night and the night before we left for our honeymoon, (aka the first night that either of us slept in our bedroom.)

We both laid down in bed, looked up at the ceiling, and at the same time we both exclaimed because we now realized why the other bedroom was the master bedroom…

There was no light in the ceiling. Not only was there no light, there was no place to put a light. No little socket thing that comes out. Nothing. We only had the glow of light from the hallway.

Now, before you look down on us, keep in mind that we hadn’t spent much time in this bedroom. (You should all be happy about that.) The only time we were in there was to move in furniture and make the bed. We never really bothered to look at the ceiling. We knew that the other bedroom had a place for a light, so we assumed this bedroom did too.

Okay, back to the real story. We decided that it was way too much of a hassle to switch rooms now. Plus the bigger bathroom far outweighed the possibility of being able to see at night. Our solution was going to have to be lamps. And that was something to worry with after our trip.

So, worry with it we did. We went shopping with all of our wonderful gift cards (thank you cards are on the way, by the way…sorry, we’re slackers). We bought many essentials for our apartment, including a nice table lamp. Being as indecisive as we are, it took quite some time to pick out this lamp. We finally decided on a simple black stand and a light gray lamp shade. The light bulbs took even longer to pick out, if you can believe it.

Needless to say, we finally made it home with all of our purchases. I, very excitedly, took the lamp into the bedroom to set it up. I plugged in the stand and screwed in the light bulb. I turned it on. It glowed spectacularly. I then took the plastic off the shade a carefully lowered it over the bulb.

Only to be stopped. The light bulb would not fit through the hole in the lamp shade. What the crap?!

“Aaron!!”

“What?”

“The lamp doesn’t work!”

“What?!”

“It doesn’t fit!”

He came in the room. “What do you mean it doesn’t fit?” He looked. “Oh.”

I took the shade off. “We need one of those lamp things. You know, those metal things that go into the lamp and around the bulb and you screw the shade on top. What are those called?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, I guess we have no lamp for tonight.”

So we lived in the dark again. The next day, we were on our way home from work. We live about a block away from an Ace Hardware store.

Aaron turned to me in the car. “Do you think the Ace Hardware would have the thing we need for our lamp?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to drive all the way over there if they don’t even have one though.”

“What do you mean ‘all the way over there?’ It’s two seconds from our apartment!”

“Okay, whatever. Let’s just call first.”

I proceeded to look up the phone number for Ace Hardware on Aaron’s iPhone and call. A bored teenage girl answered the phone.

“Thanks for calling Ace. How can I help you?”

“Hi. Um, I was wondering if you had something at your store. I’m not exactly sure what it’s called. It’s the metal thing that goes on a lamp over the light bulb and you attach the shade to it…”

“I’m not sure. Let me get someone else.”

I don’t think she had been listening to me at all. A man’s voice came on the phone next. I gave him my spiel.

“You mean a lamp harp?”

“YES! A lamp harp! Do you sell those?”

“Why, yes we do. We even have three different sizes.”

“Perfect! Thank you so much!”

We thus proceeded to the Ace Hardware Store. As we pulled into the parking lot, Aaron expressed a thought: “What if they only have gold lamp harps?

“Don’t be silly. Nobody uses gold anymore. They’ll be silver.”

We made our way inside. I didn’t dare ask anyone where they kept their lamp harps as I am sure they were already mocking the clueless girl who didn’t know what a lamp harp was called. We found them eventually.

Lo and behold, my wise husband was right. There in front of us were three sizes of lamp harps. All of them were gold.

“SERIOUSLY?!”

A gold lamp harp simply wouldn’t do. Our entire bedroom is made up of gray, black, and silver. Gold would stick out terribly. We resigned to another lamp-less night.

On our way home, we called Aaron’s mom to tell her of our harp woes. We asked her where we might find one. She suggested Target or Wal-Mart. Those stores were out of the question for that night.
“What about Kohl’s?” Aaron asked. Lisa said they might have one. We literally live across the street from Kohl’s. I, however, despise going to Kohl’s and would be partaking in no such outing. Aaron offered to drop me off and go look. I will do my best to share what happened to him.

Aaron went into Kohl’s and looked around for the lamp section. When he could not find it, he asked someone where it was.

“We don’t sell lamps.”

“Oh, you don’t sell any lamps?”

“No. We may be getting some in with the back-to-school supplies.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”

Apparently, Kohl’s believes that only students need lamps. Whatever.

(Side note: we were just at Kohl’s yesterday, and yes, they have lamps for back to school!)

So, no lamp harp again. No lamp that night.

Fast forward one more day. We are going on three days with this stupid, mindless problem. It was about 9:00 at night when we were finally on our way home. Neither of us felt like stopping anywhere, but we were determined to find a lamp harp. We pulled into Target.

I had to use the Kodak Picture Maker, so I sent Aaron off in search of a silver lamp harp. My phone rang a few minutes later.

“Hi.”

“Hi. They have one silver lamp harp left. It is adjustable. It’s $4.00. Sound good?”

“Sounds good. Thanks.”

We paid for our lamp harp and headed home. The anticipation was building. We would finally have a lamp in our bedroom!

When we arrived at our apartment, I went straight into our room with the lamp harp. I unscrewed the bulb, and put the lamp harp on the two posts of the lamp. It didn’t seem to fit quite right.

“Aaron…I can’t get this on right. Can you come help me, please?”

He came in. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t get it to stand up straight.”

He took it from me and tried putting it on. “These are too small or something.” He messed around with it for a few seconds until it appeared to look somewhat right. “I guess this will work.”

We put the light bulb back on and put the lamp shade on top.

But something was still not quite right. The shade barely covered the top of the bulb. Not only that, the hole in the lamp shade was still too big for the little lamp harp screw.

“Why is it so high?” I asked. “Should we adjust the lamp harp?”

“Maybe…let me look here.”

Aaron investigated the problem for a couple minutes…. “Wait…are you serious?!”

“What?!”

He took the shade off, took the harp off, unscrewed the bulb, put the shade on, and screwed the bulb down into it.

“What is it?!” I asked again impatiently.

“We don’t even need a lamp harp!!”

“Are you serious?!”

That he was. There sat our perfect lamp. It hadn’t needed a lamp harp at all. Not at all. We had just spent 72 hours and 4 dollars on a stupid, useless, silver, lamp harp.

At least it would have matched…

The End.

If we had only looked a little closer the first time...