Over the course of our day, the following things have happened:

1.  Will's other sister (not the one who came to visit, the other one) called him while he was at work to scream at him for not telling her about our engagement.  Will doesn't really get along with the females in his family and this is pretty good evidence of why.  While part of me wants to flog Will for not telling them sooner, the rest of me understands why he avoids dealing with them.  Even the happiest of situations can turn them into screaming wildebeests.  So yeah.  By nine in the morning he'd already had someone screaming at him.

2.  Two of our friends decided to split up.  They've been married for just over two years and when we lived in Roseburg, this was the couple we'd go out to dinner with when we wanted to do "couple" things like, well, going out to dinner because there wasn't anything else to do in Roseburg.  And the decision wasn't really mutual so much as it was the wife unexpectedly dumping her husband.  Will and I are trying to convince the husband to move up here and crash with us while he gets himself settled but, because of his outrageous car payment, he can't afford to just up and move, even if we didn't charge him any rent.  So, while he saves up money to move (because the Wife decided that she wanted to keep the apartment), they are going to keep living together in the apartment.  They've moved into separate bedrooms, but…what kind of hellish torture that must be!

(We'll just sort of…gloss over the fact that if he's living there and still paying half the rent and his entire car payment he isn't likely to save up money to move any time soon)

3.  Will's company is going through budget cuts and they are letting one of Will's favorite coworkers go so that they can keep Will.  While it is certainly flattering to know that they will do whatever they can to keep him even if it means working around his impossible fall school schedule, Will still feels really badly for the coworker that they are letting go.  He even begged them to put him down to part time again so that they could afford to keep the other guy, but I guess they wouldn't listen.

I'm trying to think of a funny way to wrap all of this up, but…yeah…I've got nothing.  I've been writing allllll day so my brain is fried.

I think that this has been a Monday of Garfieldian proportions!

If you are ever in the Portland Metro area, you must have dinner at the Black Bear Diner in Beaverton.  Will and I took his sister there for dinner tonight and it. was. so. good.

The other fun part of the diner (besides the yummy food) is that the outside of their menu is designed to look like a newspaper from 1959.  You always hear about how much the prices have gone up but when you see a classified ad selling a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home with a yard, garage, family room and den for $16,000?  You almost fall out of your chair.  New cars for $2000? Jeebus.  It almost makes me want to live back then, but then I realized that I'd officially be considered "bad" because I'm living with my fiance before we are married.

When I mentioned this, Will said "it's still frowned upon you know," and Missy (Will's sister) and I looked at each other and almost at the same time said "I don't know anyone who didn't live together first!" and "Now its weird not to live together before you get married!"  Poor Will.  I think he really does want to live back in 1959.

I felt it was my duty to remind him that in 1959 he wouldn't be able to play WoW or spend so much time on the computer because…wait for it…there weren't any personal computers back then!  Will insists that he would love to work outdoors and has this romantic idea about being a farmer but whenever I suggest we do anything that doesn't involve climate control, he gets twitchy and says he'd rather stay home.  I say that the man who thinks walking a few blocks to the store instead of driving is "weird and un-American" would have a pretty hard time being a real farmer.  But because I want to be a good fiancee, I simply patted his knee and said "of course you'd rather work the land honey.  I totally understand," while rolling my eyes at his sister.

You know, 'cause I'm supportive and stuff.

People, I have discovered something that has the potential to be very dangerous.  I can use my Tivo to download television shows from Amazon.com. Thank god the shows cost $2 per episode or I'd have all sorts of things being downloaded right now! Though I have to say that this thing downloads slower than my old dial up connection used to download stuff.

I discovered this in a fit of "I've watched all my Netflix but my body doesn't want to concentrate on work and I know it will be at least a couple of hours before I end up going to sleep!"  I mean, sure, I could clean the kitchen but really–who wants to spend their Saturday night cleaning their kitchen?  Yeah, Will's sister is supposed to visit tomorrow but if you ever saw how Will's family kept house you would understand why I am not worried about her opinion.  A sink full of dishes? Is nothing compared to the way that house was kept.

Okay, end of tangent.  The point is this:  I can download television shows from Amazon into my Tivo.

It's a good thing I almost never have any spare money because this? Would suck all of it right up.

Last night Will and I went to see the Foo Fighters at the Rose Garden here in Portland.  For those of you who don't know and couldn't guess, I'm a pretty big fan of Nirvana.  I came late to their party (which is a long long story) but once I managed to get my hands on their music, it was over. I was a Nirvana-head.  I still kind of am, but I have to admit that (until last night) I hadn't heard much non-top-40 Foo Fighters.  I know, I know, Dave Grohl is a rock god among men and has talent oozing from his pores.  I get it, but I didn't get it until last night when we went to the concert.

First, unlike the other concerts I've been to (the most recent being Etta James when she played the Halfshell in Roseburg a couple of years ago) these guys played. And played and played.  They played for more than two and a half hours and only had a couple of "talk" breaks.  I was really glad for this because this was Will's very first concert ever and I wanted it to be a good one.  By some miracle we ended up with perfect seats too, so I think that as far as first concerts go, this one was pret-ty awesome.

I also feel very proud of my Nirvana nerdiness because I had been hoping they would play at least one or two Nirvana songs and while they didn't play anything that I recognized immediately as a Nirvana song, they did play a song called Marigold.  During the performance I leaned over to Will and said "I think this is a Nirvana song!" because it just sounded…like Nirvana (how many times can I use the band name in one paragraph? Let's find out!)!  Then today, I was looking up Dave Grohl on Wikipedia and sure enough, Marigold was the B-Side to one of Nirvana's singles.  (*sigh* remember when there were such things as B Sides?) It didn't start out as a Nirvana song–it was written by Grohl for another group, but then he and Kurt Cobain played around with it and ended up re-recording it.    I feel very proud that I was able to recognize the band's ness.

The concert also serves as proof that, especially in the case of Will and I, opposites really do attract.  After the concert, while we were waiting for the train home, Will said "Wow–Dave Grohl must have to get wasted to be able to go out on stage every night!  There's no way I could ever even think about doing something like that!" at the exact same time that I said "Dave Grohl looked like he was really enjoying himself! That looked like so much fun; I want to be a rock star!"

Apparently I have lost the ability to stay awake in the morning.

For the last few months, on the days when Will had to be at work (or school) early, I'd get up with him and then go back to sleep after he left.  I figured that would stop when summer hit and that, once his classes were done and his work schedule evened out, I'd get into a regular waking/sleeping routine.  And I have.  It's just…kind of weird.

I'm still doing that "oh I'm too tired, I need to go back to bed" thing, even on nights (like last night) when I get a full eight hours!  I don't know if it means that I truly need more sleep (because seriously? the full eight hours? is an anomaly) or that my circadian rhythms have gotten completely farked.

What I do know is that Poppy now understands exactly what "go back to bed" means and whenever I say it, she runs into the bedroom and curls up on the bed in Will's spot.

Today was a baby-sitting day and when I got to Wendy's house, my friend Katie was there!  Katie's been doing this summer-long Alaska road trip and I had been wondering when she'd be back in Oregon.  Today my wonderment was answered by Katie leaping out from behind the front door of Wendy's house and saying "RAWR!" (We? are an odd bunch)  Then she was craning her head and kind of bending weird and when I asked her "are you trying to read my shirt?" (wearing Happy Bunny today–oddly appropriate for when Fiona did not want to rest) she said "Erin! Your Hand!"

Yeah–even though it has become my fidget tool du jour, I often forget that I'm actually wearing an engagement ring.  It still looks kind of weird on my hand, but it feels just right.

I have, essentially, been awake since four this morning.  This is because that's when Poppy woke me up by pulling a bathrobe off of the back of the bedroom door.  Normally I would just roll over and go back to sleep but our bedroom door actually fits exactly into the door frame and so, instead of using over-the-door hooks, I had to put two thumbtacks into the back of the door to hang the bathrobe on.  Of course she managed to pull the thumbtacks with the bathrobe.  So, at four in the morning, I had to crawl around on my bedroom floor using my cell phone as a flashlight (I didn't want to wake up Will) until I found both thumbtacks.  This? Took more than a half an hour.  Then? Every time I would just about be back to sleep, she'd find some new mischief to get into.

I have my iTunes on shuffle and it just switched from Tennessee by Arrested Development to Shout and Feel It by Count Basie.  I love the shuffle function.  And I kind of want to watch Swing Kids.

I have discovered an almost savant-like ability.  You know the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game (who doesn't)? Last week Will started playing the Six Degrees of Matt Damon with some WoW friends on one of their forums and I? Kick So Much Ass At This Game, without using IMDB.  I? Watch way too many movies!

For the 4th of July weekend not only did I have deep fried hot dogs (seriously? I know it sounds twelve ways from disgusting but oh my god they are good) but on Sunday we had barbecued chicken and salad.  Okay, so the barbecued chicken was actually baked in the oven and then brushed with barbecue sauce but I say that in our grill-less abode, it still counts.  Yay, cookout food!

I also spent most of the weekend watching the first season of Lost.  I have this tendency to run away screaming from things that are too popular too soon so I am really late to the party on this one.  Lost is…well if you watch it then you know already.  I have decided that the reason it is so popular is that from episode to episode (now having watched the full first season and a couple of episodes of this most recent season) is that there is no way to get a foothold on what the hell is going on.  Is it a monster? Is it a tractor?  Are they dead? Are they being experimented on? What the hell is happening?!?  I have to say, though, that I find Charlie to be completely endearing, for a recovering heroin addict and Hurly (ey?) feels really familiar.  I do not know why, but I feel like I know the character or the person and I don't know if it is because I've met someone like him in real life or if I've seen other characters like him on television.  Either way I am kind of ticked off that I do not have the second season of the series available.

Though, if I had the second season available I probably wouldn't get any work done, which brings me to the reason for this post: what the hell is it it with Mondays?

Yesterday, as I was ensconced on the couch and watching Lost, I was looking forward to getting back to work today.  I was planning and I kind of wanted to just stay up and get to work after I watched the first season finale but since it was late I made myself go to bed.  Then today I woke up and you know what? Work was the absolute last thing I wanted to do.  Oh I worked, but I was mostly thinking "wow, I wish I had the time to read my book" and "maybe I should go back to sleep."  And…and…where did the glorious motivation go?  Why is it hiding?  Why can't it carry over from one day to the next?

Am I the only one that goes through this?

This has been a week of daytime unmotivated slack assedness accompanied by late afternoon/early evening "oh crap, I really need to get this work done!"ness.  Evenings are typically when I write my blog posts so…there you go.  A handy excuse for not having posted since Tuesday.  Tuesday! I am a blog SLACKER!

Really quickly, for those of you who don't read Jen's blog, you should head over there right now.  She has exciting news!  Jen writes one of my favorite blogs and I've been reading her for a few years now.  I am so incredibly excited for her, so I want all of you to go over there right now!

For those of you who were around before I re-launched the blog and who remember the ongoing saga of "whether or not to leave the window open at night," Will and I have finally reached a compromise and what's more, Will is the one who came up with it!

For those of you who weren't around or who just like to hear the same things over and over again, Will and I have been going around and around this one argument over whether or not we should leave the bedroom window open at night.  It got pretty hairy during the impromptu heat wave in May and then went away when the temperature dropped back down into the 50s.  For the last week or so, though, with the heat being in the "normal summer" range, the argument has come back–only this time it has been as a "no you can have your way" "no you can have your way!" "no, you should win," "no you should" competition which I blame solely on the residual schmoopyness from getting engaged (and if you don't think I'm going to ride that train until it just won't go anymore, you are sadly mistaken).

The basic argument is this:  Will wanted to keep the window open and the fans on at night because it was hot.  He says that it is perfectly safe to keep the windows open at night because, in the event that someone tries to break in, well–Will is a big believer in the second amendment. I, on the other hand, say that we live in a ground floor apartment and why invite trouble?  What's more, in order to be prepared to confront someone who might want to break in through our GROUND FLOOR APARTMENT'S OPEN WINDOW, you need to sort of, you know, hear them coming and even though we have some great big shrubs right under our window that they would have to push through, when you have three fans blowing, the noise is unbelievable and there is no way we would hear anything especially since Will does not wake up to the smallest sound like I do and he's the one that is comfortable with…the second amendment.

We've tried compromises.  We've tried a dowel in the window while leaving the window open and the fans on.  Me? No sleepy.  We've tried leaving the window open and the fans off.  Neither of us slept much.  We've tried closing the window and bringing in a fourth fan.  I slept okay but Will swears that he was overheated all night (we'll ignore the fact that he woke me up at 2AM by yanking the blanket up around his ears).  We've tried leaving the window open and the fans on right up until the minute we go to bed and then closing the window and letting the fans circulate the colder air.  No dice.

Then, the other day, Will comes home and annouces "I have figured out a compromise to the window issue" and I thought "oh crap" and immediately envisioned booby traps and spring loaded thingies in the bushes outside the window or Will deciding to sleep in the living room until the winter time.  I was visibly cringing until Will pointed into the corner of our "dining room" and said "Bert!"

Bert is the portable air conditioner we bought last summer when we were living in our hellishly hot Roseburg apartment.  Since we moved up here, however, he's sat in the corner collecting dust because, for the most part, our apartment stays a good 10 degrees cooler than the outside world (bottom floor, almost no direct sunlight.  It's beautiful).  The other day I actually patted Bert and said "poor Bert, sitting there with nothing to do."

Now he has something to do!

Bert is currently sitting in the corner of our bedroom pointed directly at the bed.  He is only turned on at night while we are sleeping because we don't want to jack up our electricity bill and, because we keep the door to the bedroom closed at night he keeps everything lovely and cool.

It feels a little bit counter intuitive to turn on the air conditioner and then use a blanket, but I've decided to let that go.

In other news, for the 4th we are pulling out the counter top deep fryer and having deep fried hot dogs! It sounds incredibly disgusting but oh my god they are gooooooooooooooooooooood.  I think I will have three.  Happy Holiday Weekend!

Today at the library I TOTALLY scored when I found the first season of Lost (which I've been meaning to put on my Netflix queue) and the fourth season of Felicity (which I am ashamed to admit I do not yet own) on the shelf.

I felt that this procurement, along with the fact that I managed to only check out those two things and two books (one of which I had requested) and not half of the fiction section like I first thought about doing, warranted its own blog post.

A decision has been made about the wedding.  Like a real, honest to god almost tangible not wavering decision.  And that decision? is this:

We aren't getting married until my bangs grow out.

I've had bangs since I was thirteen and to be honest I will most likely have bangs on my wedding day because hello, I have the five-finger forehead thing happening but um, my bangs… they just need help.

About a month and a half ago I was pulling my hair back into a pony tail and as I ran my hand along the top of my head I noticed that the hair on the top of my head toward the crown is kind of thin.  I would like to tell you that I thought "huh.  Oh well." and went about my day but I think you know me better than that.  I freaked out.  My hair was thinning! Oh my god! I'm too young to have old lady pattern baldness! I can't afford Rogaine for women!  I'm going to have to tell people that Diane Keaton is my idol because I'll have to wear a hat for the rest of my life!  (Not that Diane Keaton isn't cool and all but…well, you know)  I was going bald! BALLLDDDDD!

And then I noticed something.

You see, for the last…since college years, I have been mostly cutting my own bangs.  I won't pretend that I am any good at it and even now they get a little slanty until I make myself just. stop. trimming already!  If you have ever cut your bangs yourself, you know that it can be kind of hard to determine the point at which your bangs should start and creating a distinct line can be kind of difficult especially if, once in a while, some stray hair falls forward and you cut it before you think to check and see where it fell from.

Yeah.  So my bangs?  Begin really far back.  Way too far back.  Which, thankfully, means that I'm not actually going bald, I just really suck at cutting my own hair.  But I already knew that I am not good at cutting my own hair and have come to terms with it.

To remedy my unfortunate bang-rest of hair-ratio, I am going to let my bangs grow out and when they get long enough that I can pull them back into the ponytail and not have that old paintbrush look, I'll go to a professional and have them cut new bangs for me.

And all will be right with the world.