4 months until I become a Mrs. Mrs McCarthy, to be precise.
I quite like the sound of it 🙂
And I suppose this is an announcement, sort of, that I’ll be taking my future husband’s name. We talked about it and decided that, since we want to share a surname and his carries a bit more weight than mine (I love mine, but I did take it out of a book), this would be the most sensible option. R did tell me that he didn’t mind if I didn’t take his, but in the end I think it will make us feel like more of a family. Plus he’s actually useless at doing anything that has to do with paperwork and being organised, so in the long run it’ll just be easier if I make the change. I’m thinking about keeping mine for writing. My novel is about a third done (after many false starts) and although I’m not doing anything poetry-related at all right now, I kinda hope I will again in the future.
It’s also been almost 4 months since I landed my contract with Valtech, who I’m now no longer working for. The contract was for only 3 months, so my leaving didn’t come as a shock or surprise; nevertheless, I was mightily sorry to leave what turned out to be one of the most enjoyable jobs I’ve ever had the good fortune to land. Furthermore, it paid for our entire wedding. That’s right … we’re all paid up! Well … apart from the rings and my dress, the former of which we won’t be purchasing for another couple of months at least, and the latter of which is still hanging on the fate of whether or not I get a new contract.
Happily, the work situation is currently looking rather positive. I’m waiting to hear back about a lucrative job offer that would see me have to move to Wolverhampton for 5 days a week. Not that the relocation would be a challenge – R has already said he’d be willing to move with me, and since it’s a contract the move wouldn’t be permanent. We’re nearly at the point where we’re able to sell our house, so it’d simply be a matter of offloading this property and renting somewhere new for a while, at the end of which time we’d be able to buy a new home. Technically we could right now, but the extra money would certainly help us find somewhere a bit nicer. And it’d mean I’m able to get The Wedding Dress – the one of my dreams, that I’m going to try on in Paris in 8 days and am so bloody nervous about, because if I don’t like it on then I’ll have to find another option, and if I do like it on then I don’t think I’ll have any other option but to buy it.
I’ve rapidly come to the realisation that weddings are funny things, built more upon dreams and fantasy than actual real life considerations. I’m not saying we haven’t been practical about ours; we have, and the location is slightly impractical in and of itself, being (pretty much) all paid up with 4 months to go is fantastic. People keep saying things like “oooh there’s not long to go now!” but in all honesty it still feels like a lifetime away, and right now I’m spending more time painting walls and window shopping for a new car than thinking about decorations and vows and blah blah blah. Nevertheless, The Dress is one part of the fantasy that I’ve hung on to. As a chubby, morose-looking teenager, then a skinny, unfortunate looking young woman and now a chubby (again), slightly more presentable adult (ish) I’ve still not been able to shake this deep-rooted desire for visual self-perfection – that is, the opportunity, at least for one day, to be entirely happy with the way I look. And even though I’ve been lucky enough to land a partner who is happy with the way I look, it’s simply the case that The Dress is far more about me than it is about him.
In all other respects I’ve decided to downplay the aesthetic aspects of my role in our wedding. I don’t want to not look like myself. No false eyelashes, sky high heels, push up bra (not that I could wear one in The Dress) or unusual hair styles. R is wearing jeans. We both want to look like ourselves; not some over-styled hyperreal version of ourselves. That’s not the kind of wedding we’ve planned. Even The Dress, in all its gorgeous perfection, is sublimely understated. Just bloody expensive. Who knew simple and demure would end up costing more than embellished and massive?
In other news, my website broke for a couple of weeks – not the front end, the back end; my CMS was rendered useless by a WordPress update error, which has thankfully now been fixed. So I’m going to, hopefully soon, be filling in all of my #bookaweek updates. It’s not that I haven’t been reading (I have), it’s just that work kept me so busy that I haven’t read as much as I wanted to, and haven’t had the time to blog about hardly any of it. So until I start work again, which should hopefully be in a couple of weeks, I’m going to cram in a load of reading (the massive pile – literally a pile, I ran out of shelf space months ago – of books in the living room is making me feel guilty) and chronicle everything on here.
4 months until I’m Mrs McCarthy. Just saying it makes me smile 🙂