to duty or not to duty

so i got home today with my mailbox overloaded with RSVP cards...and a jury duty notice. I think that most people would think that this is a bad inconvenient thing, but remember that bucket list i made? Serving on a jury is one of them, i think it would be so incredibly awesome!!! But guess what?!?!?!?! i got summoned for March 2nd! yep, that's 5 days before the wedding, it's on that Monday, and i already took wed-Friday off of work. So as much as i really want to go, i think I'm going to have to request to delay it for another time.

I hate Shakespeare… I think it is the dumbest thing on the planet (besides shoes). I know that he lived a long time ago, but I wish that he would just speak normally, instead of using all of these metaphors and old English words. I just found out that one of my favorite movies, ‘10 things I hate about you’ is based on ‘The Taming of the Shrew’. Weird.


So we sent out our invitations last night, if you don’t get one that means we don’t like you. Jake is relieved because he thinks that this means we get to relax now that they are sent out! HA! Apparently he doesn’t know about the other many of things we have to do, but he will…(insert evil laugh here).We seem to be having a problem with deciding the things that should be the easiest for us. For instance, we cannot flipping decide on our first dance, I think this is because music is such an important part of both of our lives, we cannot find anything perfect that fits us. When we first started dating we had this thing about parking in an empty parking lot at night and dancing in the empty lot to music (it was fun). So one night we decided that we needed to pick a song that was ‘ours.’ We picked ‘At Last’ by Etta James, it is an amazing classic love song and probably one of the top first dance songs. So that has been our song for the last 3 ½ years. But I don’t like it anymore, it doesn’t make sense for us. The first part of the song goes like this,

“At last, my love has come along
My lonely days are over”

That is not us at all, we both dated probably 3-4 people before each other and we are young, so it’s not like we’ve been waiting forever to find love. I don’t know, we just cannot find a song that represents us and who we are as a couple. Then we are having a photography issue. I want to be able to have full access to the pictures to be able to edit them myself, and that is usually not possible. These are two things that we care about a lot so we are having a lot of trouble deciding what to do. We will figure it out though and it will be awesome!

Get off your ass and stop takin my money!!!

My friend “Jane” has 3 kids and an ass hole husband who doesn’t live in the same state as her. (he is at the moment but he has only lived with her for 4 weeks in 2 years so far). So she obviously needs help financially, so she goes to the state and asks for help with daycare, they then tell her that before they do that she needs to file for child support against her husband. She does (but he doesn’t pay) and she gets daycare help. So instead of paying almost $2,000.00 a month for daycare she pays $200. This is great, because she needs to work to support her family, which she takes care of by herself. So tax season rolls around and she claims two of her kids and her husband claims the other one and she then gets his refund because he doesn’t pay child support. I know that she could use this, as long as she doesn’t blow it on shopping, so it’s good. It’s important to know that when you are filing your taxes the govnt. only counts up to $3000 for your daycare refund (you don’t get all of this back, just a %) so “Jane” paid $2400 in daycare bills last year for her 3 kids, I paid almost $8000 for Tyler. “Jane” gets around $700 back from the gvnt and I get $800. So that 5-6 thousand extra bucks that I spent on ty I get $100 extra back. This is very screwy to me. I make about $200 a month “too much” to qualify for daycare, and because of this I have to pay $400.00 a month more then I would if I had help from the state. (although I would pay it all myself anyways).

*note* the next part is about welfare, I have nothing against it, as I was on it for a couple months, but it is about the people who abuse it. This does not apply to you “Jane”.

I have a major problem with people who abuse the welfare system, I think it is especially bad in Arizona because of all of the illegal’s. But just ignoring the illegal thing, there are a ton of lazy people who abuse the system. I think welfare is a great thing if you need it, it saved my life after I had Ty, but I know that nobody can rely on it forever. I don’t like that people go to the DES office and sign up for food stamps, monthly bill help (I forgot what it’s called but the govnt just sends you a check every month), daycare help, and insurance. You can literally go to the doc/hospital whenever you want just because you have a cough and you don’t have to pay a penny for it. Then you can head over to the grocery store and spend 500 bucks for groceries and not having to worry about clipping coupons, because it’s free to you. All the mean time your kids are in daycare (so you don’t have to watch them) because you don’t have to pay for it and the state is sending you a check every month for the 4 hours a week you work at Mc Donald’s. Then tax season rolls around and you only made a couple thousand at your job and you have a bazillion kids so the govnt sends you a check for 4-6 grand. I really think that our state and govnt. needs to do a better job at investigating who we are giving our money to; it really makes me sad to see it wasted on people like this. We need to give it to people who deserve it, like “Jane” who is a single mom of 3 but works 40 hrs a week at a good job.

i just wanted to say that jake finally had a bad dream about our wedding last night. Not that it's good to have bad dreams but at least i know he's thinking about it. He dreamt that he got stoned and went completely goofy then missed all of the important things, then he was sad about it afterwards (in his dream & when he was awake).

At least we're not having bad dreams about not wanting to marry eachother, that would be a bad sign, but that wont happen.

45 days!!! : )

This morning our new receptionist started, I haven’t gotten the chance to really talk to her yet but one of the first things that someone said to me this morning was, “I hope none of the racist people working here have a problem with this.” I was completely taken back by this, I cannot believe that this crap would still be around. To even think that there could be a problem is absurd to me, especially considering the events that happened yesterday. Not that I think things could change over night, but it’s been like 50 years, it is 2009 get over it.

Um, so I am getting married in 47 days. I don’t know where the time went!! It’s been over 15 months since we got engaged and it has gone by so fast. I feel like I have done nothing but plan the wedding in the 15 months. Seriously I feel like I have really not accomplished anything else in life besides that.

Next subject:

I think everyone comes to a point in there life when they realize that life is short and I realized that probably around Ty’s 2nd birthday. (The first birthday he is still a baby, but the 2nd well he is a toddler, running around, speaking well etc.) I remember thinking, what happened? I just had him yesterday?!?!?! When I realized that life is too short and that he’ll be going off to school, getting girl friends, moving out and I knew that I had a short time to spend with him, I mean really, I could die any minute. So I made a promise to spend as much time with him as possible, teach him things and make sure that I raise him the best I can. But I also started to realize (from watching Oprah) that no matter what I want to think, my life is also about me. Even though Ty is the center of my world and he is always first, I have to also make sure my life is great while making his (and Jake’s) amazing. So I came up with a ‘bucket list’ (did anyone see that movie?) a list of things to do before I die. I told someone this and they thought it was kind of morbid, but how are you ever going to accomplish anything you want to do if you don’t know what it is? So I started writing down things and so far it is over 3 pages typed up. But I wrote down every little thing I wanted to do to make sure that I didn’t miss out on anything. And even if I don’t get to do all of it, at least I knew what I wanted to do and tried to do them. I would say that 85% of the things on my list either involve our whole family, or just me and Jake, so it will be fun for everyone. Some of the things on my list:

- Take a photography class
- Teach Ty to read before school
- Go to Disneyland on Christmas
- Be in NYC on new years eve
- Go on the Disney cruise with family
- Make-out under a waterfall : )
- Take a cross country road trip during summer break with family
- Learn a foreign language and go to a country to use it
- Stay in a five star resort
- See at least 10 more Broadway plays in NY
- Throw a surprise party for someone I love

And a lot of other things.

I had the weirdest weekend. I’ll start off with the baby shower, it sucked. Seriously. I don’t know if it was because I was a bad hostess or because the ‘father to be’ is an A$$, but everything sucked. First off nobody knew each other, she invited one person (couple) from every group that she knew. So that was awkward. Second off the father to be decided that he didn’t want to be involved except he would like to get everybody drunk. He went out and bought over $100.00 of alcohol, which in my opinion is completely inappropriate. He didn’t want to sit next to his girlfriend and help her in any way, and he was just a complete pompous the hole time. Nobody wanted to play any games and they just wanted to open the presents and then have a party. I really think the worst part of it was that I had to stay there the whole time. I wanted to leave so bad! And I wanted to punch this guy in the face on my way out. I feel so bad for this girl, why is she with him??? UGH!

(*side note) Speaking of bad couples, James just e-mailed me and told me that him and his gf/fiancé broke up. While I feel for him and what he must be going through after living together and dating for 2 or 3 years I am beyond ecstatic. I seriously wanted to cry because I was so happy. It has to be the best thing he has done in his life in a long time.

Then on Sunday my mom and I worked on invitations all day, just cutting and cutting paper. It was really tiring. I would have rather paid the extra $200.00 to have the invitation place cut them, but oh well.

So my cable got shut off because I completely forgot about it (again), and while I could just pay it I decided to keep it off to see what happened. It has been amazing! Seriously I never realized how much time you lose when you are just watching TV. We usually are movie people and we only watch 3 shows a week religiously, but most of the time we just use the cable for the movie channels and for ordering movies. But it’s been off since like Wednesday and I feel so much closer to my family. It’s not like we watch a lot of TV, Ty usually watches one ½ an hour recorded show a day while I make dinner and then Jake and I watch a movie at night. But having Ty help me with dinner and just talking to Jake at night is way better. So while I’m going to turn it back on tonight because I honestly cannot miss gossip girl (!!!!), I am going to try to keep it off more. It’s a waist of valuable family time.

I keep having weird dreams about the wedding, not like nightmares but just off the wall weird. A couple weeks ago I was telling my friend that I can’t see myself getting married without a tattoo for some reason. So last week I had a dream that Jake and I were getting tattoos done the day of our wedding, and for some reason it was imperative that they were done before we walked down the isle. And he wanted a full sleeve intricate thing (which in real life he would never ever get) that took forever. So I was sitting their telling him that we had like 20 minutes before we had to get married and he better hurry up. Then another dream I had was that all of our centerpieces were tiny bowls full of those cheap candy almonds in pastel colors that you only see at Easter (that was kind of a nightmare, ahhh). The weird dreams always wake me up in the middle of the night and of course I stay awake for hours trying to not stress about my dream, it’s lame.

So on Monday we were at Jake’s parents house and they asked about the wedding plans and I told them that we were hoping to send out the invitations this weekend, and then Jake’s mom says, “oh I forgot to give you a bunch of addresses for my family.” I am surprised how calm I acted. I have had the guest list pretty much finished for a very long time, it’s one of the first things I did in order to plan how much of my parents money I can spend (ha!). I have just continued to update addresses and add a couple extra people, but I asked them for a list over a year ago when we got engaged, 6 months ago when we were looking at how many invitations to buy and like 2 months ago when I was finalizing the guest list. So we bought 150 invitations, which is more then we needed, and now I don’t have enough. The wedding is supposed to be for 200 people and we now have 276 people. I am praying that we have 76 people who are too far away to come but honestly I don’t know if that will happen. Lamity lame lame.

So I have this “friend” from high school, I’m not sure if I wrote about her or not. But her name is Carrie and in high school we were pretty good friends, she is short like me and we have the same shoe size so that was cool. But Carrie is the type of person that naturally just annoys people, you know those people. The ones who just wont stop talking, who call you about nothing and when you hang out with them your mind wants to explode from all the non-stop chit chat. . .Well anyways, she’s one of them. As much as I see that in her, I don’t really care. She is a really cool person and we have a lot in common, so I don’t mind. But a lot of other people do mind and don’t really like to hang out with her. So Carrie is pregnant, (just like everyone else I know) and that is good (sort of) but she calls me a couple months ago and said this, “I want you to do my baby shower with Jessie.”

1: That is not proper etiquette; someone has to offer to throw a shower for you.
2: I don’t really want to plan it with Jessie, she’s not cool.
3: As much as she is my friend and I like her, I am super busy right now and don’t have the time (honestly).

But here I am and the shower is on Sunday, only 2 people have said they can come so we’ll see how many people show up.

I feel like she is completely not prepared at all, I mean nobody is prepared but she seems like she doesn’t want to be prepared. She told me that she wasn’t going to read any baby books or parenting books, and every time I ask her about anything with the baby, she’s just not excited. So I went to Wal-Mart and bought so much stuff for the baby Jake kind of freaked out. I just don’t want her to not have the essentials, and I feel like she doesn’t know what the essentials are. But buying all of that stuff super made me want another baby even more, Ty is 4 and he’ll be at least 5 by the time we have another one and that is getting too far apart, in my opinion.

For some reason New Years Eve/Day has never been really important to me. It’s just another day, and really all it means to me is that I am going to write the wrong year on everything for about 2 ½ months (and I get the day off of work). I guess most people look at it as a new beginning, but isn’t everyday a new beginning? Or for that matter, every hour, minute or second? You can really change your life at any time if you wanted. There are so many people who decide to change something about their life on new years, which is good, but why not any other day. It seems like a copout because it gives you an excuse to do whatever you want to stop doing (or continue to not do) whatever it is you are going to start on New Years Day until that day comes. So if you decide in November that you will start exercising for your new years resolution then you have 2 months to eat whatever you want and sit on your a$$. That is lame. I think the people who think like that are the like 60% of the people who fall through on their resolutions. Which is another thing; it is so ingrained in our heads that the resolutions we make don’t usually work, you are like expecting it not to work so it doesn’t. It sets you up for failure. I guess I just think New Years resolutions are lame overall.

So that is that...


Last night we had a fondue dinner at our house. It was super yummy. Tyler liked it, because we kind of did a movie night where we had the fondue on our coffee table and watched a movie while we ate, he likes that. Melting pot is jake and my favorite place to go, so I tried to have most of the stuff they do, but I didn’t want to make all the different dips, so we just dipped everything in cheese. We had steak, kielbasa, sourdough bread, apples, etc. The steak in cheese was amazing! I would have never thought of it but it was the best!

Tomorrow we are going to the Fiesta Bowl Parade. My family goes every year, so that will be fun.