big girl pants

   For some reason, I’m big on pro/con lists. On a piece of paper, slowly accumulated in the Memo app on my phone, mentally – it doesn’t matter the form. Can’t decide if you should take a trip? Pro/con list. Thinking of cutting your hair? Pro/con list. Wanna eat that brownie? Pro/con list for sure. But I’ve never had to make a pro/con list that will drastically change my life depending on either outcome. Change the next five minutes, maybe, but not the path I’m on in life.

   I just found out last Friday that the company I’ve been interning with this summer has decided to offer me a full time position once I complete my Masters degree next summer. It’s a great feeling to learn I made a positive impression and worked hard enough to be desired by such an impressive company! It was hard work and I definitely had some ups and downs, but overall it was a great experience and I don't regret it for a second. Being supported by Garrett and my family, having a handful of friends and family in Alaska, and the thrill of being somewhere new made for a great adventure.

But now for the biggest pro/con list EVER!

   If I take the offer, Garrett and I would make the big move up to Alaska in September 2014 and begin our lives in a very new environment. If I don’t take the offer, we would stick around Bozeman and hope for an offer from my other two internships with smaller local firms. Either way, I would be totally happy with my life! That’s the hard part. I just need to decide which life.

Moving to Alaska:

Pros – the adventure of living in a different state, new people, new places, a respectable job with a big company, the number of professional opportunities that will open up to me, the growth opportunity for Garrett and I, soul-searching, a big paycheck, the overall Alaska adventure

Cons – the distance between me and my family, Alaska weather, the complexity of working for a Big 4 firm, city life, not having our core group of friends, being completely out of my element

   So what’s a girl to DO?! There are so many good “goods” yet so many not-so-good “bads”. Luckily I’m not facing this decision alone. Garrett gives the best advice and I’m confident that whatever we mutually decide to do, we will be perfectly happy and everything will be just fine. I just sometimes wish I had a tiny crystal ball that I could take a quick peek in to see which choice would be the “best”…but that’s when you just learn to trust.

que sera, sera.

onto the next “home”

   2013 has been a weird year. On one hand it has been completely awesome: graduating from college, spending time at home, getting married, moving to Alaska, moving back to Montana, etc. On the other hand, it’s been extremely inconvenient. I’ve realized that for the last five months I haven’t felt like I’ve had a home. In April, I began moving out of my cozy little Bozeman apartment. I moved back in with my parents in May and spent a month in a weird transition stage, half of my things in a storage unit in Bozeman and the other half in produce boxes in the hallway of my parents’ house. After Garrett and I got married, we immediately left for Alaska and spent a week living out of a car that was so packed, you couldn’t even lean the seats back more than an inch. When we arrived in Anchorage, we tried to make our dinky little apartment feel like home but struggled. I still have a few boxes I don’t care to unpack because it’d just clutter the place more. Next weekend, we’re moving out of this place and in with Garrett’s grandparents for the weekend: more living out of the car. Then it’s back through the Yukon for a week: car living again. Then home for a couple days: produce boxes in the hallway again. Or, heck, we might not even unpack the car! Just lug in a few pair of undies, our toothbrushes, the puppy – you know, the necessities. Then back on the road to Bozeman where we can’t move into our new apartment until September 1^st so we’re staying with some friends for about a week – half of our stuff in the car, the other half in the storage unit. Ugh! I feel like a gypsy, but I’m assuming gypsies have way less stuff to keep track of. I’m so excited to move into the new place and live somewhere for a YEAR and not just a few months, a few weeks, a few days. But I also can’t help finding it to be bittersweet because it IS only for a year, and once again we’ll be moving. 

   Whenever I imagined my married life, I always pictured me and Garrett in a quaint little fixer-upper – decorated exactly how we’d want it, our dog lying on the living room rug, hanging out on the porch with friends. That isn’t how it’s turned out so far, obviously. I want to make a home for us, but it’s just so hard when you know it’s temporary. I find myself thinking “should I print out those pictures and buy some frames to put on the wall? Well, that’ll make holes…and our lease agreement said no holes…and we have to leave in a month…I guess we’ll just keep staring at the bad paint job and barren walls…” I see friends on Facebook who are also recently married, and they’ve got cute little kitchens with nice plates and leftovers in the fridge and a broom in the corner and it’s so obvious they live there together, happy and fresh into marriage land. Meanwhile, Garrett and I live in damp basement that I’m pretty sure grows mold in the corners (I’m assuming that’s what it is…) and is the PERFECT climate for fruit flies to prosper. I want to make Pinterest crafts, dang it! I want to make a nice place for us, I want to bake cookies without having to buy every single thing before doing so including the pan, I want to feel comfortable walking around in bare feet, I want my clothes to dry in less than five days if I hang them from the shower rod, I want to feel like I can lay on the couch without something crawling out of the depths and laying eggs in my ear, I don’t want to have to go out of the garage door every time I leave the house. I guess I’m complaining about a lot of mundane things. 

   I just have to keep telling myself “home is where the heart is”, and that’s wherever Mr. Morris is. And now Remy, too! 

i lied about the novel thing.

   You know what’s really, really hard? Completely recapping the last month of my life in a blog post. I keep putting it off and putting it off, but it just makes it add up more to the point that I get anxiety just thinking about all the WORDS I have to TYPE! And it’s all just so silly because I started blogging so I could keep my loved ones informed and instead I’m just hoarding all this juicy information. How cruel.

   So I just decided that instead of writing “part two” of the so-called novel I invented in my last post, I’m just going to say random things. Whatever pops into my head, no matter how important, regardless of the order they happened in, begins now.

• I am living in a humid, noisy, dirty, dark, cold, basement apartment in Anchorage, Alaska. I’ve been here for a little over a month now and I still can’t get over how weird it is that I am living in ALASKA? Who would have ever thought. I live with my new husband, Mr. Morris, and we are making due with our current predicament.
• I work at a fancy-shmancy accounting firm downtown in one of the tallest buildings looking out toward the beautiful inlet. I have a love/hate relationship with work right now because it’s summer and who wants to work? And it’s a hard job. I have to teach myself a lot and I use my brain more than I’d like to. But the view from my office is just….it’s just.
• We added a member to our new little family! A beautiful pure white “Alaskan” husky (that’s not a real breed but, you know what? No one cares) She’s the sweetest little girl and I already love her to pieces. We don’t officially get to take her home until next weekend so I am just PINING away.
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• I have no tan, whatsoever. This is important because I am a very, very pale person in real life and I genuinely depend on my summers to give me that “living” glow that I can sport until around the time of the first Montana snow. But not this year. As my dad used to say, “I’ll meet you next to the clear girl”. Alaska summers, you’re a bit different from what I’m used to.
• I eat far too many pita chips for my own good.
• My favorite place in AK so far has been…everywhere other than where people are. Alaskans are weird, ok? At least people in Anchorage are weird. There are a lot of homeless people, drunk people, homeless drunk people, homeless people that wish they were drunk, drunk people who think they’re homeless…etc, etc. But I love getting outside of the city and exploring! We’ve been hiking, biking, exploring, driving, walking, sitting, playing all over the place.
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• I am making some good money! It’s exciting. But I’m pretending it doesn’t exist because I have MARRIED WOMAN responsibilities. Boo. Hiss. Just kidding.
• Newsflash: men are less tidy than women.
• My upstairs neighbors are the LOUDEST PEOPLE ON EARTH.
• I still haven’t finished my wedding gift thank you notes?

And there you have it. My life in a very tiny nutshell. 

prepare for a novel - part one

   Presenting…Mrs. Morris! Yep, the big day has successfully passed and I am now a married woman - weird!

all photos property of Spotlight Photo and are not to be duplicated

A little lot about my special day(s):

   It rained and rained and rained the five days prior to Saturday, June 1^st and I didn’t want to admit it but I was in a slight panic. It wasn’t that the wedding would have had to be called off if it was a torrential downpour, but I so wanted pictures outside on a sunny day with the mountains and the trees and the grass..etc, etc. We had a Plan B for an indoor ceremony at the same venue, but I still secretly crossed my fingers before looking at the forecast each time. I told myself to only look at the proposed weather for Saturday once a day once the 10 day forecast was televised. The first time I peeked, it was supposed to be 82 with thunderstorms. The 82 part sounded great, but I was a bit worried about the thunderstorm aspect. The next day I snuck a glimpse and it said 62 and cloudy. Talk about a variation! A bit perturbed with the 20 degree shift, I now began to think it’d be too chilly. The forecast given for Saturday eventually began to even out and it looked like it’d be about 70 and partly cloudy. I decided I could deal with that.

   On Thursday, the wedding festivities began at the venue. I had the good fortune of Garrett’s mom, Angela, wanting to play a part in the decorating aspect for the event. We took a trip to a neighboring town to check out a rental shop and quickly discovered that we had the same vision for the wedding décor! I was so grateful for her interest and willingness to help because I genuinely wasn’t going to put much work into decorating – simply because I found it expensive, hard to tackle with just me and my bridesmaids, and pretty overwhelming. We rented furniture, chandeliers, trinkets, signs, and so much more – all so beautiful. I was excited to see what vision Angela had for everything and was completely blown away. Family on Angela’s side began to arrive during the week and dropped everything to help turn the barn into a scene from a fairy tale. It was rustic with a fancy country French theme, lights strung from every possible corner and chandeliers casting sparkling spotlights everywhere you looked. From high-backed upholstered chairs to mounted chipmunk heads, from heirloom lace to hand-made banners, and everything imaginable in between, my mind was completely blown. I could’ve just stared in awe for hours. The amount of time that family put in was incredible. All day Thursday and Friday, early Saturday morning, then again on Sunday to take it all down. You couldn’t have hired a better crew!

   The venue was a fairly obvious choice for me from the beginning because my parents are property managers and have rented this particular spot out for weddings for years now. It never occurred to me to look into different venues – not because this one was free (because it wasn’t), but because I once stumbled upon some wedding photos from a prior ceremony and they took my breath away. I decided I wanted those mountains behind me as I said “I do”. The spot came with a beautiful outdoor area for the ceremony and a two-story barn for the reception. The capacity of the barn is slightly over 200 folks which we originally thought was manageable, but we slowly discovered that it wasn’t realistic. Garrett’s dad’s family has farmed in the valley for about six generations now, which naturally means they are known by almost everyone. My situation was slightly different having lived in the area for a bit more than a decade. After working on our guest list we came up with a grand total of almost 400 people. 400! My parents couldn’t believe it and broke the news that it sadly wouldn’t work at the venue due to lack of space and a general hazard to the facility. I felt horrible having to tell Garrett to cut off people that he’s known for his whole life, but it turned out to not be so hard after all. We got the list down to about 275 and decided we just couldn’t cut it down anymore. We hoped that it would just work out. As a sort of saving grace, we learned that the Pastor that married Garrett’s mom and step-dad was willing to lend us his giant canopy he uses for the traveling church he operates. We couldn’t believe it and jumped on the opportunity because it allowed us the extra space we desperately needed. Although I was a smidge against the idea, feeling like it might take away from the simplicity of the barn and homestead idea, I quickly realized how beneficial it’d be. And it totally was. The wedding would not have been the same without it! Garrett’s groomsmen and usher took the canopy project on like a bunch of super heroes and I am so thankful for their hard work. Even the Pastor admitted it was the fastest he’d seen the monster go up! It was incredible.

   Friday was for decorating and I can’t even explain how happy I was that I didn’t have to direct people: put this here, that there, hang that over this, blah! That was the part I was not looking forward to. But, fortunately, Angela didn’t require that sort of direction and led Team Décor with ease. Lights went up, chandeliers were hung, furniture positioned, stuff hauled, mirrors and picture frames placed, …etc, etc. It was amazing to watch. Each time I stepped into a room, my socks were knocked off. The best part was that I couldn’t have envisioned it better myself. It was beautiful.

   Garrett’s dad and step-mom hosted the Rehearsal Dinner that night and it was equal parts fun and delicious. We hung out on the screened porch of the main house and enjoyed the slightly warmer weather, though we still looked apprehensively at the storm clouds swimming around in the sky. My fingers remained crossed despite the positive forecast for the next day. My bridesmaids helped with clean up, the groomsmen played yard volleyball in their nice clothes, grandparents chatted, Team Décor worked a bit more, parents relaxed…it was a great evening. We walked through the ceremony a couple times and it all started to get a bit more real. I was nervous standing in front of everyone, practicing vows. Nervous butterflies began to come alive in my stomach. My bridesmaids and I stayed in the main house that night while the groom and his guys stayed in a neighboring house down the road. They came over and we played card games and chatted for a few hours, relishing the last time we’d all be in the same place for quite some time. My sister/Maid of Honor notified us that the Northern Lights were dancing outside and we all excitedly went to the screened porch to watch. It was incredible! I’ve never seen them before, especially in Montana, and couldn’t help but see it as some sort of sign for the next day’s events. They lit up the sky for hours and my sister took some stunning photos. It was so cool!

   After getting to bed late due to festivities and a prank by the neighboring groomsmen (trying to scare us…those punks), we ladies finally got some beauty sleep. There was some unnecessary drama in the morning concerning some missing breakfast food and I had a brief Bridezilla moment, but luckily I think that was the only one. The guys may or may not have thought it was a free-for-all the night before and might have eaten/taken some stuff, but it all worked out. Then it was off to get our hair and nails done at one of my bridesmaid’s mom’s salon in town. It was so fun having us all in one place – some helping another paint fingernails, another pinning up curls. I was so happy with how my hair, fingernails, and toes turned out! We did a few practice rounds on a wedding style and mastered it the day it actually mattered. Each girl looked beautiful and unique because I didn’t specify a particular style for hair or nails. It worked out perfectly!

…to be continued

something big just happened.

   I completed my senior year of college! Just now! Well, like 38 minutes ago really. It’s over, just like that. Instead of getting all mushy-gushy in a giant essay about “how fast time flew” or “oh the memories we made”, I am presenting:

College: A Year FOUR YEARS In Review

In late August of 2009, my parents and I caravanned to Bozeman on a sunny day. I drove with my mom and my dad hauled all my “necessary items” in his truck behind us. Despite almost locking my keys in my car at a rest stop outside of Deerlodge, we made it to my new home safe and sound.

The day was a hot blur of over-excited 18 year olds, blue and yellow t-shirts, loud music, humid dorm rooms, introductions, organization, and temporary farewells. I will never forget my mom telling me she and my dad were sad as they made the four hour return trip. I was too prideful to tell her I was sad, too.

But I was excited! So excited. I was finally in college – no more curfews, no chores, no sibling who borrowed things without asking, new faces, a new job, responsibilities abound…

   Freshman Year consisted of awkward dorm living, bad cafeteria food, experimenting with the party scene, bad grades, bad study habits, new friends, homesickness, intimidating exams, freedom, finding myself, and homework. To say there were “ups and downs” would be an understatement.

I was lucky to be attending the same University as my significant other and spent 80% of my time on adventures with him. We learned that the year we spent apart was more than worth the angst, emotion, and distance. And I’m so thankful for that.

   Sophomore year brought huge changes. At 19 years old I signed my first lease to a blue triplex with mold and pot-smoking neighbors. It was definitely an awkward dance as three girls tried to cohabitate. One liked parties, one liked fishing, and I wasn’t really sure what I liked yet. I found myself stuck in the middle of a situation only three teenaged girls could ever create for themselves.

I discovered I was better at school than my current transcript said I was. I became interested in bike rides, novels, quiet drives, close friends, and dogs. School was #1, Garrett was #2, and everything else was in a giant cluster in third place. I still got homesick but I made new friends. I no longer had to eat cafeteria food but couldn’t cook a non-bland meal for myself to save my life. I got a job at a coffee shop and found a passion inside, but unfortunately had to quit due to a mean stalker :(

   Junior year brought another big move. Katie and I left the original apartment after basically getting booted and found a cute little place a few blocks from downtown and campus. We studied, gossiped, cooked, drank, cried, danced, exercised, laughed, and grew together. She became my second sister and my rock as I cranked through the hardest year of my college career.

I became tired of school and dreamed of a different life. I bought a bike, experimented with yoga, began eating healthier, and cut out some bad influences. Garrett and I realized we were it. He taught me to relax and to be calm, I taught him to plan and anticipate. I still got homesick and missed my real sister and my dog with my whole heart.

   Senior year went by in a flash. I entered the school year with a beautiful new addition to my ring finger and excitement coursing through my veins. I juggled wedding planning, internship applications, difficult classes, a new job, and club involvement and felt overwhelmed more often than not. I recognized my desire to prove myself wrong. I found that my current priorities were not making me happy.

I nervously accepted an opportunity to move to Alaska for the summer of 2013 and was thankful to have a man by my side to support such scary decisions. I dragged myself through two semesters of endless work and tried my darndest to do other things for my wedding, for work, for clubs, for friends, for family, for me. It came as a shock to realize my four year undergraduate stint at MSU was soon to end.

   And now it has ended. I completed my “final” final exam today at approximately 10:25am and left the building in a weird daze. I’m so happy! And yet, I’m so weirded out.

   Fortunately (or unfortunately), I will be returning to this familiar town and campus in the fall for Graduate School. The only things that will change are fewer familiar faces, a wedding band added to my ring finger, Alaska memories in my mind, and (hopefully) a little furry companion.

I can’t help it...: where did the time go?