Happy Turkey Day!!

Happy Thanksgiving! Hope everyone enjoys some delicious food and good company today!

Honeymoon Recap - Getting There

I've been trying to find the time to blog about the honeymoon, but I've just been struggling to find the motivation. I am going to post about each leg of the trip, starting with the awful frustrating trip there. We were picked up by the car service on Monday morning and headed to the airport. Our flight (with first class seats) was originally supposed to fly from BWI to Phoenix and Phoenix to Kauai. Turns out our flight from BWI was 3 hours late which would have caused us to miss our connecting flight in Phoenix. After standing at the counter for over an hour, the oh-not-so-helpful US Airways rep booked us on a flight out of DC-Reagan and told us that we needed to take a cab to DC to catch an 8:35am flight. Mind you, it was already 7:15am, and she assured us that if we hurried down to the cabs, we'd be fine. We knew better, but still, we ran downstairs and jumped into a cab with a crazy/maniac driver who liked to slam on his brakes every 5 seconds. Surprisingly, we made it to DC in about an hour, just in time to hear our names being paged. Yep... We missed our flight. Again, we stood at the US Airways counter for another hour while another rep (this one a little friendlier and helpful) finally booked us on a flight on American Airlines. Lucky us, we were now flying from DC to Dallas, Dallas to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles to Kauai...NOT in first class. What a start to the honeymoon, right? At one point while we were standing at the counter, I turned to Ryan and said, "Do you think this is a sign that we shouldn't have gotten married?" The only good "sign" of the day was a US Airways plane with the logo for the Philadelphia Eagles painted on it - See the picture below. Our flights ended up being fine, all on time and with no issues and we finally made it to Kauai after traveling for about 20 hours. More to come with a recap of our time in Kauai.

Home Improvements by the Handyman

This past weekend, Ryan and his new father-in-law spent the day on Saturday working on finishing the part of the basement that will be Ryan's workshop. I'm getting the feeling that now that we're married, Ryan can't wait to get away from me and will be spending all his time in the workshop. Hopefully, some nice projects will come out of his desertion hobby. I have included some pictures below of the workshop to show the progress that was made. There's still some work to do be done, but it's looking good so far.

In addition to the progress in the workshop, Ryan made some really nice shelves for the basement. I have included the pictures of these as well, along with a picture of the huge pile of sawdust on the basement floor from all of his hard work. The first picture is of the frame for the shelves. Second one is of all the sawdust, and the third is the finished product with all of our stuff on the shelves. Good job, Ryan!

It's Official

I'm a little late posting this, but last Thursday, I started the process of officially becoming Mrs. L. I started at the social security office, got there about 10 minutes before they opened, and there were already 4 people waiting in line to get in! After spending about 45 minutes there, I got the receipt for my new identity name. I headed on over to the MVA, where thankfully, there were only 2 people in line ahead of me. I paid $30, took an eye test, and failed miserably at signing my new name for the first time, and they handed me a brand-spanking new drivers' license. I made one more stop at the bank, thinking that I'd knock out all of the in-person name changes in one day, but apparently, Ryan had to be there to sign the new signature card for our joint account. Why? I'm not exactly sure since his signature is not changing! Oh well.. I'll drag him there eventually. I spent a good part of the rest of the day on the phone with credit card companies, other banks, and updating reward accounts... Surprisingly, the credit card companies were the easiest to deal with - they didn't even ask for proof that I had gotten married! Kind of scary. All in all, not an awful day, just a little bittersweet. I did almost lose it in the morning when Ryan told me to "have fun" and I said something like, "Fun doing what? Losing my identity?" I know. I know. I didn't have to give up Chick, but I am a firm believer that it is way too confusing for kids when their parents have different last names. And, who knows, someday we might actually have some of those... Kids, I mean. Chick is still part of my name though. It has taken the place of Nicole - definitely a tough decision, but I just couldn't bear to part with it. Ryan did take me out to dinner to celebrate and try to cheer me up... I think I'll keep him... and his last name.