Bloggins McGillicutty

Man, finally I'm getting around to post #3 on this thing!  Celebrate!!

Since my last post I've had quite a few monumental events occur in my life.  Number 1, I got the job I interviewed for and started December 1st.  Pay and benefit-wise it is pretty much a lateral move, but it's nice to work at a place where sweat pants aren't acceptable business attire.  Not that I have a problem with sweatpants (that's right, I'm wearing them right now!), it's just that sometimes you really do need to look a tiny bit better than the homeless person you are serving.

Number 2, I got engaged!  Yep, and I'm not even knocked up!  Ok, that was wrong, but it was a really huge surprise and I couldn't be happier about it.  Well, maybe if someone gave us $20,000 to fund the thing, then, I could probably scrounge up a little more happiness.  D and I had been discussing marriage for a while, but for some reason I had it in my mind that he wouldn't propose until springtime.  Not sure why I picked spring, but it's arbitrary anyway when you've already told each other that you want to get married.

A silly part of my excitement with getting married is the name change.  Once married I will be Katie O'Malley.  It has quite a ring to it, no?  AND, just google it.  I'll finally be one of the masses.  I'll share my name with the current First Lady of Maryland! In a way, I love my current, distinctive, Italian last name, but it makes internet anonymity a little difficult when you are the only person in the world with your name.  Plus, when I tell people my name, about 90% will know how to say it and spell it right off the bat.  I've been at my new job for nearly a month now and my last name is still spelled wrong in some places.  "O'Malley" should make my life much easier.

Number 3 sounds minor, but it's a big step for me.  I finally have a laptop.  D got it for me for Christmas and I love it.  I don't have the internet at my place, but he's letting me borrow his mobile broadband thingy so now I'm able to waste hours upon hours on surfing the web in my free time.  It's like I'm a real, 21st century girl now!

Number 4 is actually related to Number 2, but it's almost so huge that it deserves its own spot.  For our wedding, we've decided to do it all in Florida.  Lately we've been specifically thinking Key West.  I know it's far for people to travel, but as long as the most important family members and friends can make it I'll be happy.  When I think of getting married on the beach at sunset I can't imagine anything more beautiful.  

Honestly, there's just no way that we could afford to do the big, traditional wedding here in St. Louis.  At least not the way we'd like to do it.  An intimate, relaxed wedding sounds much less hectic to me, even if it is out of state.  Most of my friends and family are supportive, but I have encountered some criticism already.  A relative said I should just have it here so that more people can come and we'll get more presents.  Don't get me wrong, I love presents, but that's not quite what I'm centering my marriage around.

So, I'm going to try my hardest to keep this thing from turning into a wedding blog, but I'm not making any promises!

Tomorrow is New Years Eve, so I hope everyone out there has a good one and a great 2009 full of weight loss and financial success!

cold, wet, and mine

I'm a little nervous here folks. On Thursday, I'll be meeting with the HR folks for one of the major St. Louis hospitals to accept a position with them. I had the interview on Friday, they called Monday for my social to do a background check, and today they called with their offer. The only disappointing part about this whole thing is that their salary offer isn't nearly what I was hoping for, but I guess that part will be nailed down during the negotiations part of the meeting. I've never had to negotiate a salary before so this will be fairly intimidating. Hopefully I can convey that I'm worth every penny they can afford.

I wish that my supervisor for my current job wasn't in Tan-Tar-A this week for "training". Even though I can't stand this job, my sup is probably the best one I have ever had, so it would feel better to give her my two weeks notice rather than her boss who won't really give a damn either way. When I told my sup about the interview she actually wished me good luck and seemed pretty happy for me. Most of the old-timers at my job tell all of the young workers to get out while they can. Others are bitter and don't care either way. Luckily most of my friends at work aren't like that.

Tonight the boyfriend and I started talking about the word "mine" - I have no idea why - and we couldn't figure out what kind of word it was. Noun? Verb? Auxiliary something or other? I lamely settled on adjective because I thought, "Ya know, it describes something, like this thing is green and that thing is mine." Or, per Danny's example, "Yeah, it's cold, wet, and mine." For some reason those three words were just hilarious, probably because it proved how dumb my decision sounded. Lo and behold, "mine" is a pronoun, and I was barely able to believe that after five years of French (where you basically re-learn your own language) I managed to forget about pronouns. What an idiot!

So yeah, that's just a snippet of the riveting life of Yours Truly.

P.S. I just noticed that this blogger thing has labels for your post, and one of the examples is "scooters". Turns out this post was all about that Vespa I'm dying to buy.

Walrus Gumboot

Some jerk already claimed walrusgumboot.blogspot. com back in 2003 - and hasn't used the blog since that initial post - so this address has to include the hyphen. Hope that's not too difficult.

I wanted something kind of strange and random for my next blog (buttered knife was my previous front-runner) and this word pairing popped out at me during a karaoke night at Double D's. Can anyone guess where it's from?

Well that's really it for this post. Not too sure how often I'll use this thing, but I promise to at least post one more time. If anything, it may assuage the disappointment of the next blogger who attempts to register a walrus-gumboot.blogspot.com.