To The New Year

Without meaning to sound cynical or mean, I'm tickled by people's New Year's sentiments and the "defeated but not discouraged" little notes they write. They talk to the year. "2017, you were a real challenge but we made it through to the next chapter of our journey."

 I chuckle a hateful laugh. "This year brought joy and pain..." 

That's a side effect of being alive. Do people expect to have a year without hiccups and blunders? 

"This year will be my year!" Well I sure hope so for you but you didn't have to wait until January 1st to go after your dreams. It's not a magical day. The Earth doesn't even know what day it is. It's just looking out from the merry-go-round at it's star buddies that it hasn't seen in a year. 

Perhaps I just don't get it. I know Ellen takes the New Year quite seriously. She countdowns from weeks out. She likes the fresh start. Except that I don't see it that way. Last year's problems will still be there. If all the years were a fresh start, we'd never learn anything or remember what we spent the last year doing. Ellen had a tough year... but she hasn't really solved her problems yet. (don't worry Ellie - none of us have) So what about January first clears her head? I want in on this. 

For now I'll keep on keepin' on - sleeping, snacking, and telling myself I'll finish my paintings someday, you know, when the time is right.

Soapbox

In an effort to put-off doing what's expected of me, I went down memory lane. Yes, one year in the captains chair of Ole Lux n' U will create an alley of lovely moments, carefully captured and edited so that you don't see any of that icky stuff we like to pretend isn't there. 

These are some of my couples from this year and they're all lovely and whatnot and I really am excited and happy for them. I love Love. I love happy beginnings! I like to get to know them and hear about the people they have in their lives and things like that. I like to imagine what their lives will look like. Sometimes a couple seems so right for each other and sometimes you don't understand what brought a pair together or why one of them puts up with the other. Sometimes it's nearly jealousy inducing love and sometimes I wonder if I'll get a call to do flowers for the bride's second marriage in a few years - but that's a rather mean thought. 

I've done lots of big thinking on weddings and marriage in the last year. It's hard not to compare all of these relationships with each other and also the ones I see with the people in my life. If there was a quantifying chart of sorts that could lay things out for a couple, I wonder how many would look at the chart and still go through with it. Would anyone, if presented with an outline of the life they'll have with this person, say, "Yeah. That's good enough."? Because it's not going to be a perfect, flawless chart. You'd probably have hoped for more for yourself - looking at it all played out like that, even though choosing someone else would just be a different set of trials. It's more like choosing what annoying things you think you can tolerate. Marriage kind of seems like a romantic crapshoot. You don't really know what you're getting. You kind of know but you can't fully know because you haven't gotten through life yet. It's important to really like that person an awful lot.

The more weddings I decorate the less special each wedding feels. On the one hand, there's no having an original wedding anymore - everything has been done thousands of times over, except for garish things and those have no place at a wedding. On the other hand, that shouldn't matter. People seem to forget that a wedding is a celebration of the marriage, not an elaborate photoshoot for you at your fake best. I've become increasingly uninterested in lending a hand for a wedding that's lost it's morals along the way. Somehow I've also become slightly annoyed by weddings that only go through the motions instead of adding a little personality to it. People take this whole wedding show propaganda way too seriously. The wedding industry is a greedy monster that promotes all the wrong things and I'm often embarrassed to be a part of it. A wedding doesn't need music or flowers or specialty linens. That's all so far from the point. Have a little fun with it. What's with the somber music? And why are weddings and funerals the only times people give speeches about how great you are?

That soapbox said, some couples are very easy to believe in and I delight in their celebration (and find myself not charging them for things because I'm just too excited - don't tell Dad!) I feel I should say that I'm excited to get married someday. I believe in marriage. It's the big stressful show that I don't feel great about. 

This Year - A Photo Recap

As I pulled pictures from the last twelve months I thought about all the different kinds of years people must have had this year. I felt very self-focused about it all except that it's my year. The year I had. And sure, other people are what really effect the year you have. Sprinkled into this year are homecomings, weekend trips, friend visits, bad traffic, new recipes, farewell dinners, birthdays, tough days, that whole 'politics' thing, and one-off moments that seemed insignificant at the time but you'll remember them forever just because they felt good or made you laugh or made you feel a way you never want to feel again.

I pulled my recap photos of the happy year I had and thought about Ellen. Ellen had a very different year. Ellen's year really blew. And some people had a year worse than Ellen's year and better then my perfectly pleasant year. How many times do you think I can say 'year' in this post?

We started January 2017 with the re-opening of Buddy's favorite hangout.

Brett moved home from Buford in February, thus reinstating the lively, gut-busting adventures of "The Crew".

In March I cut my hair and I'll never do that again.

April was full of weddings and slumping with happy friends. Don't they look happy?

Sometime in there Dad packed his family into his car and took us to Sonic for hot fudge sundaes. It gave us all the giggles, followed promptly by stomachaches.

May rounded out wedding season with my Mama-sidekick and banjo lessons with Eisenhauer.

June brought summer plants and a birthday celebration...

that resulted in the Photo of the Year.

July finished a big bus venture with Ellen ....

and started a chilly one with The Leisure Club Lite.

August started some exciting scheming.

September brought me a new friend.

October was a blur of fluffy blooms.

November brought these two together forever. Nate's so so happy.

And just before the years end in December, I find my little dream home.
(I got the keys today! And so it begins. There's just so much to do!)

A Weekend in Athens

Yesterday I got back from visiting Ari and Nate for a long weekend. It was a regular weekend for most people but the boss lady over at Lux & U let me leave work on a Thursday so I could have a three day weekend. The last time I drove to North Georgia, I had tire trouble by the time I got to Orangeburg. This time I had tire trouble by the time I made it to North Charleston. I think my car really hates North Georgia. I took Mom's car instead.

I got into town Thursday night around dinner time and Ari and I ate her leftover vegetables and had a celebratory glass of wine while we looked at wedding things on Pinterest. It was so girly and embarrassing that we broke out into giggles many times. Ari laughed with glee when she "pinned" her first wedding dress. And then she was embarrassed again. We sipped our wine and looked at gowns and flowers and invitations and then Ari decided it was too much to think about so we went to bed.
The next morning we made the most delicious buttermilk biscuits that we ate with a side of bacon and then we had quiet time. Ari had to get a little work done, so I sat with her cat, Mabel Simmons, and read and googled and thought about life. It was cold and raining outside and when Ari finished her work, we decided we didn't want to leave the house today. Within 10 minutes of that thought we were en route to the grocery store for pizza and baking ingredients and a quick visit to a chocolate shop that serves "drinking chocolate" in little espresso cups. It's thick, liquid chocolate. Almost like drinking hot fudge. After that we came home and hunkered down for the night. We did more wedding planning, watched a scary movie, and right around dinnertime, Nate arrived with his dog Chester, and we talked more wedding plans and ate pizza and went to bed.

Saturday was the big best day. It was snowing when I woke up with Miss Mabel curled in a ball under my arm. We used our leftover buttermilk to make pancakes and we listened to Christmas music and watched the snow. I thought it was awfully magical... until Ari made me exercise with her but once I got past that, we baked a cake, played a few rounds of Cribbage, and then we loaded up and headed to the farm.

The farm belongs to a couple that works at UGA that Nate became friends with while he was in grad school. He would watch and tend to the farm whenever the couple went out of town. They have horses, goats, cows, and chickens and lots of land and woods and exciting plants. This is where Nate proposed to Ari and the couple had us over for an engagement toast. I don't need to ramble on about how great this place is so instead I'll tell you that we went for a freezing cold walk through the woods to find a Christmas tree that we cut down and brought back home to decorate. We found a big Charlie Brown Tree and had to decorate it with what we could find because most of the Christmas decorations were victims of a house fire a little while back. Long story.

We had a potluck dinner, told stories, wrestled with dogs, and had a toast to Ari and Nate.