A European Honeymoon - Dublin

Before I blog about the wedding (which was, by the way, the most magical and delightful event I have ever attended!), I'm going to tell you about our great trip to that continent across the sea, Europe.

We started with two days in Dublin, Ireland. Aer Lingus offers cheap, cheap flights from Chicago to Dublin, so we thought we'd take advantage of the opportunity to see a wee bit o' Ireland. (Yes I did just say that with the accent of a leprechaun. Deal with it.

Our home in Dublin was the Bellgrove Bed & Breakfast, a lovely little cottage just outside the city. The first day we spent walking around Dublin. We saw the old Viking church, ate some fish and chips in Temple Bar, and spent a couple hours just lounging in one of Dublin's big, green parks. We topped off day 1 with some 'modern Irish cuisine'.

Day 2 started with a trip to the beach, where we learned that Irish people don't tan, they only sunburn. We got a bit of sun ourselves, as we didn't think to put on sunscreen. After a couple hours on the beach, we were thirsty, and headed back to the city for some of the black stuff. Guinness! The tour of the Guinness Store House ends in the Gravity Bar, with a free pint of Guinness and the highest views of Dublin. Then it was over to St. Stephen's Green for some more park time and dinner.

don't worry, it quickly turned to a tan!

We had a lovely couple of days in Dublin, and will definitely be back to enjoy and explore more of Ireland in the future. The Irish were so nice and the country was beautiful.

a wedding portrait

We're totally married.

What do you think...

Are we Frieda and Diego?

Or American Gothic?

More wedding photos and stories soon. And tales of a European honeymoon. Stay tuned...

home, part one

Many of you have asked. Few of you have seen. This is where we live.

[our office niche - almost never this clean]

[our potracks, without which we could not live!]

[dining table + our beloved tulip chairs, kitchen + tons of storage]

[yes, that is the flame-throwing gas oven]

A few things have changed since I took these pictures almost a year ago. But the gist of it is - we rent the rear, first floor apartment [1 bedroom + a small extra room] from the lady architect and the wine man that live in the second floor + attic rear apartment. They are probably the best landlady/landlord ever. We get to enjoy a lovely yard and garden that we don't have to maintain [unless we feel like helping]. If something is broken, it is fixed pretty much instantly. I already mentioned the free wine, yes? And we've met most of the neighbors, as they are friends with most of the neighborhood. And the neighborhood is lovely - lots of diversity, great buildings, wonderful location in the city. 

More images to follow...maybe within the next two weeks.*

*you know we are getting hitched in 15 days - I'll see what I can do! 

wedding planning is hard work

Seriously. We had to drink all this wine and these two beers.

I don't think I've mentioned our super sweet living arrangement yet. I've got a few posts planned for that. But, you should know that our landlord is a wholesale wine distributor. Our lease includes free wine. We pretty much have the greatest apartment in Chicago. So naturally, we're buying our wedding booze from our landlord. And he only carries really fantastic wines, most organic and from Argentina (his home) or Oregon or Germany. He's turned us into almost winos. 

Yeah, so we were all excited about that all-beer wedding reception. But again, the economy and our amazing contact warranted a change in plans. We still aren't serving champagne. But I can guarantee really fantastic wine, and some beers you've probably never had. No merlot or white zin here!*

*Seriously - why does anybody buy that Franzia crap? It's terrible. I'd rather drink a Meister Brau than Franzia.

What's in a name?

I decided on a wedded name. The whole decision making process for that sort of weirded me out, too. 

You see, my office is ordering business cards soon. As I just started there around Thanksgiving, I do not yet have printed business cards. Nor did I ever have 'official' printed business cards at my previous gig. So I was naturally pretty excited about this. Then I realized that these would last well past May 30 of this year...and I needed to plan ahead. 

I had been contemplating what to do about my last name pretty much since we got engaged (ok - before that). The modern, professional, reasonably feminist part of me was a little freaked out about changing my last name. I shouldn't have to change my identity just to get married. That's a sexist patriarchal tradition. 

But the other part of me (I guess the romantic, don't over-think it part) thinks that it's sort of fun to get a new last name at some point in life. Because really, when do we just get to decide what to call ourselves? And I believe in family and adopting your dude's last name helps publicly establish that you are a family unit. And, since Don is the only male in his family now that can pass on their last name (no pressure at all for boy-children...) it would be nice to help in the continuation of his family name. 

Back to the business cards - I had to seriously commit to a name. I talked to my boss about it a little. And I talked to Don - who was very helpful and told me to do whatever I wanted. Great. But I did make a decision. I'm going to have four names - the 3 I was born with, and a new one at the end. That way everyone will know that I made a decision to be part of a new family. And I can decide to claim or not claim Don as I please. :-) I think it's a good compromise.

Nous sommes des nouveaux mariés. Y a-t-il un escompte ?

Hopefully in 3 months I'll be able to pronounce that.* 

wtf, you say? Welp, we're going to France for our honeymoon! 

We had high hopes for a beer tour of Belgium, as you may recall. And then the economy got really crappy. And I almost didn't have a job. Plane tickets to Europe in June were twice what I had budgeted. So we were going to settle for a honeymoon in North America (probably NYC and Montreal). 

But thanks to Don's grandpa, also named Don, we will be going to France. (And thanks to a lovely little Irish airline named Aer Lingus, which has crazy cheap fares.) He cashed in his time share and sent us an early wedding gift - a week's stay at any hotel in the world associated with the timeshare company. (I know - an early gift and it's awesome.) After much research and deliberating, the place we liked the most is in Ars en Re, France. Where the f is that? An island on the west coast of France, about mid continent. It's a fishing village. And the hotel is a spa. Where you are required to buy spa treatments (oh, how terrible, we get to go on vacation and be pampered).

So for the next 3 months (crap - I've got a lot of stuff to do in that time), we will be listening to and trying to speak French every day. And watching a lot of French movies. Hopefully it works out. Otherwise, we will be making anes** out of ourselves.

*We are newlyweds. Is there a discount?

**asses (without the proper accent on the a)

an experiment in 'primitive' living

As I mentioned quite some time ago, we decided to live without a TV connected to any outside signal. How have we been getting along without this modern convenience? 

Famously.

And now that our DVD player died, we don't even have a TV displayed at all. It is lovely. We desire to live this way forever now, without a 'boob tube' cluttering up our living room or our lives. [see - nothing but photos, plants, and our lovely Tivoli radio:]

I tell people this and they are baffled at how we live this way or what we might be doing with our time. We don't even miss it. [Ok, so we were starting to miss it around inauguration time, but that was all on the internets, anyway. All things we are interested in watching can be found for free on the internets. Seriously - free. Hulu.com is marvelous. And Netflix - we love Netflix.] Instead of getting old and fat and lazy in front of a TV, we exercise, cook a good dinner, work on wedding crap, work on side projects to get us through this wedding and recession, all sorts of stuff. 

And - brace yourselves -  we TALK to each other. I know. It's a lost art [much like handwritten correspondence]. I find the timing of this fabulous, as we are getting to know one another even better before we get hitched.

We also listen to a whole lot of radio. Chicago Public Radio, to be specific. Public radio is one of my most favorite things. I could listen to it all night and day. Because you know what is better than being entertained? Receiving an education while you're being entertained. Which public radio always does, and tv rarely does. 

So, in my defense, my blogging absence is not due to laziness, but instead super productiveness. I'll try to do better.