My First Car: Titus

On April 7th, after much help and support from Steven, I brought home my first car.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssssssssss

After much consideration, Steven's name suggestion of Titus has been bestowed upon this new family member. He has been named after Titus Andromedon from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Perfectly sums up my new car.

He is gorgeous. He is fun to drive. His sound system is AMAZING. And, most importantly, he is mine.

Not that I'm excited or anything.

He sparkles in the sunlight, so, naturally, it's been raining. I wanted to wait to show people til it was sunny and I could get better pictures, but I couldn't contain my excitement any longer.

And now we wait to see what my plates will be.

Wedding Party: The Obviously Official Officiant

Our officiant is clearly too tall to be a hobbit. She is a wizard.

After Steven and I got engaged we had some tough questions to answer. One of our toughest choices was who would marry us. I had originally planned a wedding based around riding on a boat so we could have a sea captain marry us since neither of us are religious. This plan was abandoned when we realized that A) it was too expensive and B) the sea captain was optional and an extra cost. So, who would marry us then? Well, our dear friend Brooke is an officiant. She married Bry and David. 

"In Sonny and in Cher" is the best thing ever said in a wedding ceremony.

I had already had my heart set on having Brooke as one of my bridesmaids, though, and two bridal roles was probably too much to ask. My mom is an officiant, but Steven and I agreed that we didn't want to test our theory that she wouldn't make it through the ceremony without crying. We decided that we should pick someone who wasn't already an officiant and ask them very nicely to become one just for us. This led us to picking a mutual friend. Steven met Suzie through me, but she is, in his words, his favorite friend of mine. So who is she? Well, my friendship with Suzie goes back a long ways.

An embarrassingly long ways... 

That picture was from 2010. Like with Brooke and Kat, I became friends with Suzie back when digital cameras were just becoming big and we didn't have one yet: 2006. Bry and I met Suzie when we joined the Marching Lumberjacks (hence the yellow uniforms). Suzie plays the flute so Bry was always next to her. I didn't play anything yet so I tagged along before learning the clarinet and took to hovering near Brooke. 

Also 2010. Can you tell how cool we are? We were given per diem money on a band trip and we
 mutually spent it on this picture to commemorate how awesome we are.

We had the pleasure of living near each other for a while and that was amazing. We had random movie nights and it was a great way to end college. By our last summer together, we were all just working and hanging out waiting for our next great adventure.

This is one of only two pictures of the three of us. 2013!

When Bry and I went off to China to teach English in 2013, Suzie went off to New Zealand for her own adventure. And when I came back from China she moved to Australia! While she was in Australia, I got to ask her to be our officiant via Facebook chat because I'm a chicken. Luckily, she said yes. 

The only other picture of us. 2015!

Suzie is going to marry us and luckily that calls for all kinds of new pictures to be taken. In under three months now (I'm not panicking) we get to stand up next to our friend Suzie and get married. I'm glad we'll have a familiar face smiling back at us while we make this giant commitment together. 

Wedding Party: Kat

This pretty lady!

Luckily for both Kat and I, we met in 6th grade. That means that it was 1999 and was long before digital cameras were popular. We have plenty of terrible pictures of ourselves on film but the oldest digital picture we have of ourselves is this:

This is the oldest picture of us I could find online. 2004! 15 years old.

We met at the end of her driveway after her and her sisters ran after their new puppy Cleo. (Cleo is still around and quite youthful for 16 years old.) I don't remember if we had a single class together when we hit middle school, but we remained friends throughout the years. In fact, we were a part of a larger group of friends that whittled down to just us three. 

2006... that's all I can say.

Kat WAS middle school and high school for me. The music I listened to was because she gave it to me. The movies we saw were almost exclusively at her house. We spent as many nights as we could at her house eating Wheat Thins and drinking soda and bouncing on her trampoline. I can't even imagine who I would be today if we hadn't met. She was the one who proposed the crazy ideas we inevitably went along with. No other human being meant as much to me as this one for many, many years. Kat was the triplet that Bry and I didn't know we were missing until she came along. 

We were each other's dates for prom. 2006!

Even after Bry and I moved and were forced to transfer schools between sophomore and junior year, we remained friends. It actually brought us closer together. We were forced to reach out and hang out on weekends and call each other daily after school. (Remember when that was a thing?) We spent practically the entire summer of 2004 together. Our paths finally split after high school.

Kat's wedding. 2009!

Bry and I went off to college in Humboldt and Kat started going to the J.C. in Santa Rosa. Bry and I even went to China and when we got back we got to be bridesmaids in our best friend's wedding! Kat had a daughter we got to be aunt's too from afar and eventually even Bry got married. 

In her natural habitat, you can always find a Kat between her twins. 2011!

We got to be bridesmaids for Bry as well. And then Kat had a son and suddenly she had all the children I needed to complete my wedding party! Just kidding. But really, I am very excited to finally get my turn at having her kids as flower girl and ring bearer. 

This bitch. The one on the left, not the two on the right. 2015!

Wedding Party: Bridesmaid Brooke

Making friends wherever she goes.

Brooke was, I believe, within the first three or four people Bry and I talked to at HSU. We ended up in the same FIG (Freshmen Interest Group) for lovers of languages and took English 100, Ethnic Studies, and the Marching Lumberjacks together in our first semester.

We go back a long ways. This picture is from a band trip in 2010.

(We have older pictures of us but it is just plain embarrassing to drag those up. I've since gained some knowledge of fashion and I'd prefer to keep our 2006-2010 pictures in the past.) Brooke was, believe it or not, the person that signed me up for Facebook. I resisted it initially, but clearly she has a vision of the future and could tell way back in 2006 that MySpace was on the way out.  

She even married my sister! (You know what I mean.)

Brooke was the one who corrected our grammar in our first weeks of college (having never encountered a Pennsylvania Dutch variant of English on the East coast.) and introduced us to Dungeons and Dragons. She gave us hand drawn graphic novels for our 18th birthday and more often than not if I have a happy memory from college it has Brooke in it. 

Somehow we made it out.

Shortly into 2013, Brooke told me that she was going to be moving back down to the Bay Area and I feared the worst. We'd never see each other again! We wouldn't be able to play D&D anymore! Would we still be friends??? (All the while, I was planning on moving to China for a year in just a matter of months.) I couldn't think of anything to say. How do you tell someone how much they mean to you and how badly you want to keep them in your life? I told her then and there that I wanted her to be one of my bridesmaids. (Yes, this was February 2013... and Steven proposed September 2014... what of it?) This was the only way for me to convey just how much I wanted her to stick around. 

Here we are two years later.

Brooke has been an amazing friend over the years, and I've enjoyed growing up a bit with her. I look forward to her being an aunt to my future kids, and a partner in old-age debauchery. 

These bitches mean a lot to me, and I'm glad they get to be a part of my wedding.

Wedding Party: Bridesmaid Alia

This bitch. The big one, not the little one.

You fight for years, never get along while you live at home, and then suddenly one day you're getting married and having sisters suddenly pays off! I never so much asked her to be my bridesmaid... just sent her a picture of my ring and said, "Hahaha, you have to be my bridesmaid!" Sisters.

Why is it that strangers can't tell we're five years apart?

Anywho, Lia has done her part to fill in some gaps since Bry, my MATRON of honor is in China. Lia helped me pick out a wedding dress, she went with us to pick up our wedding rings, had a make up trial with me, and she even came to my hair trial. We live many an hour apart so it is a royal pain in the ass to get together to do wedding things, so all of her efforts are appreciated.

We accidentally matched that day from our stripey blue shirts down to our black boots.

One day I'll get to be one of her bridesmaids or co-Matron of honor or some shit. And that'll be nice.

She was also the first to buy her bridesmaid dress, so she's pretty awesome.
(Yes, those are my glasses she's wearing.)

Wedding Party: Matron of Honor

This bitch.

With her five year wedding anniversary coming up next month, and a seven month old baby in tow, no matter how much she denies it Bry is definitely my Matron of Honor. (Make sure you call her that, too. She just loves it.)

And she's classy as hell. That's wine in her cup.

Why pick her, you might ask. Well, reader, when you have a twin you tend to pick them for everything because they can't say no! Also, I like a good challenge so it seemed like a great idea to pick someone who would be out of the country for nearly my entire engagement so that I end up doing almost everything myself.

Definitely NOT using this as a chance to share bad/weird pictures of her...

I'll never know anyone as long as I'll know Bry so I get to use the most amount of ancient guilt. "Bry, call so and so about having my bachelorette party there because you made me join track with you in 2001."

Bry's first baby.

I'm giving her a hard time because she's not here, but she's already proven to be more useful than I was at 22 as her maid of honor. Now we know all the things I should have been doing. Live and learn. We'll get this whole wedding thing down by Alice's wedding.

She's basically a grown up already.

The Venue

With 102 days left til the wedding (Does anyone else's heart start racing more and more as that number shrinks?), let's take a look at the venue!

The Depot Hotel

September 2014, immediately after Steven proposed, I began looking at venues for us. And, despite what it looks like, this was actually one of the cheapest options I found. We decided to view it in person and made an appointment.

The first picture you find online looks like this:

How could anybody turn THIS down?

We went in and talked to the owner, Gia, and she told us about their history. The Depot Hotel was actually a hotel back in the 1920's but ended up being abandoned. In the 1980's, Gia and her husband bought it and turned it into a restaurant. We initially thought that since it was formerly a hotel that we would be able to make a hotel block here and have guests stay but this is not the case. I have no idea what lives upstairs but the hotel part of the building is no longer in use. 

Since we're having an evening wedding, it will look similar to this but we have too many guests
to fit them all where they are seated in this picture.

We were looking for a venue that would kill as many birds with one stone as we could get. Not only does the Depot Hotel cater but they deal with all of the set up and take down of tables and chairs, and they act as our venue for the ceremony as well as the reception. Oh, and did I mention an unlimited bar? (Your options are limited by our pocketbook, sorry, but you can keep ordering until you're too smashed for them to serve!) 

We have so many people coming, a handful of you will get the pleasure of sitting inside.
Air conditioning anyone?

We liked that we got a giant list to choose from to customize our food, drinks, and hors d'ouerves. You can rest assured knowing that everything you consume during our reception was hand picked! Follow the food link for an idea of what the food will be like:

Food!

While Bry was visiting from China, I suggested we eat dinner there so we could show her the venue. The prices deterred us and we ended up at Applebee's instead. 

I'll save eating here for the big day.

You can follow one last link to look at more pictures to get a feel for the evening. Our theme (if we had to name one) is vintage. So, dress for a very classy evening but dress comfortably for the hot July weather. Sorry, gentlemen, but you should still be in a tie.

Pictures!

Only 102 days. I'm not freaking out, you're freaking out.

Wedding Block

With only 115 days left to go, I should probably let you all know that we created a hotel block. Since so few people are coming from far out of town, we only made a small block. Now, let me explain my reasoning behind this hotel:

Steven and I aren't leaving for our honeymoon until the week AFTER the wedding. The only other cruise option had us leaving the day  OF the wedding... from Texas... so we pushed it off a week. That meant that after the wedding we had several options. When discussing our options, the conversation went like this:

Rachel: Where should we stay after the wedding?
Steven: We could just come home?
Rachel: That's so depressing!
Steven: We could get a hotel room?
Rachel: I'll see what our options are.

So, about year ago after booking out honeymoon, I began looking into hotels we could have hotel blocks in and rooms for ourselves. I went city by city to see what our options are. With the wedding in Sonoma it seemed like the obvious choice to stay there. HA. The prices immediately made me change my mind. I looked at a map to see what other cities were options. Of course, there was Santa Rosa. Hotels in Santa Rosa are the most reasonably priced but if we were going to get a hotel room in Santa Rosa, why not just come home? Again, depressing. Petaluma seemed like the best option. It is close to Sonoma but far enough away that the prices are a little better.

The trouble with the hotels we found was that they either look like this:

And, surprisingly enough, the cheap hotels ran out of rooms before I could set up a hotel block!

Or like this:

Believe it or not, there were more expensive hotels we could have chosen for our hotel block. 

So, even though it seems incredibly expensive, the hotel we picked was actually the middle of the road in terms of prices we were offered AND each room had a small discount added for being part of a block. I added nine rooms for people to book, fully expecting less than that to even book them, and one larger room for Steven and I to book. This room, one of only four in the hotel, had to be big enough for me to get ready with my ladies the morning of the wedding. So, imagine my surprise when someone booked that room before we could do it!

Why would someone ELSE want a room THAT big and $100 extra dollars for the weekend???

.

Fear not, though, I added one of the other three rooms that size left which were luckily still available. Needless to say, though, some crazy person attending my wedding will also be staying in a huge room but for no good reason... 

In any case, if you need a room for the night, you can join our block!

Follow this link to book a room!

A Mystery!

So, a weird thing has happened to me. At first I was confused, then annoyed, and now I'm just resolved to let it sort itself out. Let's go back in time to June 2015 to see where it all started!

A most accurate drawing of me by one of my students.

Way back in June 2015, I was working not one, not two, but THREE part time jobs. I was teaching 20 hours, in the mornings, Monday through Friday. I was working at Bed Bath and Beyond 20 to 25 hours, in the evenings, Monday through Friday. And I was working at the Coffee House Teen Shelter 16 hours on the weekends. It was a crazy time. But, since all of my jobs were part time, I received no benefits. 

At the time, I was still hoping to get work as an ESL teacher. Ha.

I had been following the whole "Obamacare" rules for a while and it looked like if I didn't go get signed up soon I would be out of luck. I finally went in and got myself signed up. In the end, it ended up costing me $1/month and covered virtually nothing but I was compliant with the law. Yay!

Months later, I was hired for a brand new position that gave me health insurance for the first time! Only after using my new insurance several times to verify it was real did I call up my Obamacare insurance and have it cancelled.The lady on the other end was initially confused I'd want to cancel my insurance but then she was happy for me that I had a new job with better insurance. After this phone call, I settled in to my life of being treated like a real person by a company that appreciates me.

Fast forward one month to November and take note that I got something in the mail that said, "You might qualify for Medi-Cal". "Whatever," I thought. "I don't need that. I have REAL insurance!" I continued about my life. I returned from China in mid-January after an awesome vacation to a GIANT stack of mail to sift through.

Totally worth it, though.

In the mail, I find a special envelope and in it includes my brand new Medi-Cal benefits card.

.

Turns out ignoring that the combination of me being poor and cancelling my other insurance magically got me signed up for Medi-Cal. Now, I've been on Medi-Cal before. I know how hard some people work to even qualify and keep it so I felt SO GUILTY knowing that I had it and didn't need it. What a waste of time and money! A few days later when I had a free afternoon, I decided to try to call some people and cancel it to free up money for someone who had less than me.

It actually took a while to even get the right number. At first, I immediately reached someone for help. That was, of course, because it not the number I needed. You could tell when I finally reached the right number because I sat on hold. I ended up giving up after twenty minutes on hold because it was going on five and I figured I wasn't very likely to reach someone in time before their offices closed. I decided to wait a while. One week led to another and before I knew it almost a month had passed. The guilt started to creep up again.

I finally decided to call again. I was told I was 27th in line and they put on the elevator music. I waited. And waited. I was determined to get through. I knew I would be on hold for a while so I called from my cell phone at work so that I could check emails while the phone rang. 

It got to the point where I finally couldn't take it anymore. I hung up and checked how long I'd been listening to the elevator music: 30 minutes. It felt like an eternity. Well, I'm sorry to the random person who won't get Medi-Cal because I do. I tried. I can't take the waiting. I've already devoted fifty minutes of my life to being on hold. At this point, I'm just going to let myself get disqualified when I get married in July. It should work itself out. But know this, random person: I did try.