Apparently somebody nearby just returned from a cigarette break because their smoke reeks. It's making me nauseous and headachey and I can't concentrate on anything else. Of course, this could all be because I'm just the teensiest bit hungover. For the first time ever last night I drank more beer than Matt. Boy's a bad influence. I used to never even tolerate the taste of beer even the tiniest little bit, and now I'm all "Hooray beer!" Well, by the time I called it quits and went to bed last night I was more like, "Beer foamy." At least I did manage to quit before I went completely Cave Buffy. Ugh.
Otherwise, the long weekend was mostly good. Since I didn't get paid on Friday my planned personal Saturday morning shopping spree was replaced with a mother/daughter wedding supply run. We knocked out a pretty good chunk of my To Do list and picked up bags and bags full of ribbon, fake flowers and fancy paper for DIY bouquets and invitations, plus yarn for various wedding-related knitting projects. And let me tell you, if you don't know the first thing about putting together floral arrangements, it's a lot harder than it sounds. It took my mom and I several hours and three different craft stores and a lot of harrassing other customers for their opinions before we found a satisfactory combination of silk flowers. I think my bouquets are going to turn out really pretty, so it was worth it, but darn was I ever ready to give up and call in a real florist.
I think the invitations are also going to be purty, between the papers I picked out and the font layout I came up with in Photoshop, but I'm afraid to print them because I stupidly neglected to pick up extra sheets for practice. I also forgot a straight-edge paper cutter. Once I get both of those things I can get on with making the invitations.
Yeah, I know. Blah blah blah wedding-cakes.
Anyway. Before hitting the craft stores on Saturday, I got mom to drive me through the little starter-home neighborhood I've been fantasizing about lately, only to find an open house, so we went in and had a look around. It was as adorable on the inside as it was on the outside, all light-filled and airy with vaulted ceilings and a big open kitchen. Watch me covet. The only thing I didn't like about it (and that Matt would have hated) was that the kitchen opened right into the garage, which you had to go through to get to the back yard and patio. Otherwise, there was plenty about it to fuel my house envy. Maybe this will help to motivate us to stick to a budget and keep working on repairing our credit. I want a house, dag-nabbit!
But you know, the amazing thing is that for the first time in my life I feel like grown-up things like owning a house and having a family and whatnot are within my reach. That's... actually a pretty cool feeling.
Sunday was also pretty productive, as Matt had to work and I had the majority of the day to myself to get my oranization-fu on. I finished cleaning out the front closet and turning it into a pantry, and unpacked, cleaned and put away some of his dishes and small appliances. It only left a small dent in the mountain of his stuff that we still have to put away, but as baby steps go, this was a pretty big one.
On our mutual day off yesterday I finally introduced Matt to the new Battlestar Galactica via the pilot miniseries. He thought it pretty awesome and is eager to see the rest. I want to catch him up as much as possible before the new season starts in July, but I don't suppose there's much hope of the last half of last season being released on DVD before then. I might just have to save the new eps for him to watch after he's totally caught up. Maybe by then I'll have decided how I feel about the turn everything took in the season finale.
The only real downside to the whole weekend was a letter Matt received on Saturday from the company that owns his former apartment, charging him over a thousand dollars for things like May's rent (even though he moved out in April, after giving 60 days' notice and being assured by the management office that everything was copacetic), new paint (despite the fact that he never so much as thumbtacked a poster to the wall), cleaning the fridge and stove (both of which we cleaned ourselves on our last moving day) and replacing the carpet (never mind that the carpet was ruined in the first place when a water main broke and flooded the apartment and that management refused to replace it at the time). Yeah. AND they waited until the Friday of Memorial day weekend to send the letter and yet had the noive to insist that he respond within five days from the date the letter was written (not business days, mind, just days, nevermind that it was a holiday weekend with no mail running for two of those five days), or else they'll turn it over to a collection agency and report his delinquency to all of the credit bureaus.
So we spent all of his free time on Sunday writing a letter of dispute, pointing out things like that THEY ruined the carpet and the walls didn't need a new paint job and even if they did that's standard at most other apartment complexes and not something they try to stick to exiting tenants, and how the crazy "Don't kiss in the parking lot!" manager lady ran off one prospective tenant from taking over Matt's lease and then ran off yet a second by showing the apartment immediately after he moved out before any refurbishments were done and at LEAST had the good grace to feel bad for screwing him over and told him not to worry about the rent, not to mention the FIRE next door that made his apartment unliveable because of the smoke damage, and threatening to report them to the local news and the BBB and every other consumer advocate agency and also counter-sue for everything we can possibly sue them for if they put this on his credit report. He enclosed a check for the legitimate expenses like the remaining water bill and pointed out that the fact that they kept his cleaning deposit should more than cover any cleanup they had to do that he was responsible for. And I just spent my lunch hour taking it to the post office to mail certified with return receipt. So now we'll see what happens. Hopefully this was just a cheap attempt to bully him out of some more money and they'll drop it when they see he won't be bullied. Otherwise I guess we'll need to get ourselves a lawyer.
In other news, it's much later in the day than when I started this post, and I'm feeling a little more normal.
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