jill

tonight i met up with my dear friend jill for her fitting. she will be married in just over two short months. she's one of my closest friends and will be the first in our "group" to get married.

she has an amazing fiance. nick is an amazing guy. attractive (yes, i did reveal my crush on him to her), genuine, easy-going, and full of love for jill. the two of them nearly put every other couple to shame. their love for one another is so strong.

love jill to death (bless her heart). she can be somewhat anal retentive, neurotic, so on and so on. nick, can be too easy-going and carefree, but together, they're perfect. they are truly the envy of every couple.

i am honored to be in their june wedding. i cannot wait to stand on jill's side, at our shared alma mater, and watch them exchange their vows. with all her meticulous planning, it is sure to be a perfect day.

as i saw her stand in the dressing room with her wedding dress on today, it gave me chills. it made me, once again, realize how lucky i am to have such great friends. i don't doubt for one minute how happy she and nick will be for the rest of their lives.

congratulations jill and nick. i cannot wait to share in your special day.

i love you guys!

could it be?

we may just have survived it. the winter might be officially over. (i say this with extreme caution because you never know when flurries and ice may settle in, following a deceitful warm, sunny day)

the winters in chicago can be harsh - cold, windy, and sometimes large amounts of lake effect snow. although this winter wasn't as bad compared to others, if chicagoans can get through the five months with their hats, scarves, bulky coats, it's worth it.

today it was nice to slip into shorts, don some new sunglasses, and enjoy the other people walking the streets. with the lake as our neighbor, it's also enjoyable to get on my bike and ride along the lake path.

that's what we did today.

it is surely days like these that make the winter-survival worth it.

and we're cruisin'

so, we had planned to do nothing over our vacation in april. sure, we wanted to go on some fabulous cruise. but we started investing in our retirement. started to pay off our debt. a caribbean cruise wasn't in our budget.

whatever. we found a way somehow. sometimes i'm glad i'm not in charge of the budget. we're taking a caribbean cruise, mostly to the places we have already been. this time, however, we're cruisin' with a balcony!

even though i had to do a style show through my closet, only to discover that nothing was fit my robust winter figure, i'm looking forward to laying my whale-ish figure out on the deck to get a tan. as i've always said, 'tan fat looks better than white fat.'

although i'm sad that i'm going to miss my dear friend jill's wedding shower, i cannot wait to lay on the deck of our fabulous freestyle cruise ship!

corned beef and slurpies

saint patrick's day in chicago seems to bring out everyone - even the non-irish. mostly, it's a time for northsiders to find themselves in the nearest bar and get completely obliterated on guinness and green beer.

while i have attended the chicago southside parade, i have never made it to the downtown parade. this year, i wanted to see the chicago river dyed green and perhaps catch a few glances of the parade.

after a exhilarating night of college basketball and euchre, gary and i woke up at chez amandrea's. i tend to act like a kid on christmas morning on days like these. while still laying in bed, i shouted some common irish saying. i, along with everyone else, realized how much it was not an irish accent, but that of a pakistani cab driver.

so we make our way downtown. we're all bundled up after parking the car. we make it one lonely block before we spot an irish bar. it goes without saying that we ended up inside. even for being open for three hours, it wasn't too busy. we ordered our guinness and green beer - the same thing i ripped on those "other" people about - and somehow ended up getting seats at the bar. the bartenders were quite busy and kinda, sorta forgot to charge us for our drinks. needless to say, we missed the dyeing of the river....and the parade for that matter.

but we got some great pictures to at least say we were there!

growing up.

i recently decided that it's time to start thinking about the future. that means, even planning for retirement. gary and i made an appointment with financial investors and bankers at our local financial institution to discuss some of our options. as the two of us sat across from the two of them, letters, numbers, and confusion swarmed my head. while most of it flew right over my head, i think i got the gist of it. basically, i need to start investing money. now.

gary has a great retirement plan with work. i have a pension. that scares me a little, but i was relieved to find out that there is some security with a pension (thankfully our tenacious union has that under control, as well). but unfortunately, that still might not be enough. there is a wide array of investment options. traditional ira's, roth ira's, 401k's, 403(b)'s, and so on and so forth. then there's pre-tax, after-tax, etc. at one point, the attractive financial adviser, with his rimless glasses and swooped back meticulous hair, starts drawing a diagram to explain and clarify all of this. it eventually looked like a molecular structure that brought back nightmares of chemistry. thankfully the banker sitting across relieved some of my discomfort by recognizing that many of us have debt and it's not easy to maintain day-to-day living and invest a sizable amount of our income all at once. she was also very interested in discussing cruising as a way to see the world.

all of this was thrown on us and many things had to be sorted out between us to make decisions about this investing. we finally made another appointment for a future date to come back and again, discuss our options.

the bottom line is that i cannot afford not to invest for my future. be it saving for a house or saving for my retirement, it's time to set aside some of my income for the future.

i'm not sure how all of this will eventually pan out, but i feel like an adult. sure, i've had a job and paid for all my expenses on my own. but now, it's one more step into adulthood. i won't lie - it makes me sit up a bit taller, with a half-grin of pride.