Clever, Clever

This past weekend was a bit of an unexpected ego boost for me.  There's a guy IRL with whom there was a mutual interest in the late fall and  through the holidays.  I think we were on the verge of maybe testing the waters right when I met BF.  I'd talked myself out of it since we work together and on paper, he's totally NOT my type or someone I could see anything long term with.  Anyway, we were talking Friday about why he won't settle down to just dating one woman.  He finally said, "I'm waiting for you and BF to break up!"

Mind you, he said it in a joking fashion, but I think we both know that a small window was missed, and I think he definitely regrets that.  If I ever found myself single again, I'm sure the flirtation would flare right back up, but I still feel like it's better at that...a flirtation.  Nonetheless, still good to know I've got it, right?  ;-)

Then, this weekend on my drive out to BF's house, I noticed a business card in my windshield wiper.  Forgot to grab it off until Saturday when BF and I pulled into Costco.  I glanced at it and it was a card for a landscaping company.  I mused out loud on why a company would put cards for a landscaping business on the cars of people who live in an apartment complex, then tossed it in my purse to get rid of later.  Back at BF's house I took it out to throw it away, but noticed that my name was written on the back.  I took a closer look and there was a message that said, "Bluemoon, are you interested in getting a cocktail sometime? Bill (guy across the street with a beagle)".

:-o

I can honestly say that's the first time I've ever been asked out like that.  I was super surprised and BF saw the card and asked who it was from, and how he knew my name.  I explained that he was one of the "dog people" in my complex whom I knew from when I had my dog.  This guy has lived in the complex as long as me, and we've always said hi.  He walks his dog every morning at the same time as I'm at the bus stop, so we always wave or say hi.  About a month ago he finally introduced himself, but I didn't think anything of it.  He's just another neighbor, you know?

In retrospect, he's previously complimented me on my hair when it was blown out, or my overall appearance when I've been dressed up.  Honestly, the thought never ever crossed my mind that he was interested in me. I guess I'm just oblivious!  I think it was mostly because he's got to be at least ten years older than me, and for some reason always comes off fatherly to me.  :-/  Oof.

Anyway, I was a total loser Monday when I went to catch my bus.  I was running late and only saw him out of the corner of my eye, so I pretended not to see him.  The last two mornings he's not been out there for the particular bus I've caught, so I've yet to deal with this like a grown up.  He's a perfectly nice guy who did nothing wrong, he just put himself out there to ask me out.  I need to be respectful and mature and just honestly acknowledge receipt of the note and let him know I have a boyfriend.  No huge explanation, no awkward apologies or justification or guilt, just being straightforward.  I still want to wave when I see him or do the usual chatter.  No reason not to!

In summary, apparently in the last week(s) I've been putting off an easy, breezy, approachable and appealing Bluemoon vibe, HA!  Still flattering all the same.

Quick summary of other things:

Costco resulted in the purchase of beach chair #2, as we are slowly accruing the items needed for our long-awaited beach trip.  These chairs have come a long way...they can be carried like a backback, it has a built in pillow, a phone holder, a beverage holder, a small cooler on the back, and so on.  And mine is a lovely sea green.  :-)

This weekend BF and I had a daughter-free weekend.  Love her, but it was great to have a full weekend to ourselves.  We were pretty un-exciting in terms of out and about activities.  Friday night we grilled a pizza, which was delicious.  Saturday was Costco and the grocery store, and we made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies from scratch to follow up our dinner of sausage and peppers.  Sunday we made turkey burgers and spent some time outside. So much cooking!  :-)

Been working out with my trainer 2x/week still.  The good thing is that I've gotten back to my 5x/week workouts, which I'd slacked on for way too long.  It's only been a couple of weeks, but I'm proud of myself nonetheless.  Last night he asked me to download the MyFitnessPal app to start tracking my food, and wants me to send it to him weekly.  :-o  Oh boy.  Maybe I will be shamed into eating better LOL.

Lastly, booked my trip back home to visit the family for late September.  I'm really looking forward to seeing my girlfriends, watching the Nebraska game with my brother and his wife, and seeing my family, in particular my grandfather.  He is still struggling with his health, and I think we all have a slow building sense of concern. It's always something and it's often the same things...breathing issues, constant exhaustion, and other issues that are leading him to want to have another surgery, this time for his prostate, this fall.  But he wants to put that off until he's feeling better, so who knows.  I'm glad I'll be home in September and then in December just because you never know what can happen, and I try to be mindful of that especially with him.

Nothing much else new to tell.  It's wednesday, so BF will be over tonight.  I think we're doing spaghetti and turkey meatballs tonight with garlic bread for dinner.  That's my idea, anyway, I haven't floated it by him yet.  ;-)  I'd also like to go on a walk because a) the weather is really nice and b) today is one of my off days from the gym, so any extra incidental exercise I can swing is a good thing!

Trainer tomorrow, and then my friend R is supposed to be in town very briefly.  He mentioned maybe getting together for a quick, late drink tomorrow night, so hopefully that will come together.  Not sure how I'll swing it logistically with trainer at 8:30-9:30, esp. when I leave him looking AWFUL every session.  :-p  We'll see! Friday night, if the weather holds (!!) I have plans to go to a Nationals baseball game with my gf, A.  I'm concerned, though, as the weather forecast keeps upping rain chances as the week goes on, GRR.  I've been to a woefully inadequate number of games this season!

Anyway, that's all I know for now!

Late to the Party

So I got into "Orange is the New Black" at the behest of EVERYONE, and I loved it.  I plowed through season one and then anxiously awaited season 2, which I then roared through.  Fantastic show.

Similar thing has been happening with "House of Cards".  I've had this show recommended to me so many times with such great enthusiasm, and I *finally* watched an episode last night.  It was insanely compelling, and Kevin Spacey is brilliant as always.  Can't wait to watch more, and I love knowing that I have two seasons to watch!

I would have watched more House of Cards yesterday, but it was a crazy busy and productive day.  I got my oil changed and my emissions test done so I can renew my car registration.  I had a chiro appt., had dinner and dessert with a girlfriend and went to the gym, capping off the night with a home manicure and a relaxing bath.  Good times!

Today I randomly checked out the Bleachers album, Strange Desire, and I am crushing on it fiercely.  It's got a good sound and it's like pleasing ear candy to me.  I'm excited to be listening to it in its entirety after buying it on Amazon this afternoon.

I'm reading books like crazy lately, though the last couple have been sort of meh.  Good, but nothing amazing.  I read Rainbow Rowell's latest book, "Landline".  Like I said, good, but definitely my least favorite of her books.  I guess I just feel like I've read 3-4 books with a somewhat similar time traveling plotline recently, and I liked the others better!  For the record, those were "Class of '98" by A.L. Player, "Here I Go Again" by Jen Lancaster and "Your Perfect Life" by Liz Fenton.  I really loved "Your Perfect Life" and enjoyed it a lot.

Beyond that, I also read "The Geography of You and Me" by Jennifer E. Smith.  It was okay.  Not great, just ok.  Before these books I read "Before I Fall" by Lauren Oliver.  I really, really enjoyed this book. It's another SORT of time traveling book, but more closely a YA Groundhog Day.  For whatever reason, I really liked it and I enjoyed the writing and the message and everything.  It was well written, thoughtful YA.

My current read is one I'm pretty much madly in love with.  It's called "After I Do" by Taylor Jenkins Reid. It's about a marriage that isn't working anymore wherein the couple decides to take a year break from each other to see if they either want to come back together or go their own way.  The book is so strange and wonderful so far, in that it's made me laugh out loud and made my eyes tear up in different moments.  It is brutal and honest and real.  The characters are flawed and unsympathetic at times, and at other times I can identify so much with both of them that it throws me back to my marriage falling apart, and subsequent relationships going to crap.  I'm halfway through and it's one of those books I cannot wait to get on the train to read again tonight.  I wouldn't be surprised if I finish it tonight.

So many books...some mediocre, some awful, some beautiful.  I've loved reading so many of them lately!

Good books, good music, good TV shows.....love it!

stamp that birthday as successful

So boyfriend's birthday was a success.  :-)  I met him for dinner on Friday along with his daughter, J.  The company was good and he seemed happy to have us both there, as we are most weekends! I let the restaurant know it was his birthday, so he got a birthday brownie sundae, but sadly they don't sing to birthday patrons there.  Too bad.  He did get to blow out a  candle, though!

Back at his house he opened up his gifts, which he really seemed to enjoy.  He's super excited to use the wok and is already perusing recipes and reading about how to season it properly.  Add it to our future kitchen adventures.  He also liked the T-shirt, the kitchen gadgets and had a childlike moment of joy upon receiving the Mario Kart happy meal toys LOL.

Earlier in the week on Wednesday night we very impulsively decided to take a tiny trip to Ocean City, MD to celebrate his b-day weekend.  We booked the hotel room and let J know of our plans.  We headed out Saturday morning for the drive and went straight to the beach.  We spent our afternoon lounging in the sand, enjoying the gorgeous weather and playing in the ocean.  We lucked out and got a really fantastic parking spot right by the beach, too.

After beach time we checked into our hotel and everyone got cleaned up and showered.  We then headed back to the beach, this time to the Boardwalk area.  We walked the full length of the Boardwalk, people watching, going into some shops, buying fudge (me!).  We had dinner at a restaurant along the Boardwalk where we got to sit outside and watch a supremely gorgeous sunset as we ate.  The weather was superb and it was really just a lovely evening.

We headed back to the DC area Sunday morning and enjoyed the rest of the day at BF's house.  We grilled burgers and all just hung out until J got picked up by her mom.  We got a couple of hours of solo time to spend together before I made the trek back to my house that evening.  Overall it was a great weekend and BF thanked me for making it so, and for including J in our celebratory plans.

It's interesting because so often, it's surprising to me how easily I've acclimated to dating someone with a kid. I love J-she's bright, well-spoken and has a great sense of humor.  I actually feel like she reminds me a lot of myself at that age in some ways----she's so precocious and funny.  In other ways she's an entirely different person than me in that she's self-possessed, confident and decidedly not shy.  I was very quiet at that age except with my very close friends, and you couldn't have paid me to get on stage in front of any size of group.  Bottom line is that I really enjoy her and I think having me around on her weekends with her dad is actually something she enjoys.  He bothers her a little less when I'm there (though not a ton less!) and I think activities and even cooking adventures are more fun with the three of us.  I'm not there all the time when she is, but quite often, and she seems to really enjoy chatting with me at times.

However, there are other times when I realize what a foreign thing this really is to me.  For many months, as a result of her play and then just various other social calendar items, he would have periodic weekends where he didn't have her at all.  They were flukes, but they happened rather frequently for awhile.  Now she's off school for the summer and her schedule is a lot easier, and as a result, there haven't been any weekends off in awhile.  Technically his schedule with her is supposed to be alternating full weekends and half weekends.  At this moment, we just had a full weekend and I think we're on the verge of a second full weekend.

It's hard.  I love having her around, and I know he loves it.  But our weekends are definitely very different when she's not there.  We do what we want instead of 98% of the time struggling to figure out what she wants to do and doing that.  She's a teenager so she's got her moments of being difficult, in that she will gladly groan about certain activities, but has no better ideas of what to do.  She'd be happy just staying at home and playing on her various devices or watching a movie or playing some Mario game and never leaving the house, ha!

Besides that, there's another aspect to this whole dynamic, and I have no idea if this is normal or not, as I've never dealt with it.  The thing is that thus far, after 6+ months and me being around too many weekends to count off the top of my head while J is there, BF and I do not get to do much more than kiss or make out for a few minutes in the morning.  I don't know if it's a conscious decision on his part, but it's the reality of things so far.

I've not said anything until this point because I thought maybe he just needed to get used to all three of us being there together a lot, and getting her used to me being around and being okay with me.  But she's used to me, she likes me, I like her, we're good.  And most often when we go to bed she's two floors down watching Netflix/on the computer/playing video games/chatting with her friends.  She tends to go to bed at least two hours after we retire upstairs.

The thing is, though....I only see him once during the week, and it's a weeknight, and i don't get home until nearly 6:30, and we go to bed around 11.  And lately she's there every weekend, the full weekend.  If he's uncomfortable being physically intimate with me in any way while she's in the house even after six months, and if that's some stance that he has taken for some reason, that's going to be a real challenge for me.  It bums me out to not have the option to be close to my boyfriend when he's RIGHT THERE.

I'm not asking him to lock himself in the bedroom with me for two hours while she's awake.  I'm not asking for wild escapades, walls shaking, loud, obnoxious displays of affection.  I just don't think it's hugely unreasonable to think that once we've gone to bed, and if we're cognizant of the fact that we're not alone, that we should be able to take advantage of that particular alone time.  Between our differing bed times and our hugely differing waking times (she sleeps until AT LEAST 10:30 every morning, usually later), there's plenty of time for BF and I to spend together without anyone being the wiser.

I mean, come on, she's almost 14.  She's not stupid, she knows what's happening as a general rule.  She surely has no desire to have it confirmed, but there's no need for it to go that far.  I just don't want to have to stick around until 5 pm every Sunday to have any solo time with my BF when I only see him once during the week otherwise.

It's a weird situation, and it's totally new to me.  I don't know if this is even a specific choice he's made, or if it's just something he hasn't dealt with since she has been older and more aware.  That's wholly possible, and I get it, I do.  But at a certain point I guess I just thought he would relax about it.  Couples with kids do this in their daily lives, and no one is emotionally scarred.  Honestly, J seeing her dad in a happy, affectionate (to a reasonable degree) relationship is probably a good thing for her.  Her parents have never been together, and her mom's bf sounds like he is an on/off situation.

Again, I'm not in any way saying that J should be privy at all to what we do behind closed doors.  I'm just saying that I don't think that the fact that she's in the house should mean that we are banned from anything more than innocuous kissing.  Am I way off base her?

I HAVE NO IDEA.  :-p

All I know is that I love him, I'm very attracted to him, I like feeling close to him.  Right now I feel like I'm grabbing the time when I can find it, and there aren't a ton of choices.  I find myself checking the calendar and wondering how many days it is until our Outer Banks vacation when it will just be the two of us for seven days, LOL.  Worst of all, I find myself wishing that just occasionally, J would have more plans that precluded her from spending a full weekend at BF's house, and I feel super guilty about that!  Even if we could just manage to get back to the supposed real schedule, wherein every other weekend she leaves Saturday at 5pm, I could work with that if he still hasn't loosened up about things.

In the end, I guess I'm just hoping that eventually BF will relax, and that he'll realize that we can sneak those moments when she is around, and the world won't grind to a halt as a result.  :-)  I feel like that HAS to happen eventually, right???  FINGERS CROSSED.

Patience is a virtue, blah blah blah.  :-)

I'd rather be washing my hair

I bought two different new sets of shampoo/conditioner last night because I couldn't decide between them.  I also like to alternate between two on a normal basis, anyway, so this wasn't as crazy as it seemed.  I was hoping for a hair miracle this morning when I used one of the new ones, but as usual, my curly hair was just a fuzzy mess.  I started with one product mixed with an argan oil, like I often do, but my hair seemed super awful.  So I added another one, and before I knew it, another one just on a couple spots.  I left the house at that point because I was going to miss my bus, and I immediately knew I'd made a huge error in judgment.

Today Bluemoon's hair is a product-laden mess!  I am burning with the desire to go home and wash all of this crap out, but I've got many more hours left in this workday, and there will be no hair washing for at least 8 hours.  Sigh.  I go through phases where I love my curls and they're working for me, and other times I just feel exasperated with my hair at all times, and nothing I do fixes it...cuts, styling products, finger curling, diffusing, air drying, etc.

In other news, looks like I'm getting moved from my current office at work to a different one on a different floor.  Same building, as we occupy three floors.  The main problem is that I'm getting moved from the floor I love, with most of my work friends on it, to what is basically the most boring space we have.  My biggest gripe aside from getting wrenched away from the social center of things is that I will be several floors away from the two people I work with most in my position, which is our General Counsel and one of the Approving Partners.  Right now they are not only on my same floor, but just down the hallway on either side of my current office.  It's easy to drop things off, pick things up, and stop by for quick meetings.  They are both insanely busy, so usually it's much easier to just catch them spontaneously than it is to schedule with them.  This move is going to add many measures of inconvenience to my job.  In addition, secretaries and attorneys stop by all the time to ask questions or run things by me, and they will NOT be doing that to nearly the same degree once I get moved.  The only people on the floor where I'm going are the CFO, the HR Director, my supervisor, the finance dept. and at times batches of miscellaneous contract attorneys.

I'm not complaining too much because I know that a) it won't make a difference and b) I'm moving to another office and not getting demoted to a cubicle, and the new office does have a window (even if it looks into an alley between our building and the one next to it).  It could be worse, but it's a bummer.  I know the move is coming, but I don't know exactly when.  I've been told it should happen before August, so we'll see. The only little perk is that I do get a weird joy out of organizing new spaces, and so that will be fun.  They'll move all my files and whatever I box up for me, but I will get to figure out how I want everything situated, and I will be leaving behind this awful, gigantic and weirdly laid out desk in favor of a new, more modern and streamlined style.  Cheers to that!

We've had a lot of rain and storms in the last few days, which I do love.  Hot days, stormy evenings.  Today the storms are gone and we've been left with a pretty lovely day in the low to mid eighties without insane humidity.  I'm enjoying it!

BF is coming over tonight as he does most Wednesdays.  I have some chicken breasts cooking in the crockpot with hot sauce for sandwiches tonight, and we'll be having some mixed veggies and probably a small pasta or rice side. I prefer having meals planned in advance if I can swing it when he comes over on week nights so we don't spend a ton of time cooking when we really only get a few useful hours of time to relax together.

I'm going to do a separate post for birthday recap and all other BF related stuff just to avoid this particular post getting too wordy!

In summary, my hair is gross today and while I love my boyfriend, the first thing I want to do when I get home is dunk my head under the shower and wash everything out of my hair!  :-o

my turn for birthday fun

BF's birthday is on Friday, so it's officially my turn to be thoughtful and creative.  We hit the six month mark on Thursday, which was pretty cool.  :-)  Seems that summer is a busy time for us, starting with my birthday, then the 4th of July, then his birthday, and in a couple of weeks, his daughter's b-day.  It's a good time!

He's much more practical in terms of gifting, so I won't be searching for a heartwarming piece of jewelry for him.  ;-)  Instead, I'm going with a selection of smaller things I think he will enjoy.  They include:

A card and a couple of little Bluemoon style written things I will be doing. I have to add my personal touch!  :-)  I am also getting him a t-shirt that supports his favorite NASCAR driver, a small collection of cooking gadgets that he's been wanting, and a wok.  The man does love to cook, and a lot of the fun we have on the weekends at his place is trying new recipes or new cooking gadgets.  This weekend we made homemade potato chips!  YUM. The t-shirt breaks up the kitchen theme a bit at least.  I'll also be getting him some Reeses Pieces, as they are his favorite.  :-p

We are celebrating the actual birthday by going out for an Italian dinner friday night with his daughter.  No other plans have been determined yet, but that's our starting point!

** I also got a new bikini and will either be a) sending him a picture of me modeling new bikini and/or b) wrapping it up in a tiny package to present to him since it's more of a gift to him than it is to me.  ;-)  HA!

Crossing fingers that my birthday plans are a success!  He says birthdays are not a big deal to him, but I feel like may be because no one has made a big deal out of his birthday for awhile.  I want to change that, but within reason.  :-)  Nothing over the top, just lots of little things to let him know he's appreciated!