It's the one-year anniversary of the start of the adventure

That is, the one-year anniversary of getting laid off. (Roughly.) Which is what prompted all the soul-searching and eventually the road trip, which is what got me here today. It's also the minus-3 month anniversary of our wedding date. Oh, and I got my engagement/wedding ring this weekend. So naturally, all of this has snowballed in my brain to produce various thoughts on marriage.

So, the next few posts, I'll be sharing those, along with the story of how all this got started (excerpted from the rough draft of my book about it all).

I have a ring, part 2

It's weird showering with jewelry on.

I took it off to knead bread this morning, but then I forgot to put it back on.

Last night in my sleep, I stabbed myself in the eye with it. I'm not used to sleeping with jewelry, either.

But these aren't complaints. I feel all official and stuff. I've never had a ring before, and I've never worn my own jewelry on that finger, either. (That would have jinxed it.) For that matter, I don't think I've ever worn rings on my left hand. This is going to take some getting used to.

But I'm official! Hee...

I have a ring!

Menu changes

I spent the morning analyzing the wedding menu and making it a little more streamlined. I originally wanted to do a big crawfish boil for the rehearsal dinner on Friday, but the logistics of overnighting 200 pounds of live crawfish, then finding two 80-pound boiling pots to cook them in, plus providing all the fixin's for 75 people, were proving difficult. Not to mention that overnighting 200 pounds of crawfish would cost me about $1000, and who knows whether the FedEx guy could find our little house way up in the mountains in time? So I eliminated the cost and the panic factor by cutting the menu back to crawfish gumbo. I can use frozen crawfish for that, and I don't have to find an 80-pound boiling pot to cook them in.

Same process for the pig roast on Saturday--I was having a hard time finding a caterer willing (and able) to roast a whole hog and then deliver it. Either I had to get the pig with all the trimmings, which I didn't want, or I'd have to drive three hours to pick it up myself, which I didn't want either. So I'm going to roast several huge pork shoulders instead. Same great taste, no "ewwwww" factor from guests unfamiliar with picking through a hog carcass, and significantly cheaper. I'm hoping to channel all the saved money into more beer purchases.

The underground foodie scene in Pamplin, VA

Well, I'm just gobsmacked. The teeny-tiny town I grew up in (Pamplin, VA: population 200) has finally developed a few links to the outside world. Yesterday, while reading Serious Eats (one of my favorite foodie blogs) I discovered an old article about Frog Bottom Farm, an organic CSA farm in Pamplin. My reaction ran the gamut between "WTF? In PAMPLIN?!" and "That's so (expletive deleted) cool," and "Why didn't anyone tell ME about this?" I checked out Frog Bottom's website and discovered that although I don't know the owners (they moved down from Northern Virginia), they're the sort of people I want to know. Small, locally-owned, organic CSA farms are exactly what I was searching for all those years I lived in New York, and now here's one in my (former) backyard. What are the odds?

So I did some more Googling and discovered a wealth of local wineries, small organic free-range pig/poultry/lamb/goat farms (here's one), local apiaries, microbreweries, and even more CSA farms. There's a WINERY. In PAMPLIN. (Until about a year ago, Appomattox County was completely dry.) There's even an off-the-grid modern Danish kit house in Pamplin now, complete with solar panels and recycled insulation. The community of food outliers I'd always sought in New York, hanging out in the wilds of Central Virginia.

I was appalled that no one had bothered to tell me of these new developments, so I called my parents and asked them why they hadn't told me. "Well, you don't live here anymore," my mom helpfully pointed out. Apparently these small farms are struggling--the locals are notoriously wary of outsiders, and an organic CSA farm will win no favor with them, the vast majority of whom already maintain their own extensive vegetable gardens. In New York, when your options are 1) buy organic from the farmer's market or 2) go to the corner deli and pay $3 for a head of lettuce that's doused in pesticides, shrinkwrapped in plastic, and flown in from Chile, it's no wonder that people are increasingly turning to #1. But out in the country, where people already grow their own vegetables, there's no incentive to pay the premium for "organic" at either the grocery store or the farmer's market. I get that. I'm sure Frog Bottom's customers all come from the bigger cities in Virginia.

But it still warms my heart to see a burgeoning community of people who share my passions about food right in my own hometown. Now I want to locally source the food for the wedding, featuring the local organic veggies and pork and maybe even some local wines/microbrews. I realize I'll be the only person at the wedding that cares. But that's what the locavore movement is about, right? Supporting the farmers around you? I hope these ventures take root and become successful. I'm having pleasant daydreams of living in Appomattox Country again, surrounded by fresh-grown organic fruits and veggies, free-range chickens and pork, local wines and microbrews, sitting on the back porch after a good meal talking about all those things with fellow foodies. And trust me, never ever before this did I ever have a pleasant daydream about living in Appomattox County again. If they manage to conjure up a good cheese store, all hope may be lost for me.

Finances hurt my brain.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been trying to clean up the household finances. You know, all that grown-up stuff you have to do when you get married: plan a budget. Make a will. Get life insurance. Et cetera. It's proving more difficult than I thought it would be, for various reasons--and most of these reasons are outside my purview, meaning I get to spend a lot of time beating my head against the wall, wondering why the universe keeps throwing up so many stumbling blocks. All these years I thought I was the fiscally irresponsible one--I didn't have kids, or a mortgage, or a car, I had a lot of credit card and student loan debt, I had a fetish for international travel and expensive shoes. Turns out I'm a lot more financially savvy than I thought (debt load aside). I'm hoping that once the combining process is finally complete, then it will just be a matter of maintaining the whole thing--that I won't have to spend every month, in perpetuity, beating my head against the wall.

The first priority, of course, is paying off the debt. I think I'm going to get a second job, waiting tables or something, to help expedite that. If my new stepson is going to live with us, we need a bigger apartment and a second car, and right now we can't afford either one.

The good news is that a dry run of my taxes will yield enough of a return to pay back all the money I owe the IRS. So that's one debt crossed off the list. I guess that's the good part of not making any money--you don't owe any to the government!

Lots of weird dreams last night. I dreamed Pockets was coming after me with a knife, and then I dreamed another close friend of mine was dead, and then the old I'm-being-forced-to-go-back-to-high-school recurring nightmare cropped up. Good times.

I have a job!

That is, a permanent one! My temp job was officially made perm today--the financial firm I've been working for is finally extending an offer. Pro: they're offering more money than I'm currently making as a temp. Plus benefits. Con: that amount is more than $20K less than what I was making in New York, in essentially the exact same position. More con: I could make that NY amount in LA or San Francisco. San Diego's labor force seems to be retardedly underpriced.

But there's not really anything I can do about it--the high-priced jobs don't really exist here and the salary offer they made was firm (non-negotiable; and yes, I asked). So I'm taking it, and breathing a sigh of relief. Now I can go to the dentist, start my 401k back up, and not have to worry about my paycheck disappearing.

(Well, sort of. If this past year has taught me anything, it's that you can't assume anything. So I find it helpful to assume two completely contradictory things at once, i.e., I will have this job for the next year, and, I could lose my job tomorrow. But hopefully not.)