MONTH #2

MoniKitchen
Heavenly Chicken
I'm at work right now, so don't have the recipe here, but will add this weekend so you can all indulge!

Will You Go Out With Me?
Bahama Breeze
This was over my Christmas break. We had drinks in the bar and talked about Guitar Hero and reminisced about the Honeymoon while drinking our Mai Tai's.
Tim had ribs and I had some cajun rice dish with a whole mass of seafood in it. We thought about going to a movie, but instead decided to come home and play more Guitar Hero!! It's like we're 14yr old boys!

That's HilAAArious!
We have a tendency to get obsessed with things, and most of our catch phrases come from television and movies. Well, our funniest moments and "new" thing for this month was "SWARLY!" It is from How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM!). One episode a barista mishears Barney's name, so writes his name as "Swarly" on his coffee drink. The gang continues to call him Swarly for the remainder of the episode. So we burgld the storyline and decided to start calling Josh 'Swarly' without telling him why. Eventually we explained, but it was funny to randomly call him that and he was a good sport and just went with it even though he had no idea what we were talking about or what it meant!

NEW CATEGORY!
Obsession of the Month
In reference to the above entry, I decided to add the category of Monthly Obsessions. B/c believe me, we get new ones often. We have many that we've had throughout the years that have settled to a slow boil, but still are faves. But we get new ones all the time and if there's any one aspect of our relationship that defines us - it's these obsesssions!
So on that note - our NEW obsessions for this month are:
-Guitar Hero III (we're both on Medium. Best song is "Ciffs of Dover")
-How I Met Your Mother (watched season 1 & 2 on DVD)
-SNL Astronaut Jones (from the second time Britney Spears hosted, at the very end. We just watched that episode randomly and never remembered seeing it before. It's with Tracy Morgan! I'm sure you can YouTube it somewhere)

Good Talk
The "Good Talk" was probably more good for me than him. It was the opening of the "drunk at the end of the wedding" can of worms. It was something that I thought didn't bother me at the time, but then the whole *principle* argument came up and bit me. It would resurface from time to time and as I've learned, as soon as I get a topic to vent about it makes me "itch" - and it's and itch I gotta scratch!

Recap
This month was the first month of the rest of our lives! Almost...done with the Honeymoon, done with Christmas and New Year's. We are at the most difficult time of the year. The ongoing argument of drinking reared its ugly head a few times. It's better than it ever was, but I've also seemed to have adapted a "No Tolerance" type of attitude toward the issue.

Marriage Epiphany
Now, I realize sometimes these epiphanies can be like "uh, duh!" But think about it in the context of, say, being engaged. Everyday you talk about getting married. You say "we're getting married" hundreds of times. But then there's those times - maybe not even until the night before or day of - when you think "Holy Shit!!! We're getting married!!!!"
These are the epiphanies I am recording. So I'm not sitting atop my marital mountain preaching my noble "discoveries" to you single persons.
With that in mind, here's my Month #2 epiphany.
Tim and I are married. MARRIED. M-A-R-R-I-E-D. Not dating anymore, not boyfriend and girlfriend, passed engaged! We are Mr. & Mrs. - together until our dying day and beyond!
So are we different people now? Not personality-wise, but moreso is this a new leaf and new life?
My realization is that YES! Our wedding day was "from this day forward". A fresh start. So does that mean our slates are wiped clean? We all know I have a problem letting things go, holding grudges and using hte past as ammunition. So wouldn't it be refreshing to say that was in our dating years - and this is now our marriage!
But, then I must play devil's advocate and ask - if we leave our issues and past fights in our "dating years", then isn't it fair to say we leave the good times there too? Is this new leaf subjective to only happy things coming along with us into marriage? While we are very much what we grew to be back in the day with the board games, movies and the wave of "curlyness", we are very much defined by the issues that plagued us and the difficult times we had to go through to get to November 17, 2007 and today!
So is marriage just a snowball travelling down the mountain into eternity? And everything we've done - good & bad has added to the size, strength and shape of our snowball? Or is this like a new year at school? Same friends, same building, same locker, but new teachers and classes. You could only be in the next year in school because you passed the previous years classes!
Who knows if I'll ever truly side with either side of this argument. But it is something to take a step back and ponder in those times I am reaching into the past for that darn ammunition.