Exciting news!

1. It's official: I will be teaching a class in my area of expertise this fall! My years of experience seem to be catching up with me- I've only been designing and teaching such classes at other schools for 8 years now! After much optimism and "possibilities" I am so relieved/excited about this being confirmed. My new boss is also going to have me work for her on other projects for additional hours (this week and next week she gave me a student to consult with, for example. I love that!) It is related to my dissertation, my foot in the door at a great university in a program where I'd like to work in the future (as opposed to the summer school program, which is great for summer but not something I'd want to do long term). This class should keep me busy enough to be engaged/learn more about how things work at unnamed university, but also give me time to finish my all-important dissertation. A feather in my cap, as my dad said. They are essentially piloting this course because I am here and able to teach it!

2. On a lighter note (but somehow no less important in my skewed view of life right now) I found the perfect dress to wear to the wedding rehearsal/rehearsal dinner/Friday night. You may or may not know that I've been stressing about this. Stressing. (Weddings make you stress about random things, by the way. Like flatware patterns. Do I really care about flatware? TMH didn't even know the term flatware before we started this and now we spend lots of time talking about it! Ridiculous). Finding dresses is way harder than it should be; I'm sure all women out there will agree with me on this one! I won't go into all the details... let's just say I got a deal and was super excited. It was even better that I found the dress right after I found out my first piece of news. Somehow the planets all aligned or something- yesterday was a good day!

3. TMH and I got our wedding rings. In keeping with my engagement ring, I decided to have my grandmother's wedding band repaired. In addition to the sentimental value, I actually like it better than anything I saw, anyway. I learned from the jeweler that she never took off the band. It is worn only on one side, as that was the side that sat against the engagement ring for so many years. We know that she took the engagement ring off, since it is worn equally on both sides. The jeweler suggested I just have it buffed up and sized, and not worry about the wear- I can just make sure to wear the band in the same way that she did. So somehow I felt very fortunate to have learned so much about a woman I never met. And to think that I'll be wearing her rings in the same way that she did... I told my mom and she started crying.

So there you have it. Things are good right now. TMH and I made a big list of wedding to-dos and freaked out but at least we have a list now and I think it's pretty comprehensive so we just have to start knocking things out. We can do it!
We are going also to a wedding this weekend that we are both really looking forward to... so that will likely further inspire us. It's so nice to go to weddings, and now I appreciate how much work it takes to really pull everything together. I'm getting so excited!

Have a great weekend, everyone.