I am employed! I am now working as an administrative assistant for LBC Solutions, LLC, which is a government contractor that comes up with ways to implement new initiatives of CMS which is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The work is dull. I spend most of my time sitting around proofreading extremely boring and seemingly insignificant articles on the Medicare Learning Network website. However, I will be getting a paycheck next week if the payroll goes through, so I can't really complain. The pay is decent, the working environment is nice. It's quiet, I sit alone for the most part and can play music on my new computer. No one calls and no one really comes into the office either. The upstairs office is new and we spent most of this week putting together furniture and hanging walmart pictures on the walls. Those would be pictures bought at walmart, not actual pictures of a walmart building, for those of you who were wondering.
I'm finishing up my first week here and so far so good. LBC Solutions is owned and operated by Cynthia's grandparents. They have fewer than 10 employees and the owners mostly work from home so there's not really anyone in the office except Cynthia and me on any given day. Hopefully this isn't the end all be all job for me, but it has benefits and pays really well for my first full time job, so I will be sticking it out here for at least until after Chris and my wedding.
Speaking of which... our wedding has officially changed dates to Sunday, January 8th, 2012. It still sounds really far away, but I suppose it will creep up on us ever so slowly. Since Chris was baptized in a Christian religion we were required to be married in a Christian church. We were thinking that my church would not be an option because it was almost an hour from the wedding reception area and I had given up on it being there anyway since we agreed to have the ceremony in the reception hall. Once we realized that getting married in the Thatched Cottage wasn't going to be a legit Catholic wedding (which is required by my mother), I put my foot down and said that if we had to get married in a church anyway, I wasn't going to get married in just any church just because it happened to be closer to the north shore. That just seemed silly to me. I have a really great connection to my church, I have been going there since my mother had me baptized there, I'm a well known parishioner, and I wanted to be able to include my Folk Group buddies. Also, did I mention that it's beautiful? Here's a picture.
This is what the alter looks like on Christmas. I'm hoping there might not be quite that many poinsettias, but the trees and lights are really beautiful that time of year.
Here's one of the outside. It's actually quite a large church. If you ignore the red traffic light, it's rather nice. So our ceremony is scheduled to start at 2:30 p.m. then we'll take pictures and everyone will be able to return to their hotel for an hour or so. We will be chartering a nice bus to pick everyone up from the hotel and take them to the reception hall. This way, no one gets lost or hurt driving if it happens to be snowing, and then whoever has been drinking will have a sober right back to their room. The reception starts at 6 p.m. with a cocktail hour, and then a 4 hour party ending around 11 p.m.
I'm pretty excited in the first place that the wedding isn't going to be in the afternoon. I want my college friends to be able to get completely drunk and have an awesome time and I don't really expect that to be happening at noon. Well I'm sure some of them would hit it pretty hard at 10 a.m., but not everyone.
The next thing on the wedding planning agenda is to look for a photographer. There are a few in the area that we could definitely take a look at if we ever actually took the time to sit down and decide on a few. Word on the street is that Chris' parents will be paying for the photographer and we're going to try to keep it around $2,500. That sounds like a lot of money, but when it comes to wedding photography, it really isn't. Both my sister and Jaclyn's wedding photographers were in the ballpark of $5,000, but Chris and I didn't feel the need to go that crazy with it.
Today is the first day of October and later this month Elise and I have an appointment to go look at wedding dresses at Kleinfeld's in the City. I think it is going to be a lot of fun. Elise is losing a lot of weight and looks great, I am not really. They say that they have a really great selection of plus sized dresses, so hopefully we will be able to find something that I feel good in, nothing has really been fitting or looking that good lately. It's really discouraging to try to fit in a wedding dress sample that is clearly like 3 sizes too small for you and then try to make a decision based on how you think it will look if it was the right size.
Elise is hitting the job applications pretty hard and will hopefully have a few things to look at in the next couple of months. She is really needing to get her stuff together and move down to Virginia to start helping Jason out. Chris and I are really happy in the condo. We could use a little more space, but in a few months or however long Cynthia will be staying with us we will not have use of one of our bedrooms and half of our living space. Once we have that taken care of we may decide to get a puppy, which would be really exciting.
Our tasks for this weekend are to install the Ensor's new family computer, pick a few photographers to make appointments with, and get the addresses filled out on our wedding guest list. If we can get all of that done it would be great. I am really loving all of the fall air around here and hope it starts to get cold soon.
Until then
Julibean <3
