Blogging Fail

I keep staring at my blog reader and seeing our last post here fade further and further into the past.  It finally switched to "two months."  First the excuse was honeymoon preparation, and then the honeymoon itself, and then... who even knows.  One thing led to another thing, and blogging fell by the wayside.  And now it feels like there should be something monumental to say to get back on the blogging wagon.  But after several weeks of resolving to blog again soon, I guess it really comes down to just doing it. 

Since we last blogged:
*We spent two weeks in Greece and London
*We visited my family in Massachusetts
*We went camping upstate with my college friends
*We rented bikes on Governor's Island
*We rearranged the living room, including purchasing a new bookshelf
*We went to the shore a few times, and tried a new ice cream place
*We (especially Becky) worked way too much
*We pondered life changes, like jobs and apartments and schools, obsessively
*Probably a lot of other not blog worthy events

So, we're all caught up, right? 

Ha.

My mom asked for some honeymoon stories, so hopefully we'll get back to a few of those.

The blogging drought has been accompanied by a picture taking drought.  I'm sure there are a few, but Becky has her camera with her while she's lamey-cake working right now, so I'll give you a few Greece pictures in case you forgot what we look like:

 And this is the two of us plus my college roommates swimming upstate two weeks ago:

Hopefully some of you are still out there, and hopefully it won't be two months until you see us again!

They came!

Guess what, to our wondering eyes, appeared in our mailbox today?  Our new passports!  We bought our honeymoon plane tickets months ago.  It seemed logical that we should purchase our honeymoon plane tickets in our married name, and we figured that we had several months to request the new ones.  Enter procrastination, and applications sent much later than we planned.  We were beginning to fear that they would not arrive before our trip, which would pretty much be an epic disaster.  In the back of my mind I was afraid that what we had read about dealing with the same-sex marriage and the name change (i.e. that it was completely uncomplicated) would turn out to be completely false.  But it was true!  They're here! 

The to-do list for the trip is getting longer and longer as the trip is looming closer and closer and it is starting to get scarier and scarier.  I keep adding things to the list rather than just doing some of them.  Events that I mentally associated with the trip, such as the ending of the parenting group I've been running at work and the start of the summer weather, are suddenly happening.  Thankfully the State Department is keeping pace with the calendar even if my brain is not! 

Random Thursday: Surgery week edition

When I started this I wasn't fully intending it to be a weekly thing, but it seems to be turning out that way.  Apparently even in weeks where I do not go to work things are dragging a bit by Thursday, and it's easier to write thoughts out in random lists than in full blown posts.

1. We finally got moving again on honeymoon planning.  We stalled a bit a few weeks ago when the hotel we picked for Athens was booked for our dates.  But we have picked ourselves up again and are now debating the risks vs. rewards of seedy neighborhoods in Athens.  To be within walking distance of attractions, or to not be within walking distance of prostitutes and junkies... 

2. My ideas about good and bad neighborhoods have evolved a lot in the last three years of doing home visits for a living.  I've seen a lot of things that would probably not make my mother too happy (sorry Mom).  But no one on the internet seems to be able to tell me how sketchy Athens compares to my experience of sketchy New York.

3.  I watched a bunch of episodes of the show Parenthood on Hulu.com today.  It's like Modern Family, but less funny and more dramatic.  I like it.  I think I will put Season 1 on our Netflix queue.

4. The pain from surgery has definitely gone down a lot, but my patience for any pain/discomfort has also gone down a lot.  I'm ready to be fully back to normal now please!

5. Getting new passports in our new name is going to cost us $110 each.  How annoying.  Technically this is just the renewal fee, but we renewed in summer 2009 so it's annoying!  I suppose I should just be grateful that they will recognize our name change (because Massachusetts considers the marriage a legal name change the feds apparently have decided there's no way around honoring that) and not require us to jump through any additional hoops.  But I can think of better uses for our $220!  Like, oh, a semi-private Santorini sailboat tour?

6. Jen and the boys are coming to visit for the weekend, so you can expect Auntie blogging on Sunday or Monday!

7. The cats are really unamused that I have been home all week but not really letting them jump on me and generally maul me the way I usually allow them to do.

8. Today was the first day since surgery I was able to stay awake all day.  I know napping during the day sounds luxurious and/or lazy, but earlier this week I was so freaking exhausted that I couldn't possibly stay awake so it was absolutely a necessity!

9. Somehow our commute seems a lot longer when I'm sitting at home and Becky is doing it by herself...it feels like forever between when she tells me she's coming home and when she actually gets here.  I sincerely hope that we can someday live and work much closer together than we do now.

10. I'll leave you with pictures of the cinnamon rolls that Becky made for me a few weeks back, but then I forgot to include in the weekend recap:

Yum.

It's Different

After we booked our honeymoon tickets the other day, I tweeted something about needing to get a new passport. Someone tweeted back about the fact that she'd been married several years and hadn't bothered to get a new passport.

And my first thought was simply, "It's different."

She's married to a man, so even though they don't have the same last names in their passports (she did choose to take his name, but the same rules apply to the many women in hetero marriages who don't change their names when they get married), their marriage is likely to be recognized wherever they go. If they approach the immigration officer at the airport together and say they're married, that person is unlikely to declare that they're not a family and must go through immigration separately. And if some tragedy were to befall them, either in the U.S. or in another country, and one of them were to need medical attention, the hospital staff would likely take their word for it when they say they're married.

It's different.

In contrast, it's only in the past few months that the U.S. government declared that patients have the right to decide who has visitation rights, even if that person is a same-sex partner. That directive grew out of a Florida case in which a woman and her children were denied visitation rights to their wife/mother as she was dying, despite the partner having a health care power of attorney. And outside the U.S. the situation can be even scarier. We love traveling, and we're not about to abandon our desire to see the world just because we're a same-sex couple.

But it's different.

So not only will we both update our passports to contain our new shared last name, but we will travel with a certified copy of our marriage certificate. And we will travel with originals of our healthcare proxy and power of attorney documents. And I'm already working on scanning electronic copies of these documents, along with our wills, so that we could access them online anytime if needed. Yes, we have wills. We've been married 4 months, we have no substantial assets, and we don't have children yet, but we have wills. Our families are very supportive and would no doubt follow our wishes to the best of their abilities, but depending on where we are, our marriage has different levels of recognition. (The drive home from MA to NJ is always fun: now we're married, now we're not, now we're married, now we're sorta-married, now we're maybe civil-unioned?) I'm generally a pretty risk-averse person anyway, but on these matters, I'm taking as few risks as possible. So yes, we'll be spending that $220 to update our two passports as one more marker of the legitimacy of our relationship.

I don't mean to sound bitter; I don't begrudge the privileges of anyone who's in a hetero marriage. I just wish those privileges could be shared by all of us.

I wish it wasn't different.

So all of these thoughts were running through my head yesterday, when I got a bit of a reality check. I was about to leave work when my director asked if I knew of resources for someone claiming asylum. I didn't have much, but after hearing the story behind the question, I spent a good hour Googling my heart out for resources. Without giving out too much identifying information, she was asking on behalf of someone who had recently come out to his/her parents and been met with a very hostile reaction. This individual comes from a country where homosexuality is illegal and potentially punishable by death, and after successfully re-entering the U.S. following this traumatic coming out experience, this person is now trying to figure out how to apply for asylum in the U.S.

That's different. In a way that makes my passport concerns seem rather insignificant.

I did find several resources to pass on to that individual, but I'd also like to share one with all of you. Immigration Equality is an organization that is working to change immigration laws as they impact LGBT people and also help LGBT people who are struggling with the immigration system now. They do advocacy, they provide information, and they provide legal assistance for people who couldn't otherwise afford it. So I'd urge you to take a few minutes to at least read about their work, read the stories of people they've worked with, and get involved if you feel so inspired.

Help make it different.

Greece-ward ho!

In less political news, the honeymoon is inching towards being a reality rather than a dream! Both of us have successfully acquired our work's approval for summer vacation. And both of us have once again been laughed at by our offices for putting in the earliest vacation requests.

We've spent the last several weeks stalking every travel website we'd ever heard of in search of a combination of flights that didn't make our eyeballs pop out of our heads. We've pretty much been operating under the assumption that if we just searched hard enough (and crossed our fingers, and chanted, and threw in a rain dance for good measure), then cheaper flights would appear by magic. 

Shocking news: that hasn't happened so far.

Normally under these circumstances, I'd be inclined to wait a bit longer in the hopes of summer sales appearing. But unsurprisingly, we also did a whole bunch of research on that and read from many "experts" that summer sales aren't all that likely this year, between airline consolidation, rising oil prices, yada yada yada. And the flights currently available are at perfect times and are in/out of the most convenient airport to our home. So tonight we finally bit the bullet and bought our plane tickets! We are officially going to Greece and London!

To book or not to book

So, I'm sitting here trying to work on planning the honeymoon. Although we both grew up smack in the middle of the American heartland (except without sounding like a Republican campaign ad) and we were introduced by a fellow Midwestern friend, we met and got to know each other in London. And then after we graduated from college we returned to London for six months together and really cemented our relationship. So London has a lot of importance to us. But we also love travelling, so it wouldn't really feel like a honeymoon if we didn't go somewhere new and exciting. And we love the beach, so that also seems like a natural honeymoon choice. And so, our intention for the honeymoon is to primarily go to Greece, but to also spend a few days in London on one side or the other.

We are a bit spoiled living [basically] in New York City, home to three international airports, and tend to expect that relatively affordable flights will be available to nearly anywhere. Unfortunately, we are finding that flights to and from Athens are actually somewhat horrifyingly expensive. As of a week or two ago we had agreed to wait a few weeks and see if prices come down at all as airlines open up inventory, seeing as how not everyone books their travel four months ahead. For fairly obvious reasons we prefer to book plane tickets before we start booking hotels or excursions or anything of that sort.

Today however, because I am neurotic, I happened to check the availability of a hotel in Greece that I have been superly excited about staying in since I read about it. Previously the hotel was available for all of our proposed honeymoon except three nights, which were easily avoidable in our potential itinerary. It is now only available for three nights within our proposed honeymoon. I am freaking out and want to book it! Although Becky is not here with me, I have her voice of reason in my head telling me that there must be other affordable and perfectly wonderful hotels available for those dates on that island. But the panicked voice telling me that I want this one and it's getting away from me is yelling much louder! Hopefully Becky will be home soon to add volume to the voice of reason...or give me permission to book it...

What would you do??

Aphrodite

We both feel that Valentine's Day is a little silly, considering the overcrowded restaurants and the skyrocketed flower prices and the overall cheesyness. We mutually agreed that in honor of Frugality February (ha) we would not buy flowers or gifts, and in honor of not enjoying crazy overcrowded restaurants we would not go out to dinner.

But it sounds pretty lame to not celebrate our first married Valentine's Day, now doesn't it? We both got a kick out of buying Valentine's Day cards from the "wife" section (and I was happy to discover that, like wedding congratulatory cards, there are a surprising number of V-day "wife" cards that don't require a "husband"!) but weren't sure what else to do. In brainstorming over the weekend we joked about making it a computer free zone. And then we realized that that was actually the perfect non-commercial but right to the heart of what V-day is solution. We're both sort of internet addicts, and sometimes we're certainly guilty of paying too much attention to our computers and not enough attention to each other. So for one night we agreed that we would not pick up the ubiquitous laptops and would instead spend quality time with each other.

We cooked and ate dinner together as usual, and then sat down on the couch, sans computer, and worked on reading the pile of books about Greece that Becky brought home from the library! We stared lazily at pictures of sail boats on azure water and the tall white columns of Greek ruins, studied ferry and airplane timetables, and dreamed about our honeymoon. We didn't go on a proper honeymoon immediately after the wedding because the planning and the paying and the implementing of it was just too difficult to do at the same time as the wedding. Plus, we want to swim in some of that azure water, and we got married in November! It's really nice to have something else fun to look forward to now. I must admit that at the current moment we're both feeling more inspired by relaxing at the sea than learning about Greek mythology and archaeology, but regardless this post is dedicated to Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love.

Happy Valentine's Day, a day late!

P.S. Hot chocolate and cuddling in front of Modern Family DVDs was also enjoyed by all present, including our kitties (well, no cocoa for them)!