I'm married!

Well, for those you who know me or have been reading the blog for a while, you should know that I got engaged to my long-time girlfriend (of 6 years!) last summer. I'm really happy to say that, after a year of wedding planning, we're now married, back from our honeymoon, and re-adjusting to normal life.

More than anything, I was really surprised at just how much planning is involved in a wedding. We literally started planning right after the proposal (July 3rd last year) and kept doing stuff right up until the day before the wedding (July 22nd this year). But, in the end, all of the hard work and stress was really worth it. Every vendor that we had turned out to be really great, so even though it took us, in some cases, months to decide on a particular vendor, it was worth it. This leads to my biggest piece of advice for other soon-to-be-newlyweds: Allow a year for planning, start planning right away, and make a schedule of when things need to be done (there's lots of examples online).

The entire wedding experience went off with no problems at all. There's so much that can go wrong , starting with the rehearsal all the way to getting back from the honeymoon, but everything seemed to go perfectly. And most importantly, we had a great time at our wedding. It was a lot of fun! And the honeymoon (we went to Aruba!) was great as well. It was great to get a break from wedding planning, and to just spend a week relaxing with my new wife.

It was strange to know that so many people had travelled so far (we had some out-of-country guests, even!), just to see the two of us get married. But, I think that is the point of a wedding, and I now realize that that's really what makes it so much better than eloping -- you get to share one of the most special days of your life with everyone who's close to you. I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Which makes it all the more meaningful that everything went well.

At any rate, it feels great to be married. And there's still more marriage-related business to be taking care of -- it doesn't stop after you say "I do". Selecting pictures for our album, name changes, insurance changes, financial changes, it just keeps going.

But, you know what makes all the work bearable? I get to go through it with the greatest girl I've ever met -- who now happens to be my wife. :)

I'm Engaged!

It's been quite a while since I last posted here, but that's because a lot has been going on in my life. I generally don't use this blog to talk about my personal life, but I also never said that I wouldn't, so...

I'm engaged! After 5 1/2 years of dating, I proposed to my girlfriend on July 3rd -- right before my favorite holiday! We have a "tradition" (which we've only actually done once before) of going to the Portsmouth, NH, fireworks on July 3rd, then the Merrimack, NH, parade and fireworks on the 4th. So, I proposed on the beach that night after the fireworks. Ever since we first took a night walk on the beach, I knew that's where I wanted to propose.

And she said yes, which made it all the better. We're aiming for a July, 2007 wedding.

Another thing going on is that now we are moving down to Milton, MA. Milton is the closest we could get to being in the middle of our two places of work. We fell in love with the apartment we found. It's a really nice second floor apartment of a house. Great location (15 minutes to Boston, subway stop in town, but still a quiet residential town!), beautiful apartment, nice landlords.

This will slightly shorten my commute from NH, from ~1 hour to probably ~45 minutes. Any decrease in driving is good by me. I've been commuting from NH for the last year, trying to save up money for a house someday. I think that was completely the right thing to do, but I also think now is the right time in my life to take the next step forward and get an apartment that is closer to where I work. I'll still be saving money, just not quite as much.

So life is different lately! Buying engagement rings, wedding planning, apartment searching, moving... this is all new to me! But they're all happy things -- with the requisite sadness that comes with any life-changing event, of course. Exciting times for Greg Leedberg.

When exactly did this "growing up" thing happen to me?