The Marriage 15...or 20.

Several things: #1, I turned the air conditioner back on this week. While everyone, everywhere else, is talking about Fall and the crisp smell and tights and tea, we are still in this awful miserable purgatory of waning summer which just means that it's a few degrees under 100 and we will go from tank tops today to snow tomorrow. Probably. Give me moderate weather! Yeah right.
#2, on one of the days that there was a nip in the air last week, I enthusiastically pulled out my favorite pair of gray corduroy pants. There is one distinguishing, defining fact about these pants that I must mention, besides the fact that they are gray and corduroy and MY FAVORITE PANTS, that fact is that they were acquired pre-marriage. That is, they were purchased at the height of caring about attractiveness and toned shapeliness. They were the smallest size of pants I'd ever fit into. A year and a half later I pull them out, thinking I know I'm on the 'curvy' side of the scale but these are my favorite pants and I must wear them now during my favorite season. I get them on (I must admit they're about 70% cotton and 30% spandex). I think, they're on! I'm doing all right here. I do a bit of contortioning, bending knees, sticking out butt to get them really situated and they rip from waist to knee. Moaning, wailing, and a little bit of crying ensues. Zeb says (the dear) 'Well, corduroy is a notoriously flimsy fabric.' We both know that is not the issue.
The point of the story is... um, that I'm not exempt from whatever Murphy's type law says the more you swear you won't gain weight after you get married, the quicker you will? Or that the indulgent, conscience free honeymoon year should finally give way to the exercising and healthy eating that I actually want to mark my life? Or that I get new clothes? Yeah, the new clothes one (also, the other two). So I did. I held my nose and went to the mall for about 4 hours too many and emerged with three pairs of pants that are actually my size, that is, about 4 sizes larger than fifteen months ago when I entered this blessed state. That's the trade off? Gain 4 sizes in exchange for this amount of happy? I'll take that compromise any day.

#3, However, three pairs of new pants could not quite shake off the feeling that I might be getting too careless about superficial external things. I'm a bit afraid I might be, dare I say it? Frumpy. I've accepted the fact that it's coming, the frump, I just wanted to ease not jump into it. So I got myself bangs as well. Because that makes me feel hip and relevant. And every time I say that Zeb asks me what does that even mean and I really don't know so I shoot back in an insulting tone that his face is hip and relevant. See what I mean? That's even a frumpy come back. It might take more than bangs to save me.