It’s been a year since our wedding day today. It feels like ages ago, but at the same time, it also feels quite recent. So much has happened since that day that it’s crazy to think that 365 days have passed since that sunny day standing on an ocean bluff at the top of a tiny seaside town called San Clemente.

Chris is still annoying me in 2017 as much as he annoyed me in 2016, so not much has changed. To justify how annoying he can be, he recently sent me on article about how annoyance is a sign of a good relationship. The rationale behind this is that if your partner is still eliciting emotions out of you, that’s a positive sign. I suppose that’s one way to look at it. He’s no less annoying today than he was on March 25, 2016. 🙂 He did make fun of me less that day, though.

And as time goes by, we’ll get more questions like, “Will you be in New York for much longer?”, “Where will you be settling?”, and the inevitable and already many times asked “When do you think you will have kids?” I don’t have answers to any of that now; neither of us do. But I’m sure when we figure it out, we’ll let you know. Can’t we just enjoy life and stop checking things off our life “to-do” list?

The passing of time isn’t so bad after all. We’ll continue to get new shadows and wrinkles on our faces. We’ll have our cholesterol and blood pressure checked and compare them routinely. We’re going to get old and start shrinking together. These are all happy thoughts.

It’s been less than a year since our wedding, and I’ve managed to finally complete our wedding scrapbook. It has all three days of our events, plus some of the planning documents (tasting notes, wedding day schedule) for it. It’s over 62 12×12-inch pages of memories. It’s crazy to think that we spent about 14 months planning this event that lasted three days and is now summarized into 62 pages.

I speak with a lot of people — friends, friends of friends, colleagues, and see so much negative wedding and wedding planning commentary. There’s always going to be a lot of stress in planning a large event with a group of people that is more than a handful, but when I flip through these pages and relive those three days in March, all I can think about is how worth it it was to have spent all that time and energy planning to be surrounded by the people we love most in life. It’s even more exciting when your friends and family still talk about it and marvel over how much fun it was, how delicious the food was, and how gorgeous my dress looked. It’s cliche, but I haven’t had a single regret about any of it, not even the money spent. This scrapbook is a reminder of a truly happy period, and is a seg way into the next happy and hopeful period of our life together.

In my life, I’ve only had two different people ever have flowers delivered to me — Ed and Chris. Ed had flowers delivered twice to me, but to my parents’ house, which never really felt like they were a delivery for me as they were for the house, as bad or ungrateful as that may sound. “Every girl should have flowers delivered to her at least once,” my brother proclaimed, as he proudly admired the massive bouquet he bought for my high school graduation. It really was a spectacular display of all the colors of the rainbow… all just for me. It was a bit overwhelming to think about how much time and thought he put into this delivery and selection… because as I knew then and now, he would obsess over every last detail. The bouquet even came with a helium “Congratulations!” balloon. That was my Ed for me.

The second time I had flowers delivered for me, it was the first week of December 2011, and a large bouquet of white roses was delivered to my office. The office manager placed the open bouquet in a white pitcher at my desk, and when I returned from my meeting, they were sitting right there in front of my computer at midday. I was shocked. No one ever has flowers sent to me other than Ed. Did Ed send these? How did he find out my office address? Then I wondered if there was some mistake and that these really weren’t for me, so I checked the address note and confirmed that yes, these were for me. I opened the note attached, and the mysterious message with the funny grammar and punctuation was definitely not my brother.. and that’s when I knew for certain it was Chris.

That was over five years ago now, and now, in January 2017, Chris is still sending me flowers at the most random times on the most random days. Today, I cannot even count the number of times he has had flowers delivered to me. When I left my last job, I had so many vases that I had to give all of them away. At my current job, I have four under my desk and at least five in the office kitchen. Sometimes, he will send them for 538-day anniversaries or other random days of his choosing. Other times, he will send them the week of Valentine’s Day and not on Valentine’s Day. Other times, he will send them just to make my female colleagues jealous because that’s the way Chris is (“It’s always like it’s your honeymoon period!” one former colleague at my last company half-mocked, half-joked). Sometimes, I’d even catch myself feeling guilty opening yet another box of flowers for me — at my last company and my current company. “Your boyfriend/fiance/husband is always sending you flowers!” the women would exclaim. Yes, he certainly is.

Today, for probably the 40th time, I had two dozen long stemmed roses of assorted colors waiting for me from Chris. After a while, the novelty isn’t quite there anymore, but the same feeling of “Wow, do I really deserve this?” still comes. I don’t really think I am deserving of all these flowers and generosity in the same way I didn’t think I deserved it when Ed did it for me those two times, but I still never get over how beautiful these flowers are. These flowers are representative of love. I love my baby.

My friend left to go back to San Francisco this afternoon, which means that I came back home to an empty apartment tonight. Chris is also away in San Francisco for Dreamforce, which means it will be a quiet week to myself. When I came home to the apartment tonight, I had the same sort of empty feeling I had the couple of times my parents left New York when they’d visit. Even though it’s chaotic and space is more tight when we had them at my Elmhurst apartment, and even when they’d argue over dumb things and make situations worse than they were, I found that I still missed them. I guess that was my version of “normal.” Of course, my friend who was visiting is nothing like my parents, and she’s very go-with-the-flow when it comes to everything from plans during the day to our shoe box apartment size. We don’t get to spend that much time together anymore, but when we do, we always have a lot of fun. We spent a lot of the weekend reminiscing over crazy things we used to do together when she lived in New York. Even though that time has passed and I’m glad it’s in the past, it’s such a nice feeling to have shared memories and laugh over dumb things we did. I don’t get to do that with that many people anymore.