Being Amber Rhea

In honor of the fourth anniversary of my divorce:

(And, honestly… I won’t always post Liz Phair songs!)

Today Rusty and I are celebrating our 3rd anniversary. And if it weren’t for blogs, I think the likelihood of our paths crossing would’ve been much lower.

So here’s a retrospective…

December 8, 2004: Rusty’s first comment on my blog, wherein he expresses his affinity for PHP. I had found and started reading his blog sometime in the month of November. I don’t remember exactly how I originally found it, but I think it might’ve been through David’s blog. I remember being intrigued and perplexed by all the driveway photos.

March 9, 2005: We met IRL for the first time, at a blogger trivia get-together at Central City Tavern. I also met IRL that night: Thomas, Nikki, Jen, Shannon, Tony, Joseph.

April 22, 2005: Blogger bowling. It was a small crowd (just me, Rusty, Jen, and Joeventures) and I was taking the opportunity to size him up, as they say. I even thought about asking if he wanted to come home with me that night, but due to boring logistical issues (and, yeah, nerves), I decided not to. I knew by that point that I definitely wanted to do him, though.

April 26, 2005: I seized the opportunity to drop some innuendo that could, in the event of disinterest on Rusty’s part, be written off as simply a garden-variety sophomoric joke. I asked for several friends’ interpretations of his response (it seems like he was probably doing the same thing as me; gotta have plausible deniability!) and after getting unanimous opinions that this was, indeed, what you kids call “flirting,” I took the sexual innuendo to email.

April 27, 2005: It just so happened that Rusty had sent me a one-line email regarding the new version of Mac OS X, so I didn’t even need a pretense for emailing him - I just replied.

April 27, 2005 - May 5, 2005: We exchanged a series of emails fraught with business metaphors to refer to fucking. It was pretty funny and entertaining until it reached the point where I started to get annoyed and wondered when we were going to fuck already. There was also a four-day gap where he didn’t respond and I started to wonder if he wasn’t interested after all. He blamed it on working 40 hours a week and getting behind on email. Or was it nerves?

Sometime during the weekend of May 1 (sort of tangential): I was visiting Dacia in New York, and I told her about how there was this “local blogger dude” that I really wanted to fuck, and I was trying to make it happen. After I got back home she sent me an email that concluded with, “Good luck with Rusty!”

May 7, 2005 (tangential): The Great Blogswap of 2005 (a.k.a. the “blorgy”) was set to commence the week of May 9, and there were jokes via email about swapping more than blogs. Little did the rest of ‘em know that would be true for Rusty and me! (He drew my blog.)

May 8, 2005: I finally got impatient with the innuendo and said this in an email to Rusty: “Re: interview scheduling, etc.: I love me some good innuendo as much as the next guy, but it’s about time to close the deal. I can provide references… -oh shit that’s more innuendo. Never mind.” He replied: “I agree about there only being so much innuendo before something has to be done one way or the other. If you’re serious, tomorrow night would actually be a good time since I get off work at 6:15 and don’t have to be in the next day ’til 2. Or Friday night, since I’m off Friday and Saturday. If you’re not, I won’t think lesser of you for it.” And I replied to that: “Of course I’m serious. What do you think I am, some kind of asshole? Tomorrow night eh? That’s fine by me, although we could make it interesting by saying Wednesday after trivia. Or wtf, both! Right? Right.”

May 9, 2008: Monday morning I emailed him directions to my apartment. We’d already exchanged cell phone numbers. At 7:09 p.m. I still hadn’t heard from him and I sent an email saying: “Ok dude I know you’re there, you’re commenting on blogs at the same time as me. What’s your deal? Maybe you are too wrapped up in bestbuysux.org.” Then he went on IM and we chatted for a while, about all kinds of things (including the first day of the Blogswap), until finally at 7:50 I said: “are you coming down here or what?”

evilwilly1: haha, sure
evilwilly1: I need to wash the retail stink off first though
AmberATL30309: gah…
AmberATL30309: now are we clear on what this is or do we need to lay some ground rules
evilwilly1: I’m all about some ground rules… your thoughts?
AmberATL30309: uh, no drama. that’s pretty much it.
evilwilly1: works for me, no strings attached
AmberATL30309: fabulous. i was starting to lose my faith in ATL men.
AmberATL30309: and I’m assuming we’re not repeating this to our blog buddies
evilwilly1: nah
AmberATL30309: i’ll have to tell you about the gay virgin sometime
AmberATL30309: anyway what we have here is a “FWB” situation
evilwilly1: kickass, exactly what I’m looking for
AmberATL30309: excellent

After Rusty and I had been fucking for a few weeks, Sara Beth joked that we were going to fall in love, and she was going to speak at our wedding and recount the dirty details of how it all started. At the time, I scoffed at her; but hey, she was totally right!

And the rest is history. :)

What can I say that Rusty hasn’t already said? And how can I put into words how much I love him? (Cue “awwww” track.) Instead, I will do a photographic retrospective to commemorate the two-year anniversary of me and the GDBF being dirty and domestic.

Also, everything I wrote last year still stands. Rusty… I love you in bold, italics, and all caps!

Happy Birthday Being Amber Rhea

Originally uploaded by Amber Rhea.

As you can see, last night’s blog birthday party was a rollicking good time. Special thanks to Sara for making these awesome, blog-specific cupcakes (with really tasty icing, I might add). I can’t remember if I ate 3 or 4 of them; I lost count.

Amid the revelry last night, two podcasts were recorded. One consisted of Sherry and I kind of interviewing each other about blogging, social media, and all that good stuff. The other involved passing the recorder around to everyone at the table, and having each person talk about their blog, why they started it, blogging in general, and whatever else they wanted to say with a digital recorder in their face. Look for both of those soon on Mostly ITP.

Thanks to everyone who came out last night for the festivities! What more could a blogger ask for?

Update: It just makes sense to include a roll call of everyone who came last night, since almost everyone there was a blogger.

Blogs in attendance:

• Alenda Lux
• Blog for Democracy
• The Daily Bacon
• Drama Wench
• Drifting Through the Grift
• An Entrepreneur’s Journey
• Going Through the Motions
• GrabbingSand
• Gratuitous Dumbassitude
• Monotonous
• Peachtree Screed
• Radical Georgia Moderate
• Sodomy Creek
• Spacey Gracey Review

Today’s the day, folks… this five-year anniversary of this blog’s inception. According to About.com, traditional gift ideas for a fifth anniversary include airline tickets or a cruise. I’m just saying.

When I started this blog on April 17, 2002, I was 22 years old, married, living in Athens, and about to finish my undergraduate degree. I was using a 350mhz Sawtooth G4 tower, which was a really nice computer and which I still miss sometimes. There was no such thing as podcasting. There were very few blogging tools available, and the ones that were available were pretty clunky, so a homegrown system was obviously the way to go. Plus it gave me an opportunity to practice (and improve, over the years) my PHP skills.

But now, five years later, in commemoration of this milestone, guess what I’m doing? I’m moving to WordPress. I never thought the day would come! And I bet you didn’t either, readers. I have to say, when I was messing with WordPress last week, getting the new site ready, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the WordPress back-end code looks a lot like my code. Only difference is WordPress has more of it consolidated into functions (which makes sense).

I’m switching to WordPress not because it’s the hip thing to do, but because I was happy to continue using my homegrown system until I began to feel limited by it. And, in the past few months, that’s what has happened. There are capabilities I’d like to have - for example, tagging - that I don’t have with my system. Sure, I could write that stuff into my system, but why reinvent the wheel? I don’t have time, and I’m past the point of trying to “prove” my PHP/MySQL programming capabilities to myself.

So, without further ado - the new site is (drumroll) beingamberrhea.com. Please update your links!

You can grab the new RSS feed at http://www.beingamberrhea.com/feed. Alternately, if you don’t want to get my daily del.icio.us and Twitter updates, you can subscribe to http://www.beingamberrhea.com/category/blog/feed for actual blog posts only.

The old site will remain for posterity and reference, but after a few days I will disable comments.

I look forward to seeing y’all around here!

Today, April 9, is the one-year anniversary of our very first podcast party! Rusty blogged about it at the time. It’s amazing how time flies.

Here’s to another great year of podcast parties! <clink>

We’re back from the whirlwind success that was the Kos Q&A (Jerome was AWOL). Rusty is putting the final touches on the audio; in the meantime, I’ll finish what I started.

As you’ve probably read at Rusty’s blog by now (since I directed you there) this year has been amazing for both of us. Best year of my life - and I’m not one to casually throw around superlatives. We started as friends with benefits, because that’s what we both wanted at the time; little did we know that we’d come to enjoy the hanging out, talking, watching the Daily Show, etc. as much as the 11-on-a-scale-of-1-to-10 sex. Three months later we were officially “dating” (a wholly nondescriptive term, but there isn’t a more accurate one in the bass-ackwards popular lexicon, so that’s what I’m relegated to using), but May 9th, the night of our inaugural fuck, is by far the more significant date. -Incidentally, May 9th was also the first day of the Great Blorgy of 2005; as far as I know, we were the only participants that swapped fluids as well as blogs.

As Rusty mentioned, the week or so leading up to the actual hook-up (another term I sort of hate) was rife with innuendo-laden emails. To wit:

Amber:

As to our previous conversation, while my resume is not up to date, I feel confident that my practical experience makes me an excellent candidate for whatever position(s) you would have me in.

Rusty:

Regarding your qualifications for the advertised position(s), the hiring process requires multiple, lengthy interviews. They all take place in the same afternoon or evening, and scheduling is flexible.

Amber:

I am typically available a few nights a week, although I can be more flexible if need be, assuming the interviews in question are lengthy and multiple as per your email. One of my concerns is the length of the commute, but I trust we will discuss this and other requirements during the negotiation phase.

And so on.

Finally I decided we’d reached our innuendo threshold, and the rest is history.

It’s not often that you can say someone scarred you for life (literally!) and it was worth it. But then, I had no idea that your garden-variety indoor carpet could draw so much blood. I started to have an inkling that Rusty was a keeper, though, when he got out the carpet cleaner (that, btw, is not an innuendo) and scrubbed away all traces of aggro* fucking. Nothing I like more than a man on all fours on my living room floor.

Who knew I’d fall in love with a fella named Rusty who went to college at UT and drives a big red truck? Truth is stranger than fiction - and much, much hotter.

* Ed. note: Pls. disregard inaccuracies in that product of drunken blogging.

I’ve barely had time to think today, much less write long blog posts, but I should mention that today is Rusty’s and my 1st anniversary. I have a whole lot I want to say later - ranging from the cheesy to the salacious - but I probably won’t get time until really late tonight. (We’re about to head out to the Kos/Jerome interview!) In the meantime, take a look at the awesome post Rusty wrote; it pretty much says it all. (And a few commenters admit to being voyeurs.)

Today is an important personal anniversary. I can’t believe it’s already March - and I can’t believe today marks 1 year since I went to Jefferson’s sex party in NYC. (Thanks are due to Dacia for that; and Jefferson, obviously.) How time flies.

I knew it at the time, but especially now reflecting at the 1-year mark, I can say with certainty that going to that party was much more than just going to a party for me. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself; it signified a huge turning point in my life. I know this sounds cheesy, like I’m assigning an awful lot of weighty significance to a sex party, and also kind of like a Hallmark greeting card; but I’m for reals, y’all.

It’s been one hell of a year since then. Overall things have been very, very good. There’s been some shittiness in there, to be sure, but there always is; the awesomeness to shittiness ratio has been very high over the past 12 months. I am a lucky person.

Oh, and yes, I realize this blog post has high dooce potential - not because I’m blogging about work, of course, but because my real name is on my blog and OMG what if my boss sees that his astute web developer is a dirty slut??!?1? People have been fired for less. But you know what, I don’t care. I am tempting the fates of the internets and putting my shit out there. Every day I care less and less what people might think about what I write herein.

Somewhat related: Bitch Ph.D.’s post about pseudonymous blogging. Maybe I kind of fucked myself by putting my real name in the title of my blog 4 years ago; and if I were to start over, I might just go by first name alone. But then again, maybe not. I know people are free to share as much or as little as they choose of their real selves on blogs, and there can be quite a feeling of freedom in pseudonymous blogging - but I’ve always had this thing where I feel compelled to be real (not just when it comes to blogging), even if it has potential to bite me in the ass. So there it is.

Hmm, this wasn’t supposed to develop into a treatise about the relative merits of pseudonymous and eponymous blogging. Oh well, I am nothing if not prone to tangents.

Anyway. Here’s to turning points! <clink>

I thought today was the one year anniversary (or anti-anniversary?) of my divorce, but my blog archives have proven me wrong - it was yesterday. Oh well, so much for doing a comtemplative post The Day Of. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure I feel like doing a comtemplative post at all - or at least, not something lengthy. Insert here the obligatory observations about how much can change in one year’s time, and how we can never really anticipate what the future (even just a year in the future) will bring.

You know how it goes. When I was 18, I never imagined I’d be married at 21. When I was 21, I never imagined I’d be divorced at 24. And so on and so forth.

Last year I had a trip to Boston (and a Red Sox penant) for my birthday - and the concomitant ruminations about the quarter of a century milestone. This year I’ll have a new job*, presumably some sort of celebration with the GDBF and (hopefully) other ATL friends I’ve met in the last year, and some ruminations on the “quarter of a century, plus one” milestone.

* Ed. note: More on this later. But not too much more - dooce factor, you know.