Our original plan for our anniversary weekend was to travel to West Virginia and visit New River Gorge National Park. However, two weeks prior to our trip, Greg sprained his ankle playing basketball! So we changed our Airbnb reservation to October to give his ankle time to heal.
Our wedding anniversary in 2021 fell on a Thursday, which also happened to be grocery shopping day! So after work we had an anniversary date to Aldi and Target. Since the pandemic, one of the only times we go out is to get groceries together once every two weeks. We actually have fun together so calling it a date wasn’t too far off! I even wore a cute dress for fun. On Friday, the halfmoon cookies I ordered from the bakery we used for our wedding arrived so we got to enjoy those!
Greg was really busy with work, so he had to spend lots of time doing that over the weekend. We still made time for some fun though! We got a pizza on Saturday night and had a bonfire, and on Sunday night we watched some episodes of Malcolm in the Middle – one of our favorite shows!
Finally, the first weekend of October arrived and we got to take our overnight trip to West Virginia! It was a quick trip, but we had lots of fun. New River Gorge National Park is only 3 hours away so I’m sure we’ll be back to explore some more. You can read more about our trip in this other post!
We exchanged gifts about a week early this year because I accidentally saw the gift that Greg got for me. It wasn’t my fault, I swear! It’s online marketing’s fault, actually. It started after I got home from a dentist appointment and mentioned to Greg that I love the X-ray bib they put on you because it’s weighted so I think I would like a weighted blanket someday. He took note of this and searched weighted blankets to get me as a gift. Suddenly, I started getting ads on social media for weighted blankets! It must be because we are on the same Wi-Fi, but these targeted ads are going a little too far if they are showing me ads based on the search history of other people in the house. I guess I need to go incognito to search for gifts now! I tried to ignore the ads because I didn’t know for sure that’s what he was getting for me. But then the package arrived and I saw the name of the brand, Bearaby, that I had been getting ads for online. Greg had just sprained his ankle, so I brought the package inside for him since it looked like it was going to rain. I admitted I saw the brand name on the package, so we decided just to exchange early since I already had an idea what it was. I didn’t know what color he chose though! I really like it! It’s braided fabric so it’s breathable which is nice because I get really hot when I sleep.
My gift to Greg also has a backstory! In the past, I’ve made photo albums on Shutterfly and I love to design them! I realized we didn’t have a photo album of our trip to Las Vegas and our hike to the Grand Canyon where we got engaged in 2017. So, I made a photo book by combining the photos with the commentary I wrote on my blog. When it came, the formatting was all wrong! When I looked at my project online, everything looked perfectly aligned, but the printed version had large spaces between paragraphs of text, which caused the words to not all fit on the page and become cut off or obscured behind the photos. I contacted Shutterfly and they gave me a voucher to order a new one. I thought maybe something was wrong with their printing process that day or something. But when I received the second one, it was the same! I contacted them again and they suggested to make the large amount of text into several text boxes instead of one large text box because it may be near the character limit. I didn’t see how this would help, but I gave it shot. I reformatted it and reordered it to find it still was misaligned when printed! This went back and forth several times until I ended up figuring out the problem myself! The problem was with their editing software. For whatever reason, if I was typing in a text box and hit “enter” to start a new paragraph, the software would make all the lines after that double spaced. But this didn’t show on the editor or the preview – only once it was printed. So to avoid the formatting issues, I made each paragraph its own text box and avoided using “enter” at all costs. Finally, the fifth version I received was correct. Phew! The book I gave Greg when we exchanged gifts was not the final version, but at least he could get the idea while I figured out the issue.
Overall, we had a wonderful 4th anniversary and I’m excited to plan out what we will do for our 5th anniversary in 2022! We have tickets to see Elton John in September 2022, so if Covid allows that to happen, that’s how we will celebrate!
Thanks for reading!
-Rebecca
Flourish & Blogs 