let me entertain you!

a few days ago my cousin sent me an email. it looked weird, like spam, so i didn’t open it.

when i talked to her on the phone yesterday she mentioned the email and i told her i didn’t open it. she told me to. it was a message from a friend of hers, saying that he knew someone doing casting for a new show about newlyweds. so i applied….

here is our application and the pics we submitted:

Names: B.B. (age 27) & Terra Maples (age 29)
Phone: 913-xxx-xxxx
Wedding Date: September 10, 2011

Hello, I am Terra and the tall drink of water in the pictures is my boyfriend+, Bryce (i am not a fan of the word fiance). I am a flighty, outgoing, artistic type. He is a laid-back, intelligent, mountain man.

Bryce and I met on match.com in 2008. I was tired of dating the same kind of guys i always dated (READ: musician types without jobs) and he had signed up as part of a bet with a roommate. Our first date was to the Opera. He had randomly bought season tickets and the first show was the day he called me. It was last minute, but I had never been to the opera, and I really liked my interactions with him, and had promised myself i would take any date i was offered…i was writing a blog about them.

We hit it off. He left to travel for work for a few months and we he got back he couldn’t get rid of me.

In March of this year we decided to ditch the city (Kansas City) for the country. We were ready to buy a home, but we didn’t want to move to the suburbs. So we chose to be closer to family and live in the beautiful Ozark mountains around Beaver Lake. We found a house. Placed an offer and the offer was accepted. I quit my job. We lost the house over an inspection. Whoops! I went to spend two weeks with my best friend in Brooklyn and while I was there Bryce came up to join us for a weekend. And we got engaged, surrounded by friends and a drag queen singing karaoke. You can read all about that here if you like, but you asked me to keep it brief. We came back, found another house and at the end of June we packed up all our crap and our two pups and headed for Garfield, AR, population 490.

We knew we didn’t want a long engagement, so after figuring out that a friend of ours (who shoots weddings) had one free day between June and November, we picked it! September 10 aka 9/10/11. We are getting married in my aunt’s yard in rural southern Missouri. I wasn’t someone who knew what I wanted out of my wedding since I was little and that has been a blessing and a curse. However, there is a lot of love and history and family intertwined into our wedding. And I honestly just can’t wait. Since I haven’t been working, I haven’t been overly stressed out with wedding-ness and for this I will be forever grateful. Bryce and I take pride in our relationship for being so easy and I really wanted to keep that state of being through what could have been a super stressful situation. It is one big day to signify the coming of many, many more big, little and in between days.

The next year should be a pretty busy one for us. We moved from a 1,100 sq.ft. rental to our 3,600 sq.ft. home. We can currently furnish almost half of it. Bryce is planning on building a rock climbing wall in it. It needs painting and some other cosmetic fixes. Bryce is a mr.fixit, so a lot of the work will be done by us. I will also be going back to work, or trying to (thanks for coming back recession) in a town that I know NO ONE. I will still be trying to keep up with my blogging and hopefully getting more into creating art to sell. We are still adjusting to being away from the city and our friends, who have always been a huge part of our life, and on the flip-side, adjusting to being close to family. Throw some newlywed sauce and conversations about when to start our family on top of that and it should be a year for the memory books.