The Story Restarted

Oh ho! I'll bet y'all thought the Saga had been dropped. Never! It's just been slowed down a bit because we've both been running around like the proverbial headless chicken for the last couple months. Unfortunately that hasn't changed, for me anyway, but it's been long enough, and I'm not going to bleed to death, headless or no, so on with the story! (Ok, so maybe I'm stretching the metaphor.)

To catch you up with the story so far, the end of June brought me to the point where I finally decided that, yes, I would go ahead and pursue Charlessa. It had been building for a while, and the beginning of June had me putting serious prayer into the issue, and at the end of June/beginning of July I made the decision to go ahead and stop vacillating. I just didn't bring it up with Charlessa right away.

We had a trip to Ireland with our clogging group coming up in another month, and Charlessa's parents were coming! I was SO totally thinking only of Charlessa and her parents' comfort when deciding to wait until after the trip to talk with them. I wasn't nervous! It would be awkward for them to go on a trip with their daughter's boyfriend right there! Me nervous? Never! It was only for their comfort that I waited, right? Right. (Actually, that did work out pretty well.)

So through July and the first week of August, Charlessa and I proceeded pretty much as normal. And then came Ireland. Oh wow! Fantastic in so many ways! I definitely got to meet and get to know Charlessa's parents, and the same for them. It helped that her parents and I were in the same cottage most of the time, so between activities done with them and just spending time in the same building I wasn't a total stranger to them by the end of the trip. Which was a good thing since I was planning on talking to them afterwards. Charlessa and I took some walks, spent a few evenings talking late into the night, sat together for a week of bus rides, and even managed to get ourselves kicked out of a pub, though only because they were closing down before we stopped talking. :^) And one of my favorite individual moments was toward the end of the trip, everyone was exhausted, and on the bus ride back she went to sleep on my shoulder. Oh, I pretended to fall asleep too, but it was more of a blissful daze than actual sleep.

Quick note: Pretty early on, something that clued in dense ol' me that maybe I wasn't fooling anyone, was that even though the bus was pretty full as we traveled around, after a couple days there was always an open seat left for me beside Charlessa! Thanks Beth!

Finally the trip ended, and though I was feeling much better about talking with her folks, I was still pretty apprehensive. But it worked out better than I had hoped!

Continue: The Story: To Ireland and Back