Meet Mr. and Mrs. Cranky Pants

Just so you don't think that it's all hearts and flowers in the soon-to-be Vigneau household, here's how Tuesday night went: I got home from work and dropped off my things. Matt picked me up and we headed to our NFP appointment for 6:30, but we were running late because I was a little pre-occupied with the new toy I bought.

I am the proud new owner of an iPod Touch.

I've been wanting one of these ever since they came out, and when Matt's brother got me a deal on an 8G one for $150, I said yes and picked it up from him on Monday night. I was up until around 1 am that night playing with it, and then I was up again Tuesday at about 5:30 am playing with it some more. I don't have wireless at work, so I wasn't able to play with downloading apps until I got home again.

So after we got back from NFP we had a few projects to work on, the main one being the programs for the wedding. Matt had been working on them for a week, and I'm going to preface this by saying that they turned about beautifully, and I think they're a little funky and very cool. But Matt and I have very different aesthetics when it comes to print design. He likes a lot of rugged, distressed, and more modern fonts. He likes mixing many different font styles on the same page. He doesn't like nearly as much empty space as I do. I like spare and clean design, no more than two fonts, lots of white space and repetition of images or themes.

So when you have two people working on the same desktop publishing item, and those people disagree about the basic elements of style they want to use on said item, you are bound to find them butting heads. Repeatedly. It started off mostly okay. He had chosen a font on the inside which is more classical and less twisty and curly than he usually goes with, and I knew that was for my benefit and in an effort to please me. He had downloaded a background image of blue hydrangeas to go with the flowers the girls would be carrying. And he had used the quote from scripture which I suggested, even though it was one he wasn't thrilled will. But. Since Matt had been the one to do most of the heavy lifting on this project, he was less open to feedback on it than he normally is on things like this. And since I was pre-occupied with the touch, turning to play with it whenever I thought he was going to be working on it for a few minutes, tempers got a little hot and we both got a little snappy.

"Babe. What do you think of this?"

(glancing up from the iPod, my finger still tracing a pattern on the touch screen) "Um, it's good. It's a little close to the edge on the top, isn't it?"

"I don't think so, see how it's all evenly distributed?"

"Yeah, but it's still too close to the top."

A few minutes pass, and then, "I need the list of songs. That's you."

"Yep," I say, and pluck a wrinkled and torn scrap of paper from the drawer in the end table by the couch. "Here you go. I'll get you the songwriters in a minute."

I got to my laptop and begin Googling. "'Hail Mary Gentle Woman' is by Carey Landry. That's C-A-R-E-Y L-A-N-D-R-Y. And 'Sing Alleluia' is for closing. That was written by --"

"--How do you spell 'Alleluia'?"

"A-L-L-E-L-U-L-I-A."

"Spellcheck says that's wrong."

"Spellcheck's stupid. It's A-L-L-E-L-U-L-I-A."

"Are you sure? I don't think that last 'L' is right."

A little testier now, "I'm sure, that's the way it's spelled. The last 'L' is..." Pause as I review in my head what I spelled out loud. Crap. "Oh, wait. That's wrong. You're right, it's A-L-L-E-L-U-I-A. Sorry."

And so it went on all night. I looked up the writer of "Sing Alleluia" and the first couple references I found listed Jennifer Knapp, so I told him to put down her, but then I thought that might be wrong so kept searching and found the correct writers, and their names took up way more room and threw off his design. He asked me if I thought the words along the side could be read, and got annoyed when I said that they couldn't be. I started playing a game that required headphones and didn't hear him when he told me it was ready to test print. When I did print, it was printing very slowly, and he asked in frustration, "Did you print it in black and white?"

"I chose 'draft.'"

Big sigh.

"What? I thought 'draft' was black and white."

Finally at 11 o'clock, it was finished. Well, there are a few picky details still left to fix, like a missed hyphen on one, and I realized yesterday that we didn't include the names of the readers. So maybe it was more like, we were finished. We went into my room, sat down on the bed, and talked. We talked about why we were each so testy, and how we could have handled things differently. We talked about our perception of things, why we reacted to each other the way we did. We talked about what we would do the next time things started falling apart the way we did. And we prayed together for more patience, more consideration, and more gentleness with each other.

Not our first fight as a couple. But our first fight about really stupid things. Is it weird that I feel a sense of accomplishment to get past that marker?