I had every intention of making this blog post the very first thing I did once we returned from wedding/honeymooning and got back to real life.  Instead, I (sort of) cleaned up my kitchen, started sorting through excess reception stuff and today I did five loads of laundry.  I’ve e-mailed clients to let them know that I am back for work.  I’ve set up a lunch date/meeting with Wendy to start putting together what could be the greatest project in the history of the universe.  I’ve (we’ve) purchased a new vacuum cleaner.  I’ve started writing this blog post at least a dozen times in my brain.  But you know what? I’m not sure if I’m ready yet.

For all of my “oh my god I just want to be married and have this whole event be done!” crying/wailing/meltdowning that I did before the wedding now that I actually am married and life is supposed to be getting back to “normal” I don’t know if I’m ready yet.  I definitely have post-big!-exciting!-and!-stressful!-but!-turned!-out!-great!-activity let down.  I’ve been dragging my feet on putting things away and cleaning up the kitchen.  The dozen roses that sat on the table next to the cake at the reception (I think that’s where they sat, everything is kind of a blur) have all wilted (thankfully, a couple of them “died pretty” so I’ll be saving them) but I can’t bring myself to take them out of the vase and throw them away…though this is partly because Will and I are hoping we can still salvage a couple of clippings from them.  My dining room table looks like it was decorated by Tim Burton…and a packrat.

The truth is that it was perfect.  Everything went swimmingly.  No drama.  No bickering.  No tantrums.  The only regret I have is that I didn’t have time to really talk with and take pictures with everyone at the reception (but, thanks to photoshop, later on we can make it look like I did!).

The play by play account will show up in the next couple of days.  For now I’m still in blissful newlywed, not ready to get down to real life, limbo.  In the meantime:

The Newlyweds!

Today I toyed briefly (if you can call a couple of hours “briefly”) contemplating whether or not I should put up a wedding-related theme to freak me out about celebrate the fact that the wedding is just under a month away.  I’ve already written about changing the theme to something new after the wedding but today, while I was trying to get my brain to focus on things that need to get done, like work, I thought “why not put up a place holder theme?  Just to get the theme change ball rolling?”  But you know what?  I do not like ANY of the wedding-related themes that are out there as they are all kind of cheesy.  Of course, so are weddings to a point.

I have my seamstress fitting on Monday and we’ll get Will fitted for his tux next week too and then I have to figure out if we have the money to buy wedding favor bags or if I should save the money but spend the extra time making my own little sachets.  I’m thinking that it will be better to save the money given that almost immediately after the wedding we will need to begin paying the credit card bill.  Which I just added up tentatively in my brain.  Excuse me, I am going to go hyperventilate.  Jeebus.

I’m still really digging the idea of designing my own theme for after the wedding but I do not know if I will have the time to work on it.  I want to put in some extra time on work stuff so that I won’t be completely freaked out about money when I take two weeks off in September (the week before and after the wedding).  Maybe I’ll play with it while we are on our “honeymoon” (where are we going? Or are we staying home?  We’ll never tell!) but I think that that time will mostly be spent….well there will be canoodling.  That’s all I’m going to say.

We got our first present today! I think!  We are registered at Bed, Bath & Beyond and a big ol’ box showed up from there today.  I don’t remember ordering anything and Will doesn’t remember ordering anything and twitter said we should open it now so that we can send the thank you card right away so…yay! Presents!  The greedy part of me wishes that it was not completely tacky to put links to our registries up in the sidebar of this blog.

There is not much else to report from Snarkeland.  Life here has been spent mainly working and trying to focus on work and eating food and bemoaning the fact that it is supposed to get hot again next week.  And developing an addiction to Caramel Crunch & Munch.

Do you ever not blog because you have too much to blog about?

So it’s been about a week since my last post and I have to say that the week has been a full one.

I spent almost all of Saturday and Sunday and all of Monday and Tuesday playing catch up with work stuff because I managed to get really terribly far behind.  We’re talking ten thousand words (or more) days.  For four days straight. But! I am all caught up on work and I cannot begin to tell you what a relief it was to take last night off and just veg on the couch with some Sex and the City on DVD and my yarn.

And then there were the money issues.  Between me being behind in my work and a client paying me late, I couldn’t pay all of my half of the rent this month and had to ask Will for help (which I hated doing and which he suprised me by  giving gladly and without chastising me at all).  And then the bank deducted an automatic payment early and kept a deposit holding for an extra day which left me with thirty six dollars in my bank account so Will had to give me a check to cover my (lessened) rent check just in case it came out early as well, which mean that Will covered ALL of the rent this month.  And can I just say? He has been marvelously supportive about it.  When I discovered the early deduction and was crying into the corner of the couch and calling myself an idiot, there were no words of “well, you should have planned better” or “I guess I’ll be managing the money after the wedding” (which would have been the case at this time last year).  Instead he was hugging me and saying “don’t worry, I’ll cover it.  This is part of being married, we support each other.  Everybody makes mistakes,” and trying to make me feel better.

And can I just ask one question?  How come the time it takes for a deposit to be processed is measured in business days but the time it takes for a withdrawal to be processed is measured in calendar days?  It hardly seems fair. What’s up banks? Why so bastardy?

Finally there has been family drama.  Until this past week it was mostly on Will’s side and surrounded his parents and who would and would not be invited and who was and was not making a big ol’ fuss about it.  This past week it was my family with the drama and the issues and can I just say that while Will’s family is all “this will suck if you do it this way?” and “I’m going to throw a tantrum if you don’t do what I want?” my family is far more “YOU will suck if you do it this way” and “YOU are a jerk if you don’t give me my way” and seriously, it is a lot harder to deal with.  I can handle tantrums.  I don’t like them, but I figure that if a grown person wants to scream and yell because he/she does not feel that he/she has been given the proper ammount of accolade or attention then that screaming and yelling is more of a reflection on them than on me.  But when someone (especially someone you care about) tells you that YOU are the reason they are unhappy or that who you are as a person is what makes their world suck? It is a lot harder to deal with.

Especially when that judgment includes phrases like “ruining the illusion of a beautiful bride” and “ruining our chance for a happy family.”  (Incidentally those phrases are not from the same person–just putting that out there for the record.) (Also, neither of those arguments was with Will who has been nothing but comforting and supportive through everything.)(Perhaps I will elaborate at another time that is not right now and is after the wedding because I cannot take any more wedding related drama.)

Also? My house is a sty.  I haven’t been doing any cleaning or straightening for days (too busy, too stressed) and Will tends not to notice a mess until it reaches nuclear-holocost-only-the-cockroaches-have-survived levels of chaos.

And now WordPress is acting weird.

Oy. What a week.

Ladies and germs, we have an officiant!

Both of today’s meetings went really well.  So well that I would very much like to be friends with both of the people I met with and kind of hope that ends up happening.

Our officiant, Heather, is just a few years older than me and we have tons in common.  Our whole meeting was spent nodding and totally getting each other.  I feel absolutely comfortable putting our wedding ceremony in her hands–mostly because she already feels like a good friend, which is quickly becoming a theme for us.  I chose our venue because the ladies who run it are awesome and easy to get along with and would be people that I would actually invite to the ceremony and to the reception.  One of my good friends is doing the photography.  Will’s Dad offered to do the food.  I am loving that our wedding is starting to feel more like a bunch of fun people hanging out together and less like a Big Event in which I am In Charge and Must Coordinate Everything.  It is helping me relax quite a bit!

So yay! We have a venue, we have an officiant, we have a photographer (thanks Jen!), I have a dress and a seamstress to help make necessary alterations (which is what you need when your butt is a size four but your boobs are a size zero, hello pears I feel your pain).  Next up is figuring out the cake and then finding something for Will to wear.  Will by the way is very scandalized at my Docs and knee socks idea and wants me to promise that, at the very least, the shoes will be white.  I have not yet made this promise because the more I think about it, the more I love the idea of the brown Doc Marten Mary Janes (or the cheap version in the same style).  I am not sure if this is just my stubbornness kicking in or what.

The mortgage guy, Gary, was also very helpful and at no point during our meeting did I feel like I was being sold to or that he was trying to make promises that he couldn’t keep.  He was very big on the “take your time and go one step at a time” approach, which I really like and made me feel quite a lot better about my credit situation (which, I am not afraid to admit, is abysmal).  He offered to help me put together a definite road map to getting us “mortgage ready” in the next year or so.  He was also very emphatic that if it takes longer for us to feel comfortable about starting the loan process then that is okay.  I truly felt like he cared more about helping me than earning a commission.  Case in point: I am not paying one single cent for his help and won’t unless we decide to do our mortgage through him which, at this point, I would totally be willing to do someday.   He also gets major points for making me feel like much less of a loser than I did when I walked in (seriously, I was really stupid in my early-mid 20s).  I walked out of our meeting (during which, in addition to talking credit and mortgages and interest rates we also spent a fair amount of time comparing iPhone apps and talking about rural life -vs- urban life) feeling so much more confident about the whole process.

In other news, today Will left to spend a long weekend geeking out with his friends over in Bend.  It’s a repeat of last year’s WoW-apalooza but this time around most of them barely play WoW anymore.  I feel like I should be revelling in the “all mine! I can do whatever I want! No video game noise in the background! No having to figure out what to do while he plays Knock Out on the Wii or waiting until he’s ready to go to bed! All my stuff all the time!”ness of having the apartment to myself until Sunday evening but you know what?  I am in a complete and total “okay.  I have watched some Sex and the City on DVD.  Now what?  I’m bored! I miss Will! I’m turning into a total girl! Waaaaaaah!  place.

I cannot decide what to do: crochet, read, knit, play We Cheer, eat something (and if so–what should I eat?), watch TV, re-watch the second season of Sex and the City on DVD (the third and fourth seasons get here sometime tomorrow along with the third season of The Closer), watch the seventh season of Friends on DVD (it was on sale at Target) or just go to bed early.  I think I have too much freedom.

Another weekend of lying around and hanging out with Will is rapidly coming to a close and I think I’m okay with that.  I am looking forward to not having to get up early tomorrow.  We had planned to sleep in today but Will’s Dad called at about 9:30 which would have felt like sleeping in if we hadn’t been awake until almost three because something on World of Warcraft was taking longer than Will thought it would.  So…yeah.  Our big “yay we get to sleep a lot!” ended up being, at most, six and a half hours.  Oops.  I made up for it by taking a nap at noon.  (I did not mean to take that nap but it served its purpose)

Tomorrow is going to be a busy busy day.  Obviously I have work to get done–and I have to get it all done in the morning because my rescheduled wedding dress appointment is at two.  I am going to take an Advil PM tonight so that my stress level surrounding this event will not keep me awake all night.  I cannot be tired and cranky tomorrow because, in addition to having to get a lot done and trying on wedding dresses (which could end up being a five minute appointment depending on whether or not Tower Bridal lives up to its ginormous list of bad reviews on Google), tomorrow is the Jen Lancaster book signing at Powell’s!

I am beyond excited to go see Jen Lancaster again.  Her book signing last year was too much fun and I have a feeling that Jen’s brand of humor will be exactly what I need after trying on wedding dresses and being all stressed out.  I still don’t know whether or not I will stand in line to have my book signed (probably not) but just going and listening to her read and answer questions will be awesome.  I have looked forward to this event since it was announced.  Yay for book signings!

Because the bridal shop is close to downtown and the book signing is at Powell’s, I’m pretty sure I’ll just spend the rest of my afternoon hanging out downtown.  I’ll probably return some books to the library, grab a late lunch and just wander.  Or, you know, get to Powell’s really really early and spend my afternoon reading.  Either option is appealing.

Tuesday I am meeting for a free consultation with a caterer.  I don’t really like the idea of hiring a caterer since what we really want is to just do a big potlucky picnic kind of reception but I like the idea of being able to serve burgers and hot dogs if we want to and I do not know how to organize such a thing without involving a caterer as we do not own a grill or the means to transport a grill even if we did own one (larger than the tiny “sit on top of your kitchen table” size that is).  I don’t think I’ll actually hire the person but I want to pick his brain and get ideas to help make feeding the guests more feasible.

Speaking of wedding stuff, I will probaby start putting together our wedding invitation template this week as well.  I am imagning this will involve a few hours of me swearing profusely at Photoshop.

But still–the most important event tomorrow: Jen Lancaster’s book signing! Yay!

I rescheduled my wedding dress appointment for Monday.  Hear me out.

This week has been one night after another of not getting enough sleep.  Most mornings I take a nap after Will leaves for work/school to keep the bad mood at bay but that just didn’t seem to happen today due to a conflagration of events that, because I am not well rested felt quite a bit like a Universal Conspiracy to Piss Me Off.

I am not in a good mood.  This is not a good day to do any sort of clothes shopping, let alone dress shopping.  This is a day for pouting on the couch and being grouchy (until Grey’s Anatomy tonight which looks like it has the power to make me cry uncontrollably for a couple of hours which, honestly, feels kind of like what I really need right now).

When I told Will I was thinking of rescheduling the appointment he told me that I should keep the current appointment and “just get it over with.”

For future reference to all you men out there: the phrase “just get it over with” should never ever be used in any sort of association with any part of the wedding planning even when your future bride is well rested and in a good mood and it should exit your vocabulary completely when your bride to be is stressed out, tired and cranky. Seriously.

So, yeah.  I rescheduled the appointment for Monday afternoon.  This will give me the weekend to catch up on sleep regain some semblance of a good mood and calm the frack down.

To her credit, the lady at the shop I was going to go to was very friendly and thanked me profusely for actually calling to reschedule instead of just not showing up (apparently this is a trend).

So, yeah.  I kind of chickened out (or was possibly very responsible and smart).  Cluck cluck cluck.

So my blog hasn’t been super posty for a while.  The main reason is that I wanted to give my post about Dr. Davaran some time at the top of the page.  My traffic has shot way up because of that post and while I always like getting more traffic, it makes me happy because I think it says something about just how great he was.

Also, to be honest, I haven’t been posting because most of what I would write about would be a certain [insert favorite curse word here] roommate and his [insert another favorite curse word here] moods.  Dude lays on his butt all day watching movies that he streams over the internet (slowing down the connection making it hard for me to work) and then complains about how hard it is to find a decent job.  Will and I have both been sending him links to job postings on Monster, Craigslist, Carrerbuilder, OregonLive–you name it and all of the listings are either too hard, too far away, too boring sounding or don’t pay enough (he won’t go to work for less than $13 or $14 an hour).

Somebody please adopt this mofo.

I’ve started journaling–something that I haven’t done very much of since I started my blog.  I know I can vent on the internet but a) it will get boring after a while, if it isn’t already and b) I firmly believe that I shouldn’t blog about anything that I wouldn’t feel totally comfortable saying to someone else’s face.  For example, if [curse word curse word] roommate were to come out here right now and say “did you call me a mofo on your blog?” I’d respond with “yeah, did you miss the part where I called you lazy too?”  But with the journal I can bitch and moan and whine about just about everything and not have to worry about boring people or incurring the wrath of aforementioned mofo.  Will tells me that I can vent to him all I want and need but…he loves me and he’s a fixer and I’d rather save up my “you will never guess what he did” for a time when the sentence isn’t finished with “he spent all day lying around AGAIN!”  It is quite a relief to have a place of my own to do just that.  And it is saving us money too because my Tums consumption has gone down considerably in the few days since I started journaling again.

But don’t worry, I won’t neglect you oh faithful bloggy friends.

And I will leave you with some happy news.  With any luck and barring a meteor shower or other disaster, we might have found our wedding venue!  I don’t want to put a link to it up yet because we haven’t signed any contracts or paid any deposits yet, but once we do that I’ll be sharing a lot!

Everybody knows that it is never a good idea to go grocery shopping when you are really hungry.  Do you know what the other half of that rule should be? Don't go shopping when you are really full!  Last night, after the debate, Will and I went to dinner and then hit WinCo for groceries (oh yes, it was a steamy date night!).  Do you know what happens when you go shopping after you've eaten too much?  Everything looks disgusting.  So you actually end up making two grocery runs, the second one being for all of the things you forgot or skipped because you just wanted to get the hell out of the store and away from all of the edible stuff!

In addition to the food we bought last night we also bought this month's copy of Portland Bride and Groom. Yes, almost four complete months after getting engaged we finally broke down and bought a wedding related periodical.  I bought a Bridal Guide and Wedding Planner a couple of months ago and have flipped through them, but somehow buying the magazine makes the onset of planning feel even more real.  I'm not sure who was greener, me or Will.

The thing is, I am really looking forward to getting married and being married.  Even now, it is hard not to call Will my husband (which is kind of tempting fate and makes me really nervous).  I'm looking forward to the legal beginning of that life together.  But the whole planning a wedding thing? Makes me incredibly nervous.  Everyone I know tells me to plan the wedding I want to have–the one that is right for Will and I and not to worry about what anybody else wants or thinks we should do and, well, have you met me? I am all about "no, what do you want?"  I know which details are the most important (for me) and I know a few things that I definitely do not want.  After that my usual reaction is a shrug and an "I don't know…maybe?"

This shrug? Has led a few people to feel like they should be my guide.  And while I am happy that people want to help, the suggestions I am being given? Are all for things they would want at their weddings, not taking into consideration anything I've already said I know I want.  For example, even after I declared that I want my wedding ceremony to take place indoors, one friend keeps telling me about all of these great outdoor locations.  And even though we've been telling people that the one of the wedding details we are sure of is that the wedding will happen somewhere in the PDX area, people keep suggesting these areas super far away.

I don't want to turn into Bridezilla or anything like that, but part of the whole "no what do you want?"ness that makes me me includes a way bigger than healthy dose of crippling guilt that accompanies the decision to not do what someone else wants.  I have a feeling that this process is going to make me the single hand that will keep the Tums company in business.

Commiserations?

Oh my God! I suck! Here is some important information that I forgot to blog about:

Today is my neice's 16th birthday.  Seriously.  This whole her growing up thing? Should not be allowed.

So Will and I have finally set a date for the wedding.  It is looking like September 12 of next year.  I was thinking about putting up one of those big glittery countdown things that you see all the time on Myspace, but in the end I decided not to.  I'm still not sure if I decided not to because those things are gaudy or because having one on my blog would FREAK ME OUT. So yep.  With any luck, in 397 days I'll be married!

And my neice? Is 16. 16! It's Outrageous!

Last night was one of those nights. Those kind of nights when you go to bed feeling so exhausted you might actually fall over if your bed was any more steps away from the doorway of the bedroom. Then when you get into your bed your fiance makes sympathetic noises about being tired too and then, just as you are turning your bedside lamp off, he rolls over and turns his bedside lamp on so that he can read just one more chapter, which turns into, you know, five.

And then you start talking about the wedding that will happen someday and whether or not his asshole friend from the game shop should be invited and then, the larger issue, whether or not his sisters should be invited, which leads to the conversation about whether or not we should put faith in his family to remain civil should they somehow all end up in one place for the first time in more than three years which, somehow, leads to a conversation about music to play at the wedding.

And somehow, even though it's now an hour and a half later than it was when you fell into bed, you are suddenly awake! And talking about music! And agreeing not to play Unchained Melody and trying not to laugh about having a fiance who says "god that song is just soooo overdone" and then asking why you would want to walk down the aisle to anything other than the standard organ-played traditional bridal march.

I might have mentioned that I am kind of in love with this one song that would work as an aisle walking song, no matter which direction we are walking. Will isn't too familiar with the song and when I said "it's the people as M&Ms song and the song from the end of Empire Records!" he still wasn't convinced that it belonged on an important playlist (hello! It's Empire Records! Is there a song from that movie that isn't playlist worthy?). So he said "here, we'll turn on the radio for inspiration."

And he turns on the radio? And? No joke? I cannot even make this stuff up, this is what comes out of the radio:

"She's a bitch but she's my bitch."

No kidding.

It was the very last lyric to either a song or what had to have been a hysterical ad. Either way, we laughed ourselves stupid. And then spent a half an hour trying to figure out what the lyric belonged to.

So yeah, it was one of those nights.