9/9/09

I had a blast at my good friend Ashleigh's wedding this past weekend (pictures to follow soon). It was so fun celebrating with them, and it was kind of nice that it wasn't our wedding yet... mainly because this time is flying by already and I want to really make it last. My other good friend Kathleen is getting married this weekend and I am going to do a reading for it... let's hope I don't trip all up and down my words for that one, k? Once you find the partner you choose to spend your days with, whenever other people around you chose to do the same thing, and you can just tell it's a good decision for them... it just adds to the excitement. Most everything is set for the wedding, but there are a ton of little details that still need to be done. Like buying about 80 candles for all the holders we already have, figuring out center pieces or lack there of, buying Matt's suit (kind of a big deal, but it will work out), finishing gifts, cards, making sure all the technical stuff is taken care of, getting a marriage license.... and, you get the picture. Our weekends are filled up and now our week day evenings are quickly becoming busy, which truly... as much of a homebody as I am... I have enjoyed every busy, crazy, relaxing, fun part of this whole entire process. Regardless of how quickly time flies, th eonly thing I can do is take it all in, just be present with everything I am doing, especially anything wedding related :) and take lots of pictures. that will help. It's fun looking at the guest list and although we would have originally liked to invite every single family member ever, and old friends we care about but haven't seen in a while, I know it is going to be a day we never forget and almost all of our favorite people will be in that room with us.

The weekend...

Friday afternoon I called Matt to see how is much needed day off of work was going and he said he received a present from Diana (one of my mom's really good friends and also the woman who will be performing our wedding ceremony) had sent us a gift. And Matt admitted he could not wait for me to open it and opened it himself (which is great considering all the shower gifts I had the pleasure of opening and he was not there for those). She sent us a book on daily reflections involving life, love, and becoming more aware of why we do the things we do, and how we react to other people. We read the reading for August 28th and it just so happened to perfectly go along with some of the things we had recently talked about. Very cool book. I had an initial meeting with a new client that went very well and by 4:00 I was headed home on a surprisingly cool summer night and stopped to rent two movies along the way. This was the first time in a long time that both Matt and I were home on a weekday before 5 p.m. We decided to have a mexican night. I made guacamole, we had a margarita, made tacos and watched two movies! It was lovely.

Saturday we got out and went to one final store looking for Matt's ring. We ended up going back to our original place and looked at our two favorite again and suddenly one awesome ring took the lead and we made the purchase. Thankfully we made it when we did, because this particular ring is coming from Germany and could take as long as 6 weeks to get here. They put a rush order on it and we were assured it would be here at the beginning of October. So happy about the purchase and glad to mark it off the list.

I am currently typing quietly as my nephew sleeps upstairs. We had a busy night of playing, bathtime, a walk around the neighborhood and then some flipping and flopping like a fish until he found a good upside down pose in bed with two stuffed dog animals by his side. Tomorrow Matt and I plan to get a lot of house stuff done (our basement has kind of been in shambles ever since we redid the floor, but soon it will be all back to normal). And we are having my mom and Steve over for dinner on Tuesday so that's a good motivating factor to make it look really presentable. And then this week looks like this; three kind of long days at the office, Thursday working till about 3 and then headed to Parson's for my friend Ashleigh's wedding! I am one of her bridesmaids and so very excited about her wedding. Then we come back on Saturday afternoon, and Saturday night is my other great friend Kathleen's bachelorette party! And thankfully I am taking Monday off of work and we are having a cookout with the family and might run to a nice park and take a few more engagement photos for the fun of it.

Hope you all have a great week, thanks for stopping by!

Date Night

After a good but somewhat long week Matt and I went out on date last night. We had gift certificates to a nice restaurant so that made date night even sweeter. We dressed up, took our time at dinner and enjoyed a grilled salmon and a bow tie pasta with chicken and mushrooms, both very tastey. We got home, opened the windows and let this amazing fall-like weather rush through our house and watched The Reader. Interesting flick, a little odd but that's how it goes sometimes. Then waking up to the cool air, birds chirping that at one point got a little annoying but quickly switched back over to being lovely as sleeping in on a Saturday can never be bad in my opinion. We ran a few errands this morning, about to take the dogs on a walk and have a relaxing evening. I bought some new art supplies and with all this wedding planning I haven't had the energy but tonight I think I will have to play around in my art room for a bit. Tomorrow my mom and I will be working on our gifts for our wedding party and then I will go to the bridal stoe to get a bustle put in, THEN a cookout at my sisters to celebrate my dad's birthday. Hope you are havin a great weekend!

3 day weekend

I do wish every week we had a three day weekend. I just think it sounds way more logical but whatever. This past week I have been on call for work. I truly was lucky with the smaller amount of calls I got and none of them were later than 11:30 p.m. (thank goodness!) because usually once I wake up, I am up. And I don't really want to be "up" at 2 in the morning if I can avoid it. Like I said it wasn't that bad but I will be happy to turn over the phone tomorrow morning as my on call shift ends because you never really feel off the clock when you are on call. You have to try and stay in work mode even when you are home and that was a little harder for me just because I really enjoy being off the clock. Moving on... we have designed our wedding invitations! They are sweet and simple, and Matthew did a great job on them. I will start addressing envelopes and hope to have them all out by next weekend. Yay!

Tweet this

So, I don't use twitter, or tweet or anything. Not that there is anything wrong with it, I just haven't had the desire to do so... until today. I had a somewhat busy, kind of weird, overall good day but there were times that a certain thought would cross my head and I thought "that would be a good thing to tweet about". Now even typing those words I sound like a huge dork, but I'm okay with it. So my day would go something like this;

"making faces at cars as they pass on my way to work"

"wow, forced to watch over an hour of fox news at the doctor appointment, now really depressed"

"old man just hit me with his shopping cart. i. am. stunned."

*Side note to this thought; I am standing in line at a grocery store with a client waiting for her perscription to be filled. I am engaged in her story and noticed there was no more room to move up in the line and there is a good 4 to 5 feet behind me between myself and the other isle. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I get a nice jab on my calf and just above my hip simultaneously. I remember thinking in my head as I turned around "was that a joke? is there someone i know behind me playing a trick on me?" And I turn to see a short, angry looking old man had just pushed his shopping cart into me. Seriously. His wife is pushing herself in a wheel chair behind him, with their shopping cart list in her mouth, she shouts "he said pardon me!" Now, I couldn't help but say "well I didn't hear him" that was the truth, and I just didn't know anyone to say pardon me once (because if he said it, believe me he only said it once) and then just decide forget it, I am in that much of a hurry and this person is clearly deliberatly ignoring me, they deserve a little push. from a shopping cart. and the intense couple slowly makes their way past. Luckily I was with a client and I had nothing to do but kind of smile and say "that was kind of weird" and we walked to the car. I continued to laugh to myself a little in disbelief, did that really just happen?

Moving on...
"singing regina spektor in my office, hope my boss can't hear me"

"just took the dogs for a walk, neighbor found a lost dog, seriously considering the thought of matt coming home to a third puppy"

"taking pictures of adorable beagle mix"

"new flooring in basement is awesome, but very sad watching jaxon struggle to walk on it... he looks like bambi on ice"

and now "about to go relax on the couch and watch some educational reality show...."

honeymooners

yo! matt and i met with a triple a travel agent this morning to discuss possible honeymoon locations. turns out we will end up finding the place ourselves (she wasn't as thorough as we thought she could be) and then perhaps will go to them for the insurance. anyways, we both got to go into work late and after the meeting we went out to breakfast together. it was twenty bucks. which i realize may either sound like a lot to some people or like nothing to others, but to me at the time it sounded like a lot. i have grown surprisingly cheap as i've gotten older, but i admit it, so it's okay. now truly i just like to save money, and it takes some talking into for me to spend money when it comes to clothes, or good hair stylist, or pedicures (i got one once and it hurt, so besides the massage part i don't really like it) but i do realize at times it's worth it to spend a little more on nice clothes and things of that nature. yes i just said "things of that nature" when i was in training for work i was noticing people using sayings like that all the time but in odd ways "so forth" and "things of that nature" basically wrapping up the answer with a very vague statement barely answering the original question. like ellen degeneres talks about trying to end a story when you are in the middle of telling it and forget the ending... "well, it's a slippery slope my friend!"... made me laugh for some reason. okay, back to breakfast we have a lovely time and as we leave i needed matt to remind me that spending the twenty bucks was so very worth it because we rarely get the chance to do that (even if we did it every day it would still be worth it maybe just a little excessive). between the triple a meeting and heading to breakfast matt is in heaven with the a.c. pumping (his car doesn't have any!) looking over the brochures of mexico we just got, and i am blasting some enya. enya, anyone? other than my mom? it was one of my old cd's i made with nothing but relaxing music on it (great for baths, meditating) and now after work from a twelve hour day. or just pleasantly enjoying a drive with your fiance. believe me, i enjoyed it. i enjoyed it so much that i broke out in laughter and could not stop. my eyes were watering, i was making those weird gulp and quiet laughish sounds that happen when it takes your whole body in order to try and hold in a laugh, matt's crazy look over at me soon forced him into a hilarious laughing fit, and he had no idea why i was laughing which made me laugh even more uncontrollably. (alisa, you'll know what i'm talkin bout... we used to get to the verge of getting kicked out of class because of this laughter). my mom and me in restaurants can get this way sometimes. and now matt and i in the car, listening to enya in a very happy cool state. it was a great start to my day.

My dream last night...

So my dream starts out standing in a room with people, I don't really see their faces or feel like I know anyone but there are people in the room with me. The t.v. is on and there is one wall of windows looking out to a city of some sort. What is happening on the t.v. is the same as what's happening out the window, does that make sense? So all of a sudden on the t.v. there is a huge ocean wave building and building and coming towards us, I look to the window and the same thing is happening and right when the first rush of water starts to break over the top of the window I turn to my right and run to the door. (My first thought is if the water touches me I will probably die instantly... I know this is a depressing thought, but I can't hold my breath very long and drowning is one of my biggest fears). But I am the first one out the door and I start to lead this group of people behind me. I find the stairs quickly and run up a floor it was like we were in an apartment building or something. I am nervous but not really scared at this point, I had a sense that we were going to be okay. We keep running and gather all the people up over the wave so when we suddenly come in contact with the water we are on top of it and sort of swimming in it. I am relieved we didn't drown but now we have to float and swim in this water and I begin to worry about what possible creatures are in the water (I still sometimes think there could be sharks in lakes... not scientifically or anything, just a thought that will occasionally cross my mind if I am ever in a lake). So we start to swim a little fast to where we are near more people and we all seem to feel safe... and then the dream ends. I looked up a few things on having dreams about water and it seems to be pretty common (I have had a few vivid dreams with water) I don't always look up dream meaning stuff and sometimes I think the unconscious is just molding random memories together and making a dream however sometimes I think there may be meaning behind them. I found this online:

"Water dreams also come in the form of waves which may represent emotional fluctuations. If you are currently experiencing a period of tranquility and peace, you may be dreaming about calm waters and gentle ocean waves. This dream suggests that you may be gathering energy and recharging emotionally. However, more commonly people dream of violent and dangerous tidal waves. Tidal waves or tsunamis suggest a period of emotional upheaval. Anxiety, stress, and unconscious materials may be coming to the surface and affecting your daily moods. Giant tidal waves may symbolize current emotional unhappiness and psychological stress, which are threatening to destroy you. The outcome of this dream may reveal how much strength you have to "ride out" personal storms. For example, surviving the tidal wave suggests that you have enough strength to overcome challenges..."

It felt nice reading this so I am going to attach this meaning to the dream I had last night. I know I have a big positive change coming in getting married and all the planning about it has taken up most of my brain space and there have been moments of stress but overall I keep sticking to our original vision of what we want that day to look like and who we want to surround ourselves with. This has been a learning experience for me in some days letting go of my ego a little and taking suggestions, and some days truly listening to my own voice and making the decisions for me and Matt and not anyone else. I had a conversation with a friend about not inviting another friend to the wedding. I know it would still be very fun if we were to have my entire extended family, and all of our friends even the ones we haven't talked to in a while or friends of friends... but we just can't and truthfully the more intimate guest list works for us. It has grown a little more than I thought it might, but it just reminds me that we are very blessed to have really great people in our lives.

And I have grown throughout this process and I know I will continue to. I will come out on top of the water and gain more strength in myself and my relationship with Matt. There is something to learn in having disagreements, challenges, or doing things that at first seem uncomfortable (like a phone call to a friend, or a disagreement with a family member) but you soon find out it's worth it, and it will turn out better than you thought it could.