ehhh...

Sorry, I'm not feeling so great today so a real post will have to wait.  Be appeased instead by this picture of a puppy.

letters of note

Came across the blog Letters of Note today via another blog I'm fond of, called neither snow.  Letters of Note has handwritten or typed (most often on a typewriter) notes and letters from all sorts of famous people and influential times.  Some are responses to fanmail, and most are quite gratifying to read.

I liked this one in particular, a response to a fan letter requesting a signed photo from Pixar creative honcho, Peter Docter.

yet another reason why i go to kareoke

This made me happy.  And just like webgoddess said, gotta love a practical joke that's really funny but not actually at anyone's expense.  Clicky and enjoy the next five minutes of your life.

Undercover Karaoke with Jewel from Jewel

Honeymoon! Honeymoon! Honeymoon!

This has been my mantra of late.  Anytime I get stressed or nervous or anxious or frustrated with the wedding, I repeat that over and over again (in a fun little singsong voice) until I feel better.  Because no matter how crazy things get, on September 6, Ari and I will be getting on a plane and going here.

That's Club Med Turkoise.  Everything is already paid for (except tips).  Air is booked and they take us to and from the airport.  I expect my hardest decision all week to be whether I should drink my pina colada by the beach or the pool.  And bonus points for being an adult-only resort.  I love kids, I really do, but I don't want to have to deal with them on my honeymoon.  Oh yeah, and did I mention I will be doing lots of this?

Only I won't be sticking my ass out like I'm terrified of leaving the board.  Shoulders back, hips forward!

Cos they have a flying trapeze there kids.  I haven't flown in almost two years and I miss it so badly.  I am beyond excited.  I really hope the safety belts really are that gold color, because then I will totally pretend I am Wonder Woman.

I am predicting a very good week.

wedding photography giveaway

Photographer Kara Layne is giving away free wedding photography!  The deadline is 11:59 PM on Sunday, August 15th, 2010 and your wedding has to take place in 2011.  Check out all the details here on her blog.  Good luck!

covet

With as many wedding blogs as I read, it's sometimes hard not to think "what if I'd done it this way instead?"  Especially with dresses.  There's just so much goddamn-badass-prettiness out there that it's hard not to covet more than just the dress I've got.  But the fact is, some of it is just pure fashion lust, and really, we can combat that pretty easily by sharing the love.  So here you are, my current wedding dress obsessions.

First up is Sydney-based Australian designer Rachel Gilbert.  If I had about 70 billion more rock 'n roll points, I'd've gotten married in one of these:

Next up is an etsy vendor, Peppermint Pretty.  Her style is a little more rockabilly than my taste, but her Pictures of Lily dress just slays me.

Lastly is Romanian (if my google-fu serves me right) designer Maria Lucia Hohan.  Her style reminds me of an Amsale and Romona Keveza having a baby that likes to go to Heart concerts.

There.  I feel better already.

on the docket

So with 45 days to go, things are coming fast and furious.  Some of the bigger things have gotten left later than they should have (thank you blog overload and massive indecision!) but it means they all start happening pretty rapid fire.  On the agenda for today is ordering our ketubah, booking our honeymoon and ordering my veil!  That means I'll actually have a complete outfit, the ability to have a ceremony and a week of total bliss full of booze, beach, flying trapeze (we're going to club med - so excited!) and my new husband (husband!).  This thing is really happening!

confession

I have a confession to make.  This will not surprise anyone who knows me personally, but it's a little wacky, and it's made wedding planning more stressful if not harder.

I am afraid of the telephone.

There.  I said it.  It's true.  And it's not like I'm afraid of the actual object, or won't use it, or won't pick up the phone, or won't call people at all, I just really hate it.  I get really anxious when calling anyone, to the point that I have to spend serious time psyching myself up to call people (have you guessed that I am writing this to avoid calling someone yet?) that aren't my parents, sister or Mr. McGee, and I'm pretty sure they're all that way because I speak to them so often.  I don't know what it is, or why I do it, but it makes life pretty complicated sometimes.

Once, in college, I at dinner 3 and 1/2 hours later than I'd planned to because I wanted take out but Ari wouldn't call for me because he thought I was just being silly.  Well, he still thinks I'm just being silly (or crazy) but I can't help it and he eventually did order me food.

---

OK, so I made the call.  (Yay!  Go me!)  But like I was fervently hoping as it rang, the call went to voicemail.  The downside being that I have to have another phone call.  This is not so good.

balloons make everything better

Image by Ashley Rose Photography via Green Wedding Shoes.

See, I told you so.

useless

I have no idea where I'd use this but it doesn't stop me from really wanting one.

the city so nice they named it twice

When I was home visiting my folks, I happened to remember that I had been planning to visit M & J Trimming (6th Ave btn. 37th and 38th).  I remembered when I was standing at 5th Ave and 10th street... and decided to walk.  Not such a bad thing, but perhaps Birkenstocks weren't the best choice in footwear.  Anyhow, I punctuated my walk with a few stops, on of which was Anthropologie.  Now, while some of their stuff is overpriced to my mind, walking into their store is always a spectacle of loveliness, so well designed.  Needless to say I walked out with a couple of goodies.

A little sparkle never goes amiss.

Not sure where I plan to use them, but I got an A and an S to use for the wedding.  Plus, really, I can never have enough mugs.

And my piece de resistance: my guest book.  When I told the cashier that's what I was buying it for, I got a brief, but clearly incredulous stare.  I don't really care (she did recover well) though, I think it'll be really cool.  It's a kids book all about New York from 1960.  It just tied into my gently New York themed wedding, and it has lots of empty space on the pages for signing.  Here's hoping it'll be a hit!

THUNK!

That noise has been the only thing keeping my going for the last week.  Kinda odd, right?  Well, thunk is the noise that a buttload of nice, thick envelopes make when you drop them in the mailbox.  That's right kiddies, invitations went out yesterday (except for a handful of people that have yet to get back to me with their addresses)!

I had been waiting quite impatiently for them to arrive since I ordered them about three weeks ago.  They finally showed up on Friday and Ari and I worked pretty much non-stop on them for four days.  Well, I worked on them a lot Wednesday and Thursday, but 95% of what I did those days got scrapped.*  In the end, our invitations ended up being 7 pieces, with a grand total of 2 pieces that we didn't doctor at all or make from scratch (though I wonder if adding a stamp counts as doctoring, the amount of time I spent researching and selecting stamps and then schlepping all over town on multiple occasions to buy them and then affixing them, I'm saying yes).  We needed $0.61/invitation, but I decided that the cake was ugly and the dolphin wasn't quite the look we were going for.  I decided to suck it up for the extra 3 cents to get the $.064 monarch butterfly which went a bit better with the colors and aesthetic I was going for.  The international envelopes got the butterfly plus an ecclectic mix of other $0.44 stamps I had in the apartment.**

There were the outer envelopes and the coordinating inner envelopes.  The outer envelopes had the return address embossed, which I don't have a good photo of but looks hella fly:

The actual invitation card and coordinating response card.  We didn't change any of this beyond tweaking the sample in the book (first names all caps rather than all lowercase, using our own wording, some cute responses rather than the tired accepts/regrets, putting "name" before the line on the reply card rather than the "M" which seems to perpetually confuse young single men):

We used the Liberty Bell Forever stamps pretty much because that's what they had (that and flags... eugh) at the only post office open on a Sunday... the grocery store.  I liked that they worked with our metallic color scheme.  Ari, apparently the sentimentalist, liked that they said "forever."  This comment may or may not have made me melt a little.  I definitely picked a good one.  Anyhow!  The reply card and envelopes:

Originally, we weren't going to do info cards.  Then my mother said that the restaurant was going to give us directions cards we could just throw in.  Then what they had was on a full sheet of regular paper.  Then we were just going to print our own version of the directions they had on their website.  Turns out it was just an embedded map from MapQuest.  At this point we were committed.  So we drove to three (four?) office supply stores around town before finding an acceptable paper to print on (the invitations and the color scheme are metallic, so we of course needed metallic paper.  Unfortunately we couldn't find anything precut to the right size, or with much heft, but we got a nice champagne pearl 32 lb. paper and we used the paper cutter the quarter.  Ari typed up directions from three starting points and I edited and added subway directions, the venue address and phone, and our wedding website.  The photos don't really do the info card justice,*** they turned out really nicely.

And lastly, my favorite touch: the belly bands.  The belly bands are the product of six assorted visits to Jo-Ann's and Hobby Lobby.  I made them using four different scrapbooking papers, two different paper cutters, glue dots and a whole lot of time.  I could only find papers I liked in 12" squares, which initially created a problem because usually belly bands wrap horizontally around invitations.  It was Ari's idea to turn them vertically, and it both worked perfectly and looked beautiful.  They did put us over weight for the $0.44 stamp, but I think they really made the set special:

So here for your perusal, is the entire suite:

In the end, I decided I'd rather put them in the inside box rather than the regular one outside.  This particular Post Office has a hopper-thing where you put your letters.  Consequently, the invitations made more of a loud "ssshhh, plop" noise, rather than a "thunk," but it was still satisfying.  I was so excited to be done, I might have made this face:

And oh yeah, Ari helped too, even though I don't have a picture of him with his eyes open to prove it.

*For future reference, buying lots of crafting supplies and punching 300 cardstock tags and bruising your palms in the process before you have the actual invitations they are going to adorn is probably a bad idea.  Save your receipts.

**Yes, some people got a wedding invitation with a cat making a weird face on it.  It's ok, I thought it was funny, and really, no one else cares.

***There was a giant smooshy (yes, that's the technical term) and a fiber in the frame on my good camera.  I couldn't tell if it was on my lens or the sensor.  I hope the former!  And I somehow lost my lens cleaning cloth.  Then my memory card magically wasn't in my little digital camera.  So I used Ari's camera which is really nice, but full auto, and as I write this, I still haven't gotten a chance to look at the images because I can't find the upload cable.

Finally, right?

I'm back.  Finally.  Really.  It's been for-effing-ever (sorry Stefie!).  Most of the last month has been spent back East with the family catching up, watching my sister graduate, alternatively throwing and attending parties and whipping this wedding into shape.  I'll try to flesh these out into their own posts (goodness knows they deserve them - sidenote: I always say "goodness" instead of "god" because I just don't like to talk about religion or god that way when my feelings change about it all the time, but I just realized that goodness makes me sound like I'm 87.  I guess I'm ok with it.), but my mom threw me the loveliest bridal shower where lots of family and friends came from pretty far away and just around the corner to celebrate my happiness!  I was just blown away.  And instead of obnoxious shower games, we made my chuppah!  Well, started.  I'll post more about that when it's closer to being done and I have pictures for you.  And we ordered our invitations (which should arrive tomorrow or the next day!).  Let me just tell you, they rule.

But, before I went away to lalaland, I promised to post about working out.  At this point it's either hypocritical or entirely appropriate to talk about since I worked out a grand total of once the whole time I was home.  In any case, it's what you're getting.

I never played sports.  My high school didn't even have teams (except for chess, we were national champs all four years I was there I think- Go Murrow Chess!).  The only real hobby I've ever had that was physical (not including my knitting, of course ;o) was circus arts.  If that sounds unusual, it's because it is.  But I loved it, I still do.  However, no matter how much I would love to spend at least half of every day flying on the trapeze, it's expensive and not easily accessible (read: no rig anywhere near where I am).  When I spent a summer teaching trapeze, I loved it and I worked out six hours a day.  Not step aerobics or spin class, but climbing a 30 foot ladder and holding on with one leg, catching kids that decided they didn't need to hold onto an apparatus 15 feet in the air, pulling safety lines or acrobatics training during a period off.  My clothes were falling off of me by the end of the summer.

Best office ever.

I guess the point of all that is to say I don't like working out just for the fun of lifting dumbbells in the air over and over again.  I get bored.  So really, the secret, for me, to working out is motivation.  I have a few things that keep me motivated to keep going back, and I think I'll tackle talking about each of them, some in greater detail over the next few days.  Here's what you have to look forward to:

• Podcasts.  Hands down my biggest helper.  Two in particular have made the elliptical my friend rather than my enemy.
• A workout I like, that I've put together with future goals in mind.
• A nice place to work out in.  If your gym sucks, or it's far, or it's whatever, it's that much harder to go.
• Boredom.  The job hasn't materialized yet, so I'm still home alone all day.
• My wedding dress.  I didn't plan to lose weight for the wedding, and I don't have a crazy goal, but the better I look in my everyday clothes, the better I look in the photos that will hang on the wall forever.
• And lastly, good clothes.  Never underestimate the value of pockets and a decent bra.

Catch you on the flip side, children.