I didn’t sleep well at all last night. I woke up at one point and was sure that something terribly wrong had happened to me, and in my frightened flailing, I knocked some stuff off the side table, which just made things all the more confusing.

Then I went to the bathroom, which made me feel better. It has that effect on me, apparently.

Anyway, I’m exhausted. And Peggy brought in cheesecake, which has been lulling me into a lactic state of lugubriousness. Yaaaaaaawn.

So, anybody got any good plans for the weekend? I’m getting a haircut on Saturday, at which time I will schedule a practice wedding hairdo. I’ll also schedule Emily’s hairdo. Mub, did you want a hair appointment for the wedding day? I hope they can make my hair behave. I’m wanting something kind of like this:

Wedding wedding wedding. Between the wedding and work, I have an approximately two-track mind. I can just tell that once I have kids, I’m going to be one of those parents who won’t shut up about them, because I’ll be under the impression that they’re much more interesting than they really are.

But, you know, you’re free to close your browser window at any time, so I’ll just keep blathering on about my current interests, work and the wedding.

We had a session with my uncle Jerry, who is a pastor and our officiant, last night. It went well! He liked the general sketch-out of the ceremony that I’d put together. I think it’s going to be a nice combination of traditional and unique. Denny wanted to do the traditional vows (“I, Denny, take you, Aprille…”) and I wanted us to write our own vows, so we found a compromise. We’re going to do the declaration of intent in the traditional style, which will be very familiar to people, and the vows will be original. I really like the vows. I get teary-eyed when I read them. I’m a little worried about saying them without crying so much that nobody will understand me. Somebody remind me to have a glass of champagne before the ceremony to chill me out.

Although that may actually be a bad idea. Champagne also makes me sentimental, which is not something I’m going to need higher levels of. We’ll figure it out, I guess. We also did some planning on how the space will be laid out, and Jerry estimated the space will hold more than the 200 people they were telling us at the museum. Since we’ll be renting chairs anyway, it seems like we’ll be able to fit people in. Woot!

Hi, everybody.

My goodness, this week has gone fast. It’s been a pretty good week overall, though. I’m excited for Thai Flavors Community Restaurant, where we’re going tonight with Jamal, Alyssa, and Michael Tabor. It’s partly for the delicious food and partly for a board meeting. Good old Thai Flavors Community Restaurant is Jamal and Alyssa’s favorite. In fact, they go so often that Alyssa even got a dish named after her (Alyssa Bowman’s Beloved), and they got their picture on the site. They are so famous.

In between doing actual work tasks, I’ve been looking at potential wedding readings. A lot of them are stupid (“My love is a burning flame of heart-love which I share with you, the turtle dove of love and peace and daintiness”), but several of them are really good.

I’ve been trying to be subtle about it, but I keep getting verklempt right here in the middle of my actual office. Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, this poem is so touching, etc. Geesh. It’s a little embarrassing. I needed to do it because our officiant (aka my uncle) is coming to town tomorrow, and he wants to talk about the ceremony. I thought it would be a good idea to have some kind of game plan.

But the blubbering! Oh, the blubbering! Geesh indeed.

New day.

My car Donatella is getting new tires today. It’s expensive but necessary, I guess. There was a brief hailstorm outside a few minutes ago. I hope she was in the car-place garage at that point (though I really don’t think it was a damaging hail).

On the wedding band front: we’ve decided to go with the online retailer. Why? Well, the price is seriously half of what a jewelry store would cost. I figure since we’re going very plain and simple, we might as well save the money. The difference isn’t quite the price of new tires, but it gets me a good chunk of the way. I’ve heard other people give favorable reports about their experiences with e-weddingbands.com, they have the best prices I’ve seen, and they do engraving for only a very modest extra charge.

I believe we’re going to get the one on the left for AC (yours truly), a 4mm band in white gold, and the one on the right for DC, a 6 mm band, also in white gold:

On the new shoe front, I found an excellent deal on shoes for my friend Sarah’s wedding, in which I’m a bridesmaid. The shoes are a Target knockoff of these:

I’m going in for a dress fitting this evening, and the seamstress lady needed me to have my shoes so she could get the hem right.

I feel like I should post a picture of my tires, too, but I don’t know exactly what they look like yet. If I had to guess, I’d say black and rubbery.

I am in a foul mood because my job is irritating me. I don’t know if I was cut out for customer service. I like the part of my job where I just sit by myself and work on stuff without anyone pestering me. All this trying-to-please-everybody-all-the-time is exhausting. A little bit ago someone made a very thinly veiled threat to go over my head because I wouldn’t do something for him that was really unreasonable.

I talked to my boss about it, and he agrees that it was an unreasonable request. So why don’t you just go ahead and try to rat me out, Mr. Man!

Pleh. Pleh.

Update, several hours later: my boss came in and said, “Fifty-five minutes.” I said, “Fifty-five minutes of what?” It turns out Mr. Man called my boss and talked to him for 55 minutes. I said, “Am I fired?” My boss assured me that I am not. But then he had to run off to somewhere else that the 55-minute phone call made him late for, so I didn’t get the rest of the story.

I can see how it’s going to turn out. I’m going to have a conversation with my boss that is mostly supportive, but with a mild scolding for allowing my irritation with a customer to show. So it goes.

…but I can’t find my man-friend. We did drive separately today, but it seems rude to just up and leave without telling him. Where could that weirdo be?

I put like five KitchenAid mixers on my Cooking.com registry. I don’t really need five, but they come in so many pretty colors, and I couldn’t find Denny to ask him what he liked best. So yeah, I’ll have to update that right-quick.

It doesn’t feel very Fri-dish to me today, I think because I had a very busy day and I’m wearing nice pants. Usually on Fridays I have only one or zero meetings and I wear jeans. Won’t it be a lovely surprise when I wake up at 6:45 tomorrow and realize I can go back to sleep?

We’re having Thai food tonight. Alyssa invited us to go out for Thai last night, but we’d already eaten by the time she called. We made a date for next week. However, that got me really in the mood for Thai food, so we’re having it tonight as well. Oh, yum. Yum yum yum.

You know what else I like? Self-adhesive stamps. I’ve been preparing invitation envelopes, and I realized the other night that I was really glad that my tongue wasn’t stuck to the roof of my mouth.

We checked out some tuxedo options over lunch today. These are some that caught Denny’s eye:

Pinstripes
Grey
Navy (would match bridesmaid dresses)
Day suit

I think Denny’s favorite is the day suit, though I’m a little concerned that it won’t be formal enough for an evening wedding. But on the other hand, it’s not like I’m going the cathedral train route either, so maybe a little more casual is ok. I think my favorite is the pinstripes, though.

Hah. I just noticed something funny. In the upper righthand corner of those pages linked above is the slogan for that formalwear distributor: “When You Want HIM to Look His Best.” Not “When You Want to Look Your Best,” or “When a Man Wants to Look His Best.” The site is obviously targeting women who are trying to dress up their otherwise hapless significant others. That’s kind of insulting, because it perpetuates the stereotype that men have no style and that women should be in the role of making them presentable for society.

And yet, here I am.

I have had a very wild afternoon, what with WebCT being all wacky. It turns out the problem was with the file that indicated port 80. But it worked on the test server! Grr.

Also, I have had no caffeine since my morning coffee, and I’m feeling sluggish. I feel as though I am a slug. Please don’t pour salt on me. Augh!

I love you, Mom and Dad. Thanks for helping me feel less stressed out about the wedding.

Did you know that it’s almost morel season? I deeply, deeply love morel mushrooms. Here’s a picture of a man I don’t know with a giant morel. Denny’s lucky that the guy in the picture has stupid facial hair, because otherwise I might have to marry him instead, just to get at his morels!

Just kidding.

Well, I was in a bit of a funk, but then Daphne came to visit the office and I feel much better. She got a kick out of the wiggling snail toy I had on my desk. Oh, how she laughed!

Thanks, Daph.

I added a song request message forum to the wedding website, so if you have a favorite song that you absolutely must hear, post a message there. We already have a pretty decent playlist forming, but I’m always open to suggestions.

I apologize for the obnoxious pop-up ads. Such is the nature of a free service.

This weekend I addressed approximately one buttload of invitations. This whole wedding planning thing has made me much more sensitive to the challenges involved with assembling a guest list. It’s really, really hard! Our space only holds 200 people, and Denny’s family is giant. It really sucks to have to cut friends because of obligatory invitations to second cousins neither of us really knows. Our list already has like 310 people on it. I’m hoping people have a lot of conflicts and can’t come.

When an old college roommate of mine got married a couple of years ago, I was kind of hurt that I wasn’t invited. But looking back on it now, I completely understand her perspective. There are so many people I wish I could invite that I just can’t. Honestly, I hadn’t talked to the roommate in probably a year, so it made sense to snip me. Heck, I’m not inviting her, and it’s not an act of revenge or anything. It’s just such a tricky balancing act, and if I haven’t talked to someone in a year, that’s a pretty good indicator that he/she belongs on the cutting room floor.

There’s this wedding-related message board that I follow, and someone made a comment that when she first started thinking about her wedding, her main goals were that it be relaxed and fun. Now she’s having nightmares about it. I feel the exact same way. I hate that I’m getting so stressed out about something that’s supposed to be a joyous event, and there are so many cultural expectations and potential hurt feelings. I hate that every obligatory invitation to someone I barely know and haven’t seen in eight years means cutting a friend. I hate that no matter how sensitive I try to be to people’s concerns, there will be resentment, because every choice has a consequence.

*sigh*

I’m tired. It’s Monday. Please cheer me up by requesting lots of awesome rock-out songs.

I slept waaay in this morning. It’s almost 11 now, but it doesn’t feel that late at all because I haven’t even been awake for 12 hours.

It was a very relaxing day. I had to get a couple of things from Hy-Vee, and I decided to walk there because it’s only like 7 blocks, it was warm out, and I didn’t need to get anything heavy. On my way back, I saw a man lying on a lawn. It was very strange. He had one hand on his chest and the toes of his cowboy boots were pointing straight up at the sky. I was on the opposite side of the street, but I was very concerned about whether he was dead or just napping.

Argument 1: He was napping.
Points in Argument 1’s favor:

• The hand that wasn’t on his chest was behind his head, so his elbow was pointing up at the sky too, just like his cowboy boot toes.
• It was pretty nice out, so presumably someone might like to nap in the front yard.
• It’s a busy enough street, and enough people were out gardening and walking dogs and stuff that someone probably would have seen or heard when he fell to the ground, if it had been a heart attack or something.

Argument 2: He was unconscious, having suffered some sort of trauma
Points in Argument 2’s favor:

• He was lying directly on the lawn, not on a blanket or in a hammock or anything.
• The hand-clutching-chest thing.

I think he must have just been sleeping, because Denny and I went out to the landscaping store just a few minutes later, and the guy was gone. Either he woke up and got up or someone hauled him to the hospital.

It’s funny how that unconcious cowboy doesn’t even know that he’s the star of a post on the real live Internet. Art surrounds us, people. Live and love, I command you.

Whoops. I started a post today at work, and then I got distracted (probably by genuine work), and I forgot to save and upload my post. Oh well. I don’t think it was anything groundbreaking.

We got the quote from the caterer. Yikes! It looks like we’re going to have to trim back, because it’s pretty expensive, and that’s before beer and wine. That’s disappointing, because I really love food and I was excited about having such a great menu. I don’t know…I guess we could only provide beer and not wine, and that would take a big chunk out of the food/drink budget. We’ll have to think about it. I like wine almost as much as I like food, though! It’s a pickle.

Or lack thereof.

In good news, I took Danny’s invitation designs to the print shop and they made me some proofs on nice paper. They look really good! I’m very excited about them. At the last minute, I asked Danny to do a version where the type is in blue. Being the long-suffering designer he is, he gave in to my whims, but he was pessimistic about how well he’d be able to match the color with just a web image for comparison. Well…he did a great job. I actually really like the color version a lot. It’s more expensive to print color, of course, so we’ll have to see how the old budget is doing, but they look really beautiful.

Happy birthday to Daphne! Holly should know that she and Daphne are welcome here at the office any time. I miss them.

There’s finally sunshine today, after a couple of rainy days in a row. I’m looking forward to getting outside for a bit later this evening.

By the way, I am halfway considering moving across town so my future children will attend West High instead of City High, which is near where we live now. Why?, you ask. It’s because the West High biology program does a biannual (or is it biennial? anyway, it’s every other year) trip to…

get this…

THE GALAPAGOS ISLANDS.

How freaking awesome is that? My coworker Mike’s daughter is a student at West, and he went on the trip with her as a chaperone. It looked amazing–iguanas as far as the eye could see. There were a lot of other cool things too, like penguins and turtles and red crabs and blue-footed boobies.

Then it occurred to me that perhaps people can go to the Galapagos Islands without attending West High. I am researching options.

Denny and I scoped out lawnmowers tonight. Rumor has it his aunt and uncle are going to be getting us an early wedding present in ladder form, so that’s one household expense it would be great not to have. However, a lawnmower remains necessary. We think we’re getting this one. We happened to be driving my car tonight, though, which is why we haven’t bought it yet. We have to go pick it up when we have Denny’s car, because mine isn’t big enough to transport it.

In wedding news, we went to the Co-op to make some selections and get a quote for our reception food. They’re going to work up a quote and send it to us, but we have tentatively picked the following options. Note: this may change if it turns out we can’t afford it.

• House-Smoked Whole Salmon, served with aioli, capers, pickled onion, diced tomato, cucumber, lemons, and crostini
• Shrimp tray, gently steamed to perfection with lemon, herbs, and spices, served chilled with cocktail sauce and fresh lemon
• Garden vegetable tray
• Seasonal fresh fruit tray
• Meat and cheese tray: all-natural Midwest cheese (Cheddar, Swiss, smoked Provolone, and pepper jack) arranged with Niman Ranch ham and roast beef, Applegate turkey, salami, and pepperoni
• Mini beef Wellingtons
• Asian stuffed mushrooms (vegan)
• Sesame chicken skewers with apricot mustard sauce
• Chive pancakes with creme fraîche and red onion confit (vegetarian)
• Corncakes with mango salsa (vegetarian)
• Vegetarian California hand roll sushi (vegan)
• Gougeres (seasoned puff pastry) with Gruyere cheese and Andouille sausage
• Piña-a-go-go (spiced pineapple on a stick–vegan)
• Mini empananas (chicken and onion with raisins)

That list might be a little on the extensive side. The problem was that we went there right before dinner, and we were really hungry, so everything sounded really good. It was reassuring to know that we can cut things if need be. Still, though–yum-o-rama. We get to go in for a tasting in May. Whoop-whoop!

10. We saw a lady in the hotel elevator with a giant rock on her finger. Later, in the hotel bar, we were sitting by a window that faced out to the lobby, and we saw her again. We thought the glass that separated us was darkened in such a way that she couldn’t see us. Later, we found out that she could totally see us gawking at her ring.
9. The gift-opening session. No description necessary.
8. I got my first manicure and pedicure. It was fun and very relaxing.
7. I went out in public with truly tasteless headgear (I was feeling a little stuck up about it, but my friends convinced me it would be fun, and actually it was. The funny part was that women always knew immediately what they were, but it took men forever to figure it out).
6. Emily got a number from a guy in the parking ramp. She is too hot to handle, I tell you what.
5. Gary Sinise was staying on the same floor as us at the hotel. I didn’t bother him, though, because he looked like he was just on vacation with his family and didn’t want to be pestered. He was shorter than I expected, but also handsomer.
4. My co-bachelorette Sarah’s sister Rachel scored us many free drinks. She is very persuasive.
3. We ate delicious tapas at a fun place called Café Ibérico.
2. I had my picture taken with a drunk, terribly sunburned Mike Ditka.

1. I got to spend time with my wonderful, brilliant, gorgeous friends. See the (almost) full picture set here. The more incriminating pictures are password-protected, for the eyes of attendees only.

This is your bachelorette signing off. I’ll be back on Sunday.

Would you like to see some funny fake romance novel covers? See the full set here.

Maybe If I find the time, I’ll mock up some of my own and contribute them to the site. It relies on contributions from viewers like me.

I get so much done when I don’t have meetings. Today I:

1. Got to work at 8, answered some email.
2. Walked over to the hospital to have some bloodwork done (Explanation: when I was having my most recent physical, my doctor asked if I was planning to get pregnant in the next year or two. I said, “Yeah, maybe.” So she ordered some bloodwork to find out whether my immunity to various diseases has lapsed since my childhood innoculations. If it has, it’s a good idea to get re-immunized pre-pregnancy. So hold your horses, Mom, this is all very preliminary.)
3. Got my blood taken. At first I was creeped out by the phlebomotist (she was munching on a half-eaten bagel as she sat down to stab me), but she actually did a great job. I barely felt it at all. If any of you are patients at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics OB/GYN clinic, I highly recommend Deb the Phlebotomist. I’m requesting her next time. Who knows, she may even share her bagel with me.
4. Came back to the office, did more work.
5. Sent directions and a map to my friends who are coming to my house on the way to Chicago Friday.
6. Over lunch, went downtown. Mailed 20 Euros to an out-of-town friend who needs Euros to buy some Swedish CD or something.
7. When to Zephyr copies and got a proof of our wedding invitation. Pretty!
8. Bought an outfit on sale (white pants and gauzy green top).
9. Came back to the office and did work that isn’t even due till Friday. I hope I get good karma out of it, because it’s a document lending my support for some new computer equipment for Spanish TAs. I sure would have appreciated that when I was a grad student.