Hello friends! It's been a while!

I'm in a much better mood than I was for my last post, I must say :) First of all, I'm getting married in THREE WEEKS. I never thought I'd be able to say that. NEVER. It just seemed WAY too far away to ever actually happen. So that's pretty exciting! And we're very glad we didn't change our honeymoon plans, because it looks like the whole flu panic is starting to calm down. As of this moment, we're still going to the beautiful 5-star Omni in beautiful Cancun :) I have my wedding hairstyle nailed down also, which was a source of stress for a while because my trial runs just weren't quite working out the way I had hoped. But my wonderful stylist just kept working with me and worknig with me til we got it, and now we've got it. I've made a few final payments and had a few final meetings - still several to go of course. The response deadline has passed, and of course there are still a bunch missing so I'm having to track people down, which isn't fun but I'm finding ways to pawn some of that off :) It's just an irritation that I really don't need at the moment - there are far too many other details that need attention right now - and it amazes me how many people just don't think about that. Maybe it's a generational thing, and since weddings weren't always such lavish affairs, people didn't always HAVE to respond, you could just kinda show up or not show up. Well, NOT SO in 2009, my friends. NOT SO. I'm still worried that there are people who don't get that who are responding yes and haven't really "decided" that they're actually coming. I love it when you finally get ahold of a straggler and they give you something like "yeah, I should be able to make it". SHOULD be able to? No. You're either coming or you aren't, it's that simple people. Obviously if you're in a car accident or your kid's arm falls off or something, you can have a free pass, but this is not a "maybe" kind of thing. It's someone's wedding. There are head counts to be reported and per-person costs to be paid. Ugh. Sorry for the rant. I just don't quite understand why people seem to miss that point. Well, I do understand - they either haven't planned a wedding yet, or they got married 15 or 20 years ago (or more) and things have changed a lot since then. I do understand, but it doesn't make it any easier for me to pick up that slack. Oh well - I just have to chalk up to the many joys of wedding planning :)

In other news, our apartment is finished :) Well, the painting is finished. We actually finished last weekend but I didn't have my camera with me. Painting the big walls actually went pretty quickly - it only took us one weekend (minus the priming we did the previous weekend which only took about 2 hours. I don't even want to estimate how much we spent in paint and materials for the whole project, but suffice it to say that it was FAR beyond what we ever anticipated or wanted to spend. But, such is life. So here are a few pics of the finished living room/dining room. I'm not gonna pretend to be modest - it looks bad ass ;-P

Not sure what good this picture is, but it sorta gives you an idea of what we painted I guess - the light-colored wall isn't white - we painted it the same color as the light walls in the bedroom.

Again, gives you an idea of what we painted - we love how that angle from the dining room wall juts out. It looks pretty sweet :)

This was my feeble attempt to give you some idea of the color. It's called brazilian ruby - it's a dark red with purple undertones. It looks so great with the light tan color of the other walls, and the white baseboards and such. It's a cool contrast.

So the red took a coat of primer and two coats of paint, but it really did turn out great. No white peeking through, no roller marks, etc. I liked the way the Valspar primer covered (not NEARLY as spotty and patchy as the Behr primer in the bedroom, but then again our technique has probably improved since then), but it was pretty thin and it sprayed EVERYWHERE. I had to paint the window sills and the mantle white again to cover all the dark grey primer spray! But if you're planning on repainting those trim pieces anyway (like most people do, although we weren't going to!), I'd recommend the Valspar primer over the Behr ANY day of the week. I'm also a firm believer in Ralph Lauren paint. We still ended up having to do 2 coats with the darker colors (though we were VERY close to only needing one - a slightly more experienced painter could probably have done the red in one coat plus primer!), but it goes on so nicely and it didn't take nearly as much effort and precision to make it look nice as the Behr requires. I still see roller marks in places in all the Behr-painted walls - none in the RL-painted walls. It's just a more user-friendly paint I think, which makes it TOTALLY worth the extra couple bucks for someone who isn't a pro, especially when trying to do a large project. Just saves a lot of frustration. The tape came off much better with the RL paint also (after the 3 coats in the LR/DR, we had minimal peeling problems as compared to the problems we had in the BR). So anyway, for anyone thinking about doing some painting, that's my two cents. Oh, and start a savings account for it now ;)

I need to go take a shower and get myself together for my evening's activities. Ben is out bachelor partying so I'm distracting myself with a little wedding gift project. I'm very excited about it! Can't divulge much though... sorry ;) Hope you all have a lovely weekend!

Oh, can I just say one more thing real quick? (You might ask, "I don't know Jenna, CAN you say anything 'quickly'?" lol!) Verizon's phone selection SUCKS. I've gotten SOO SOOOOO pissed off at my current phone (the LG Decoy... sorry Em, it plucked my last nerve) that I decided to go get a new one. Luckily I had used my Dad's upgrade eligibility to get the Decoy because my old phone was crapping out on me, and now I'm eligible for my own upgrade. So I went and picked up a Samsung Sway. It's basically the same phone, it just has regular arrow keys around the "ok" button instead of the crazy joystick thing that the decoy has (the element that drove me up the wall). I know someone who has had it for about a month and she really likes it, hasn't had any problems or anything that really bugs her, etc. I got it yesterday (for free, which was sweet), and SURPRISE, it's going back. It can't keep up with my texting speed - not even CLOSE! It's unreal how slow it is. And since it isn't keeping up, if I get too far ahead it stops registering every key I hit so it starts screwing up words. I mean, I'm regularly getting 3 and 4 words ahead of it. I'm not trying to brag about my texting prowess, I'm just saying, it's freaking SLOW. Since the main function I use is texting, I can't handle that for 2 years. Ben got an LG Dare (the touch screen phone) so I might try to put up with this one for another week to see how things go for him. I'm convinced that he'll HATE IT after a week, but we'll see. I just don't see how a touch screen can possibly be good for texting. You can't feel the buttons - you have to be staring at it and focusing on what you're doing. No more texting while walking or talking or doing ANYTHING else other than texting. We'll see how it goes - I expect that once the novelty wears off it'll just be a PIA. That's the only other phone I'd be remotely interested in though, and I seriously doubt I'd want it anyway. Ugh.

So yeah, you were right. I'm incapable of saying anything "real quick".