"EVERYTHING"

The title of this post is "everything" because I have too much to say to categorize it specifically. Wouldn't wanna be misleading and give you a specific title, only to disappoint you when you start scrolling and realize "she's rambling again - there's no way this post is only about one thing." So I just thought I'd warn you right off the bat :) For one thing, it's been a week and a half since my last post. In the life of a person who's getting married in a week and moving in a few days, a week and a half can be amazingly jam-packed. In summary, "jam-packed" for me just means...

• Final DJ meeting (always a calming experience - it's great to have so much confidence in the guy running the party! not to mention, meeting with him always gets us SO pumped for the reception!)
  
• Final meeting with Turf Valley (and PAYING Turf Valley...EW.)
  
• Senior Party & Graduation at Gettysburg for Leanne (has it really been an entire YEAR?!?! Apart from that being sorta depressing, we got to see lots of friends and eat at Perkins for breakfast and it was lovely!)
  
• Wedding gown fitting (you're gonna LOOOOOOOVE iiiiiiiit...)
  
• Smoke on the Water (snazzy cigar event we worked with Ron & Jeanne - we drank wine, poured scotch, laughed at wasted people, and smoked several cigars. Gotta quit doing that before I become a doctor...)
• Special negotiations regarding wedding wine (requiring a modest amount of "no, you listen to ME..."). But now we will have delish white wine behind the bar (as opposed to - ew - chardonnay)
  
• Finalizing seating charts and making place cards (forcing the printer to bend to my will)
  
• Tracking down wedding response stragglers
• Developmental Biology conference in College Park, including poster presentation
  
• Giving up on program covers and handing them over to the professional printers. And spending money that was NOT in the budget).
• Taking program materials to Em's house to work on them, finding out that my vision wasn't working, and going out to remedy the situation by - you guessed it - spending more money. And no, we didn't get a single one assembled.
  
• Building furniture (our $299 table and four chairs from Value City - HOLLA! It actually looks really nice for what we paid, and it's pretty sturdy. I'm satisfied.)
  
• Gall bladder attack (minor inconvenience to the five THOUSAND things I needed to be doing other than sitting in the floor trying not to move a muscle for 15 minutes on Thursday night)
• ...followed by an abdominal ultrasound (no results yet, sorry)
  
• Packing/throwing out/crying over everything in my childhood bedroom (just started yesterday... moving saturday... bad news)
  
• Wedding presents in the mail! Wahoo!
• Spending lots of money last-minute shipping honeymoon clothes because I'm a procrastinator
• Oh, and of course work. Sometimes I work.

I'm sure there's more, but I'm also sure you're getting bored so I'll leave it at that. It's been a LITTLE busy, but it's helping the time FLY by, which keeps me from having the chance to get myself all ramped up and anxious. I'm finally starting to feel like things are in other people's hands and I can chill out a little. Having these final meetings has helped me to realize that, while it's true that these people aren't nearly as into my wedding as I am, they are in fact professionals who do this for a living, and not only do they have their shit together to my satisfaction, but beyond my satisfaction. I don't need to worry about most of the details, because I'm PAYING someone else to worry about them, and that someone else is a professional who can handle it. And there are individual people hired for each sphere of details, so they can do a better job of focusing on their own thing than I can do while trying to spread my worry to EVERYTHING. And it helps that I've gotten a lot done in the past two weeks - I just don't feel so much like there's a thousand things to do, because, well, there aren't anymore! This has given me time, over the past day or two, to start getting REALLY excited for all the fun we're going to have and the people we're going to see and the marriage we're going to start.

But unfortunately, it's also given me time to really notice the bittersweet reality of leaving home. It's been creeping up on me, and it just bit me right in the ass last night while I was packing. I have cried more than twice in the past two days about leaving my dad. Here I go again (at my desk, no less). And I won't be riding in to work with my mom anymore. I'll only see them when I make special plans to visit. College just wasn't the same - I knew I was coming back. Now I'm not coming back. And being an only child doesn't help. Call me a little narcissistic, but I know that my parents get a lot of happiness from having me around. The idea of taking away ANY of their happiness after all they've done for me simply breaks my heart. And I know that my mom has found true joy, and a comfort that allows her to deal with things like this - she knows the Lord. My dad doesn't. I'm ending the chapter of my life in which I had the greatest opportunity to witness to him, and I'm ending it unsuccessfully. I mean who knows, maybe I've planted more seeds than I know, but I know that he isn't a Christian. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. As close as I am with my dad and as much as my relationship with him means to me, this is a reality that I can barely stomach. It makes leaving him SO incredibly hard, and no one else seems to understand the depth of it. People get that leaving home is kinda bittersweet, but somehow the trade-off of marrying Ben is supposed to compensate. There's NOTHING else that can compensate for this. Nothing. Except maybe knowing that somehow my leaving was going to result in my dad coming to know the Lord, and I can't know that, so yeah, NOTHING. He's just such a GOOD GOOD person. It makes me angry that someone who leads such a good life can be condemned to hell just because they were born with an incredibly analytical and logical mind that makes it almost impossible for them to accept the supernatural. I really just need to stop before I head down this tangent, but suffice it to say that I my feelings of excitement for the wedding are at times almost completely overshadowed by all of this. My dad would be so angry if he knew that.