Weather.com can kiss my a**

Haha, ok, I'm not that upset. I'm more upset that I allowed myself to look at the weather forecast for Friday than I am about the forecast itself. 40% chance of scattered t-storms. Really?!?! That's probably the worst forecast they could give me. If it's gonna be raining at 5:30pm on Friday, then let it pour all day long so it's obvious. If it's not gonna be raining at 5:30pm, then let it be sunny all day long, so it's obvious. Don't give me this "maybe, maybe not" crap and force me to make a tremendously difficult decision at 2pm on Friday, in the middle of my wedding day. DAMNIT. Maybe we'll be able to do the wedding outside, but what about photos? Grr. I just want to know, one way or the other. I'm really not going to be totally crushed if we have to do it inside - I've made my peace with that possibility - but I always pictured my photos being done outside with blue skies and pretty, natural lighting, and the possibility of having to let go of that dream actually upsets me more. Ugh. I know it has to rain on SOMEONE'S wedding day, but why mine? The better question is "why NOT mine?". It's not like I've done anything to deserve God's favor on my wedding day. I told Him that this morning. I said, "God, I know that I don't deserve beautiful weather. I know that there's nothing special about me that makes me more deserving than anyone else. But I'm begging you, because I believe that you are the ONLY one who can do anything about it, to have mercy on me because I know that you love me as your child. If there's any way that it can fit into your plan and your will, please give us a sunny day, or at least a dry day." I'll be praying that prayer at least 45 times a day for the next two days, and I hope you'll join me :) Thanks!

3 DAYS

Whew. Everything is done. Apart from picking up my dress this afternoon, I believe that I've done just about all I can do at this point. The checklists are checked, the random post-it reminders all taken care of... now, we wait.

We moved everything into our apartment this weekend, very successfully :) Mike and Sarah and Em and Josh came to help us out. We had everything packed up by 10:30am and had everything unloaded by 1pm. Pretty efficient, huh? And ask any of them, we (well, really just "I") had A LOT of stuff to move! For living at home, I sure have accumulated a lot of stuff. And I think I did an excellent job purging and throwing stuff out and leaving stuff behind that wasn't necessary. Ben's mom and his other sister arrived after we had finished unloading (conveniently... LOL! it's ok Amberly, you were VERY helpful!) and helped us do some unpacking and re-arranging and all that. It was great to have the long weekend, because we were able to get just about EVERYTHING unpacked and put away. I was actually very impressed with our progress. We really didn't leave any boxes unpacked, except for some office supplies and books (2 boxes) that I threw up in the loft. I didn't focus too much on the loft because I don't need my study space all set-up JUST yet. We also went to Ikea with Em and Josh to help them pick up their new couches (we took the ones they were using - they were my mom's old ones and we were basically using their living room to store them, which worked out well for everyone!). They split the cost of the moving truck with us since they needed it for their couches too, which helped us out a lot! So anyway, our bed is put together, a lot of decorations have been hung/displayed, new furniture has been built and set up, new dishes have been washed and put away... it's ready to be lived in! It felt VERY different walking in there and seeing all of OUR stuff, as opposed to an empty space with some paint on the walls. It didn't FEEL like "ours" before - now it really does :) We can't just visit on the weekends anymore - all our stuff is there! It's kinda crazy. In a cool way :)

Oh, BY THE WAY, we got an incredibly generous wedding gift yesterday. Unreal. Ben's groomsman/ex-boss/great friend Ron and his wife Jeanne called us yesterday afternoon to see if we were in White Marsh, and then told us they'd be coming by to go for a ride with Ben and that they'd need his Jeep. Hmm. So when we met up with them, they told us that they were taking Ben to pick up our wedding gift, and that they'd need to put the seats down in the back of the Jeep to fit it so it would just be Ben and Ron going to get it. 15 minutes later I get a text from Ben that says "42 inch plasma". HOLY CRAP. They seriously got us a 42-inch Samsung plasma TV! It's amazing! It looks awesome :) And luckily my dad, the home theater expert, happened to be there helping us hook up our speakers to the old TV, so he was there to help us get the new one all set up correctly. Ben was just OVERJOYED - he knew this was the only way he ever would've gotten to have a TV like this, at least in the next decade. Ron told us "if there's anyone in our world that deserves this, it's you guys" :) I just don't even know what to say.

In other news, my zebrafish aren't breeding this morning, which means no work for me! On a normal day that would probably mean that I'd sit around here and do wedding-things on the internet or something til 3:30, but since I'm 3 days out from the wedding and Marina has mercy on my soul, it means I'm going home :) For now though, I'm waiting for BGE to call me back about the HEINOUS bill I got for last month. I'm convinced that they're still estimating on the last person who lived there (they don't physically come out and read the meter every month), because our bill was $89 and we didn't even live there. We turn everything off when we leave and unplug the electronics and everything. And we were only in the apartment for two of the four weekends that this bill was for. If this is a legitimate bill, it won't be long before our gas and electric are shut off! I HATE monopolies. I HATE BGE and I HATE COMCAST. HATE. Lord forgive me, but it's an accurate representation of my feelings.

Gotta go, but quick update - yeah, that bill was correct. Apparently the average bill for that apt is $174 a month. Highway robbery? You be the judge.

My day has officially been brightened :)

So after my relatively somber post from earlier, I'm writing with a far more "jolly" update :) I just had a surprise "Happy Wedding" party at work! It was so sweet! My supervisor Marina organized it and did a very good job of keeping it a secret. Even when she randomly came by my bench and asked me to come "hang out in the kitchen" with her it didn't hit me. And then, when I walked in and a bunch of people were there and there was cake, I still didn't get it immediately - my first though was "wait, when is my birthday... nope, it's not my birthday... did I get an e-mail about cake for someone's birthday today...?" It wasn't til I noticed the Crate & Barrel box on the table that it suddenly hit me, "oh, i'm getting MARRIED! Riiiiiiiight. I get it." LOL. I believe there's a term for that... "bride brain" :) Anyway, they had a card for me that most of the lab had signed, and a cookbook that everyone had contributed favorite family recipes to, and a DELICIOUS cake from this awesome bakery in Rockville, and a gift from our Crate & Barrel registry (serving bowl and serving plate that go with our dinnerware set) plus a $20 C&B gift card (the left-over gift collection money, I was told). It was so sweet, and so touching :) It really lifted me out of this mood I've been in today and brightened my afternoon.

"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.

Cupcakes and blue skies

I just wanted to take a moment to comment on "the cupcake phenomenon". I don't know if this has happened where you live or work, but the chic, hip, cool way to go out for a treat in yuppie-ville Bethesda is to go out for cupcakes. Forget snowballs and ice cream cones - if you're anybody who's anybody, it's cupcakes all the way. The bakeries around here make these incredibly rich, dense, delicious, gigantic cupcakes and charge out the ass for them, but I will say that they're worth every penny. Yummm. I never understood wedding cupcakes til I saw these. I was always thinking, cupcakes are so casual and little-kid's-birthday-esque - who has them at a wedding? But when bakeries that specialize in wedding cakes do cupcakes, it's quite another thing entirely. These are NOT your grandma's cupcakes. So, on this lovely afternoon, sunny and 70 degrees, I'm taking a walk into Bethesda for a cupcake with my post-doc. YAY for "flexible" work hours ;) I think I'll take one home for Ben, too.

And, as for the Dare, so far so good. I really like it :)

Do I dare... buy a Dare?

That's right, I'm giving in. Ben really likes his Dare so far, and I've always secretly wanted one but I was just convinced that it would piss me off. He has NO patience for anything (except his family and me, thank God), so if he can handle it, I'm gonna give it a shot. I hope I don't regret this. I'm already going to pay a $35 restocking fee for returning my phone, and I really don't want to have to pay another fee to return this one too (not to mention the cost of this phone). Plus, if I don't like this one, I fear there's no hope for me on any Verizon phone. I'll probably just go back to the original phone (the decoy) if I don't like the Dare, because at least I've gotten used to the quirks of it and I know how to handle them. It'll still piss me off, but I can deal until something better comes along I suppose. I really hope I like the Dare.

I'm blogging about a stupid cell phone to take my mind off of wedding details. I'm just freaking TIRED of the details. The bigger things were much more enjoyable. This is just, as Amberly might say, like being pecked to death by ducks. Except the ducks are figments of my imagination and they're inside my skull pecking away at my frontal lobe! For whatever reason I'm just convinced, every second of every day, that I'm forgetting something. ALWAYS. It's driving me insane. Yes, I know I'll be married at the end of the day no matter what, but if I just wanted to "be married at the end of the day" I would've gone to the courthouse. This is just part of the package - the reality is, it's crunch time, and what that means for me is, I have a lot to get done and very little time to do it. So it's ok that I'm feeling this way. I chose to go the "big wedding" route, and I would never have it any other way. I'm enjoying it while it lasts, because even though it's stressful, it's a stress that I'll miss a few weeks from now. I'll miss the excitement and the anticipation. I'll never get to look forward to this and freak out about it ever again. I say that I'm "tired of it", but what I really mean is just that I'm tired, period. It's a little draining. If I didn't have to worry about work and I could just bask in the little details of my wedding uninterrupted, I'd feel much better :) Oh well - you can't always get what you want!

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".