Our Christmas Tree

BEFORE

AFTER

License

Warning: Another very typical post inspired by "pre-wedding excitiment" that will leave the rest of humanity shaking their heads and saying, "Why in the world is THAT worth posting?!?"

We got the marriage license this morning! Now we've got 60 days to get married before the license expires.....but there's only 19 days until the wedding! :)

People are asking a couple of questions commonly.
1) Are you excited/stressed/ready/etc? Yes, I'm excited, but not nearly as excited as I'm sure I'll be as the time gets closer. No, I'm not particularly stressed, but maybe I'm not thinking about it enough. Ready for what? I've barely begun my Christmas shopping. Buying gifts for attendents and other wedding participants isn't going much better. I've still got a list of things that I should've done last week, but really won't take that much time when I do them. But I have no doubts that things will come together and the wedding will happen on December 30th and (from my perspective) it will be beautiful!

2) Housing. Yes, we've found a place to live--a 2-story townhouse in Leesburg. It'll be a bit shorter commute for Jesse and a slightly longer one for me (more like 20 minutes instead of 10 minutes). Technically, my drive is counter-commute. But having made the commute for 9-months when I moved here 6 years ago and from stories I hear from others, I'm still losing the sweet exit off of Rt 7 to the college. Jesse has practically all of his stuff moved to the townhouse. My stuff is making it over there slowly, but surely. I'm trying to take a few more boxes everytime I go. I'm still living quite comfortably in the parlour, aside from the fact that I don't have a couch.

Stressed?

I've had 2-3 friends in the last week comment on how stressed I'm not. One friend even turned into a compliment saying that I was just the right balance of excited and happy, but not stressed.

I'd like to be able to say it's because I'm so well organized and that I've got everything in hand. More probably, it's because the semester hasn't ended, so I'm still focused largely on work and it hasn't yet hit me that three weeks from today is wedding eve.

When I start to think about it too much, I start to panic that I am forgetting or going to forget something major. That I won't get around to finding anyone to clear the church parking lot and there will be a major snow or something like that.

But I also know that we have great family and friends. While I don't want to depend on them to do everything, I do know that they'll step-up and do whatever is needed to make the day go as well as possible. And beyond that, it really can't be considered a complete failure, as long as we end up married.

New Name

Warning: The following post, while not typically "sappy," is very typical "pre-wedding excitiment" and will leave the rest of humanity shaking their heads and saying, "Why in the world is THAT worth posting?!?"

Due to other changes going on at work, it made sense to go ahead and make my name change happen on some of the things at work (ID card, business cards, etc). I have to admit, that until today, anytime I saw my new name written out, my first thought was, "What a LONG name!" I had to write it out again today. For the first time, my initial thought was, "I could actually like this name."

I can't say I'm excited about having to sign 18 characters with three capitals (plus initials or middle names), but there are far worse things in life and, after awhile, I'm sure I'll seldom give it a second thought. After all, there are other people with lengthier names than that.....OK, I'm not thinking of any at the moment, but I'm sure they exist!

Update 12/11: When I logged into Angel today, I noticed it had my new name. I hadn't specifically asked for that to be changed. That info is loaded periodically from the main database. Kara must've updated the main database when she printed my new ID card with my new name.

Lack of Posts

What?! We went a whole month without posting anything on here?! One would think that with less than 2 months to the wedding, we'd be doing SOMETHING as a couple that would be worth posting. Well, I can't say that either of us was much better about posting on our personal blogs.

Why the lack of posts? I won't try to analyze and answer that.

We did spend many hours addressing wedding invitations. I'd say we spend that time together, but I had an aching tooth that weekend. Jesse did most of the addressing while sitting at my kitchen table and I lounged on my couch. Jesse getting that done was a real blessing for me!

As a huge surprise, Jesse picked my sister up at the Baltimore airport and brought her into town to walk into the house when I was least expecting it! He also drove on the trip back up to the airport.

Jesse took the lead in getting our vows written. We'd found pieces of 2-3 different vows that we'd liked. He took the pieces and put them together for us. We then spent the next day or so proof reading the vows. The vows we'd ended up using as the base were off the internet and VERY poorly written. They had great sentiment, if you read them as intended rather than as they were written. For example, they included the phrase "until death do we part." I think if one diagrammed that phrase, you'd find that "we" are parting death, instead of death parting "us"--until death do us part.

One Saturday, we attended the Walk Through the New Testament seminar. (Along the same lines an the Walk Through the Old Testament seminar we attended in August.) Now we have sign/word cues to help us remember the major events of the old and new testaments in chronological order and enough geography to help place most of those events.

We spent Thanksgiving with Jesse's family. A very relaxing and enjoyable time. I'm very thankful that his family is so welcoming of me!

We finally signed the lease to rent a townhouse in Leesburg! We should be able to pick up the key today! Jesse's parents just got into town and are planning on helping me move this weekend. Then we'll move as much of Jesse's stuff as possible over the next month. His parents will move his final pieces after the wedding, before they leave town.

On finding a house, it got to the point where one just had to laugh or despair. We tried to put in applications on 3 or 4 different places, only to be told that we were too late--someone else had put in an application ahead of us or they weren't willing to negotiate on the price. Once the application for this place was in process, we got calls from two of the earlier places--for one place, the first applicant didn't have good credit history, so they were now willing to look at our application and the owner was now ready to negotiate on the price for the second place. But we didn't like either of those places enough better to back out on the lease process on the Leesburg townhouse. Though if they'd been willing to negotiate on the price earlier, it would've been very tempting--a house (not a townhouse) in Purcellville.

The final event of November--exactly a month before the wedding--Jesse was my driver after I got my lower wisdom teeth and the other problem tooth extracted. Thursday morning, Jesse picked me up. We stopped in Purcellville to pick up my prescriptions, a few groceries (soft foods), and the tags we'd had printed for the favors. My mother had mailed me (on the previous Friday) something for my recovery, but unfortunately it didn't arrive until today. We made it to the oral surgeons in plenty of time. They took my money and made me a follow-up appointment for next week, before I went in for the extraction. I'd met the doctor previously, but Jesse got the chance to meet him, ask questions, and hear all the instructions for after the surgery. He was also good about distracting me by talking about the heart monitor, controlling heart rate, and how much he'd like the chance to go under general anesthesia.

I had no problems with the anesthesia. They poked me, put on the oxygen mask, and the next thing I knew I was waking up and Jesse was coming back in the room. It was only about 40 minutes later. He helped me out to the car. I was definitely wobbly, though I've felt worse some regular mornings waking up. We made a couple of short stops on the way home--I was fighting falling asleep all that time I wasn't actually asleep.

Jesse helped me get settled on the couch with some ice chips on my jaw/cheeks. I was out for about an hour or so when I woke up to cold water running down the front of my shirt. I changed out the ice bag with the hole and fell back asleep. It was about 5:00 when I woke up more completely. Jesse had gone into work for half a day, as he had some pressing deadlines. He did stop by again between work and clogging. And brought me some food I was craving after clogging.

It's now about 28 hours after the procedure. My mouth and jaw are a bit swollen, but haven't had any real pain. Hopefully it will continue this way and I'll be able to enjoy the bridal shower the church is throwing for us tomorrow morning!

One Month and Counting

Thursday, November 30 - 1 month to the wedding
Thursday, November 30 - 30 days to the wedding
Saturday, December 2 - 4 weeks to the wedding
In less than 696 hours, we'll be married.

There are some moments when that still seems like a long time away. There are other moments when it seems like not nearly enough time to do what still needs done and properly enjoy this time of anticipation.

In the last month:
- I received a visit from my Mom and my sister! They were both here for my bridal shower on the 11th with friends from work and clogging.
- I've had a seemingly un-ending saga with a bad tooth. (Hopefully I'll recover quickly from the extraction yesterday and get to feeling better very soon.)
- I signed the contract with the florist.
- Met with Beth about the food for the reception.
- We mailed the invitations out!! (And are getting back RSVP cards!)
- We wrote our vows. (Still need to run them by our pastor, I think.)
- Signed a lease for a rental townhouse in Leesburg. (Jesse plans to pick up the key today, I think!)
- Got out the thank you notes from the shower.
- Started putting together the favors. 2 boxes down, 5 to go.
- Put together the order of service, but still subject to changes.
- Got the major pieces of the rehearsal & dinner settled (time, place, etc). (Though just got an e-mail that might change some of that.)

Planned for the next few weeks:
- Finish the favors.
- Put together the final order of service & print the program.
- Announcements. Get them worded, printed, and addressed (including pulling together the needed addresses).
- Reception. Put together background music. Work out the order of events. Put together a slideshow of pictures.
- Get gifts for everyone involved in the wedding.

Oh yeah, I still need to go Christmas shopping. I'm sure there's lots more that I'm forgetting at the moment. But at the moment, it's feeling very manageable, in that I'm confident that everything that HAS to happen will happen. At some point, I may have to decide that some little things just aren't happening, and hopefully I'll be able to say that before we get too stressed.