Invitations and Dresses and Pictures, Oh My

Well, the timing is a little off, but I have pictures and they need to be posted!  So here are pics from the wedding invitation stuffing party-like fun times with Erin and Lindsay and lots of red wine!

 

 The other pre-wedding picture-taking extravagana was the somewhat epic, mostly really long and exhausting wedding dress hunt. The search for "the dress" consisted of hours and hours of online searching, somewhere between 5 and 7 store visits, lots of help from my mom and friends and an eventual happy ending that didn't include "the feeling" but did include satisfaction and good feelings. 

Here's a ridiculous amount of pictures to give you a feeling of how it all went down, and also to show off many of the dresses I didn't get.

There were SO. MANY. DRESSES.

Dress shopping was intense and this was pretty much how it felt.

This was almost the dress.

Could've been. Did have doo dad's afterall.

The skirt was so poofy!

 

Trying on dresses starts as fun and ends in yawns.
Sadly, this was only about halfway through the first  trip.

We tried to keep our spirits up though!

My Mommy found a pretty dress too!

We whipped out our hipster poses.

The matchy matchyness was totally coincidental and lead to adding another color to the navy and silver scheme.

This was the first dress I tried on. I totally fell in love with it at the time, but in the end it wasn't the one.

At my mom's request I tried on this SUPER poofy dress AND the crazy long cathedral veil. She cried.

I was also very close to getting this one at one point.

It was decided that this was the most flattering and also least me-like dress tried on.

I also this one on like 4 times and almost got it.

In the end, this is the one I went with. Maybe not the best picture of the dress, but I still rather like it  ;)

Honeymoon Highlights!

First blog post of married life! Woohoo! After a whirlwind of family shindigs, friend gatherings, moving mayhem and wedding celebrations Big and I were more than ready for some honeymoon r&r. The main part of our trip was CRUISIN in the western Caribbean but we also spent a couple of days before hand in SoBe (South Beach) Miami.  

Much to Big's dismay, we spent a couple hours of his birthday evening (also the day after the wedding) looking for our Miami hotel.  We crammed in as much research as possible into a short amount of time and decided to go with a hotel that had a great price, very mixed reviews and seemed like a great location - The Hotel Shelley . 

We were relieved and excited when the hotel's location was indeed amazing and the hotel itself was charming and our room (which they upgraded for free!) was perfect.

Our hotel was super close to the shopping district as well as the beach. They were experiencing horribly "cold" weather there - 60-65 degrees. It may have been cold to them, but it felt downright balmy to us.  

This shirt was EVERYWHERE and fairly hilarious I thought.

It was Art Deco Weekend, so there were neat booths and street performers all along Ocean Drive.  We watched Kate and her Amazingly Dangerous and Amazing Show.  She was pretty talented and very funny.

After a couple of days in SoBe we were ready and excited for our cruise.  It was fun, relaxing and an overall recommended experience.  We went on Carnival and had as much fun on the ship as off. Vegas-like shows, comedy acts at the Punchliner Comedy Club, a casino, live music everywhere, a giant outdoor movie screen, a romantic balcony, 24hr room service and food food, food, food. One fun little touch, was that they left towel animals in our room every night along with the FunTimes listing of everything going on the next day.

We had a truly wonderful time and went on very neat excursions. We saw the Mayan ruins at Tulum, checked out the port area on Grand Cayman and walked up the Dunns River Falls 600' waterfall in Ocho Rios, Jamaica.  Ryan documented quite a bit of our adventure on our new Flip video camera with the intention of sharing it here.  We'll try to post it soon!

keys

Today was a hard day. It was my last day at a job I've been at and loved for 5 years. The day came and went rather uneventfully. I helped a few people, tied up loose ends, finished deleting old files, cleared off my shelves. My going away party was a month ago, and it kind of felt like any other day, or maybe like the day before you go on vacation. I teared up once when I said goodbye to one of my sweetest coworkers but other than that, I was pretty emotionally detached. Nothing really hit me until later when I looked at my key chain and realized it was almost empty. No more keys for work. No more keys to my apartment. My life here in Boise is being slowly erased...

The upside to the day, was that my G-ma came into town! We had dinner with her, my parents and my brother. It was so nice.

Everything these days is bittersweet.

Sharing is Hard

This year marked our first set of shared holidays. For Thanksgiving, we did an early meal with Ryan's family and a late meal with mine. Aside from being ridiculously full, I think it turned out really well. The inconvenience for our families was relatively low and we each got to share and partake in the each other's family traditions. Christmas was a little more difficult.

Both of our families do a Christmas Eve get together but consider Christmas Day to be the Big Deal. This year, we spent Christmas Eve with Big's fam and Christmas Day with mine. Lesson learned: sharing is hard. Neither of our families were fully happy with this arrangement and neither were Big and I. Christmas is such an important holiday in both of our families, and there are so many traditions and expectations surrounding it that the change was kinda hard to take.  Ryan and his family made the big sacrifice this year by being the first to forgo spending the Day together. Our intention is to swap next year, and do Christmas Eve with my family and Christmas day with his. I'm hoping this will be a little easier next year, but I have my doubts. It makes me wonder what it will be like when Ryan and I start making our own traditions.

Any tips or advice on how to navigate these choppy waters? Do you or have you ever had to deal with sharing holidays? How did/do you handle it?

Scottish Enlightenment.

I have finally bottled the Scottish/Scotch Ale I brewed three months ago. I got 50 bottles out of it, and did so by sacrificing some of my old homebrews which I haven't been able to get through. A quick review of the three I've bottled before this one:

1) Elbro Nerkte "My Way" English Brown Ale. This is my first, and favorite of the three. It's a simple English Brown Ale that's quite drinkable. The roastedness of it will get a little out of control after the first beer, but that's okay. Other people seem to give it a relatively solid rating, for a first beer at least.

2) Walter Williams Imperial Porter Prototype - I labeled them as the Walter Williams beer, but the way this turned out I need to revoke the name. It's sweet - very sweet, and is almost like drinking prunes. And it's pretty thick. I can't get through a single one. Jered, who was over tonight, gave it positive reviews.

3) Maple Syrup Amber - Sigh. I was expecting so much out of this one. Two mistakes I think I made: Not enough Maple Syrup. I can't taste it. It tastes like a normal amber. Second: Primed with too much sugar and maple syrup. I'm sticking with actual sugar from now on. It got overcarbonated, which makes actually deciphering the taste even harder.

In the fermenter) A North Berlin Sour Ale - It was on sale for $15. I did not realize that it was a sour beer, but it is. I'm really frightened.

Next) Black IPA!

Just Bottled: It's called Karl's 90 schilling, from Northern Brewer. Looked Tasty. I brewed it like, what, three months ago? I was supposed to transfer to another fermenter after two weeks, but I didn't. It was full. This will be my empirical test as to whether leaving it in with the dormant yeast makes the beer taste like bread. I hope not.

So... Buffy.

I've been meaning to make a post about this for a while. I have a personality trait which makes me pretty much dive into things, obsess over them for a while, and then move on (this only applies to things like fiction/music, not ladies! It's the opposite for ladies. Singular. Lady. :) ). For a long time I could trace my taste in music through these phases and only these phases. In middle school it was The Beatles, then Blue Oyster Cult (don't ask me why) then Bon Jovi. Jovi lasted quite a long time, with punctuations of other groups or genres occasionally, but Jovi really wasn't dethroned until a few years ago when they became eclipsed by musicals, in particular Rent, then Wicked, then Les Mis, with some smatterings of Jesus Christ Superstar and Avenue Q and some other things that I am probably forgetting at the moment. After that obsession diminished, nothing else really came to fill it. I've had flirtations with Frankie and that genre of music.

The point, still, remains. It's generally true for fiction (which explains my 11 Philip K. Dick novels in 3 months which were some weird months), and also television. Anna has experienced me through the Dr. Who obsession, which I predict will crop up every Spring or so from now on. In college and in various periods before I've had Trek extravaganzas. Sophomore year I ran through all 24 seasons of Trek (no animated) in maybe two months. I probably watched Babylon 5 in that short of a timespan, and LOST happened as well. While these obsessions are active I spend extra time reading about them on the internet, listening to podcasts, etc. Late this past summer I did the same thing with Beer.

So, I tend not to direct my free time to several activities spread out over a long period of time (it occurs to me that this could be a positive attribute for my academic work, as long as my research and my current obsession overlap. And I finish my work before the obsession dies out).

This has all been a lead up to the point of this post: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I powered through 7 seasons of Buffy, plus 5 seasons of Angel, its spinoff. I prefer Buffy, as it's a much more character and background oriented show, but Angel is good on its own (after the first season) and tends to have better story arcs.

The character arcs and interactions are really what make the show. I give both Series my highest recommendations. The best episodes:

"Hush" - Season 4, Episode 10. It's available on Netflix. If you want to get a sense of whether you will like the show or not, this is a good place to get a taste.

"Once More, With Feeling" - Season 6, Episode 7. The musical episode. I would like this one.

"The Body" - Season 5, Episode 16. This one comes out of nowhere and is a complete emotional bulldozer. The style is brilliant, the acting is brilliant, it's all just brilliant. If you're familiar with the show, you can watch this one and get a taste of just how powerful the medium of television can be. If you're not familiar with it, wait.

I'm trying to think of more episodes, but I can't. The seasons are strongest at the end, but the end depends on what is built up beforehand. All of the seasons are great (except for a lot of season 4, which is just good). I suggest diving in from the beginning, with a little bit of patience in season 1. It's miles ahead of any of the modern Star Trek first seasons by a mile, but that doesn't say too much.

This is what happens when blogging is mixed with a lack of sleep.

invitation time!

One afternoon, 2 printers, one ink cartridge, and some red wine later, I've got these babies all printed up. I had hoped to have them sent out already, now I'm hoping to have them sent out by Thursday or Friday of this week.I think they may take even longer to assemble than they did to print. More red wine will definitely be involved!