This isn’t my picture, but it’s my blog, so I give myself permission to bend the rules. 

Happy one month wedding anniversary to us!

The coolest part of the wedding week – beside the actual wedding, which was pretty awesome – was having all of our important friends and family together in one place.  My parents got to meet all the names that I’ve talked about for 4+ years, and put faces to those names.  Not only that, but they liked them.  My New Jersey/Pennsylvania/Connecticut friends and family got an education in the southern ways of life, and the southerner’s got an education in Yankee life.  I heard, from the other side of the room, Wendy, who has stubbornly declared that she only likes 2 Yankees, proclaim very loudly “I love Yankees!”  My godfather, a New Jersey born and raised Italian, told me at one point that Kelly shared with that end of the table that she learned how to castrate a pig.  I think he was a little nervous.

It was kind of sad to leave that.  When, really, are those people from our different walks of life ever going to congregate together in one spot again?  Some may cross paths (apparently my Dad is now friends on Facebook with Brian & Elizabeth – which is funny enough in itself, given the fact that my Dad refused to email anyone 3 months ago) again in some other circumstance, but it makes me sad that that moment in time is gone.

It’s definitely something to treasure.

Upon returning home, we did the traditional carrying over the threshold picture:

And then a not-so-traditional, but we thought was important since we now have an engagment picture and a wedding picture with this same pose.

Upon arriving home, I discovered one thing: I am SO freaking glad I cleaned the house before we left.  No need to start the marriage off with a pile of dirty dishes or laundry. 

The Friday night before our wedding, we went out with a large group of our friends to a dueling piano bar called Savannah Smiles, where they basically play music, and you shout (not sing) along.  It gets rowdy, and spirited, and we had a fabulous time.

Because we are all so mature, I think early on we decided that picture-jacking would be the theme of the night.  You know picture-jacking – when you have what would be an otherwise really nice picture of someone/someones, and some dingbat gets in the background and screws up the picture?

See Exhibit A:

Of  course, once you start, you just can’t stop.  So I will now present my friends and I (at least in the pictures that I can show on the Internet without them killing me…hehe) in what was unofficially known as our joint bachelor/bachelorette party.

I jacked Wendy:

Elizabeth jacked Wendy, Brian and I:

Dave and Brian both jacked me:

Here comes Elizabeth again, jacking Brian and I:

Notice how my boy isn’t really getting jacked?  I guess that’s the brains of actually taking the pictures, rather than being in them.

The moral of the story (besides not ever suggesting picture-jacking once, lest it become an all night event) is that I/we are so thankful to all our friends that made the trip to Savannah for the wedding, including the ones that are not in this picture.  (Now that I’m the wife, I can make the sweeping ‘we’ statements).   Words can’t even say how lucky we feel to have your friendship, and our lives are definitely the better for it.

Cheers to friends!

We got back late Monday night, and it’s been a flurry of activity of settling in, unpacking (ok, not really), and getting back to reality.

In one word, the day was wonderful.  In two words, the day was wonderful and hot.  In 4 words, the day was wonderful and hot as hell.

We had so much fun in the days leading up – every time a new family member or friend arrived in to town, the excitement level just notched up a little bit more.  Friends finally got to meet that had never met in person before, and even better, got along famously.  There were a lot of late nights.  Very late nights.  I didn’t even stay out that late in college (of course, bars in CT closed at 2, so we were kicked out by 1:30).  The night before the wedding, I did my final shot of tequlia right around 2:45 or so.

But right now, I’m sure the details are less interesting pictures, so I’ll share a few of my favorites I’ve gotten from various places so far:

I lost weight before the wedding, like any bride.  I apparently lost too much after my fitting, and the top of my dress didn’t fit.  I made do with stuffing my dress with washcloths (picture from Paige, my photog, from PH Photography):

Another from Paige: Right before the ceremony – we didn’t see each other, just stood on either side of the wall and talked.  This is one of my favorites so far:

My boy awaiting me (Picture from Brian’s live Tweet of the wedding):

Here comes the bride – me and my dad (from Paige):

Me getting my ring (from Brian):

You may now kiss the bride! (from Brian):

Me, trying to cool off after the ceremony before going outside for pictures (from Brian):

Apparently a memo went out that I never got that Polka Dots was the unofficial dress code.  Of 27 people, 4 wore polka dots – and two wore the exact same dress!  This is Elizabeth, Megan, my niece Lane, and Kelly (picture from Brian).

Not the best picture of me, but it proves how far friends will go for you – this is Wendy holding a battery operated fan up my dress in the park as I was waiting for pictures.  It was 102, with a heat index of 114 (picture from my boy):

The pyramid picture (from my boy)!

We had to take a shot with our cameras (from my boy):

Dinner (picture from Brian)

The toast (picture from Brian):

Those are my favorites so far – I can’t wait to get more!

And finally – us at the fountain in Forsyth Park (picture from Paige):

Today I ran around a lot, doing the final wedding things that I can do from Alabama.  I got the oil changed and the tires filled with air, ran a couple of last minute wedding errands, hit up the bank, did a couple loads of laundry, cleaned up the house some, wrote out the welcome notes for the out of town guest bags, printed them out, got all the other wedding-related paperwork, and packed up the travelling safe with the jewelry, the marriage license, the programs, and a couple other pieces of important paperwork.  Have my bags almost all packed, and just need to clean out the trunk tomorrow and replace it will all the wedding related things.

I can’t believe it’s finally here.

I can’t believe I haven’t freaked out more.  I’m a worrier by nature, a fretter, and I’m kind of anal.  I have had a couple of moments, but they’ve pretty much been moments.  That’s been the beauty of a small wedding – there’s just not a lot TO fret over.

So tomorrow we’ll pack up the car in the morning, and head out of town.  My greatest stress right now is if I’ll make it to Savannah tomorrow in time to take my dress to the dress-press people, or I’ll have to get up early Wednesday morning and do it.  Tomorrow if preferrable, but Wednesday is still do-able for me to get it back in time.

There’s a couple of final things  to take care of – writing the notes for the cat sitters, ordering the pralines for guest favors, and making reservations for a hearse tour.  It’s all little though.  It’s manageable.  I’ve got my to-do list written out by day (see? anal!), and if I’ve forgotten anything, I don’t even know what it is at this point, so it must not be *that* important.

I still can’t believe we are leaving tomorrow for this whole adventure.

I’m so excited to see my family, my friends, the people so near and dear to me that I never get to see.  I can’t wait to spend time with them, and show them parts of the city of Savannah that I love so much.  I’ve gotten a bunch of emails the past couple of days from people telling me how excited they are, and they are so awesome to get.  It makes me so happy that people are excited.

So months of preparation are coming to a close.  The weather forecast looks good, albeit very hot.  High of 97 is predicted right now.  I might just be the bride that dumps ice down my dress.  Or something.

I can’t believe it’s finally here.

And that I’m finally going to marry my best friend.  That’s the absolute, hands down, best part of all.

I have done almost nothing school related since I got back from the conference in Chicago.  I only just tonight started to feel guilty about it, which must be the subliminal part of my brain telling me that I needed the break.

I’ve had a couple minor frustrations with school as I start the dissertation process, and the beaurocracies and politicing that goes on with that.  Nothing earth shattering, but annoying enough to get under my skin.  It irks me that some people have waaaaaaaaay more power than they should.  And it irks me when I bring up something related to my dissertation, and said people tell me “Oh, you don’t want that.”

Really?  Not to sound obnoxious, but why don’t YOU not tell ME what *I* want in this process?  Mkay, cupcake?

Minor.

I started working on my master list for the wedding.  The one that every time I thought of something over the past couple of days, I thought ‘Crap, I should have a list to write all this down on so I don’t forget it’.  I finally started that last night, and it’s easing some of the stress that was building up in my head. So I’ve broken it down by day, and what needs to get done per day, and instead of seeming overwhelming, it suddenly seems easy and managable.

Ahhhhh.

In the most fun wedding news, yesterday we officially booked our honeymoon!  Due to the fact that my boy is taking classes, and I’ll be teaching them in July, and then a conference in August, followed immediately by the start of school, and so on and so forth with other school things peppered in, we knew we were going to end up delaying our honeymoon.  We discussed different options, different things to do, and in the past couple of days the stars seemed to fall in line for one thing.

Next May, we’ll be going on a cruise of Italy, Greece, and Turkey.   I am over the moon excited.  Of course, by that point it will end up being a “Happy Honeymoon/Happy First Anniversary/Happy Graduation Annie” trip, but we’ll keep it simple and call it the honeymoon.  Our travel agent arranged for us to have a celebratory cake on the first formal night of the cruise.  I wonder if I could get us another one by saying it’s also our first anniversary?

So I need to pick up my poor, neglected camera, and spend some time getting re-acquainted with it.  Because there is no way in hell I’m going to travel to that part of the world and not be in top picture taking shape.

But first, I have a school goal.  My newest goal is to get my dissertation proposal (approximately 60 pages or so) written before we leave to get married.  So about a week and a half.

You all love me because I’m ambitious.  I’d hate to disappoint now.

As of about 11am today, I am now officially licensed to get married.  Well, in Chatham County, Georgia at least.

Haha.  He’s cute, isn’t he?

I filled out my side first, and I noticed that they ask for your occupation.  It was optional, so I left it blank.  When he started filling out his side, he said “Oh, you left your occupation blank?  I’m putting mine in.  If you put yours in, it will look so dirty.”

And since I’m never one to shy away from being dirty or taboo, I now present to you (with important identifying information removed) our marriage license application.

I was laughing so hard, I’m surprised I didn’t snort.

We are perfect for each other.

Every bride is supposed to have wedding related dreams and nightmares, right?  At least, that’s what I’ve heard.  I already had one about the officiant not showing up, and us ending up with a Catholic priest that was pissed he had to do our wedding, so he purposefully took forever.  I had another one that I vaguely remember, but it had to do with guests that weren’t supposed to be there.  Not people we hate, but people we invited that said they couldn’t come, and then showed.

Last night’s was a total doozy.

I ordered my boy’s wedding band before we went to Chicago, and it came while we were gone.  It’s a plain, white gold band.  That’s not the dream part.  The dream picked up while I was getting ready for the wedding.  I took the ring out to make sure it didn’t need extra polishing.  As I looked at it, I noticed something on it, like a scratch.  I decided to look a little closer, and I discovered the entire band had carvings of flowers all around the outside – not obvious, but shallow etchings.  I couldn’t figure out what happened to the ring, so I kept turning it around, trying to figure out why it had flowers on it.  As I turned it, I suddenly noticed something else engraved on it.

The Pizza Hut logo.

WTF??

First of all, Pizza Hut?  Not a fan.  At all.  I grew up 40-ish miles from NYC. Pizza Hut is NOT pizza to me.  Now, if it had been a Pepe’s logo, or Letizia’s, then I might have understood.  But Pizza Hut?  No.

There really is no second of all.  I’m still hung up on the fact that I dreamed the Pizza Hut logo was engraved in my boy’s wedding band.

What in the living heck does this dream mean???

My favorite interpretation so far came on Facebook by someone I used to work with:

“It means anyway you slice it, your love for your fiance is thick and chewy and your eyes Sierra Mist over when you think of the big day. It also means things will go well on the big day as opposed to the Domino’s effect”

We returned home from the trip to Chicago for the conference late last night.  It was a good week – an exhausting week.  The conference was huge – it’s the premier, prestigious conference for communication, and also the international one.  It started on Wednesday (I didn’t go to anything then), and ended Monday.  I made it to the opening reception on Thursday night, shmoozed, networked, and had a late dinner with a professor.  Friday/Saturday/Sunday were pretty much exactly the same – arrive at conference early, stay all day, come home late.

I saw a lot.  I learned a lot.  I got some really good ideas for moving forward with some research projects.  I gave my two presentations.  The first one, on the comparison of men’s and women’s beach volleyball from the Olympics went well.  I read a wee bit more than I would have liked to, but the professor I did the research with said I did a great job. My paper that analyzed profile pictures on Facebook was in a session called “In Your Face-book Cues”.  When we got there, I realized that the room was filling up.  I didn’t realize how much until I actually stood up to look at the audience.

Have I ever mentioned before how much I hate public speaking?  Hate, loathe, despise?  Hate.  Which is completely ironic, I realize, for someone getting a Ph.D. in communication, but whatever.  I have never been a fan.  I do it (I have no choice) and I’m told that I fake confidence really well.  I still hate it.

Thus, when I stood up and saw a packed room (and by packed, I mean easily over 50 people, and the biggest room I’ve ever talked to), the speech that I had almost memorized went completely out of my brain.  And I talked fast.  And I stumbled a couple of times.  At one point, I lost my place, and to me, felt like I stood up there for 15 minutes looking like a jerk.  I was so upset with myself, mostly because I KNOW I could have done better, and my cage got completely rattled.

My boy, and my friend Alotta Errata (who came in to the conference to visit) said I did a good job.  Much better than I believed I did, and since I’m really hard on myself and not objective, I have to rely on their opinions.  My boy actually just said I only stumbled once (in my head, I think I stumbled about 20 times).  So the reality is that I did a good job, but I have a hard time accepting that.

I did get several questions during the Q&A, and a couple people came up to me after and talked to me further about the paper.  So I must not have sounded like a total idiot.

So now it’s time to refocus on projects I now want to do, and…dum, dum, dum…the dissertation!  Because I’m finally now at that mythical point.

We did manage to sneak down to Navy Pier on Saturday for some non-conferencing activities.  I’m not sure why I brought my camera, as this is about the extent of the pictures I took all weekend.

The ferris wheel on Navy Pier

Me and my boy on the swings:

OH!  We did do something that I thought was fabulously cool.  Back in the 70’s, there was a skit on Saturday Night Live called “The Olympia Restaurant“.  A Greek (?) family that owned a restaurant where all they served were cheeseburgers.  I love that skit.  My friend Andrew suggested we go to the Billy Goat Tavern for lunch last  Thursday, explaining it as “You know, the ‘cheeseborger, cheeseborger’ place”.  I thought he meant the chain “Cheeseburger Cheeseburger”, but then he said the SNL skit, and I got so excited.

First thing I heard when we opened the door?  “Cheeseborger, Cheeseborger, Cheeseborger”.  It was perfect.  Just like the skit.  You get ordered into line, and the head guy looks at you and places your order for you based on your size.  “Double, double, double, double, treeple, treeple, double”.  I got pegged for a double.  No fries, cheeps.  No Pepsi, Coke.  If you dare look at the menu board, you get caught, and then the guy yells at you “No look at the menu.  I’m the menu!”, and then he orders you a cheeseburger.  It was so cool.

So it was a good trip, with lots of conference, and not a lot of sightseeing.  Very mentally exhausting.  I feel like I could sleep for about 20 hours and not be rested.

It was so fabulous to get into my own bed last night though.

(Pssst.  25 days to go until the wedding!)

One month from today, we’ll be getting married!