Snapshots

We got an email from our photographer that he may have a "preview gallery" of our wedding pictures by the end of next week! But, until then, you'll have to survive with snapshots I have literally stolen from other people's web sites.

I think I bitched about flowers A LOT here. I am allergic to THE WORLD. This makes the Midwest particularly unpleasant in the spring and the fall and remind me why I love it here? And it made the prospect of flowers unpleasant for me. Anyway, Natalie came over on Saturday morning and we did flowers. They were BEAUTIFUL. And it was so wonderful to do them together. But, by the time I got to the wedding site, my eyes were already irritated from the makeup and when the photographer told me to stick my face in my bouquet like I was smelling them, I had a minor bridal freakout.

No. Can I not touch and/or be near the flowers until the ceremony?

And see this picture? This is what happened to my flowers post-ceremony. I set them on this coatrack thing during the signing of the license and never picked them up again.

Everyone said our cake was yummy. I believe them. It looked great. Look! Cheesecake!! Go Muddy Paws!

Biker Boy did not want any cutesy stuff at our wedding. But since I was in charge of the cheesecake, I had them put on these bride and groom strawberries. Biker Boy rolled his eyes at me, but I swear they made everyone smile.

As we were doing flowers on Saturday morning, my mom surprised me with these favors. They were chocolate flowers with a little note on the back. Biker Boy and I had decided on no favors as a way to save money, but these were quite the hit. I saw lots of people eating these things right up! (We'll ignore the fact that there were heart-shaped notes on the back. We did this entire damn wedding heart-less until the final morning. Fie on you, heart-shaped wedding conspiracy!)

And then there was a girl walking down the aisle. Look! Flowers! This is the only time you'll see the bride with her flowers! What a freaking gorgeous day!!! (It looks like we have no guests because of the empty chairs. See, what happened was that was the side yard where I was waiting to walk towards our guests. Later that evening, people sat in those chairs and ate dinner. But now it looks like we had a sparsely attended wedding, which just wasn't so!)

And then there was a marriage! Whee!! Look how happy they are!!!

This post was just for you, koo!! I swear I'll post better pictures when we get them. But this is just a small taste for you!!!!

A weird thing happened the other day

Last Friday, we had a dinner at a fantastic restaurant in Minneapolis. My whole family was there! So was Biker Boy's family! My sister was a bitch and made me cry. Biker Boy was a bit anxious that it was a bad sign of things to come.

Reverend Natalie talked me down from killing my sister. I woke up on Saturday and realized that at the end of the day, nothing my sister did or said would matter to me. Biker Boy said, "perfection is not our goal." He was right. Perfect was not our goal.

Everything was wonderful. Seriously. The weather cooperated. You don't believe me? I wore my sleeveless dress outside without a wrap all day and Biker Boy wore his suit all day without ever taking his jacket off. How did these things happen simultaneously, you ask? Well, it's because the weather was awesome.





Look! Pretty weather!! The grass is so green! Gosh, that's a pretty place to get married!

We put the flowers together in the morning. It was fun and kind of relaxing, you know? My favorite part was when we had to send BB out to get another dozen cream roses and when he came back he said, "I'm going to walk down the street carrying flowers every day. People were smiling at me."

Then we went to hair and make-up. Oh, the fun. I appreciate getting pampered.

We made it to Summit Manor for pictures on time. I'm proud that I was on time. I spent most of the weekend driving around in circles in St. Paul because it is conceivably the most confusing city in the universe, but we made it to the ceremony site on time!

Pictures. See Biker Boy in his suit for the first time. Pictures. Oh, you'd like to see some of these pictures? Well, so would I, frankly, but we're going to have to be patient. I'd post a snapshot or two, but I don't really have any of me and BB where one of us isn't blurry or frowny, so I don't want you to think we looked blurry and frowny, so no pictures for you!

Ceremony. This was as perfect as I could have ever hoped. It was so wonderful to see all our friends and family sitting there, the readings were wonderful, and Natalie did such a great job. We were proud that when she said, "by the power vested in me by the state of Minnesota," she didn't even flinch, especially since both BB and I laughed.

Everything was perfect and I swear I'll go into more details at a later date when I have fantastic pictures to illustrate every moment!!

Just Kidding!

Ha! Fooled you all that I was stressed out, didn't I? (Okay, I WAS stressed out, but I'm blowing out lots of breaths and unclenching my jaw. Everything's better now.)

Yesterday we met with our officiant to go over our ceremony and in the hustle and bustle of the showering and the making breakfast and the answering rude emails from students and the getting lesson plans ready, I didn't wish my patient, loving, generous fiance happy birthday.

I sat down at my desk at school, looked at my notes for the day, and saw BB's birthday highlighted in my planner. OH MY GOD.

I suck.

A very large, expensive present later, I was back in good graces. But, um, I think my birthday may go uncelebrated this year in penance for FORGETTING HIS BIRTHDAY three days before we got married!!

Spinning

Wake up early. Drive there. Teach. Drive there. Teach. Head home. Quickly eat. Drive there. Teach. Drive home. Prepare lessons for the next day. Head hurts. The world is spinning. I lay down, but know I must get up again. No time for sleep. Ten minutes and I'm up. I sit at the computer, answering unanswerable emails. I field the angry phone calls about small children and fancy liquor. I enter grades. I can't stop now. Lesson plans. Assignment sheets. The small piles of ungraded papers.

The doctor's appointments. The new, additional restrictions to our diet. The medical bills I can't stand to look at piling up on the table. The phantom pain. It's not there, but it's only a matter of time. Plead with my body - just hold out for one more week.

Two issues of Sports Illustrated sit unread on the table. Two weeks of laundry piled in the closet. My head is now pounding. The trash needs to be taken out. The recycling is piled up by the door and I know the resident managers are going to yell at us soon. Did I update the registry to include an ice cream scoop? The phone rings. Crisis elsewhere. What can I do from here? Flowers? Music? I don't know. Why can't someone else answer these questions?

Thank you notes pile up. I can't bear to look at them. The gifts are piled up in the corner. We need to do something with them. People will be in town tonight, but I am working until 9. The floor hasn't been swept in weeks. The bathroom has a starring role in my nightmares, what with its filthy bathtub and hair filled drains. The refrigerator is empty. There's no yogurt, no cheese, no milk. There's not a piece of fresh fruit in the house. Empty cardboard boxes line the walls. Someone please come and organize our house.

It is past midnight. I crawl into bed. I am physically and mentally exhausted. I can't sleep. I lay in the silence, waiting for the blessed sleep. The dream comes again. I know I am crying. I want it to stop. Make the dreams stop. But when I wake up, I want the dreams again. I look over and see him sleeping. I love him. I am envious of his sleep. I start awake, again and again. The dreams. I reach for him, but he is unreachable.

The tension has moved from my jaw to my shoulders to my upper arms. I am like the tin man, unable to move. Someone please oil me. I wake up as the alarm goes off at 7:00 am on a Saturday. I jump out of bed because I know if I lay there and think about the coming day, I will not make it out of bed. The pain is tremendous. I want to be happy. I can't. I can't. I can't do this anymore.

You Want to Make a Memory Part II

When I was 17, I was allowed to sporadically drive to school. Mostly this was allowed when I had to be somewhere after school and no one wanted to drive me. It was only sporadically allowed because if you think I'm a bad driver now, and boy should you, imagine what I was like when I first got my license. My skill at driving has been compared to a two-year old with her first trike.

My parents kept a tight rein on me. Maybe they thought I'd turn into a raving lunatic who would one day become addicted to morphine and randomly discuss the collection of my urine in a public venue? So if the truck was gone from the driveway, someone knew where I was. Exactly where I was. (Funny story: I was in a grocery store alone for the first time WHEN I WAS A FRESHMAN IN COLLEGE. I had NEVER been in a grocery store by myself before then. I almost had a panic attack.)

One day I drove to school. But when I got there, I noticed this rash all over my body. Everywhere. Seriously. My face. My stomach. My hands. Oh, god. The humiliation.

But it never occurred to me to get in my truck and just drive home. That would have been skipping school. And girls like me didn't skip school. I went to the office and had them call my mom so my mom could tell them I could leave. A normal person would have just left and gone home.

My mom took me to the doctor (boring story about an allergic reaction to a medication I was on - ha!). My sister was in college at that point and was home for the day. So my sister, my mom, and I went out to get ice cream and my mom didn't make me go back to school that day. It was my first experience of playing hooky - doing something in the middle of the day I shouldn't be doing because I should be working. It is a memory I cherish.

The three of us were laughing, windows rolled down, eating ice cream. My mom's hair was whipping all over the place and getting in my sister's ice cream cone. My sister was pretending to be grossed out. My skin was on FIRE and I pretended like I was going to rub the ice cream on it to make it feel better. Livin' on a Prayer came on and we screamed the lyrics out. Tommy whispers baby, it's okay - someday!! The sky was blue, the grass was green, and the trees were budding new leaves.

Next week at this time, I will be playing hooky again. My mom, sister, best friend, and I will be getting our nails done. We'll be picking up the flowers from the florist. I hope the memories I make in the next week or so will be as lasting as those of that afternoon in the spring of 1997.

Beware: Too Much Information May Be Shared

We got a package in the mail yesterday. Now, we have been getting packages pretty regularly thanks to my severe Etsy addiction, lots of gifts from our gift registries, and my adorable fiance's somewhat mysterious addiction to personal scents. But this one is different. This one is from a medical lab with two containers I am supposed to use to collect my urine. For two days. In a row.

Let's back up a bit. You remember my brief, but oh so passionate relationship with Mr. Morphine, right? Well, despite my insistence that going to a kidney stone specialist at the University of Minnesota was "stupid and a waste of time and money," I was outvoted and convinced that I should get up at an ungodly hour of the morning last week to get a CT scan and go "visit" the doctor.

I don't know if you guys know about CT scans. It's this crazy three-dimension picture in which they can basically scroll through your body with the click of a mouse. And they took this scan of me (!) and compared it to the scan from the ER from back in March. What they saw was not promising, as it appears there are two brief shadows in my right kidney that might be stones, not to mention a really screwed up ureter that looks like it has seen a stone or two or two dozen in its day. I am scared. I don't ever want to be laying down, incapacitated, on the bathroom floor, ever again. And I sure as hell don't want it to happen in 10 days when, in case I haven't mentioned it, I AM GETTING MARRIED.

Lots of details about kidney stone prevention - diet, drinking lots of fluid, blah, blah, blah - were shared with me at this appointment. But the most disturbing aspect was that they wanted to do a urine analysis. Oh, my God. Let me do this and never speak of it again. Please.

It is quite possible I have had other kidney stones in the past, but never noticed. These are called "silent stones." And it is possible that these two shadows in my CT scan may very well be silent stones. So the results of the test are not dire, but did I mention the collecting the pee for two days in a row? I am very disturbed by this.

So, this weekend. Every single time you pee, I want you to think that I am collecting my pee all weekend long. Every single time.

Cutest thing ever?

BB: I saw the cutest thing on the way home from work today. You would have squealed.

NGS: Was it a pug?

BB: (stares in disbelief)

NGS: Yeah?

BB: Yes. It was a pug in a sling on the owner's back. This guy was rollerblading and all you could see was this little pug's face.

NGS: Cuz pugs are the cutest things ever.

BB: (stares in disbelief)

Rub some dirt on it!

When we first moved in to our apartment, we had some friends over for our first dinner party and one of them brought us a spider plant as a housewarming gift. It was potted in compost from their compost pile, their cat had eaten a few leaves off of it, and it was the tiniest little guy you have ever seen. It was so wee. Someone, I can't imagine who, christened the plant Lindsey because it is possible that Christian Kane was the best thing ever about that show with the soulful vampire.

ANYWAY, Lindsey stayed wee all through the winter. We'd move him around the apartment from window to window, chasing the sunbeams. Biker Boy would religiously leave out a glass of water every few nights so we could water Lindsey with room temperature water. Lindsey moved from the coffee table to the dining room table to the kitchen counter, back to the coffee table. We just put him wherever there was sun and room.

But in the last couple of months, with the onset of the dreaded time of year some people like to call spring, Lindsey has expanded. And looks like this:



Now, I'm not sure what you notice about this picture*. Is it the fact that we read National Geographic and Sports Illustrated and those seriously are the only two magazines we get at our house? Is it the fact that there is a remote for our sound system on the table, when the sound system is mere FEET away? Is it that I have been wrapping a lot of presents and have yet to put away the scissors? Is it the handily placed bottle of wine** used to give you perspective on how DAMN BIG our plant has become? You can't even eat at the table with Lindsey anymore because he's a damn fat ass.

So we have to repot this plant. And, as I'm sure you can tell because of our obsession with moving this guy all over the place, it's not like we have a big collection of potting soil or pots available to us. We went to a party tonight at the house of the person who gave us this plant as a housewarming present. And out of nowhere, I simply asked her, "do you have any dirt?" Because other people have dirt, right?

And she gave us a new, BIGGER pot filled with dirt. So tomorrow we're going to go outside and repot the plant. We might even break Lindsey into TWO pieces and call them Lindsey and Junior. Wheee...

*Ummm...Biker Boy wants everyone to know that he just took this picture at my request and he demanded recognition that "he is the awesomest fiancé ever." There you go.

**We don't drink much around these parts. There's about a cup and a half of wine gone - used to make a roast one day a couple of months ago. And we really should throw this bottle out, but there's a picture of a horse on it!

***Also, I realize that I haven't been using the "roommates" tag I have because I moved out of the place with the roommates a long time ago, but from here on out, I'm considering Lindsey and Junior roommates.

News?

I'm scanning the headlines at cnn.com before I leave the house this morning. (Yes, I look at CNN instead of some other, more respected sites, because I can't stand the sensory overload that happens when I look at other news outlets - New York Times, I'm looking at you.) A headline reads, "Dreadlocked heartthrob voted off 'Idol.'" Ummmm...wait. Isn't that what happens on a reality show - every week someone gets voted off? How is this news? How come I am so upset over this?

Suffering

On Friday the weather reports were DIRE, indicating gobs of rain on the greater Twin Cities area. So I mentioned to Biker Boy that since biking would be out of the question (I am a princess and refuse to ride when there is any precipitation of any kind because I will melt), I was going to do yoga on Saturday morning. When I woke up yesterday and THERE WAS NOT A CLOUD TO BE SEEN IN THE SKY, I said a brief prayer of thanksgiving for the blessings of sunshine, a brief epithet to all weather people everywhere, and a vile curse word toward my beloved fiance, who never forgets anything.

The yoga video we have is designed for cross-training athletes. It assumes a certain level of fitness that I may or may not actually have. And it is painful, painful, painful. And of course, Biker Boy would not believe the cloudless skies and instead preferred to listen to the evil weatherman on KSTP and so refused a bike ride. We yogaed instead.

Today I have been hunched over a computer screen all day, working. And every time I must move a tricep or hamstring, I curse this yoga tape. It should be encouraging me to get into better shape so I can handle the workout better, but instead it encourages me to think of devilish ways to destroy the tape so I will never be forced to look at that peppy lady's face again.

1) Accidentally leave it underneath my truck, so it accidentally gets run over.
2) Rip out the film from the plastic case and mention that it might be time for a new VCR.
3) As an experiment, see how long it takes the plastic case to melt in the microwave?
4) As a different experiment, see if it would float in Lake Harriet. Or see if the melted tape would float in Lake Harriet?
5) Leave in front of an open window on a nice, sunny day. Ooops. I forgot it would melt!!