penn

Merry Christmas

From mine to yours

One of these years, I'll remember to get better at holding the remote so folks can't see it. That's my trick to a good holiday photo; set up the camera, then use a remote shutter trip to take lots and lots of photos.

Wedding Update

The wedding is fast approaching, and I am just ready for it to be here. We are almost ready. Mostly, we're putting finishing touches on things and doing photocopying and whatnot. I'm leaving town on Friday to celebrate Christmas with my family, so Matt will hold down the fort and get some of these tasks done. Lucky him; he gets to take in the cake contract with the final payment.

I vacillate between being stressed (so much left to do!) and feeling strangely zen. I am excited and ready to reinforce our commitment in a public way. The key elements are all in place. Everything we're working on now is just fluff and extra. It will make things pretty, but it's not necessary. For example, we already have 29 tin can luminaries made. I am hoping to make another dozen or so more, just so we have more than enough. But if it doesn't get done? We'll still be married at the end of the day.

I am looking forward to my time at home, where I have a limited number of wedding things I can get done. I'll finish the music playlist for the reception and get the meal cards designed. Otherwise, I will enjoy time with my family and Oregon friends. And then I'll be back in Minnesota quickly (only one week at home!) to prepare and ready everything to celebrate with everyone here.

I am most looking forward to showing our family where we live. They will finally get to meet Lucy cat and see our apartment. And I have several people coming to the wedding that I haven't seen in ages. Good family friends from Nebraska surprised me by saying they'd drive up; it's been over a decade!

What a joy, to have this community celebration. I am glad that weddings are such a communal thing. Not that elopements aren't lovely, because I think they are, but our emphasis has firmly been to be surrounded by love on our day. Our service wording and liturgy reflects that emphasis. I can't wait to share all the details with all of you, post-wedding.

New Dish love

Admission: I am a 29 year old adult, and I have never owned new dishes. Okay, maybe if you count the one corel-ware bowl and plate I bought last year to use in my office. But I have never purchased a brand new set of dishes in my adult life. I've made due with hand-me-downs, thrift store finds, and various random pieces.

I mentioned in my last post that we had received some dishes from one of Matt's cousins. Specifically, we got five place settings of the lovely Aspen dishes from Crate & Barrel. And, folks, let me tell you this: I am in love with these dishes! Maybe it's just the honeymoon period, but I cannot let these beautiful pieces sit in the sink all dirty. I have always been a good dish washer, but I am now excellent. Something about letting a white dish sit dirty in the sink instead of letting it spotlessly drip dry in my dish rack just galls me. So, I have been washing up every night as soon as we finish dinner.

Here's to hoping the honeymoon period lasts!

Hi!

Lucy wanted to say hi to the blogosphere, but then she got distracted by a bug on the ceiling. In fall and spring, we get an amazing number of box elder bugs and Asian lady beetles that flood our apartment. Lucy has a fabulous time chasing them, so we try not to worry too much. The only big inconvenience is that our ceiling light fixtures get filled up with fried little bug carcasses, but that's a small price to pay for cat entertainment.

Speaking of cat entertainment, we got our first wedding packages this week. Matt's cousin sent us some lovely dishes from Crate & Barrel. Of course, Lucy greatly enjoyed all the wrapping paper and bubble wrap. We are saving the packing supplies (waste not, want not) for some potential future shipping of some craft items Matt's family members are making. Lucy decided to have some fun dragging bubble wrap around the apartment, so I had to do some more tidying this morning.

In other news, Matt and I have begun to visit the gym again. We renewed our membership starting in November. We have to go 12 times a month, at a minimum, to get partially reimbursed by our health insurance. It's been good to be forced to be active. Tonight, we went to the lap swim. I haven't been properly swimming in ages, but I still managed to stay in the pool for almost 25 minutes slowly plodding my way along. It was wonderful to remember how good the frog stroke (aka breast stroke) feels. I hope we can make pool visits a regular part of our workout plan. Being active definitely helps calm my addled brain.

Wedding nightmare

I've been having a variety of wedding nightmares recently. Last night was a particularly vivid one. I wouldn't call it scary, per se, but it was not pleasant.

I still have not figured out how I want to do my hair for the wedding, so I've been growing it out for quite awhile. My hair is about shoulder-blade length now. I dreamed that I went into the salon to get my hair trimmed so it looks nice and pretty for the big day. I had some guy, and he was a trainee. And that guy had definite ideas about what my hair should look like. He also didn't like the kind of cut I prefer (a round layer), so he claimed he didn't know how to cut it. We argued back and forth for a bit, and then he turned me around so I couldn't see. Meanwhile, I was screaming for a manager.

In the end, I had chin length hair. And my overriding fear, in the dream, was that they would then curl it so my hair was just tight little curls all over my head.

I was glad to wake up to my full head of long hair. And I really can't wait for the next month to be done so I can be done with wedding nightmares. In the light of day, they are quite funny to me, but they aren't particular pleasant in the moment.

More Contra

Last night, I had the good fortune to hit up a contra dance in the local small college town. I've referenced contra before, but the dancing never gets old for me. Last night was fun again. Matt and I went, and we also brought two friends from town who had been a few times. We stayed for the first half of the dance and then went out for a nightcap before heading back home.

This morning, on one of the blogs I read, I notice that the author went contradancing yesterday too. I wonder if she went to the same dance as me? I link here because I love her description of the dance:

When you go to a contra dance, you become swept up (quite literally) in world gone by. You feel like you're at the Dance at Grandpa's from the Little House books. The band plays all the traditional folk tunes, and a caller tells you what to do. It doesn't matter what you look like or how old you are. Nobody cares because when the caller tells you to switch partners, you do it. You find yourself dancing with a 4 year old and then a 70 year old, a teenager, and then your husband. You find yourself dancing with your own father for the first time since your wedding day.

This is exactly how I feel when I contra. There is a little of whirling and twirling in many of the dances, and I feel like my whole evening spins. I could definitely sing the dancing song from My Fair Lady. I love the mixing, mingling, social nature of contra.

I encourage all of you to check out a contra dance if you ever hear of one near you. It is a rollicking good time and worth attending. I wish more communities would have social dances in general; I always feel sad when I read books from the 1920s and 30s and hear about all the dancing folks did then. Of course, we do still dance nowadays, but dancing seems to be a thing for kids that is generally left behind in adulthood except for drunken dancing at weddings. I'd like to see a day when adults come out to dance socially again.

Engaged!

Matt and I are engaged! I've been remiss in my sharing duties, as we've been engaged for quite awhile now. Heck, we've had the photos for quite awhile. We had our photos done in July by the eminently talented Kelly of K&K graphics (she's a good friend too!). We enjoyed walking around Portland and spending some quality time together.

Our wedding will be in December. We're hoping for snow a few days ahead of time so folks can still travel and everything will be pretty. We have all the big details set except for the photographer; that's the most nerve-wracking part for me as I love good photography!

Above all, looking at these photos again reminds me how excited I am to spend even more time with Matt in the many years to come.

Last Letter from your Lover

full disclosure: I did win a copy of this book from Penguin books. And, boy, am I glad.

I just finished The Last Letter from your Lover, by Jojo Moyes. All week, I have been picking away at this book bit by bit. Now that I've hit the weekend, I literally devoured the last third of the book.

This novel is set in the 1960s, and the premise is that a woman, Jennifer, wakes up from a bad car accident with little memory and significant discomfort in her life. Nothing seems to fit correctly, and everyone around her seems a little strange. In short order, both the reader and Jennifer realize that life feels strange because Jennifer got in the car accident while leaving her husband to go to her lover for good. Post-accident, she has been returned to the life she was desperately trying to leave.

For the first two thirds of the book, Jennifer is untangling threads of an unremembered affair through hidden letters. In the last third, we move to the present day as a journalist also tries to untangle the threads of letters she has found in the archives of the newspaper where she works.

To truly do the book justice, I feel I would have to reveal too much of the plot. But it is really an enjoyable book, and it moved along just fast enough to always leave me wanting more when I put it down each night. In my mind, that's a successful read.

Friday fun reading

Here's a really neat article on order and organization. It's mostly just pictures. Worth a read.

In other news, we're headed up to Fargo for the weekend for a wedding. School is keeping me crazy busy. I am enjoying the crisp fall weather. I've got so many bits of news to share, both big and small, but not enough time to write it all down. One of these days, my patient readers, one of these days.

Stolen from Facebook

"It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly." ~Bertrand Russell