Monday, June 30, 2008

Wedding Dresses - round two

OK the novelty has worn off. I am tired of trying on dresses. Its not like playing dress up, now its more "why are you still trying on dresses".

There was one store where I SWEAR the lady put me in ugly dresses all day on purpose. Then she flaunted a couture dress in front of me. At that point, of course I loved it. She said I had Champaign-taste - Whatever lady, the other dresses were just UGLY.

I am what I am calling a "value" bride. I would not even touch a couture dress unless it was discontinued, off-the-rack, and more than half price. There were two that fit that bill. Of course I liked them, but I couldn't stomach the price. As I turned them away, the bargain shopper in me was yelling 75% OFF, ARE YOU CRAZY? GRAB IT AND RUN!!

At one point it was storming and the power went out in the store. I did yell "Grab the dress and run". No one thought that was too funny, except my mom.

At the last dress shop, I could tell I was narrowing it down. Two of the dresses were so similar, I was nit-picking to choose between them. The lady at the store suggested my sister try on the other one next to me so I could see them side by side. God-love my sister who obliged even though she hates the whole wedding dress thing. She helped me finally choose.

I have to send thanks to my Mom and sisters for bearing with me as I go back and forth and back and forth analyzing each aspect of every dress, weighing it against the cost implications.

So I spent more than I planned but I'm happy. Lets hope this doesn't set the tone of entire process.
I figure I'll cut costs from somewhere else (not sure where yet)

The point is, I picked one and moved on - phew, glad I'm done with that.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Wedding Dresses

Today I'm going wedding dress shopping with Momma T. This will be my second trip. Wedding dress shopping is an interesting thing indeed.

You spend time putting on an elaborate dress that is WAY more money than you would normally consider spending. Then you walk out and everyone gasps and tells you how BEAUTIFUL you are. Who would LOVE that.

The problem with this - I know, how could there be a problem with this - the problem with this is that by the end of the day my ego was so artificially inflated that my memory of how I looked in each dress was seriously warped.

The pictures brought me back to reality. No, the dresses didn't suddenly give me a waist or hide the extra pounds. I also had to look at the really bad ones again.

When my friends asked me how it went, I told them that I need my mom and sister to be my cheering section every morning when I get dressed!

At the end of the day, Momma T was ready for more. She planned the agenda for today - how could I turn her down. This time, I wont look back at the pictures. I am the most beautiful girl in the whole world!

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Serious about blogging

Ok, I'm going to commit to updating this on a more frequent basis. I am in admiration of people that do this for a living. Not only are they witty writers but they also get all of the tech stuff. RSS feeds, Twitter, social networking....I am so out of it sometimes.

I am lucky enough to know one smart lady that has had serious success with her blog. www.indexed.com. She won awards and stuff.

Other sites I visit - NEVER at work though ;)
www.restaurantwidow.com
www.dooce.com (girls at work turned me on to this site. love it)
www.woot.com - A deal a day!


So it's been a slow start to blogging for me. I have only has 7 posts and 0, yes 0 comments. Come ON people. I know my friends (Mo, I'm calling you out) and family are reading this. To their benefit, I never update the site, so they are frequently disappointed with the lack of content.

NO FEAR, I am committed (to this, not an insane asylum)

Ok, I will starting thinking of good content so the next posts aren't so stream of conciseness.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Mr. and Mrs.

So this post is about a month overdue but it's here all the same. After almost 7 years Jonathan decided to pop the questions.

In true Jonathan fashion, he caught me TOTALLY off guard. He knew with all the "talk" that I would be suspecting a proposal on our upcoming trip. In order to make it a surprise, he did it on the flight (wedding-singer style).

Side note - Our trip was a cruise to celebrate getting my MBA. When I booked the flight, I didn't look too closely at where the layover was. My thought was, as long as we get there on time, who cares. I looked quickly at the itinerary and told Jonathan our layover was in Orlando. His aunt and uncle live in Florida so unbeknownst to me, he told them of his grand plan to propose on the plane. They decided to trek to Orlando and congratulate us as we disembarked. So here's the funny part - our layover was at ORD. Those of you that know your airport codes, know this is O'Hare, CHICAGO. I couldn't figure out why Jonathan was so upset when I told him about my blunder (prior to the trip). My thought was "So what, we're still going on vacation". Now Kenny and Annette (Jonathan's uncle and aunt) think I'm a real bonehead.

So back to the story - We were airborne one the way to CHICAGO at a god-awful early hour when Jonathan got up. I didn't think much of it. I settled into my first book of the trip.

I wasn't even through the first couple pages when there was an announcement. If you are anything like me, you just tune out the announcements. It wasn't until I heard something about "this isn't your crew." and "I'd like a moment of your time." that I realized it was Jonathan. No, I didn't recognize his voice - everyone sounds muddled in those things.

About the time my very sleepy brain had almost figured out what was going on, a very excited flight attendant pointed MY camera right at me. Please remember the VERY early hour. I was not expecting to be noticed, let alone photographed that morning. The camera pointed at me was the last trigger to my unaware self that "this was it". I suddenly was very shaky and nervous - as I can best remember, this is what he said:

"I would like to draw your attention to the woman seated in row 5. She has made the past 6 years of my life magical. I would like to take this moment to ask her to spend the rest of her life with me. Marci, will you please stand up?"

I stood but in that awkward way you do on a plane because there isn't enough room to stand upright. I also couldn't see him so I looked at the plane full of people and mouthed, "where is he?". Everyone pointed toward the front.

I walked into the aisle and towards him. He got down on one knee and opened the box to my beautiful ring!

This picture shows how fabulously unrehearsed and awkward it was. We both have hilarious faces and the picture is crazy blurry (that flight attendant was very excited). It is hard to post such a bad picture of myself but I have to share that moment with everyone!



After that I think I carried the ring around in the box- either totally forgetting to put it on my finger or too nervous to touch it.

Needless to say, I didn't sleep on the plane!