Just When I'd Labeled the Day: It got way better

Remember Tuesday? Things were looking up and then crashed? Well Tuesday turned out great. No, I did not make it to the gym for my class.

But I did:

• Get an email saying that the new graphic designer would work with our budget. Awesome!
• Get my mitts on not just one dress of a size that would work but also got another bigger size for one girl who was going to need her dress fixed to fit (an 8yo in a 6X). When my fiance struck out at JCPenney, the girl who was helping him suggested we try Burlington Coat Factory. He called them, the did, indeed have the dress and held a couple for me. AWESOME!
• Come home to find an envelope from my former landlord. I held my breath and opened it - to find a HUGE deposit return. I literally jumped for joy at how the day turned out.

What a relief the day turned out to be. Now to just start crossing other things off our insane to do list. :)

Don't Even Know Where to Start

This whole thing has turned into such a disaster. Friday the graphic designer we've been dealing with for months kind of added the last straw. Then I posted a thing on The Rot (my new name for a popular wedding site with a rhyming name) about it and I should have known better. There's a band of bitches that just like to be bitches and think that they're just 'being blunt' and really they're mean. So I left work sobbing. Happy Friday.

Now I have great dresses for all of the flower girls but one. The one that it would be the worst to have her in an 'odd girl out' dress. And I can't find another dress like the others in the right size anywhere. Hours on the internet, multiple store visits in multiple areas... have all come up empty handed. TJ Maxx has its drawbacks.

Then the person I thought would be my new graphic design solution... yeah, WAY out of the budget. Stop my heart and make me think that I'm on candid camera style out of my budget.

It's looking like my evening will not be spent at the gym but instead going to more stores on a dress hunt that is likely a wild goose chase, searching etsy (and cursing their information overload), and the cheaper invitations sites. Oh, and I think I may be getting sick.

Two Days to Portland!

In two days, we're actually going to take a vacation. I can't wait. We both need this as individuals and as a couple. It's not a big deal vacation - just driving down to Portland to stay in a hotel I had a Groupon for and maybe going to a movie and just hanging around the hotel but we're going to turn our phones off and just be a couple for two days. Not a couple that is planning (and paying for - oy vey) a wedding or moving or anything. Just two people who love each other.

It's desperately needed. I've been mildly-moderately dizzy for a week. Generally it's not too bad. Sometimes it's just looking at the computer screen and thinking that they curved the lettering when they didn't but a couple times it was enough to start thinking that I should pull over until it passed. We've both been snippy.

Should I stay home to work on moving in so the house is a little less like an episode of Hoarders (minus the opossums and other vermin)? That might be a good idea but I haven't had a real day off - just doing what I want to do - not work or wedding. Next week, I'll go gangbusters on the house and garage and shed and then, I'll finally be able to get back to some semblance of routine - regular mealtimes and time at the gym.

Sadly, the times I most need to write to chill myself out are when I can't find time. Perhaps there will be more on moving in later. Or not.

Weddings = AISLE. Geography = ISLE

FYI. I just saw somewhere else that a wedding professional used 'isle'. Bonkers, I tell you.

In other news, I sent out the bridesmaids bomb a few hours ago and I'm on pins and needles for reactions. Boiled down, it said that I couldn't find a way to like one of the cheaper brands. But I really thought about it and with 5-10% off from the manufacturer for ordering more than three, plus the 10% coupon I got from the store at the wedding expo plus the credit I had applied to their accounts, it's normal. I said to look at the two brands I like, send me votes for the one that you like best (I'm doing individual styles within the same general idea) and we'll go from there. Really it wasn't bad but it feels really strange to say, "Now if you could hop to and spend your money on this dress I'm dictating, that'd be greeeeeaaaaat."

I hope they like them and everyone's happy.

Such High Highs, Such Low Lows

It's been a rollercoaster of a week that has left me thrilled to see Friday. Except that the weekend doesn't mean what it used to anymore.

To catch you up, it's now about T-4 months. I've been dress shopping all over the greater Seattle area, been to Portland and Vancouver, and stores at home. While I've found some things I like plenty, I've been unable to find anything that was LOVE. Certainly no waterworks and hugs all around. Saturday I went to one of the fancy pants places in Seattle, skipped the gym because it was too late, did back in angle parking in Seattle, and paid for parking. Only to work my way clear around the store and find nothing that I could afford and wanted to try on. Desperate, as I worked my way home, I stopped at DSW to see if they had wedding shoes I wanted, and at TJ Maxx to see if they had anything that would work, and then on to Nordstrom to see if they had anything that would work or the right shoes. By the time I got home, it was close to 7pm.

By my estimates, I've made at least 20 store visits and have tried on over 100 dresses. I'm whitewashed and wedding fatigued. I couldn't give less of a s*** at this point.

Tuesday, my fiance and I went to lunch. I was looking forward to this lunch. It's been gray, gray, gray and my office is harder to deal with these days. I had a gyro coupon and was all jazzed. Instead we got into this big thing on how he's finally starting to understand that we're in crunch time. Somehow in his mind that just because I have lady bits I should a) love wedding planning and b) be good at it. But he has no idea how much things cost versus what we have to spend. In his mind, we should be further along by now and it's my fault. Because it's all my job. It was ugly. Like I considered not coming home ugly. I was so mad and so hurt (oh yeah, it started with - so you have to order the dress for the size you are now?).

Wednesday, I went back to a store I had been to previously and found what may be the one. It's the first one that I've wanted to send pictures to everyone and ask them, "Isn't it amazing??" It's close enough that if I don't find something even better at the place I'm going to on Saturday, I'm ordering it, done deal.

Thursday I was on cloud 9. Completely refreshed for wedding planning. We can do this! Look at all of these pretty things on Etsy! Now I can do bridesmaid dresses and flower girl dresses and then menswear! The ugly invitations aren't insurmountable! I can somehow sort through the incredible amount of stuff on Etsy and find amazing things! I can do all of this and work out two hours a day!

By today, I went in the kitchen to make BM dress appointments (one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of... give me the books, swatches, and price lists and leave me be!) and went to book one with a place I had tried dresses on at. They had told me that all parties of three or more get their dresses at 20% off and that made them pretty reasonable. When I called she asked if I had bought my dress there (which, really, maybe I didn't are you going to spit on me? Or maybe I found my dress elsewhere but you were so nice when I was trying on dresses, I wanted to throw you a bone. Buzz off!) when I told her I hadn't bought one yet you would have thought I told her I kick puppies. She starts in on me about how a lot of their delivery dates are well into June at this point and, "What style are you looking for?!?!" and snap, snap, snap. It was surprisingly nasty. Then my fiance got back to me about the appointment I was trying to make with the planner for Monday. He's going skiing (and I was supposed to be psychic and know this) and how he needs his time off and how he doesn't want to just do wedding stuff and more wedding stuff and then have to go back to work.

But I'm supposed to spend my entire weekends doing wedding stuff and then my evenings doing wedding stuff, all while working out all the time, keeping his house clean, and moving? Oh, and putting in extra time at work so that I can make good performance bonuses. And, best of all, I can't even say what I want because all of my coworkers can hear. "No, no, I understand, your relaxation time is important. Don't mind me. I'll work on our wedding while you go skiing. Just like I spent Labor Day working on wedding stuff while you partied in Spokane. No problem."

And, I was supposed to get to play a game of Plants vs. Zombies as a reward for getting some stuff done but suddenly the kitchen was full of people and it was not the relaxing break I had been hoping for. Suddenly I'm back to hating weddings.

kind of le screwed

It's time to freak out. We're t minus four months and so far it looks like I'll be wearing either a burlap sack or jeans and a t-shirt. Shit, shit, shit. It's not for lack of trying. Just considering the math, I've made at least a solid fifteen dress shop visits. Now, even if you just figure five dresses per visit (which I know many of them have been more like twelve), that's at least 75 dresses I've actually put on. And while there are a number that I've really liked, none of them made me cry then force $1,000 on them so they'll give me one of my own.

I'm running out of stores and hope.

Freezing my Palladium Off

I am crazy sick of freezing at work every day. I honestly don't know why I don't just get about 10 pairs of of footie pajamas in some nice conservative colors and some tasteful accessories and just wear them to work every day. More and more I fail to see the point of putting together anything that resembles an outfit only to wear my coat all day long. Seriously, I'm wearing a sweater, slippers, and a blanket and one of my coworkers has the window open. Gah.

In other news, we ended up ordering fiance's wedding band yesterday. CHECK! Yay! Sadly I'm almost as excited to just have it off the list as I am for the significance. It did make me kind of sad to be the practical couple watching this other couple that was just crazy giddy about the whole thing. Picking out her ring and then his. They were young, though. Is it youth that makes them giddy when we aren't or is this a bad sign?

He was pretty funny about the whole thing. First, we ruled out doing cobalt or tungsten or any of those. They can't be resized and as apologetic as he was about the increased cost for a resizeable metal, both of us want to be able to spend the entire marriage with the same rings we got married with. He wanted white gold because it's what my ring is made of but ultimately we opted for palladium because it is hypoallergenic and with his skin being kind of sad these days, it would suck for him to react to the white gold and to have to get a new ring.