Great grandmother's spatula!

My oh my has it been a long time. And yet, still not a lot to report. Where shall I start?

Wedding stuff is sort of at a stand still. I've put on no less than 105 wedding dresses, and can't seem to fall in love with any of them. There was one yesterday that was very nearly perfect, but alas it was incredibly expensive. So far, we've decided on what Mavis and his groomsmen will be wearing (complete with top hat, yay!), also centerpieces, and the entrance way decorations. And we bought most of the bouquet parts. So, decorations are coming along nicely. Now if I could just find a dress and decide on a ceremony site, we'd be looking good.

Now, about that dress from yesterday. We finally acquired a second car (yay!), and I was down in Cincinnati applying to jobs. I went into Formal and Bridal (down in the bridal district, largest in North America, whoa), and they were sort of rude. So, I walked across the street because European Bridal had a sidewalk lunchboard sign saying they were having a HUGE SALE. I went in to try on some dresses to make myself feel better about F&B being such bitches, and the sales consultant was super nice and she was totally listening to what I was saying about hating most of the dresses I've put on already. Anyway, I was explaining to her that F&B were so rude about my filling out an application and she was like "Oh, we're hiring! You should fill out one of our applications too." Well that was sort of awkward since I came in to try on dresses, but the atmosphere was awesome and all the ladies seemed really nice so I did. I'll cross my fingers, it seemed like an awesome place to work. But more about the dress, this isn't IT because European Bridal doesn't allow pictures and I was so flustered about turning in my resume and talking with the hiring woman on the spot that I forgot to ask Shannon to email me the information on the dress. But here is something that looks like it.

Basically it was this really plain boring white pure silk dress with this backwards bolero over top of it and then she added in this awesome belt to make it look like one dress, it was pretty fabulous. I wish I had had someone with me to see it. Oh well, maybe next time.

On the gaming front, Mavis has been playing Demon's Souls and I have started (but not really gotten a chance to play) Dragon Quest VIII. Demon's Souls is just as unforgiving as everyone has made it out to be; but he's also playing without being online so there aren't any asshole trolls around to invade his game and kill him. And Dragon Quest VIII is a traditional RPG. I'm very much enjoying what I've seen so far. Persona 2 is next on my list to play after I finish DQVIII, it arrived like three weeks ago and it's practically begging me to play it.

Well, fuck.

Well, fuck. It looks like the trip to Evansville this month will be canceled. When Mavis was on his way to pay rent this afternoon the check engine light on the car started flashing and then the car began to shake. We're taking it to a mechanic tomorrow to have the code scanned to see what's wrong with the car, but we're not hopeful (nor is our luck that good) to have something minor be wrong with it. I'll let you all know what is up with that tomorrow after they scan it. If it is something minor (cross your fingers and pray folks, pray) they have openings all next week to fix it and then everything will be fine for the trip home.

Unfortunately, this means now not only do we have to worry about paying for our wedding, but also a new car. Yay! I suppose we could postpone the wedding until we find some more cash but we're both pretty partial to the date we've already chosen.

Also, finding a job in Oxford that I can walk to is seriously limiting my options. So yay, what an awesome day.

Just a bunch of crap

This is not a cohesive post, mostly because there isn't a lot to talk about. My first official one month weigh in was on Tuesday and since last month I've lost two inches in my bust, an inch in my waist, and two inches in my hips. Go me. I also just finished my free week of workouts at Curves, which was a lot of fun. They have a really great community going on in there.

That's it for weight loss. Mavis has (so far this summer) beaten Dragon Age II, Pikmin, and Mass Effect (again). He's playing through Mass Effect 2 in preparation for Mass Effect 3 and has started the first Metroid game for the gamecube. I only have DS games left to play, and Super Mario Bros for the Wii.

I found this dress. I'm contemplating having my maid of honor wear it. No promises though.

I also found these, but I'm not sure if I like them for the wedding or just some party I'm going to throw this summer.

Dresses

Everyone is talking about prom. CNN wants to hear about the experience of picking out my prom dress, livejournal wants to hear about my favorite prom memories, the local paper wants photos of prom pictures to show to the kids how people used to dress up for prom. Seriously?

Picking out my wedding dress will be (I imagine) much like picking out my prom dress. Which was a lot of fun for me, but not so much for my best friend at the time. I have a tendency to love dresses with a million and a half tiny buttons all the way down the back, or the ones that have the impossibly long zippers, or needing to be laced up all the way. It was NOT fun for her. And in the end it turned out to not be so fun for me either when she got frustrated and zipped my back into the zipper. YOWCH!

At any rate, I am looking forward to going dress shopping with some of my bridesmaids, possibly Mavis' mom, and hopefully one of my token dudes. I just gotta lose about 40 more pounds. I gotta keep on keepin on, 10 down, 40 more to go.

Gifts, or not to gifts?

I've been doing a lot of thinking, and I still can't decide. Mavis and I have been together for a long time now, and have a lot of the things that we need. We have no need for a new toaster or blender. We have all the small appliances we need. So, instead of asking for gifts for our wedding I've been thinking of doing a honeymoon registry.

There's a site that's sponsored by The Knot that sets up honeymoon registries called Travelers Joy. Basically we set up an account for us that details all the money we need to take our honeymoon and our guests donate an amount that they would have spent on gifts. So we still get to go somewhere for our honeymoon, and all our guests get to help pay for that instead of some dumbass appliance that will break sooner rather than later.

I think I'd rather have the memories of our honeymoon for a lifetime than a couple of years with a new blender. Right? Of course we'll still register for a few gifts for people who aren't comfortable donating for our honeymoon or just don't understand the internet.

What do you think? Is this a good idea, or some pipe dream that I shouldn't even consider in the first place?

Screw you PSN

I'm taking a break from talking about wedding stuff to complain about the PSN. First of all, if your customer's credit card information is stolen you might want to consider sending out an email or notice ASAP. Second of all, for the first part of the PSN being down we could still watch Netflix but then while they were "fixing" some stuff they broke the ability to watch Netflix.

So, we've been turning on the Wii. And watching Netflix from there. Oh, and also I found a game or two I'd like to play for the Wii and now most of our friends are "oh, I'm going to by the 360 version instead of the PS3 version". So, way to go Sony you've done a great job of driving your players elsewhere. The PSN being down for 2+ weeks is unacceptable.

We don't have any PS3 games in the backlog right now, so since I can't get my PS3 to do anything we probably won't be turning it on for a while. Oh, and that 30 free days of Playstation Plus that you're offering? You can stick it. Because it's not good enough.

Centerpieces?

I made an announcement last night to all the people who might not know that we're trying to use empty wine bottles as our centerpieces. I had already told several friends not to recycle their wine bottles because I wanted to use them in our basically free centerpieces. My original idea was something like this. But then I decided that buying strands of twinkle lights might get expensive really quickly.

So, then I found these! And I think they're pretty special. Basically we'll get all our friends to contribute their old wine bottles, and get my dad to cut the bottoms off. Then I'll either head to the dollar store and buy a bunch of cheap candles or buy a lot of them in bulk. I'm envisioning these as my centerpieces with maybe a few stray ornaments laying around to tie it all together.

I saw some bowls of ornaments that some people used as space filler, like around the quest book and in nooks in the bathrooms to make it all look polished. I haven't yet decided if that's what I want to do yet.

Here are some other centerpiece ideas that I had as well:

Some floating candles, instead of candles in the bottles.
Of course my Xmas topiary.

And that's all the actual centerpieces, but I had some guest place card ideas:

Fillable ornaments.
Ornament card holders.
Snowflake card holders.

But seeing as we're trying to cut down on the whole ornament thing those are all out. So, there you have it. Mostly a graveyard of old ideas today.