The Wedding Party

A result of our long friendship before we ever started dating, Ryan and I have a lot of mutual friends. For some reason, most of them are guys. This posed an interesting problem for picking our wedding party. Most of our friends get to stand on his side of the church, and he wanted to include a lot of them. I have 2 sisters, a future sister in law, and a few close girl friends that I wanted to be my maids, so I drew the line at 7. If I hadn't, we'd probably have 15 groomsmen, I'd be scrambling around asking people I barely know to be my bridesmaids, and they'd be hanging out into the aisles of the church during the ceremony. As it is, we'll fill up the stage and he can use everyone I wouldn't let him include as an usher so they still get to be a part of our day.

Once I picked my girls, I started thinking of ways to formally ask them (most of them knew they'd be in my wedding already) to be my bridesmaids. I like to be crafty, so I decided to make cards and write notes inside them all telling them exactly why I wanted them to be in my wedding. Some of the notes were long and mushy, some were short and sweet, but they were all heartfelt. For the actual cards, I saw a little doodle of a bride and her bridesmaids (on Etsy, I think) and decided to modify it for myself. I bought some blank cards and envelopes and drew a bride with a maid on either side of her on the front of the cards, I wrote my notes inside, and then colored one maid on each card to look like the recipient. I liked this, but they were still kind of lacking in color, so I found some paper with wedding doodles on it (cakes, champagne glasses, hearts, etc.) that were kind of in the same simple style as my bride drawing. I lined the envelopes with this paper, and the result was pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself. 

Ryan and his mom came up with the idea of giving the guys he wanted to be his groomsmen a bottle of whiskey, but customizing the labels with wedding stuff. We found a website that let you type in your own text, and it would put it on a Jack Daniel's label. We played around with it some, got a rough idea, and decided he could tweak the wording later. However, between our initial discovery of the site and the next time he tried to use it, Jack Daniel's apparently sent them a cease and desist order, so he had to go with our rough draft wording, that we had thankfully already saved, just in case. He just had the label printed on wallet sized photo paper and glued them to the bottles, and I think they turned out very nicely.

The Venue

Now that you know the story, we can start planning! My sister made an observation when I first got engaged: when people hear the news their first question is one of two things. If the person is female, first question is "Can I see the ring?" If the person is male, the first question is "Have you set a date?" This probably says something profound about the difference between guys and gals. Girls like sparkly things and boys like to know when they'll have to show up for things. Who knows? Anyway, to answer all of the men, we started trying to set a date. After discussing all potential scheduling conflicts, we decided sometime toward the middle or end of May would be our best option. Since we met in college and Ryan proposed in the chapel on campus, he really liked the idea of getting married there. I made a call and discovered that the only open time was from 8-2 on May 12th. Graduation for half of our wedding party is at 10 on May 12th. Nope, not gonna work. We discussed some other options, but I really wanted the place we get married to mean something to at least one of us, so the ceremony is going to be at my home church. This left us free to pick just about any date we wanted, so we opted for the next weekend, May 19th.

The next big decision was where to have the reception. We could do it at the church, but most receptions at Baptist churches are really just glorified receiving lines. Not that there's anything wrong with that at all, but it's not really want we wanted. Having the reception at the church is probably more what my family would expect, but his family, not being Baptist, would have other expectations, and this day should be about both of us. We were tossing around ideas for places on the Coast, when I remembered that there's a building next to the Walter Anderson Museum in Ocean Springs that has a big room with full wall murals painted by Walter Anderson himself. How perfect! Minimal decoration required (or allowed), unique, dance floor and bar friendly, pretty inexpensive. We called and it was open for our date! Venues: done.

This is the room where our reception will be.

An idea of what it looks like with tables set up.

The Story

Hey guess what...I'm engaged! I figured I'd start posting about the wedding planning process, but I'm over a month in and haven't even told you the engagement story yet, so first things first.

The fiance and I met at school, and even though we graduated in April, we still have a lot of friends that are still there, so we visit a lot. On the weekend in question, we were going up for the MSU vs Bama game, so he picked me up after work and we headed north.

When we got to Starkville, Ryan said we had to make a stop on campus because he told his sister that she could borrow his camera for Bulldog Bash. For those of you who don't know what that is, basically they close all the roads in the Cotton District of Starkville, set up a stage in the middle of the street, and it's a huge concert with people and vendors and all kinds of things that are damaging to cameras everywhere. Ryan is very protective of his camera, and I knew his sister was planning on being right in the thick of things, as close to the stage as she could get, so this whole borrowing the camera idea seemed a little odd, but I wasn't going to question it. We met her in the Union, handed over the camera, then he suggested we walk around for a while before meeting up with our friends. We hadn't been on campus in a while, so this sounded like a plan to me.

We set out and I pointed us toward the Drill Field, in the middle of campus. He seemed reluctant to go that way, which was a little odd, but I pressed on. We ran into a friend and stopped to talk but I did most of the talking and Ryan was preoccupied with his phone. He eventually told the guy (who is actually going to be one of the groomsmen in our wedding) we'd catch up with him later and pointed me in another direction. He steered me toward the chapel, getting antsier by the minute. When he opened the door, I saw a guy playing the piano at the front, so I figured we'd just turn around and continue our walk elsewhere so as to not disturb him, but Ryan led me right down to the front, grinning at me the whole way, got down on one knee, pulled out a ring, and asked me to marry him. And then I saw a big flash. Turns out the camera at the concert story was a cover for getting the camera to her so she could capture our big moment and the preoccupation with the phone was his sister telling him she had gotten someone to agree to play the piano for the whole thing. And now the moment you've all been waiting for...the pictures!

"Will you marry me?"

"Yes!"

The ring!

Tuesday

My last 2 posts have been written on Tuesdays, (quite unintentionally) so I figured I should write one today to keep up the trend, even though I missed last Tuesday.

I was here...

....doing this...

I also did lots of other things like ride a tandem bike around Mackinac Island, look for petoskey stones in Petoskey, MI, and hike a million miles up and down zillion foot tall dunes to Lake Michigan, which was a billion degrees below zero when I stuck my foot in. It was a lot of fun, but I was happy to get back home to the land where it's 90+ with a relative humidity of 3000% in June (not the lucky-to-get-up-to-75 weather I experienced for a week), where people say y'all instead of yous guys, and where sweet tea is a staple. Honestly, other than the accent and the weather (and of course the lack of good drinks) Michigan is a lot like Mississippi. Lots of farms, lots of cows, lots of country stations on the radio.

Making the transition back to work from being on vacation wasn't so bad either. I went into work yesterday, was asked to work the weekend shift at the Walmart branch of the bank, and told I could take Tuesday and Wednesday off. Off for a week, work a day, off for 2 more days. I can dig it.

I had all kinds of plans for today. I was going to get up and walk with my dad as usual, do some cleaning, go to Hobby Lobby because I have a crafty thing in mind and need supplies, and spend the rest of the day working on my still splotchy leg tan from the beach. However, my alarm didn't go off (or perhaps I turned it off without realizing it) so I wasn't up at 5 to go walking, and as a result, I am still in my p.j.s at 10:00. Oh well, there's always tomorrow, which I probably won't blog about because it's not Tuesday.

Noise

As my dad and I were out walking yesterday morning, he said something about how wrong people are to assume that living out in the country would be quiet. I hadn't really been paying attention to the noise around me before that, but I perked up and started listening. It is loud! There might not be the sounds of steady streams of cars rushing past, horns blowing, and people yelling, but there are roosters crowing, dogs barking at the crowing roosters, birds chirping, frogs croaking, crickets...cricketing.

This morning as we set out, I started listening again. You can hear roosters coming from every direction. I would like to see a map pointing out every house with chickens within a 5 mile radius. I bet there would be a big circle right around our house. Imagine the Ring of Fire, only the Pacific plate is my yard, and the volcanoes are chickens. (Now there's an interesting mental image...)

In addition to the usual critters this morning, we also heard our friendly, neighborhood lion. The Mobile Zoo is right down the road, and every so often, I suppose when it's feeding time, you can hear, or rather feel, the lion roar. It's kind of like the bass at a concert, only in my front yard at 5 am.

Anyway, I suppose if you truly want quiet, even living in the middle of nowhere won't always do the trick. Life just has a way of being noisy. My advice to those in pursuit of silence: find a library.

What I've Been Doing Lately, Picture Book Style

I graduated, which makes me very happy and very sad at the same time.

I started working at the bank again. (This is not really where I work. Century Bank is a much nicer looking bank than this. Even the Walmart branch.)

I hung out with this guy a lot, but not as much as I would if we didn't now live an hour and a half apart instead of the former 2ish minutes. (P.S. Isn't he a handsome?) Yesterday I went car shopping with him which made me decide to start saving my money...

...for one of these.

I started getting up at 5:00 every morning to run with my dad. I like the exercise. I love the conversation and the time spent outside watching the world wake up.

I was asked to help teach 2nd grade Sunday School, which I am very excited about and will start next Sunday.

I also went to the beach and got a funny, splotchy sunburn on my legs, which I will spare you pictures of because I couldn't find any non gross sunburn pictures.

Basically, I started my transition from college student to whatever comes next. So far, not so bad.

Just Call Me Domestic Darla

It is Saturday. More importantly, it is the Saturday of Super Bulldog Weekend. What does this mean to you? Maybe nothing. To me it means that I was up late last night and I'll be up late again tonight, therefore, in the interest of my mind and body, I should be asleep right now. Instead, I was awake at 7:30 am. Wide awake. I could have stayed in bed hoping I would fall back asleep, but it was hot, so I decided to go downstairs and have breakfast. Once I reached the kitchen and saw the state it was in, I decided I'd straighten it up a little first. This turned into completely cleaning the kitchen (wiping counters, scraping up little bits of cookie dough that seemed to have gotten plastered all over everything, sweeping, and mopping) and the living room (scraping up even more cookie dough that somehow got under the rug, sweeping some more, mopping some more, straightening the pillows, and vacuuming). Then and only then could I make the coffee and biscuits that I came down for, but before I'll be able to enjoy eating them, I'm going to tackle the dishwasher, and possibly even the dirty dishes in the sink.

P.S. I wasn't even here last night to make this mess.

P.P.S. I think I have a problem.

I just spent a while reading a few other blogs, so I feel the need to write something in mine since I've neglected it for a while. The only problem is that while I have the inspiration, I lack the subject matter. The only thing I can think of is that I never wear my spoon ring anymore and I never play my ukulele either, rendering my last post completely obsolete.

Also, I am hot. The living room in my house is big and open and has tile floors and my roommate and I are cheap. These things combine to make it cold in there all the time. However, even though we don't set it very high, we do keep the heat on since it's been downright Arctic here for the past week. The heater runs and runs, unsuccessfully warming the living room but way too successfully warming my bedroom which is much smaller, a lot less open, and carpeted. I don't know how thermostats work, but I'm assuming that whatever instrument measures the temperature of the room is in the living room where it is currently 67, not my bedroom where it has to be at least 90. The only exception is my closet where it is always 30 below. Maybe the architect designed my room the way he did, knowing that the closet would always be cold, because he knows that boogie monsters prefer a warmer climate. Unless my personal boogie monster is the Abominable Snowman. Or was he not actually one of the monsters that worked to scare kids on Monsters, Inc? I don't really remember, but I don't think he was. Guess that means I'm safe.

It looks like I had more to talk about than I originally thought.