Calendar and Fishy

I know, I know. I haven't updated forever. It's just that there's a few big things to blog about and I feel like I can't blog about insignificant things until I catch up. Oh well, I'm giving up. I'll eventually get around to blogging about the wedding, the honeymoon, life as a newlywed, etc. But for now, I can't help but report on some very blog worthy events that happened last night.

The first isn't an event as much as a funny story. Some dear friends of mine are moving to Georgia on Sunday. Thus, I hosted a small gathering with a few friends last night to say goodbye. Holli, one of the friends that's moving away told me that she had a Christmas present for me back in December. It just always seemed that she forgot to bring it every time I saw her over the past few months. She would give me hints though as to what it was and I eventually guessed that it was a desk calendar. So last night, I asked her about the calendar. She looked at me sheepishly while her husband, John, snickered. I guess they had a garage sale in preparation for the move. The calendar was wrapped in Christmas paper and Holli put it out to sell. John told her that no one was going to buy a "mystery" item. Holli won out and the wrapped calendar was purchased. So not only does my friend purchase a gift for me, tell me that she has a gift for me, leaves me in anticipation for months about actually receiving the gift, but then sells it at a garage sale for a quarter. That was the worst Christmas present ever. At least I never even purchased a Christmas gift for her.

There was a random assortment of people at the little dinner party, including one of my most unique friends. Let's call her Hollywood. She's great and a lot of fun, but sometimes quite spastic. Anyway, she saw my beta fish in a bowl of cloudy, low water and promptly chastised me for abusing my fish. I told her if she was so offended by the state of my fish bowl, she could clean it out. She went straight to the kitchen to do so. A brief moment later, I saw my husband go running into the kitchen. Apparently Hollywood had dumped poor fishy down the disposal. Fishy couldn't be reached by the human hand, so sweet husband thought that the only way to get to poor fishy out of the sink would be to shop vac him out. Luckily, Holli lobbied for poor fishy's safety and convinced sweet husband to forgo the shop vac and explore other options. I know you're all on the edge of your seat in anticipation of the ending to this tragic story. Well, poor fishy did, in fact, survive. Apparently, some salad tongs and a flashlight make for a safe, albeit, slightly mangled fishy. He's now still alive after 24 hours, so we're fairly sure he'll make it. I'm pretty sure he laid in the drain for about 20 minutes. Luckily, Hollywood had the foresight to continuously pour water down the drain to keep him alive. Thank you sweet husband for saving my fishy with my salad tongs. It looks like I need a new set of salad tongs now. I know I should have been so scared to loose poor fishy, who's been with me for quite some time, but I was laughing so hard. It was like a Friends episode. Well, we wanted Holli and John to have one last memory of us all before they left.

And some final Arizona words to the Ronquillos. Congratulations John on this new, exciting chapter of your life. You've already accomplished so much in your short life and I know you'll continue to be amazing. Holli, we have so many memories. Thanks for bringing the pictures to remember some of them. Long life rock painitng. I love you both and will miss you, but am very happy for you. Plus, I know you'll come visit me and our friendship is nowhere near the end. Take care of each other! BFF!

I said yes!

Brandon finally asked me to marry him last night and guess what? I SAID YES! This may be confusing to most since we've been engaged for three months and our wedding is in 9 DAYS!, but here's the thing... Because of a whole bunch of timing issues and circumstances with the ring, he's never really had the chance to propose. We just kind of decided to get married and then started planning the wedding. So here's how it went...

I came home from work and he greeted me at the door and invited me in. The house smelled wonderful and there was classical music playing. He led me into the living room where the table is. There was a bouquet of roses on the table along with a candle and dinner. Dinner was ribs and mashed potatoes and wow, was it good. After dinner, he served key lime pie. During dessert he got down on one knee and asked me what I had planned for the rest of my life. I told him that I was planning to spend it with him. It was very sweet and very cute. I'm so excited to get married to him.

Spa Day

I have this fabulous friend named Stacy. She is absolutely wonderful. We met in college, both finance majors. I don't think either one of us could have graduated without the other. In honor of my upcoming wedding, Stacy treated me to a spa day. It was amazing. I'll walk you through from the beginning. We walked in the front door and were immediately treated like royalty. We checked in and were then given a brief tour of the facility. We were then led to the women's area where we were presented with keys to our lockers and comfy slippers. We found a comfy robe in our lockers. Before changing though, we headed to the restaurant for lunch. We split a very yummy chicken basil sandwich and a pesto chicken pizza. It was all delicious. After lunch, we changed into our swimsuits, covered up with our robes and headed first to the jacuzzi. After a brief sit in the jacuzzi, we got out to get ready for our massages. We then headed into the women's lounge to wait for our massages. The women's lounge was a very quiet, peaceful room with super comfy chairs, frosty beverages and soothing music, and a bunch of women laying around in bath robes. Stacy had a maternity massage, while I was treated to a Camelback Signature massage which consisted of aromatherapy, reflexology and hot rock massage...heavenly. After an hour of pure bliss, my massage was over. Sad. We then changed back into our swim suits and headed back out to the pool. The water was the perfect temperature. The weather was great. We ordered fruit smoothies and layed by the pool for a good two hours. The best part about the whole day was spending such great time with Stacy. We just talked and talked and had the best day ever. Thank you Stacy! It was just what I needed in the middle of this chaos called wedding planning.

11 More Days!

Greatest Bridal Shower!

My bridal shower was on Saturday. It was amazing. It was done as a group effort by a few of my friends, namely Jill, Holli, and Janette. It was perfect. The food was amazing. Tons of people came. I got a lot of great gifts including twelve, yes TWELVE pieces of lingerie. Now, some of my friends were very dirty in their gifts, but it was fun. Brandon's aunt was there and she gave me some lingerie, but it wasn't very scandalous. After she saw all the other stuff I got, she was so mad that she didn't get what she really wanted to. She thought that Pollyanna could have worn what she got me. All in all it was a perfect shower and I have the best friends in the whole world who are spoiling me rotten! Thanks girls!

On another topic, (still wedding related), we finally got our invitations in and sent out on Friday. They were delivered at about 11 am on Friday. At noon, Jill, Jackie (my sis-in-law), Lynda (friend), Josh (brother), and Brandon were all at my house folding and stuffing about 400 invitations. They were all in the mail by 1:30 pm. Good job everyone!

We also narrowly avoided another wedding catastrophe this weekend. My flowers are all calla lilies. White ones for the tables and deep red ones for my bouquet (which were a bit difficult to find). Well we ordered them a couple months ago, apparently when my wedding date was still May 19th. I guess we forgot to tell the florist that the date changed to June 2nd because the flowers came in this weekend and the florist wanted to know why we didn't pick them up. Plus, they said they had a hard time finding the red lilies and didn't know if they could get them again by June 2nd. Well my mom talked to the owner of the flower wholesaler today and he didn't make her pay for the first order and said he will be able to get more flowers in time for the real wedding. Isn't it wonderful when people are just nice? Thank you Mr. Flower Man. You are a very nice person.

12 MORE DAYS!!!!

Wedding planning keeps on going...

So, we had a slight catastrophe this week. I was supposed to get the invitations on Monday, but when they came in, they were horrible! The biggest (one of many) was that they spelled Brandon's parents last name wrong. So they are reprinting them and we should get them back on Friday. We have a crew ready to stuff at noon so we can hopefully get them out by Friday afternoon. Most people won't get them before 10 days prior to the wedding, but I guess there's nothing I can do about that. I'm getting my facial today and my spa day on Monday. Don't I have the greatest friends? We finally booked our honeymoon this week. We are spending five nights at a resort in Cancun! Yay! I'm so excited about that. We can lounge around in luxury for a whole week! My bridal shower is this weekend. I'm pretty excited about that too. I think some of my friends might try to embarrass me, but I doubt that's possible. I just can't believe how close it's getting. Before you know it, I'll have been married for 50 years!

23 days to go!

I know I have not been a good blogger. I really want to. I just need to try harder to make time for it. Okay, so I get married in 23 days! Wedding planning started out to be more stressful than I could bear, but I stepped back, took a breath, and relaxed. It's been pretty smooth sailing ever since. I guess the thing that I've noticed so much in this whole process is how little I care about the event and how much I care about the actual marraige. I really could not have chosen a better man. He is truly amazing. He tries so hard to make me happy. He works endlessly on communicating with me and solving all problems before they can cause contention. I'm not saying everything is always perfect, but he tries so hard to understand me and thus inspires me to try hard as well. I never thought I could be this happy.

Okay, now getting past the sappy stuff, I am also excited about the actual wedding day. I have my dress and it's beautiful. It's ivory with darker ivory embroidery and a deep red sash around the wasit. I'm wearing a strand of my great grandmother's pearls for sentiment (plus they actually go with the dress). My colors are cranberry red and ivory. I've designed the reception myself and it will hopefully be different than other receptions I've been to. There will be no trellis or ivy or picket fences. It will actually be quite simple, but hopefully elegant and I'm excited to see how it all comes out.

I think I'm almost done with most of the planning. We're still waiting for the invitations to come in. I am still in search of fabulous earrings. I still need to craft some type of mechanism to hang a bunch of round, Chinese paper lanterns from the ceiling at the reception. I have a dress fitting on Friday. We still have to book the honeymoon too!

Luckily, I have a lot of very talented friends. One of my friends is an extremely talented photographer and has already done some fantasic engagment photos for us. I'm excited to see the wedding pictures that she does. I have another friend who does makeup and skin care. She has provided me with some great products to get my skin ready for the big day and is taking care of my makeup. My cousin does my hair. We've already practiced my wedding hair and I think it will look great! And I have several other friends that are planning my bridal shower and have shopped with me and have planned with me. I am very lucky.

23 more days!

GETTING MARRIED!

Hey everyone! I'm engaged! Yay for me! Okay, so I've been engaged about 2 1/2 weeks, but I wanted to make sure to tell everyone before they read it on my blog. We're getting married in May (date is still up in the air). I'm so happy and have no doubt at all that he's who I have been looking for my entire life. I'm so in love and cannot wait to be with him for eternity. I'll write details later about how it all came to be, but for now, here's a picture my grandma took of us the other night. Everyone, meet Brandon, my future husband...

More Gushing

One of my friends told me that I gush about B. If you are tired of hearing about how great B is, then stop reading immediately. The other day, I got a home decorating project in my head and at 9:00 at night after we had already been out for the night, B helped me measure and hang and staple and anything else I needed until the project was done. He didn't even complain once about it. By the way, the project turned out GREAT! Then, yesterday, another bouquet of flowers mysteriously showed up on my piano, right below the recently completed project. The saddest part is that I didn't even notice the new flowers. I felt so bad. I'm so spoiled. So happy... Did I mention how cute he is?

Headaches and tattoos

Have you ever felt like something was just off. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I haven't been quite right lately. I'm all achy, I have had a headache for 4 or 5 days, and I'm so tired all the time. It's not a lack of sleep and I'm eating healthier than I was. Shouldn't I feel better? I don't think I'm getting sick because I don't have any sick symptoms. I wish I would feel better because everything seems harder to accomplish lately.

On a different note, I'm willingly letting a woman run a needle along my eyelids for an hour or two tonight. About 6 weeks ago, I got permanent (aka tattooed) eyeliner. It was the most painful thing I've ever experienced. Apparently it takes two visits to really complete. I can't believe I'm going back for more! What am I thinking? Although, I love having it. It means that when I wake up in the morning or just get out of the shower or pool, my eyes are defined and I don't look sick. Also, my eyeliner doesn't wear off by the end of the day. Oh, what glory! I guess beauty is pain.

Best Boyfriend Ever!

I am so lucky! B is so good to me. For Valentine's Day, he had a huge bouquet of roses delivered to me at work and then cooked me dinner that night. It was perfect. Last week, he noticed that I was frustrated when I was cooking because I don't have any good pans, so a couple days later he showed up at my house with a really nice set of pans. This weekend I was struggling and somewhat emotional. Even when others may have thought I was being crazy, he just loved me and was so patient. Plus, he came to my house on Saturday and mowed and weeded my backyard and cleaned my garage. Yesterday, he brought me a book about how to fix my car (he said mostly for him), a gas can for my lawn mower with stuff written all over it about how hot I am, some Stargazer Lilies (I'm running out of places to put flowers), and a Costco card (he added me to his membership). He's wonderful and I'm in love!