Ask and ye shall receive...

... three weeks later.

I'd mentioned -- wow, yep, three weeks ago -- that we're not sure yet what approach we're going to take for wedding reception decor. There was a request for photos of the space so as to allow the collective interwebs to better weigh in with suggestions, and I'm just now getting around to taking you all up on that.

Here's the room where we'll be dancing... so, hopefully, where most people will be spending most of the evening. The table on the right won't be there, nor will the table with the coffee thermoses.



I like the french doors. I like the columns. The light fixtures on the ceiling, though, aren't my favorite. Let's take a closer look:



Hmm. Not sure what to do about those. Deeming them not a big deal and declaring that my dislike for them won't ruin the look of the whole room is still a distinct possibility.

The room with the dance floor is connected to the room with the bar (fitting, no?):



There'll be fewer tables in here, as we're not doing a seated, plated dinner. It's valuable real estate for mingling and chatting and enjoying hors d'oeuvres.

The last room, which sort of wraps around the room with the bar, is this one:



All those windows there? They overlook the ocean. Islands and sailboats and sparkling waves and all that good stuff. It's gorgeous, but it's a little separated from the rest of the interior space, and far(ther) away from the dance floor. I think we'll have a few tables set up in here for folks who want to take a break from all the rocking out. (Not everyone finds that as energizing as I do, I've been told.)

At this point, we've pretty much narrowed it down to two not-very-overlapping potential approaches:

(1) whimsical! cute! breezy! sprigs of flowers or single blooms in mismatched antique bottles (we already have these, oddly enough) and jars and stuff, clustered together. possibly with ribbons.

or

(2) elegant! dramatic! lots of votives clustered around a taller visual element, possibly consisting of plain cylindrical vases filled with blooms submerged in water. more candles. lots of little white lights.

Oh heck, lots of little white lights either way.

We'll be starting the festivities while it's light outside, and transitioning into nighttime, so I'm not sure how option 2 would look while there's still sunlight streaming through the windows, or how option 1 would look at night without tons of candles. (Clearly I'm really looking for a way to avoid using the lighting that comes with the place.) I've loved every photo I've seen with rows of little white lights stretched across a ceiling, but I don't know if that would put off enough light... and the ceilings in question aren't exactly vaulted, so there's that.

So. What do you all think? Which option (or neither) would you go with, and what would you add that we haven't already thought of?

Wistful (but not really)

Parts of being unemployed for most of 2009 were pretty great. Not the financial stress or the constant rejection or the uncertainty, that's for sure. But oh, the available time I had! Hours on end for errands and cleaning and hobbies and socializing. That part was lovely.

I'm realizing that perhaps I have too many interests. That sounds awfully depressing, though: shouldn't one be interested in lots of things, and be thankful for all the interestingness in the world rather than shutting it out? I like knitting. I like reading, using the artistic and intellectual parts of my brain, and learning about fascinating topics. I like cooking healthy, tasty dinners. I like exercising and feeling all healthy and strong. I like good conversations with quality people. See my predicament? Which of those items should I cut back on? There's no good answer there.

Something has to change, though. I'm the type who needs (NEEDS) at least 8 hours of sleep, and probably an hour itself just to *get* to sleep. Figure in 9 hours a day for work and commuting, plus an hour to get ready each morning, and that leaves five hours -- not nearly enough time to go to the gym, cook dinner, have a substantial conversation with The Awesome Fiance (or anyone else, for that matter), and throw anything else fun into the mix. And yes, I want to have each of those elements in every day, or at least most days.

I think I'm asking too much, and that makes me sad.

List Triumph

So how did the weekend go? Pretty darn well, actually. Let's see how I did with that list:

- meet with travel agent
Done!

- draw up list of questions and topics re: wedding venue
Done!

- meet with venue contact
Done! And I took photos of the place, which will come in handy as we figure out how to prettify it.

- figure out wedding invitation verbiage; if successful, place order
Not done. But, in my defense, we did tackle another big wedding-y item.*

- assess needs for this year's garden (flowers and vegetables)
Nope. Instead, I weeded and cleared the dead vegetation out of our flower beds.

- force myself to do boring PT exercises for my knee
Done! This still stays on the list moving foward, though.

- do laundry
Done!

- organize linen closet
Done!

- organize clothing storage
Done for now... will need to do more when the temperatures are consistently out of the winter-sweater range.

- draw up list of issues to be addressed by an electrician
Done!

- knit: work on sleeves of current sweater; refrain from casting on new project when massive gift knitting endeavor continues to loom
Yes, I did this. The sleeves aren't finished, but I worked on them... and no. new. projects.

- read: finish current fascinating book so as to move on to next fascinating book before it has to go back to the library
I've got about 10 pages left, which will be read later this evening.


* True to our things-fall-into-place form so far, we went to look at wedding bands and didn't intend to make any purchases, but we ended up buying exactly what each of us had in mind for ourselves. Bonus: we got a great deal, we were able to give our money to a local business, and had a fantastic customer service experience. Trying on rings while eating cake and sipping champagne? With salespeople who are knowledgeable, pleasant, and not pushy? Works for me!

Hello, old friend...

It's been a while since I've posted an Ambitious To Do List (ATDL). The weekend ahead certainly calls for one:

- meet with travel agent
- draw up list of questions and topics re: wedding venue
- meet with venue contact
- figure out wedding invitation verbiage; if successful, place order
- assess needs for this year's garden (flowers and vegetables)
- force myself to do boring PT exercises for my knee
- do laundry
- organize linen closet
- organize clothing storage
- draw up list of issues to be addressed by an electrician
- knit: work on sleeves of current sweater; refrain from casting on new project when massive gift knitting endeavor continues to loom
- read: finish current fascinating book so as to move on to next fascinating book before it has to go back to the library

Wish me luck!

Spring has sprung!

Kind of a trite title, but I don't care. It was a gorgeous 57 degrees today (apparently the norm is 42). To celebrate, I have a photographic update of the tulips in our yard. As of five minutes ago, they looked like this:

Swoon.

The Awesome Fiance earns his superlative moniker(s) every day. This weekend in particular, though, he went all out: he installed a bathroom exhaust fan to replace the anemic and useless one that came with the house. I don't have a picture -- let's face it, it's a white grate on a white ceiling: nothing much to look at -- but take my word for it when I sat it's a vast improvement. His dad helped, mostly for moral support and to run down to the circuit breaker box in the basement, but The Awesome Fiance did all the important work.

In the next few weeks, weather permitting, we'll be tackling the set-up of a rain barrel (water for the garden! doing our part to reduce run-off pollution!), which involves as a prerequisite the installation of gutters on the house. I'll help (instead of reading and knitting like I did during the fan installation...) but I suspect the lion's share of the effort will be his. Because he's awesome.

An Injury-Free Ski Adventure is a Good Ski Adventure

So I haven't posted in almost a week because... we were on vacation! It was me, Mr. Terrific, and the Terrific Family, and we went skiing. At this point, I should note that the same group went on a similar vacation last year, and I took a snowboarding lesson that proved to be the ultimate example of my coordination failures. I had a nice time, but I spent 2 hours on the slopes, at most. This year, in contrast, I made the very wise decision to ditch the snowboarding concept and take a ski lesson instead.

You know what? It wasn't horrible! I only fell twice over the course of the two days we had lift tickets. And, most surprising of all, I spent most of my descents with my skis relatively parallel to one another: no excessive snowplowing to slow myself down! Granted, I wasn't blazing down the trails at breakneck speed, but I was staying in (relative) control by skiing across the mountain like you're supposed to. I even rode the chair lift *by myself* without forgetting to lift the safety bar before attempting to disembark (can't you just picture it?) -- hurrah!

And as a bonus, we had only the best spring weather for the whole trip. As you can see, it was very sunny:

zen and the art of wedding planning

All the wedding-y decisions we've made so far have been surprisingly, blissfully, almost oddly easy. We look at our options, we let ourselves ruminate for a bit (if we have to at all), and without fail one option presents itself very clearly as the one that feels right for us. Our venue? We walked in and promptly forgot all about the list of seven other places we'd considered. We went back and forth on whether we should do favors and ended up getting really psyched about what we've decided to give to everyone, once we thought of it. And don't even get me started on how I found my dress (which I should totally tell you if I haven't already -- 97% off retail, bay-bee!)

The big decision that was making me nervous, though (and of course that means "the decison I was trying to postpone as long as possible"), was the invitations. SuperFiance kept suggesting that we start thinking about them, and while I agree with him that deciding these things now will make our lives easier in a few months, my tendency toward indecision put me in flight, rather than fight mode. There are a LOT of different types of invitations out there. Elegant, whimsical, vintage, modern, professionally printed, DIY. Gah!

I bit the bullet and agreed to sit down and look at some possibilities last night. By the time I reached my thoroughly-overwhelmed threshold, we had a few possibilities flagged for future inspiration at the very least, and one design that we liked more than the others.

About an hour later, the solution became apparent, and in this case the answer wasn't a vendor or a location but a frame of mind. I looked at SuperFiance and said "hey, if we look at those invitations again on Saturday and still like the same ones, you wanna just buy them?" No rethinking, no hassling with fonts and graphics and paper cutters and dimensions in a quest to make every last element of the day as "us" as it can possibly be.* They'll be "us" enough because we like them. And we'll be much, much happier making a decision and moving on.

I wonder how long we can put off deciding what to use for reception decorations before the it'll-all-fall-into-place approach works for that, too?



*We're picking our battles and playing to our strengths when it comes to projects (hello, home-grown flowers). We're ok as garderners, but graphic designers, not so much.

I knit like I cook.

As I think I may have mentioned, oh, every time I talk about cooking, I'm not the best at following recipes. Measuring is time-consuming (and it results in more dishes to wash, I would say unnecessarily), so I usually don't do it. I often don't have every suggested ingredient on hand, and depending on what the missing element is, I forge ahead anyway. Even when I do have all the right ingredients, I'm likely to use less of some (oil, for instance) and more of others (recipes never call for enough cinnamon, ever).

And yes, I approach knitting in much the same way. I'm about as incapable of following a pattern as I am at adhering to a recipe. Right now, I'm working on the Mirabella Cardigan from the spring 2008 issue of Interweave Knits (clearly I conquered the what-to-knit-next decision that had me stumped last week). I'm making a rough approximation of it, anyway.

First, I decided to use a finer gauge than the pattern calls for and knit a larger size to arrive at the dimensions I'll need. Next, as I always do, I opted for knitting in the round rather than knitting flat. At that point, I figured I might as well knit it as a pullover instead of a cardigan, and lengthen the short sleeves to full length. The jury's still out on whether I'll change the neckline.

Here's what I've got so far:

ouch (and yay)

I've already mentioned that I've had to take an extended, infuriating, grump-inducing hiatus from running. I've been going to physical therapy and doing exercises to get my knee back up to snuff. The decline of fitness has been inevitable, though.

Over the weekend, I decided to put a toe back in the shallow end of running. As much as I don't want the progress I've made to be destroyed by overuse too soon, I'm also wary of being too inactive by way of paranoia. If I don't get back to training, I'll never get back to my former capacity (such as it was). So I ran, a very little bit. Very little. I did six minutes total, broken into three two-minute segments, separated by walking. I didn't listen to music, lest I be tempted to keep going through a particularly high energy song. And I didn't push myself with speed or hills.

It was lovely. But now I really, really hurt.