Time flies... even if you're not having fun!

I swear I'm not trying to neglect this poor blog over here, things have just been going a mile a minute in our lives and I don't know how to keep up with everything anymore!

Shortly after we hit up NC, we went to Memphis to see Jeremy's parents and homecoming-- I got to see some of my sisters I haven't seen in a while and sadly reinforced that some of my pledge sisters still hold my illness against me... But, the person who matters most in my swift exit from Rhodes (the girl who unexpectedly got saddled with my rush party) doesn't hold it against me and is still a friend, and that's all I really care about :)

I also got to see Charles and Krystal and the kids for a few minutes, even ran in to Alex and Jay (whom I haven't seen in 4-5 years) and ran in to some of the folks who were seniors and juniors my freshman year and really made my "Rhodes experience" PLUS I got to meet my great great great grand little!!

Andrea, on the left, with HER little Sam and her grand little Maggie! My Alpha family has grown so much and it makes me SO happy. Good job to my little Caroline for keeping up the love!

Since then, there has been more drama at work that I won't go in to, but suffice to say it's wearing me thin... we have an abundance of workers here today and I'm soooo tempted to skate out but I've left a few Fridays in October and I'll be out for two solid weeks in December so here I stay...

I've been trying to distract myself with my Pinterest blog and trying to put more of a concerted effort in to AEA and getting that off the ground and rolling since one of the other staff members here has been handing out my business card for me! I also coordinated my friends Della and Brent's wedding last weekend to great success, and I'm hoping they'll write a nice little testimonial type piece for me!

Since then, the weather has been fluctuating ever so much and so now I'm back in the fall cycle of trying not to get bronchitis! Which is awesome since I have four weeks until surgery and really can't afford to be sick at the moment...

Other than ALL of that, we're just preparing for Thanksgiving and a trip to Indiana-- we get the whole week off this year! We were really hoping that Ana would still be around to see, but we're not really worth much in the big scheme of things so they vamoosed a while ago. Oh, well, we'll just go up to Memphis and see Charles and Krystal and their kids, and pick up all the baby stuff they're giving us for whenever the heck that happens, and help Marc and Jan out a day or two before we head up to Indiana to see Josh and Sarah!

Then, we get back, and it's a week until surgery... yikes!

Well, that's all I have-- ciao for now!

Fastest Week of Our Lives! (in pictures)

These are just the pictures from our camera, we'll have the professional stuff and ones from friends later-- enjoy!

We started the week with Celtic Christmas-- here's JJ Sheridan (piano)

and Joe Craven (everything)

Pipers and drummers headed out at the end

Michael (The Border Collies), JJ, and Alison Brown

Me and Ms. Whitley both of the Rosin Sisters and Westchester Elementary School Library!

Good job waitress-- dark picture of everyone at lunch (work)

Much better picture of everyone, but without JL!

JL and Richard try not to laugh as they subject Jeremy to the lady who rubs people's backs...

Mary Mac's Tea Room (where we had lunch)

The cake from work-- it was YUMMY, good job Kurt!

"Do Not Refrigerate With Cake" -- why would you?

Lauren earns her lunch by helping pass out cake

From the 16th floor of the Georgian Terrace-- we never did go to the roof!

Joe checks out the fancy artwork on the wall in Joey and Lauren's room

and the $6 bottle of Evian

Joey looks lawyerly on his suite chair

Violet goes for Jeremy's lemon-- she went to town on it

Me and Anne-Minter-- 20 years of friendship!

Group shot, even if it's a little blurry.

Jeremy, Violet, Lauren, Joey, Brent, Joe, Nathan, Anne-Minter, Me, Meg, Julian, and Michael

The view from Marc and Jan's room

Me and Brent with our "Jew Beer" (He'brew-- good stuff!)

Sad Walrus-- it's cold and rainy!

Lauren takes over the picture making

The finished product-- so cute!

Peter, Matthew, and Derek-- orchestrators of the Rehearsal Dinner

Em, Me, and Fia

Josh and Sarah

Mom and Me (we don't look related, do we?)

I really have no idea what Brent, Joe, and Joey are doing here...

Even Vivi pigged out

Brent, Josh, and Jeremy

Lauren sings Brent the Dreidel song in Latin. Happy Chanukah, Brent!

Fia pins my "Bride" button on my scarf

and I humor my friends momentarily. The fake veil went away.

AJ works on my hair

Jan gets her hair done

What the what did this woman do to Dill's hair?! She NASCAR'd it, that's what!

Fia tries to straighten my layers

Brunner saves the day with lipstick (mine was on my dresser...)

Lauren's hair has been un-NASCAR'd!!

Hollis and Michael Reardon who got married the same day we did!!

Joey chewing his food at Varsity, Jr.

Lauren enjoying

Jeremy being, well, Jeremy

And me with my CHILI DOG OF AWESOMENESS

"I am Jewish and I approve this message"

"I'm going to miss you SO MUCH!"

It was a really fantastic week and I can't wait to see the rest of the pictures since it went by so quickly! I'll put up more when we get them.

Whaaaat?!

4 days!

Work's been crazy, the kids have been crazy, and who KNOWS what's going on in my head! I have pictures, but the internet at the house has chosen the best time ever to flake out so I'll put them up whenever I can get the bandwidth...

Wish me luck with the rest of the week!

10 to go!

A brief hello while I wait for dinner to cook-- we're both so tired after today, we don't want to do anything we need to do!

We've already gotten some amazing gifts. I realize that these are gifts for which we registered, but it's still ridiculously exciting when you actually get them! We have a lot of kitchen stuff-- a panini press, bamboo kitchen tools, a nice salad spinner (I am so uselessly in love with salad spinners), guest towels-- I'm also really excited about all the sushi making stuff that we haven't gotten yet but shows bought on our registries. Sadly there are no rice molds on the C&B website, but I found some at Cook's Warehouse! Whoooo! Sushi party at our.. nonexistant... place...

Briefly, I would like to see "It's Complicated" even more now that I know that in addition to Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, it also stars John Krasinski.

We managed to get our table linens on sale, thankfully, and I've started collecting cups and whatnot, so there isn't tooo much left to do, it's just a lot of little stuff that adds up!

YES! THEY MOVED UP THE RELEASE DATE ON THE HANGOVER!!!! DECEMBER 15, WHAT!

Sorry, that's just awesome news. Definitely watching that one night while getting stuff ready for the wedding!

Other than that, there isn't much going on. Less than a week until Joe, the first wedding party member, shows up at the airport! I can't WAIT to see him and Lauren!!!

Alright, I should go check on the chicken. That's enough babbling for now!

Two Weeks...

Two weeks to the wedding and I'm ready to pull my hair out. The temperatures have started to drop, it was 22 last night. It's also started raining more. Why didn't I just put it in the spring like I wanted to?

Day of Killing (and eating) Turkeys

This Thanksgiving is out of the norm. Which is saying something since last Thanksgiving we had Taco Mac with Emily, the year before turkey with Suzy, and the year before that (the first year Jeremy and I knew each other) I served slightly overcooked chicken breast in a semi-debacled Amy and Meg hosted Thanksgiving. I guess I'm used to Thanksgiving with Family (in caps) being a little more formal. We bust out the good china and put on our best-- if you don't use your good stuff for holidays, when will you ever use it?!

Right now I'm in Indiana with Jeremy's family, and it tugs at my heartstrings because I was so looking forward to finally spending a Thanksgiving with my mom, but Jeremy hadn't been up here in over a year so I told him we'd come. Plus, we're kind of hoping that one of us will land something that will prohibit travel in the days after the wedding. You know, like a job!

It's been nice seeing Josh and Sarah, though, they're so sweet, and they're in the middle of renovating this house they just moved in to. They're renting it, but it was Sarah's grandmother's house and needs a LOT of work! After failed attempts at peeling layer after layer after layer (and possibly more) of wallpaper off the walls (of which I had no part because I was in the middle of wedding details and I was scarred by the process when we lived on Westchester), we all decided it would be best to do some creative renovating and skip the pain and suffering of having to use dark magic to remove this wall paper. That cuts out a lot of the work for tomorrow, which means we will get to see Swiggett since she's just over in Bloomington!!!

I'm so very very close to finishing these bridesmaids bags, and now I just have to find a few things to put in them. Emily's helping me out, and I'm going to get a couple of other travel-sized things, plus I've been looking at all these awesome vintage brooches on eBay that are going for like $1 each! If the price stays under $1.50, I'm going to get each of them a brooch and they can keep it, pin it on their bag, or put it in their hair (which is what I'm doing with mine). I found this bracelet which matches an old necklace of my Granny's that mom has now, so that's going to be mom's present, and then this pin which might be an interesting addition to the fascinator I'm conning Meg in to helping me with, and these earrings which are very similar to the 1928 earrings I wanted! It would be really great if I could get them at or under my max bid of $7, because that would mean I'd saved something like $60 for very similar earrings! I'm bidding on a couple of other things right now (not that I super need to spend the money, but it's all told under $25) that will either go for the wedding or to the brooch collection that I am TOTALLY starting-- thank you for the inspiration Madeleine Albright! (side note: I'm totally hoping that I can talk Jeremy in to Moto GP tickets next fall for when the exhibit is in Indianapolis since apparently we don't get it in Atlanta-- que ridiculo!)

Plus, if I have some luck getting $1 brooches off of eBay, I can use them to decorate little bags, which I can totally sew with ease and put up on my etsy store (in spite of the fact that it's not doing a whole lot for me at the moment...) for sale. I need to start looking in to sewing laptop cases like I've seen in boutiques-- they sell them for like $50 and they would totally only take like $10 to make!

I've gotten a lot of my food budgeting done for the wedding, and thankfully Vicki is saving me big time by donating three trays (!) of Chick Fil A nuggets! I'm going to do the sushi still, it's the one thing I'm dying to have and I won't cut it out, I even cut the beer out of the budget just so I could have it.

We did get bad news, though. Valerie and Matt's court date got changed, so they won't even be bringing Ana over and going to Ethiopia without her. Jeremy's very sad about it, he misses her so much, and I'm sad because we'd made it in December so they could be there. :\ Such is life, I suppose. Pictures will be a little more difficult with Violet as flower girl, but they do have the absolute perfect dress, and with Julian as our ring bearer, Michael as a groomsman, and Meg an honorary bridesmaid... it's really quite fitting that Violet should join the party!

PS, our wedding has gotten quite out of hand! Apparently we have too much family!

I'll close this super long post now with my little Thanksgiving peace:

I am thankful for my friends and my family. This year has been extremely hard and there's no way I could have made it without them! Let me introduce you:

My mom, my brother Casey, and (of course) Jeremy

Vivi! Violet (9mos) Kavanaugh, our flower girl!

Michael, Violet and Julian's dad, and a groomsman

Meg, Nan, Violet, Della, and Iggy-- they're actually related, but have taken us in anyway!

Meg is an honorary bridesmaid of sorts

Meg, we are both goofy. She is also Julian and Violet's mother.

Sarah and Caq

Julian, our ring bearer, at his 3rd birthday last spring

These people are our family, though we may not all be related, and I am SO thankful for them!

I am also thankful for Jeremy, he is such an amazing friend and fiance, and I'm so thrilled I'm going to spend the rest of my life with him. We push each other and try each other every day, and I'm so glad we're together.

I'm also thankful for what I have. It may not be much, but it is something. I have a roof over my head, I have an awesome family (there are STILL a ton of people I'm missing in that family thing above!), I'm not going hungry, and I have some semblance of employment. Things could definitely be worse.

Here's to the coming year, to more things for which to be thankful, and finishing up this wedding majigger!

ciao for now folks,

M