Dramatic pause
So, amazingly enough, every day at least three people come into my office and say "So, how's the wedding planning going? You hanging in there okay?". And always, I answer with a tired smile and a cheerful "Yep, everything's going great!"
And really, everything is going great. We are so far ahead of ourselves that we're taking a day off this weekend and going to the zoo. But you know, there is also some seriously fucked up shit going on too. Like the dress drama from last week.
Friday I went to go pick up my dress (which I dropped off for alterations on February 4th, mind you). The seamstress asked me my name, I told her, she looked bewildered for moment...then when I said "Oh, it's the one in the fabric garment bag" she suddenly realized that my dress was the one she was working on RIGHT THAT MINUTE. Let me tell you, I went from zero to bitch in roughly 2.6 seconds, especially when she made sure to tell me that oh, she was leaving in 10 minutes but there was at least an hour's worth of work left. Um....the hell????
Luckily for the seamstress, the manager was hustled in pretty quickly (I think they have a panic detector in there or something) and she managed to calm things down by promising the dress would be ready for me tomorrow. Which is fine, since we are still two weeks out from the wedding but COME ON. YOu had it sitting there for 6 weeks, I had an appointment to come pick it up and have my final fitting at 6pm on Friday (which was marked on the ticket) and you start working on it at 5:30??? Needless to say, I was not a happy girl when I left the shop that night.
So I showed up on Saturday evening to pick it up and it was ready. Unfortunately, it had somehow developed this weird dented boob look so the little Cambodian seamstress put some bra cups in to make it fill out; stitched them in right then and everything. But then this happened:
Her: Okay, $20 for bra cup.
Me: No.
Her: It's $20.
Me: No. The dress was supposed to be ready yesterday, I'm not paying that bill. I'll talk to Lori (the manager) about it.
Her: But....you have to pay.
Me: No. Please go get Lori.
Her: But you pay for bra cups!
Me: No. I'm not discussing this with you, please get Lori.
Needless to say, she finally went and talked to Lori, Lori said to waive the fee, and we walked out with the dress....and did not pay the damn $20. We decided not to argue about refunds because dude, we were so done with the situation we just wanted to get out. So there was that.
And then there was the family drama.
I haven't talked about it much here, mostly because I tend to not want to talk about family issues here. But fuck that shit, because Kevin's father can just be SUCH an asshole. THis particular round of assholery involved him calling to tell us that Kevin's cousin hadn't gotten her invitation so we needed to send her another one.
Right, except his cousin wasn't invited. None of the cousins on either side were invited, because we do not hang out with, call or see our cousins more than once every couple of years, if that. So I called him and told him in as nice of terms as I could that she didn't get an invite because she (and her brothers, and my cousins) were not invited.. And he pulled this shit about how they were faaaaaamily so we should be inviting them and oh, I must have invited SO MANY of my friends because Kevin only has like one friend in town and all kinds of other bullshit that just pissed me right the hell off.
Fuck you, you fucking fucker.
Man, I feel better now. We've shifted from storming around muttering curses at him to making rude jokes about the situation so we'll be okay.
In the meantime, my job is kicking my ass. Something about me being about to be gone for three weeks is making things all kinds of urgent for me. Rat bastards.
Oh, but I got a bonus at work! My boss still thinks I'm awesome! Go me!
Go me, right straight to bed because I'm as tired girl.
This is all I have, people.
Foot Status: Not broken, but is unfortunately badly sprained and will probably hurt for the next 2-6 weeks. Vicodin helps, as does a well done wrapping with an Ace bandage. Dress heels for work do not help.
Work Status: Um, what? Work? I go there and I wander around in a haze because all I want to do is sleep. My boss is amazingly patient with the fact that I DO NOT CARE about my job right now.
Wedding Status: Barreling down upon us. Last few projects are being wrapped up and stress is showing itself because I am sleeping all the damn time. Waiting to leave the sleep zone and get into the hyper excited zone. I'm gettin' there.
I'm going to go eat some Oreos now. But they're reduced fat, so the dress will still fit when I go to my final dress fitting.
Not down for the count by a long shot
Nine days of radio silence and I still want more.
It's been crazy in my world lately, and it's worn me out. Yesterday I tossed a new hire package into my "to be filed" bin without doing the actual offer letter, and today I freaked out because I couldn't find said package. I've spent the evening blowing raspberries on Riley's still-bare belly to make myself feel better.
Last weekend was the Vegas Bachelorette Extravaganza, and I'm still recovering in a number of ways. Apparently, I am too old to be one of "those girls", the ones walking down the Strip in a kick ass pink cowboy hat while alternately drinking vodka from a giant red cup (hooray for no open container laws!) and yelling "Woo!!" because the night after I did that, I suffered from my first honest to goodness, I-can't-move-without-puking hangover. I suppose that may have had more to do with the fact that I drank 3/4 of a bottle of Ketel One in the space of 3 hours than it does with my age. But that part, it was everything a bachelorette party should be...loud and fun and with lots of goofy drunk pictures and sides that hurt from laughter the next morning. Saturday found us lazing around and recovering, and that was good too. The whole point of last weekend for me was to spend time bonding (and re-bonding) with the women I consider my touchstones. And that? Was accomplished.
There were a lot of good memories made last weekend.
But there were some kind of crappy ones too. There was drama, which I both expected and dreaded because of the way things have gone over the past few months. I hoped it would just go away, in my own sparkly happy optimistic way, and I showed up on Friday night hyped up on caffeine, laughing at stupid jokes and ready to have a good time. But it wasn't enough to erase everything that had been bothering me, and despite following my mother's admonitions when I called her that night (Her advice?
"Drink the vodka. You'll feel better." My mom, she is hee-larious.), everything blew up in my face.
The hard part is that it was the kind of drama that causes a person to step back and look at what happened and think really hard about what comes next. Things shifted and they broke a little and they got fixed a little but nothing is really the same. There's going to be a lot of tiptoeing arond the wreckage for awhile, unfortunately. I still have no idea how everything is going to shake out, and it's made writing this entry very, very hard because I know that people who were part of the story are reading it. But I'm not going to sugarcoat it and ignore the fact that last weekend sucked as often as it rocked.
I'm a person who honestly and truly values my friends, and because I do, I tend to forgive an awful lot. Sometimes I let people get away with too much, and sometimes I think that they know me better than they actually do. Sometimes I bite my tongue when I shouldn't, and sometimes I expect too much from someone.
I said a lot this weekend, and for once in my life I do not regret anything that I said. I spoke my mind, and I probably hurt someone's feelings with some hard truths, but I'm hoping with all my being that those truths were really and truly listened to, because something needs to change. Things need to change because I am tired of feeling sad while I watch a friend stagnate and stay miserable because they refused to acknowledge that sometimes, the only thing that can help them is a change in the way they deal with life, and people, and their relationships. So I said my piece and it's out there and people will do with it what they will.
To sum up:
Vegas Bachelorette Extravaganza-Part awesome, part crappy, all memorable.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *In other news, Hepatitis A shots are FUCKING EXPENSIVE, but how much would it suck to come back from a honeymoon with hepatitis? It would suck a lot, I'm sure.
So yeah, we went to the travel clinic today and walked out with three shots (Kevin had to get a tetanus shot too, ha ha!) and prescriptions for anti-malarial pills (because OF COURSE the pennisula we are staying on is a malaria zone) and Cipro (to be taken if hit by the dreaded traveler's diarrhea). I have to say, this little visit to the travel clinic was not the most romantic part of the wedding planning so far.
While we were at the travel clinic we decided that next week we would go donate blood since we will have to wait a year after we return from the romantic malaria zone to donate again, and
Weetabix's entries lately reminded me that it's time to get my ass down there because I'm almost universal with my O+ blood. I'm sure that spending time together with needles and tubing sticking out of us will be WAY more romantic than discussions about traveler's diarrhea.
And just to round things out, we have SUPER SEXY PLANS to hang out at urgent care tomorrow night and insist that they fix my damn foot. Because I am admitting defeat. It's been two weeks and the damn thing still hurts all the damn time and today I poked it and almost cried. I'll be insisting on no permanent casts though, because A) I have to wear heels at the wedding or I will trip over the dress and B) I cannot hike in jungles and see monkeys if I have a leg wrapped in fiberglass. Besides, it's a tolerable pain, so I can fudge it with a stupid air cast or something.
I also have a super sexy cold sore right now. LIFE IS FANTASTIC.
(Seriously, it is. When I'm not stressed out to tears, I am deliriously happy. My moods would make a great roller coaster.)
Well isn't that SPECIAL
Guess what?
Kevin got laid off today.
AWESOME.
Where's the vodka? I demand vodka!
Sunday was way better than yesterday
I was so cranked up the other night that I totally neglected to mention that I got to spend most of Sunday with
Coleen, who is officially one of my most favorite people in the world. She flew in to Orange County to do some training and since I am a native Southern Cal girl, I thought nothing of the 90 minute drive up to pick her up at the airport.
She didn't really expect me to come pick her up I think, but I am really glad that I did because she was on a cursed flight or something. Seriously, not only did she have a zillion crying babies on the flight, the luggage door on her plane wouldn't open so there was no luggage for her. No luggage, so sorry! Not that it stopped us from having a good time. It was literally moments before the two of us were babbling back and forth like we'd been friends since birth.
It's strange, the Internet. You meet people for the first time and you already know each other, have the backstory and the intimacy of people who see each other every day. We gossiped about the wedding and family and dumb boys and weird people, ate dinner together while laughing loudly, sacked out on the couch and snarked at the TV while watching
Grey's Anatomy, made fun of kiosk tchotchkes at the mall and shopped for flip-flops together.
And it felt like we'd been doing it forever.
Coleen is good people, with her Philly accent and her funny Sherman and Clarence stories and her gigantic crazy-in-a-good-way family. She would walk across fire to help one of her friends, and when she's in your corner, you can't help but smile.
So now we've got two reasons to get our asses out to Philly someday. (Pratt, I'm looking at you as the other one.)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *In other news, I fell down yesterday.
Wait, let me back up a bit.
Those pretty silver shoes that I bought for next weekend's Vegas Extravaganza were just begging to be worn, and I figured hey, they need to be broken in. So I found a shirt with a silver stripe hiding in my closet, and paired it with black pants and my pretty silver shoes. I was quite fetching.
My morning went fine, but at lunch I had to go to Target to pick up a new pair of sunglasses to replace the ones that broke the day before. So I headed into Target, all fetching and pretty and knowing exactly what I needed, but then I realized that hey, the tile floor was kinda slippery under the heels of my pretty silver shoes.
And then I fell. Right in front of the registers, no less. And man, that hurt. But I got up and trooped on over to the sunglasses section. Found what I needed and then headed over to the shoes to see if they had some cute low heeled ones to replace the cute low heeled ones that recently gave up on me. I headed across the tile line aisle with my mind on shoes.
And then I fell. Again. Not as many people around but WOW, that second one hurt even more.
I decided to tiptoe carefully over to the food section because I had promised a friend that I would bring more candy for her candy jar. And the entire food area was....tiled. I walked slowly over to the candy, found what I needed, and headed back towards the registers. I was right by the makeup section, almost to the registers.
And then I fell. A THIRD TIME. Only this time, it was in front of five Target employees. I think they were all worried that I was going to start yelling "I SUE YOU! I SUE TARGET!" but instead I just got up and tiptoed over to the register, where I promptly took off my stupid silver shoes and put on the cute black ones I had just picked out. And I tried not to cry, because my foot and my elbow and oh, my pride, they all hurt.
My foot hurt badly enough that I both A) called my mother and cried a little because WHAT IF I BROKE MY FOOT A MONTH BEFORE THE WEDDING (she reassured me that there was nothing to worry about because the dress would hide a cast) and B) considered a trip to the urgent care. But it felt better this morning, so I think I'll survive.
But you should all feel sorry for me, and keep the laughing to a minimum.
