Day 6 – Thursday

DH and Dad went out to do some wedding-related errands, while I went back to the stylist for the 2nd trial run. We started with the hair. I was soooo relieved when I saw that the extensions matched my hair color. In fact, it was uncanny how well they matched. Later when I got back to my sister's house, the kids thought it was my real hair (I had been wearing my hair up, so they didn't know how long it really was), and we kept holding the extensions up to my bangs to see how the color matched EXACTLY. The hair style was really pretty. Then I let her do my makeup again. I asked her if it was possible that the airbrushing had caused the makeup to be too thick and cakey. She said no, it was the makeup itself. She said she had used Revlon Colorstay before, but she would use Mac today. I was like, “drugstore makeup?!?!?!? I'm paying you $XXX and you used DRUGSTORE makeup on me?!?!?” But in my head, of course. I asked her not to do my eyes at all, I would do them myself. That way the makeup didn't take as long. It turned out much better. I still thought it was kind of thick, but when I got back to the house, everyone gave me the thumbs up, including DH, so I emailed her and told her the look was ok to repeat on Saturday.

We all had lunch at a barbecue place in Carrollton, that was totally empty. The food was great and the restaurant was clean and had nice décor. Shannon said it had just opened, replacing a barbecue place that had been there before it. We kind of laughed about the idea of opening a new BBQ restaurant where one had just failed. I made a comment about how it must be very difficult to have any kind of restaurant in the area due to the competition. Shannon said, “What competition? There's hardly anything around here.” She meant Carrollton as compared to other nearby suburbs to Dallas. What you may not know is that Dallas is chain-restaurant heaven. I guess Dallas is sort of a test city where most chains start. There are zillions of restaurants a short drive from wherever you are. So we thought Shannon's comment was totally funny, and DH told her we would kill to have any one of those restaurants anywhere near our house. We have a couple of mom-and-pop restaurants about 20 miles away, but the ambiance isn't THAT great and they can't even spell “tater tots”. There is one nice restaurant that we know of that is about 30 miles away, but otherwise even in the next major city they are all mom-and-pops. I'm sure that sounds great to most people who are sick of chains, but mom-and-pop diners get boring after a while, and you get tired of sitting in booths with ripped seats eating food that was clearly frozen a few minutes ago, while the radio station is tuned to the Sirius-XM-preview channel or inexplicably has been set on “scan” and the one single server-slash-cook doesn't seem to notice, or if there are 2 servers-slash-cooks, they are arguing with each other and it's hard to get their attention. Oh, and you have to wear your coat while you eat because they can't afford to heat the place. I bet when DH reads this he will laugh, because I swear this describes nearly every restaurant we've been to in the state of Oregon. That's it, I'm starting a letter-writing campaign to Mimi's Cafe.

Thursday night, back at my sister's house, we opened a DVD of an old sitcom where DH was once an extra, and had a big laugh trying to find him. He had never seen the episode before, so it was a bit of a challenge trying to find the right one, as he could barely even remember what the plot might have been. We ended up spending some time using the fast forward button. He saw an actress he recognized and mentioned that she had been very funny on the set...Shannon was like, “um, so, you were there when they filmed this...?” and quit fast forwarding just as we see DH on the screen. It was so funny.

We worked on the wedding dance playlist, and then left Shannon's house to check into our hotel nearer the wedding venue.