Jack: Feb 14, 2006 - Oct 29, 2009

We are heartbroken by the loss of Jack today. We miss her so much, already. She was the best cat in the whole wide world.

I guess some energy has returned, because I've worked 8-hour days for the last 3 days. Unbelievable! Wedding is in 45 days and we still haven't quite determined how we're getting there (drive or fly or train or ?). I suppose part of that was that the funding priority was going toward the venue rental and the food and the photographer. In the wedding industry, everyone wants to be paid way in advance, and I guess I understand why, but it's very challenging when the party is planned in such a short time frame. PH pretty much has his heart set on driving, but that means a LOT of hotel bills. I'll have to think about this later when I haven't been working all day and otherwise stressed out.

So simple a child could do it

I have made a decision about the wedding. It is one of the top 3 decisions that all the wedding planners tell you NOT to make. But Dallas has left me with no choice.

I am going to make my own wedding cake.

Ok. really, I am making cupcakes. But it is one of the decisions that all the magazines and websites say not to do, and apparently is very tempting for many brides, but they say don't do it even if you are a professional cake baker. But I looked at about 50 cupcake websites for the Dallas area, and about half of them have gone out of business and the other half did not have any designs that impressed me.

And then I recalled testing cupcake bakeries in Chicago and Portland and also deciding in all cases that my own cupcakes were better.

The odd thing is that the designs I have in mind are extremely simple; so simple that I'm sure a child could decorate these cupcakes. And yet I could not find a bakery that seemed up to the task. So, I say, if a child could do it, then why not me. Why not me in my hotel room the day before the wedding?

Wedding invitations - don't try this at home

I told Mike that for our next wedding, we won't be printing invitations at home. My printer can't handle cardstock and I just found it to be a big pain and they didn't turn out very good. I wouldn't probably have gone with an engraver or anything, but if I knew then what I knew now, I might have ordered from etsy or someplace like that instead.

Here comes the rain again

It started raining yesterday. Pouring cats and dogs, actually, plus we have the joy of high wind here on the mountain. Still, it's a nice change from the incessant sunshine we've been experiencing since July. :)

I'm trying to hunker down and feel cozy, but I'm sicker than yesterday and pretty miserable. I remember a time in my life when I had energy, but it's hard to imagine that will ever come back. In the meantime, the stressors in my life just continue to pile up, which I'm sure does not help my overall health.

Today was my first prenatal appointment. My new doctor seems more relaxed than my old doctor. I had another ultrasound to check for heartbeat. The doc saw heartbeat and The Bun jumping around. Then they took a whole lot of blood from my arm, which now hurts. Doc says I need to get both flu shots, even though I told her that I don't have any interaction with people. She probably didn't believe me since I was clearly suffering from this cold, which is on Day 9. I have heard that whatever this is going around lasts about 2 weeks, so, few more days of fever and sleepless nights to go, I guess.

I heart Carbonite

I use an online computer backup service called Carbonite. I have subscribed to them for about 2 years now, for $50/year. They backup all your files offsite so you can restore them if you accidentally delete them or your computer crashes.

As we know, my computer had a meltdown recently. When I got it back from the computer geek I was happy to see I didn't need to reload iTunes. It opened and all my songs and playlists were there.

Or, so it would seem.

Yesterday I finally spent some time reloading programs onto the newly wiped computer, and when I was done I figured I better plug in my iPhone/iPods and get them synched with some music I'm considering for the wedding. That is when I found all of my files were actually gone. The song lists were still there, but when you clicked on a song to play it, suddenly iTunes decided the song was not actually there. First it told me there were 100 problems. Then 300. Then I realized iTunes was not being truthful with me and every single file was gone.

I went to the Apple help desk and I tried every single suggestion they had for restoring my files, and NOTHING WORKED. I was very dismayed because I had lost 2000 files, and of those, over 300 were digital purchases only. (I didn't realize how much money I spend on iTunes before now.)

I could not remember if Carbonite backed up music files, but I checked anyway out of desperation. Well, they do! And I got them all back! And all my iPhone apps! And it was easy!!

http://www.carbonite.com/

Sunday morning coffee post

So, after my computer crashed, we went on a brief trip, and immediately upon return from that trip I developed a bad cold/low-grade fever which knocked me out until pretty much this morning. Stupid airplanes. How can I catch up blogging when so much has happened? I'll just write til I run out of coffee.

The purpose of our trip was to tell our family the big news: we are getting married in December and we are expecting a baby in May. That's right, most people drop those kinds of announcements one at a time, but we do both together!

The wedding will be in Dallas, where my sister lives. We've actually been planning a wedding for quite some time. When we learned about the bun in the oven, it forced us to choose a date right away. We talked about just getting married here, but we really wanted our families to be there and since none of them are in Oregon and most of them are in TX, it seemed easier for everyone if we moved the location. We also talked about not having a wedding at all, but it was hard to abandon the ideas that we had been planning for so long, knowing that we would never have the chance to realize them again. Some of the ideas did have to be abandoned (my dream of bringing in a full orchestra and big band (yes, we were seriously planning to do that)). But our plan was always to have a Christmas wedding, and so we find ourselves organizing and paying for a wedding in only 2 months. I see now the brilliance of having a year-long engagement - it's kind of like a layaway plan for the wedding. I suspect PH may have to go with a stand-in wedding ring until I can get him the real one he wants later.

We are looking into flying into Dallas on a one-way ticket, and then driving back home as a kind of honeymoon. We'd visit the grand canyon and Sedona and Las Vegas. Initially PH had suggested driving both ways. On this last trip (that produced the cold), we had yet another tearful incident at the airport with TSA and it was with a heavy heart that I admitted that I think I'm willing to give up flying now. PH had enough of TSA long ago. So he said, we'll fly one more time (to our wedding) and that's it. And I said, really, we don't even have to fly then. He liked that idea. But, it will take us several days in TX to get our marriage license, so we may fly anyway to reduce the amount of time PH has to take off from work. Although, he says he doesn't care how much time he takes off since he gets paid vacation. I don't know. This is something we're thinking about. I hate TSA and what it represents and what we have become. PH says he doesn't understand why everyone just allows themselves to be treated that way. I said it's because TSA can prevent you from getting to your plane on time, or at all. I didn't argue because I wanted to go home. I regret it now, but now it's too late.

Being sick when you have a bun in the oven means you're not allowed to take any medication at all. PH went to talk to Pharmacist who said he would not recommend anything except Tylenol every now and then. Since then, a couple of moms have told me Robitussin is ok, but now I am mostly better. The fever was the worst. You have to watch it, because if it gets too high then you're cooking The Bun and that is bad. But mine stayed low, but just enough to annoy the hell out of me, make me feel like my eyeballs were boiling and I was breathing fire through my nose and mouth.

We got satellite TV this week. We don't have a broadband connection here in the mountains, so our previous method of watching TV on the internet wasn't going to work here. My favorite show is LOST and I didn't want to miss the last season, which should start up in January. So we got a move-in special on a satellite dish, and it's all set. It came with a DVR. I decided I do need to learn how to use it, because there's so many commercials on TV I can't stand it. I also found that there isn't much on TV at all. I suppose when LOST is over we may just cancel the dish. I'm not sure. I thought I would like HGTV but it seems that all their shows are like lifestyles of the rich and famous, except they are marketing the shows as if we are all rich and supposed to relate to this. Remodels of 5000 square foot homes. Re-do your backyard for $40k. How to buy a vacation home abroad. etc etc. Nothing I can relate to. I loved this Canadian show I used to watch called The Painted House. And the same designer later did one called Facelift, which was like Extreme Home Makeover before EHM existed. I loved it because even though the before/after was always pretty extreme, it was also do-able for the average person. HGTV doesn't have any shows like that, from what I can see. I've also found that our local PBS is so far not as good as KCET. I suppose nothing is. But I was kind of surprised because OPB funds a lot of PBS programs nationwide, so I thought they must be kind of good.

Coffee's out, so am I. Going to try to make today a workday to make up for the week and a half that I've missed. (Well, can't say I missed it, haha.)