The things that keep you up at night

I woke up a bit early for work this morning and decided it was absolutely crucial that I add up (again) what we still owe wedding vendors. I'm not a huge fan of that number.
Being a spreadsheet freak has helped me realize what we can afford and not afford in the past year-- which is nice, but it makes me constantly worry. It isn't that we are in dire straights or anything, but here is the order I recommend:

1. Wedding
2. House
3. Car

Not:

1. Car
2. House
3. Wedding

Waiting is not my strong suit. The bank will probably tell you, "don't buy a car right before you start looking to buy a house because we won't give you a loan." I'm not sure how we became the exception.

Time to start buckling down. Between Summerfest (beer), camping (beer), and multiple trips to the Comedy Club (hard liquor), we pissed away (...literally) a lot of money that could have been spent paying off our wedding vendors (more parentheses: I know we did not literally piss money. Stop hatin' on me literal police).

HOT

Oven Hot.

Literally, that's how hot it felt at 2 pm last Saturday as I went back up into our attic/crawlspace.  My uncle Jim arrived at 8 am to install a bathroom fan in our upstairs bathroom.  No, we did not have an exhaust fan in our bathrooms when we bought the house, and no, it is not necessary to have one for your house to be up to code. Apparently, all you need to vent out moisture in a bathroom is a window.

Jim had installed a vent at his old house so he was a huge help with this all-day project. Some things I learned while we were doing this:

1. Get started early. As the day goes on, it gets hotter and hotter. You will thank yourself at noon for starting at 8 am.
2. Electrical work, although complicated, was not that scary.
3. Doing work on your house seems to typically be a two-man job.
4. It was hot. Really hot. I was sitting on a board on top of insulation, and I had sweat rolling down my face as if I had just stepped out of the shower.
5. We don't have much room in our attic.
6.  I was surprised to find out that our layer of insulation is almost 1 and a half feet thick. That is pretty thick! We'll see if that makes a difference in the dead of winter.
7. Thank God for blown insulation. Anna might disagree (it ended up EVERYWHERE), but it saved us a lot of discomfort that fiberglass would have caused.
8. Did it mention it was hot?  If I had to guess (and Jim will agree), it was about 130 degrees up there.

I may also have cut too big of a square in the ceiling for the vent, but that's not a big deal (again, Anna might disagree). It always can be fixed. Also, I learned from Jim that you can always try to fix something, and if you screw it up too bad, then that's what the pros are for.

To make a long story short (kind of), we got everything done and working by 3-ish, but as we were crawling up on the roof to cut a hole for the vent, we noticed a piece for the vent was missing from the box it came in.  I am going to go pick it up tomorrow and (hopefully) recruit my brother Luke to finish up the roof stuff.  He knows what he is doing up there, so I trust him. Ha! We will keep you posted on the results!

Also if you would like, check out my new sports blog!
You can find it here:http://sportsanyone.blogspot.com/

-Josh

Chaos!

I came home to insulation all over the floor throughout the house. Josh and his Uncle Jim were installing a vent in the upstairs bathroom. He will make his debut blog authorship appearance soon to talk about what the heck happened. :)

3 Months and Counting...

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."-Bill Cosby

Josh has had this quote on his Facebook page ever since I can remember. Yes, I realize how bizarre it seems to quote Bill Cosby when all you can think of is "Jello Puddin' Pops!" but I've always thought it was a great quote because it is completely true. Yet, I’ve never been able to accept it. I’ve caused myself a lot of stress trying to foster communal happiness, and I knew from the get-go that I had to take a different approach for our wedding.

But the wedding thing hasn’t been easy, especially under a budget. There’s only so much you can pull off, and screaming “It’s MY wedding!” is so bridezilla. Other people’s opinions matter too much to me, but drawing the line has been tough. I heed some advice too much, causing my unhappiness, while I other advice I don’t listen to at all. 

But when we peel away all of the layers of other people’s opinions, it really is OUR wedding. We are doing it our way—keeping it really small, only inviting the people whose names we know and who mutually know ours, the people that we talk to on a regular basis. The invites even say—

“Because you have shared in our lives

By your friendship and love…”

I think they key is “shared in our lives.” I don’t want to be embarrassed when I walk around the reception, chatting with guests and introducing my new husband. “Hey… you…. This is Josh. Josh, this is …. awkward pause… please, dear God, just finish my sentence for me….”

It’s all so much easier said than done. It doesn’t change the pain I feel when someone expresses their dissatisfaction with choices we have made.  How am I supposed to know? I’ve never done this before! I sure as hell will never do it again.

Though my growing ulcers hate to admit it, the wedding is less than three months away now. We have engagement pictures scheduled for this Sunday evening. Hopefully the heat wave breaks by then. My mop of a mane will not respond in an attractive way to this humidity. Yuck.

When I was in the third grade, I was forced into some bad habits. The only sister in the entire parochial school I attended (from Pre-K through eighth grade, mind you) taught third grade. Sister Marge had the tendency to amble back and forth at the head of the classroom, reading to us from third-grade novels, stimulating our third-grade imaginations. Our creative moments were mostly born from guessing at what she had in her pockets while she subconsciously crinkled whatever was in there. The crinkling overwhelmed her reading voice (I still don't know what happens in Tuck Everlasting). Candy wrappers? Receipts? Each step she took across the old classroom floor was emphasized by the creaking of the wood panels. Creak, creak. Crinkle, crinkle. Dramatic pause. Something about the fountain of youth. That was Sister Marge's bad habit. Crinkling.

Regardless of her bad habit, she instilled plenty of others in her students. While she was instructing, we weren't allowed to get up to blow our noses or run to the bathroom until the lesson was over. Really, the only lesson I gleaned from that rule was that a hand is as good as a kleenex (which doesn't really translate that well in adulthood). I also happened to develop incredible bladder strength.

This never seemed valuable to me until I found myself lying face up, staring at the ceiling of a tent from the 1980's as a barrage of raindrops assaulted the tent walls. This was the joy of camping. Josh and I had rented out a campsite at Yellowstone Lake State Park for the weekend, and prior to the 100 degree weather, the forecast was full of scattered thunderstorms. From 3 a.m. to 4 a.m., I scrunched my face and held my breath. All I could think about was how awful this used to feel while I sat through those third-grade reading sessions. Sister Marge never taught me how to drink half a cooler of sangria before bedtime, but she did guide me to a little self discovery. I learned that I'd rather sit in pain for hours before I'd face her scolding when I tried to run for the bathroom. The self discovery I learned while camping? I'd rather kill myself holding it before I would think about venturing to a bathroom in the middle of a rainstorm.

This holds true even when said rainstorm lasts several hours without breaking. What did break, though, was my spirit. Thoughts of inevitable UTIs seeped into my head as the rainwater seeped up from the floor of that 1980's tent. This was so not worth it. So I channeled my inner third-grader, twisting and turning and whimpering until I woke Josh up. Suffering with a buddy is better than suffering alone (unless you are the buddy, I'm told). Sister Marge's strength training had finally failed me. I was going to make the long, dark, wet walk to the bathrooms.

But just as quickly as I had finished off that last beer before bed, the storm let up. The light from the moon illuminated my path to the outhouses, and in what clearly sounds like the most glamorous moment of my life-

Victory was mine.

Thoughts as I Stuff Wedding Invites

When you send mail without enough postage, the mailman returns the mail to the address that is listed on the top left of the envelope (the sender). Although I'm sure it is some sort of felony, couldn't you just put the address of the person you are sending your mail to on the upper left corner, your own address in the center, and then just see if they send it to the person you are trying to send mail to for free?

Where We Are Now

This Friday marks three months from our wedding day, and there is still an incredible amount of work to do. I shouldn't complain, though. I recently saw pictures from a friend's wedding, and she literally put the thing together in just a few days. I noticed that her centerpieces are freakishly similar to the ones I spent weeks planning and still don't have assembled. Actually, her whole reception space looked freakishly similar to what we have planned so far, and yet I talk about how I can't possibly get everything done in the next three months.

I'm going to remind you that by our wedding day, our engagement will have lasted 14 months. Having this surplus of time has brought out a perfectionist in me that I didn't know existed, and has actually come up to bite me in the ass. Let me explain.

As of now, we are priest-less. As many of you know, our priest at St. Thomas Aquinas is a military chaplain and is being deployed at the beginning of October. He sometimes misses Mass due to training, and his substitute is a great priest (I'll call him Priest II) with great heart. The trouble is that Priest II's voice sounds like he lost it right around puberty and never gained it back. So when Priest I called us to break the news of his deployment, he naturally offered Priest II as a substitute. Naturally.

But this newfound perfectionist (bitch) quality inside led me to think we could refuse and go out to find our own replacement. We spent so much time picking our readings and planning our ceremony so that everything tied in together, and all I could picture was a church full of confused guests who couldn't quite figure out what this guy was saying. And besides, we know and love Priest I, but we have never even talked to Priest II. Don't you want somebody who knows you, at least a little, to perform your wedding?

The answer is clearly yes, but sometimes, life doesn't work that way. We contacted the following priests:

1. Priest III- The retired priest from St. Thomas Aquinas: Will be in Hollandale that day.
2. Priest IV- Josh's mom's distant relative: Performing a wedding that day. Not ours.  
3. Priest V- My mom's cousin: Being relocated to Missouri? 
4. Priest VI - Didn't answer our calls for a week. Finally answered. Performing a wedding that day. Not ours.
5. Priest VII - Not performing a wedding that day. Perfect. But he compared our relationship and the fact that we live together to a guy in the bible marrying the whore of Israel. Like I said, definitely not performing a wedding that day.

More and more, I'm realizing that if I even end up walking down the aisle that day, it will be next to a miracle. I've found myself picturing our wedding ceremony with Priest II performing the Mass, and it makes me laugh. Yes, people will have a hard time understanding him. Yes, our hard ceremony planning might be for nothing if nobody gets anything out of it. But by God, I will be looking at Josh, he will be looking at me, and we will be laughing because we actually made it. It will actually be happening when three months prior, it didn't seem possible.

That is, if Priest II is available. We still don't know for sure. But really, I learned my lesson. I can't control everything that will happen that day. I used to have these premonitions of my wedding morning:
I wake up in my hotel bed in a room filled with my best friends and sisters. I'm holding my breath, freaking out, crying, scared to death. Not because I'm marrying Josh, but because I'm just getting married. There's really no turning back. When I remove myself completely from the situation, and disregard how much love we have for each other, getting married is a BIG DEAL. The biggest deal. The most important and expensive day of my life. Why wouldn't I freak out? Why wouldn't I want to have every little thing go perfectly?

But post-priest I through VII-fiasco, I have these same premonitions. I wake up in the hotel, surrounded by my friends and family. The sun is blasting through the curtains, but this time, I'm relaxed. I'm excited. I'm ecstatic, actually. I've realized that I'm there for the biggest day of OUR life. I'm there for Josh. I'm not there for a textbook wedding, where everything works out the way people expect. Our relationship isn't textbook, so why would our wedding be?

Until next time,
-The whore of Israel

Things got busy, okay!?

So remember when I told you that you'd be the first to know about my tablecloth endeavor?

Well you weren't. Actually, you were probably the absolute last to find out about it (when I say you, I mean "blog," because the readers of the blog actually probably DID find out about it first. They are actually probably SICK of hearing about it because, well, I'm proud of the damned thing). But what I'm trying to get at is that I am embarrassed by my lack of blogging. Apologies.

Anyways. I shall present to you a list of things that have changed:
1. Everything.

Well, not everything. In fact, nothing in the house has changed apart from the main level, in which everything has changed. :)

And keeping in the pattern of presenting things to you in a dramatic way, I present to you before and after pictures of the main level!
Before:

After:

Oh wait. That's just Frank. Besides being the cutest, most endearing kitten in the world, Franklin is also a new addition to the McCann/Speaker household. Dane County Friends of Ferals found him in a ditch with his umbilical cord still hanging out. As soon as they removed that thing, we scooped him up. Gotta love those ditch cats.






But honestly, here's the after:

There's still a lot of work to be done, but I think we've made a lot of progress in the last month and a half. I also want to take some time to subtly brag about the pillow cases I made to cover the ugly pillows that came with the couch. I think I did a fine job. Is that too subtle? I could go on, I guess. But I won't.


And now, the least talked about tablecloth in the history of tablecloths you've never talked about:

It took a surprisingly long time to finish it, and Josh took a surprisingly short amount of time to immediately spill barbecue sauce on it. By the way, did you realize that barbecue is spelled with a C instead of a Q? This is news to me. And in more BBQ news: happy fourth of July everyone!