This weekend, Alison and I pooled together the Target gift cards we got for our wedding and bought over $300 worth of drapes for the house (and we still have two windows that haven't been taken care of.) Target online has this weird restriction that won't let you use more than 4 gift cards on one order (you can use an unlimited number in the actual store.) Anyway, we had to split everything up into two orders. Two orders turned into about 7 shipments... it's ridiculous. The worst part is that they've shipped all of the curtains by now, but the curtain rods are all backordered until May. :-P We might just have to cancel those from the order and get them somewhere else...

Last night I had a dream about snakes invading my house. Two coworkers and a random church friend were helping me hunt them down, when I was woken up by Alison accidentally kicking me in her sleep. Her nails felt like I was bitten, so you can imagine that I woke up quite startled.

Speaking of Alison, I've been pretty much silent lately about my marriage. Married life rocks, and I feel very blessed to be married to this amazing woman. I'm so thankful that God brought her into my life. We're still working out things like our morning and evening schedules, but things have been great. :-)

Things are coming along nicely this week. With only 4 days to the wedding, we've been moving Alison's stuff over to my place (soon to be our place...) Things are a bit messy, but we're going to do some cleaning today. Alison's parents get in town on Friday, and both Alison and I are taking half-days at work so that we can be there to pick them up from the airport. The day of the wedding, I'll probably watch the C-USA championship game (assuming Memphis doesn't totally blow it and lose before the final.) Then it's off to the church to take pictures and get hitched. :-)

Alison's Dad took a picture of the creek in Massachusetts where I proposed to Alison. Click on the image for a bigger version. (I have one that is twice the resolution of that in case anyone is interested. It's 369K, and is 1600x1200.)

Tonight is the meeting with a lady at church that will approve all of our music for the reception. I'll be playing it through my iPod at the reception, so I'm just going to bring that to her. That reminds me... I need to call Alison and ask her to pick up my regular headphones when she's at my house this afternoon (because I really don't want to share my earbud headphones with a random person.)

The wedding is in exactly two months (59 days). :-)

With the Singing Christmas Tree and Dr. Whitmire's retirement over, things are finally going to return to semi-normal. This weekend Alison and I selected the cake and hired the baker, chose a photographer and took our engagement photos, and registered at Target and Bed, Bath, & Beyond. We still have a few things to register for, but we've got the important stuff taken care of (like plates, glasses, silverware, towels, bedding, etc.) Alison's mother (and sister) will be picking out the final bridesmaid dresses this week, so then we'll be able to select matching tuxes and hire the florist.

Next on the list for me is to print our return address on the envelopes and start writing addresses on envelopes so that we'll be ready when the invitations come back from Alison's dad. Alison and I will also select the music for our reception, which should be a relatively painless process. :-) Things are coming together quite nicely, and I wonder what people that have longer engagements do with their time.

Speaking of engaged life, I'm really finding the engaged couples' class at Bellevue to be helpful. It's a twelve-week course on marriage issues that meets from 11:00 - 12:15am at Bellevue each Sunday. After week twelve the class starts over again, but you don't have to take the classes in any particular order. For instance, Alison and I started at lesson 8, and will stay in the class until we get lesson 7. The class mainly consists of engaged couples, but it is open to everyone. Our teacher said that probably 50% of married couples at Bellevue needed to go through the class.

We got to know several engaged couples better at a class Christmas party. Although most of them are younger than us by a few years, I still enjoy being able to talk about wedding stuff. I encouraged one guy that was contemplating taking a year off before getting his MBA to take the plunge and start right after he gets done with his undergrad. I told him it's like a bandaid (as Seinfeld says, "Right off!!!")

Wedding plans are coming along nicely. Alison is meeting this afternoon with the lady in charge of weddings at Bellevue. We have selected the site, taken care of the reception (everything except table settings), and mailed the blank invitations off to her father (he's an art professor and is going to print them up for us.) There are still things we need to do, but we're getting stuff done and things are pretty low-stress. Where is the stressed out craziness that people have warned us about?

My personality type is a mastermind, and I do well in handling big projects. I think organization is going to make this a really fun project. :-)

The screen on my Pocket PC died last weekend. Luckily it was just the touch recognition that died, so I was able to connect to it and copy all of my files to a safe place. Now that I've had to go without it for a few days, I have realized how much I depend on it. That was my third Pocket PC, but it was the first one that I used on a daily basis (for about the past 3 years.) I've ordered the new one from Dell and it should be arriving this week... In case you're interested in that kind of stuff, I'm getting the Axim X51v (the "v" stands for VGA.) It's definitely an upgrade to the old one, and I can't wait to use my calendar program (Pocket Informant) in high res. :-)

Work has been really fun since I've been back. I'm getting to manipulate multiple databases and write code in a proprietary scripting language... the kind of stuff that I enjoy. It's difficult enough to be somewhat of a challenge, but not so daunting as to make me give up. Have I mentioned I love my job?

Alison and I have gotten lists of different responsibilities for planning a wedding, and we'll be going through all of that very soon. As it stands right now, we want the wedding to be Saturday, June 3rd. All of that really depends of on the availability of the church and the minister, of course. I'll keep you updated.