8 Months gone/8 months to go

I've been doing a lot of counting down in the past few weeks as the quarter comes (so quickly!) to an end, and as the conference I'm planning at work approaches (two weeks from today!). I recently got an email from The Knot reminding me that there are 8 months to our wedding date, and then I just realized that we've been engaged for 8 months already! Wow. Let me try to make a list that makes me feel better about being half way through a nice long engagement:

Totally done:
Choose a date and a place - whew!
Choose a dress (Still to do - get dress fitted and find accessories)
Choose shoes (I'm so excited about my shoes!)
Choose a photographer
Refrain from eloping for 8 months

In process:
Catering plan
Started the process of being married under the care of our Quaker meeting
Lining up housing options for out of town folks
Working on our registries (and cleaning out some of the too much stuff we already have!)
Getting close to sending out Save the Dates
Other weekend events

Things not to worry about yet (at least not in a detailed way):
Our honeymoon (yikes, maybe we should think about this)
Wedding bands (rings, not musicians)
Flowers - as long as they're more bright than pastel, and they smell good, I'll be happy.

Ok, I think I'll stop before I get too much further into listmaking. I know we're on track with lots of our plan-making efforts, but it still feels overwhelming, and like it's going by so quickly. Will the next eight months go by before I can stop and catch my breath? Have to enjoy the little moments along the way, and take mental pictures a la Jim and Pam, especially now while my camera is broken and I can't find the time to replace it!

National Punctuation Day

Dang! I missed National Punctuation Day. I can't believe it. I did spend most of yesterday's work day re-writing a website and using my copy-editor skills, so maybe that makes up for it a bit, but I'm still sad I didn't get to celebrate.

I love how dorky the NPD website is. Just straight up, in-your-face dorky. There's a man wearing a cape and an exclamation point on his t-shirt holding a cake shaped like a question mark. Can you imagine anything more dorky?

Of course, I mean "dorky" with the utmost respect. Just like I like following the rules of spelling, I love knowing the grammar rules and following them (mostly). I remove unnecessary gerunds that can be replaced with active verbs. I know the difference between insure and ensure. My office mate was shocked (and I was surprised) when I didn't immediately know whether she should use "hardy" or "hearty" for an email she was writing (turns out either would have been fine).

(source)

I found out about NPD from The Bride's Guide, a Martha Stewart wedding blog. I've fallen way behind in my blog reading because I've been so busy at work and after work. Since blogs are such a part of how I've been researching and visualizing different parts of the wedding, falling behind in my Google reader means falling behind in wedding plans, too. Back to the blogs I go!

Library school fun fact #1: Dewey

Whew! First week of school and work - I'm already worn out! Looking forward to a restful weekend.

Meanwhile I wanted to share my first (of what I hope will be a long series!) of fun facts from Library School. (Yes, I might just capitalize it all the time. It's important.)

As you probably could predict, we've already talked a little about Melville Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal system. He was also the co-founder of the American Library Association, which held their first conference in Philadelphia in 1876! He also founded the first library school, so of course he's a big name in the history of libraries and librarians.

So ... drumroll please ... the fun fact is that Melville Dewey was also a proponent of spelling reform, that things should be spelled simply and phonetically. Check out this letter to the editor Dewey wrote in 1914 from the NYT archive:
He uses his suggested spelling rules, spelling "called" as "cald", for example. I'd love to talk to "Melvil Dui" and ask him some questions about his system. How does it account for different dialects or regional pronunciations? Does phonetic reform base spelling on pronunciation instead of the rules of written English? How does that relate to his obvious passion for the care and preservation of the written word in the form of books?

I'm thinking maybe I'll add him to my fantasy list of people alive or dead I'd have dinner with.

Efficiency and balance

First day of school! Today I started a Master's program in Library and Information Science at Drexel's iSchool. I'll be taking three courses each quarter for the next two years, if all goes according to the current plan.

And yes, I'll still be working at my job, 40 hours a week. Plus each class will apparently take 8-10 hours of work each week - two of the classes include a three-hour weekly meeting on campus, one is all online. Plus countless hours of wedding planning that up to now have been happening at work and after work. Sounds busy, right? Sounds to me like I'm going to be giving up several hours of primetime TV watching. :)

So, the next few months will be my study in efficiency and balance.

(my photo from Vancouver, BC)

How to keep getting all the work done and still play some?

Right now I'm afraid I'm overthinking it, or over-organizing. I already have a work to-do list and a work-only calendar, and I keep a Google calendar with my social plans, exercise opportunities, CSA share pickup dates, and birthday reminders. Adding school schedule to the mix has mixed everything up! Now I bought a new day-organizer to try to keep track of everything in one place. (I know a paper organizer is old-fashioned, but I'm waiting until the iTouch gets a camera - maybe then I'll sync all my paper and computer calendars!)

Maybe being this busy will take my mind off the steady movement toward winter. I love fall days like we had today - cool in the morning, but warm in the afternoon. Bright blue skies and high white clouds. Haven't noticed the leaves starting to change, but I know it's coming. Soon it'll be time for boots and corduroys and soup. For now, back to my lists and organizers.

Who's that girl?

It's almost my birthday! And it's a big one - 3.0. What?!? Who is this person who is turning thirty?

Is it possible that I'm the same person inside that I was when I was 15, open to the wide world, more feelings than I knew what to do with?

Am I the same girl I was when I wore my first wool sweater during my freshman year of college, just learning what winter was about?

The same girl who decided to go to Africa because she saw a rainbow? Who has moved boxes and boxes of books across the country? Who had shoes made for her in Vietnam by someone who traced her feet onto a sheet of paper?

Yes, yes, yes!

And that same girl is a day older every day, but still mostly the same. Still thinks her cat might be the best company. Still looking for the right way to spend her work day. Still needs her family.

And that girl will be 30. I'll live in the same apartment for a second year - first time ever. I'll take care of myself. I'll get married!

Fruits of summer

Did you know that strawberries come in all these shapes? (image from here)

Last summer C and I picked an overwhelming 23 pounds of berries, all shapes and sizes and sweetnesses, from a farm in Pennsylvania. We happened to choose the day we were having a heat wave, so we were glad not to have strawberry soup by the time we got home with our haul. We ate our fill and then filled our freezer with enough berries to last us through spring!

This summer we were a bit more moderate in our picking - only 17 pounds! They filled our fridge.

So we ate and ate - strawberries on our waffles, strawberry smoothies, the best strawberry rhubarb pie I've ever had - we combined three recipes to get it just the way we wanted. Oh, it was good!And now we have our stock of frozen berries put away, like squirrels with a freezer full of delicious nuts.

Thinking we might pick some blueberries over the long weekend! I love summer. Happy fourth of July!

And happy birthday to my Gramma, who turns 88 today.

Dress shopping, Part 1

What is it about finding the right dress? Somehow it seems like it should be so easy. All the magazines and consultants and people telling you that there is a dress for every body shape, that they can find your perfect dress. How does that mesh with the changes that happen between the time you find the dress and the time you wear it, especially if you're stressed planning a wedding and living your life?

Trying on dresses for the first time wasn't fun. It wasn't terrible, but it would definitely be a stretch to say it was fun. Good things came out of it, though; progress was made. Leaning now toward something long instead of the tea-length I was first considering, after one of my co-shoppers pointed out that a short dress plus sitting down for our Quaker ceremony might mean that some of our guests would get an eye-full! Thinking about ivory. Still trying to strike a balance between simple and lacy/romantic/delicate.

I'm so grateful for my co-worker, who found all my inspiration dresses, and who looked at the pictures of me trying on dresses without once saying "unflattering" or commenting on the faces I was making. :)

And then this morning I almost bought a dress spontaneously - a no-return, on sale from an outlet store kind of a dress. And I felt like that might be both a relief (to have a dress, any dress, and know that it would keep me from wearing a white t-shirt to my wedding) and that it would cut short the joy and satisfaction that come from searching, taking advice, trying on too many dresses, and eventually finding the right one. Not the designer label one, not the cheapest one, just the one that's right for me. So it's probably for the best that by the time I was really ready to buy it all they had left of "my" dress was size 2. There's plenty of time, and about a zillion more dresses waiting out there.

Engaged all over Philadelphia

View Engagement spots in a larger map

These are all the places C and I shared little parts of our engagement celebration in our city. So many little stories. It's too bad the names of all the spots don't show up here, but I also like just seeing them spread out all over.

We have the ring now! It's so beautiful. I love wearing it, and what it represents, and that we chose it together, and that C was nervous to give it to me even though we've been engaged for four months already! I'm excited to tell the stories of how we got here. More to come soon.

Gotta start somewhere/sometime

I've been thinking about blogging. Thinking that it's a good way to keep track of how you feel and what you do while something is happening, instead of trying to recreate and remember everything after that thing is over. Say, hypothetically, after you're all good and married and you want to make a scrapbook. Better that I should blog as we go along so I can keep better notes, a better record.

But the thing is, sometimes for me, remembering without any notes makes for a "better" record, because I tend to forget the bad things that happen along the way. Good thing I have some observant folks in my life who help remind me about things that have happened, and some of them even see patterns of things that I would have missed entirely (or blocked out).

And I can imagine that in the year to come there will be lots of good and happy things, and lots of complicated things to work out, some hard feelings, some tense conversations. All normal in the course of planning a wedding, right? And/Or in the course of forging ahead in life and work and relationships of various kinds.

So here I am. Blogging. We'll see how it goes.

Constructing/deconstructing in the neighborhood

We live in an old building in West Philly that used to be called The Ivan. And in the stairway, there are brick window-shapes all filled in with concrete blocks. They've always seemed mysterious to me - why are there or were there windows into the stairwell? Yesterday C and I were exploring the back side of the building and I saw this double-bricked window on the first floor. The careful art of filling in what was a window.

We live along the trolley track - here's the spiderweb of deconstructing the pavement around the tracks in order to pour it again in a nice, smooth street.


They knocked down an old big house that was next to a big community garden. I'm not sure what's going to go on the two lots now, but for a short while there were these constructions in the midst of the deconstructed house. Love it. They remind me of the cairns that I've seen all around the world, built by a friend near a river in Montana, built by an artist along the coast in Vancouver, built and left at the tops of hills all over.

I love my neighborhood.

Rainy spring days

I was almost to my front door on my way home from work when I saw this duck. Thinking it was a rubber ducky left out in the rain, I tried to pick it up. But it slipped from my fingers, leaving a sticky yellow sugar-film on my fingers. Poor lost peep! Melting in the rain.

Spring only happens because of rain - it makes everything grow and be green. I get that. But still, rainy-all-day days are so hard when I'm trying to emerge from winter into my sunshinier self.