Hi there. How are you? I’m okay! (Sometimes I forget people I don’t talk to often, or ever, read this and then think I have dropped off the face of the planet from anger or illness or both - hi mom!). I really am okay though. Wedding planning is still on track, and while I’ve had a sore throat for most of the week, I’m otherwise fine and well (and have been duly swabbed to check for strep, etc. - results in on Monday).

So, with that bit of housekeeping aside, the next major project Neil and I are tackling on the wedding/honeymoon front is getting our honeymoon luggage and supplies all sorted out. Because we won’t actually be in any one place more than 2 nights (except for a few days toward the end of our trip) and would like to fly with carry-on luggage only, we’re going to backpack.

Everything we’ve seen recommends a pack no more than 30L in size, so it doesn’t require an inflexible internal frame and can be shoved under a plane seat or in a train luggage compartment or carried on a bus. I also just like the idea of traveling light.

So, after consulting a few sources (mostly travelindependent.info and the packing list from On the Road with This Fish), here’s the plan so far (and this is just mine - Neil’s will be similar, and obviously we won’t each carry a camera and laptop…):

Clothes (Avg. temps will be in the low-mid 20’s Celsius)
1 long-sleeve shirt
3 short sleeve shirts
1 button-down shirt
1 cardigan
1 pair of “convertible” pants (legs zip off into shorts - they dry quickly and are comfortable)
1 pair of Tilley pants
1 pair of linen pants
PJ’s
3 pair of overnight-dry socks
3 pair of overnight-dry underwear
2 bras
Comfortable walking shoes (I’m thinking Ecco)
Flip Flops
Light Fleece pullover
Swimsuit
Tilley Hat

I figure if I want anything fancier, I’ll buy stuff there. We have mostly adventure-ish and relaxation-based activities planned, so i can’t see bringing nicer shoes or a dress/skirt at all.

Handy Stuff
Sewing Kit with safety pins
LED Headlamp
Travel sheets of in-sink laundry detergent
Clothes line
Ear plugs
Sleep mask
Antibacterial hand wipes
Pocket pack tissues
Microfibre travel towel
Fold-flat water bottle

Electronics
XO Laptop and charger
Cell phone and charger
Plug Adapters
Camera and charger
Gorillapod Tripod
Spare SD memory cards
iPod and charger

First-Aid Stuff
Band-Aids
Mole Skin
Neosporin
Assorted Pharmaceuticals (Pepto, Imodium, Advil, cold medicine, sleep aid)

Toiletries
Hand lotion
Deodorant
Chapstick
Facewash, etc.
Travel make-up palate
Body soap
Toothpaste/toothbrush
Dental floss
Shampoo/Conditioner
Hair Brush & Elastics

Practical Stuff
Passport
Local & International Driving permits
Travel & Medical insurance coverage info
Money belt
Credit & Debit cards (we’ve been burned by cards being canceled in foreign countries before - so we plan on taking 2 credit cards and one debit card in each of our names, so if one is canceled we still have a backup)
Copies of passport and financial info
shoulder bag/daypack

Anything you can see that we’re missing, that you wouldn’t go without? Or anything I’ve listed that you’d just leave home?

I am getting sick.

This is very bad.

So far, this is perhaps the worst week for me to fall down ill.

I have an entire day full of very important meetings on Thursday, complete with people flying in from out of town to attend.

I have a major event to send people to that needs the prep & setup finished.

I have a bunch of training to give.

I have a houseguest right now.

I have a party being thrown for me on Saturday.

So if everyone could share their wacky, crazy sickness-aversion remedies, or just wish really, really hard for me to stay well enough to function until Sunday, that would be very much appreciated.

Darren asked an interesting question in the comments of my last ranting entry (for the record, I feel better now that it’s out of my system):

Hey, I have a related wedding question. Julie’s going to be a bridesmaid this summer, and so she has to obtain a dress. The bride is mostly handling this, but I was shocked to learn that the dress store requires Julie’s size details more than seven months before the wedding.

Seven months? Why such a ridiculously long lead time? One theory I had was that it’s totally artificial. They want you to order your wedding dress and bridesmaids’ dresses really early in the wedding planning process, when you have more money to spend. What do you think?

There is actually a reason behind all this (or at least this is the one I’ve been given). It just further highlights the insanity of the wedding machine:

Dress manufacturers (because the stores are really just resellers for a whole gaggle of designers) wait until they have a certain number of orders for any given dress in order to produce it. Then they obtain a gigantic swath of fabric, set their machines to “Dress A” and create eleventy-frillion copies of Dress A in the sizes and colours that have been ordered. Then they do Dress B, and so on.

This is extremely financially beneficial for the dress manufacturers (though I suspect that any savings are definitely *not* being passed down to the purchasers) and does have the added, sensible bonus of having any matching dresses (hello, bridesmaids!) come from the same fabric dyelot, so they do truly match.

By the time enough orders are collected and dresses are made, then shipped, it’s usually many months later (for example - I ordered my dress in September-ish and it showed up at the store in early January). I believe the latest one can order a dress is 3 months before an event, and then there is usually a hefty “rush” fee.

Once the dress arrives, the wearer of the dress needs to go to the store to make sure the correct dress arrived and that there are no major flaws - if there are, at least there are a couple months to rectify the issue.

Orders are often botched, because dress stores are completely paranoid about “Dress Piracy.” The stores cut all identifying tags and markers out of all their dresses, and assign their own style numbers as a reference. That way, unless you spend hours pouring over the internet and/or bridal magazines, you can’t simply say “Oh, this is Alfred Angelo dress A612″ and start “shopping around” or worse, have an independent seamstress copy the design for you. This is also why nobody lets you take pictures in bridal salons (until after your dress is purchased).

This is also why you must make an appointment to try on dresses. Because a) you can’t order one without a gatekeeper between you and the cryptic labeling system and b) you must be watched to ensure you’re not being devious!

Yes it is entirely stupid, because I have had no trouble finding any of the dresses I tried on and was interested in on the internet, including the one I purchased. And I took plenty of cameraphone pictures alone in the dressing room. Also, I have not met any seamstress or tailor worth his or her salt who will just blatantly copy a dress design. There are some professional ethics and integrity at play.

(Note: I have been to one store - Frocks - who let you take pictures to your heart’s content and keep the designer’s names and styles apparent - but this great little store is the only area vendor for most of these designers who don’t sell direct - and the dress designers manufacture the same way, with large batches, so you still need to order well in advance).

Anyhow, if the store didn’t botch the order, and the dress arrived intact, it’s now time for fittings! Because the dresses are made on a template that increases and decreases universally with the ordered size, and are all made to fit someone quite tall, it’s pretty much a given that one will need to have their dress hemmed at the very least, and usually let out/taken in at some points as well - since few women are perfectly proportionate top and bottom.

So on with said fittings! And as I mentioned, bridal salons generally have very strict times when they will do fittings (as referenced in my previous post). Kindof like cell phone companies, the best times, perks, etc. are reserved for those whose money the company doesn’t yet have their fists firmly on.

Go in, be pinned up, wait a few weeks while the seamstresses do the necessary work, go in and try it on again to be sure, then finally get your dress!

There you have it. The gigantic, Fordist machine build upon the fragile psyches of women who’ve had it beaten into their brains that they must look like princesses accompanied by a troop of Barbie Dolls on their special day.

That’s it. I fucking hate weddings. Everything to do with weddings.

I told Neil the other night that I don’t want to get married any more, because I don’t feel good about it. I feel like a miserable hag who has no time to be awesome after dealing with shitstorms at just about every angle.

This of course is not true - I definitely want to marry that man - I’d just rather elope at this point.

Apparently, when one is getting married, she is expected to put her life on hold to execute it. And I do emphasize “she.” Neil has a bunch of wedding-related things on his plate as well, but everyone seems to want to talk to me. Or they keep asking me if I’ve “checked up on him” with little disapproving “tut tut” noises. As if I’m partnering myself with a four-year-old who needs to be reminded to brush his teeth, and then examined for tooth cleanliness as well as breath, because he may have just smeared his tongue with toothpaste instead of actually brushing.

For the record, we check in on each other. We both have a shit-ton of responsibilities (both wedding-related and non-) that need to be met in order to keep our lives running.

Anyhow, I digress….

Putting one’s life on hold to plan a wedding is the most ridiculous fucking idea I’ve ever heard. It’s not a fucking coronation, it’s a goddamn dinner party. The end. Considering that for work I can plan half-a-dozen major events with 6-figure budgets at once, a girl should be able to plan one measly 5-figure wedding and still have time for reasonable amounts of work, play and sleep. Not so much.

I’m just so pissed off at this point in the myriad ways I’ve been jerked around and how a bunch of things are self-destructing, that I need to vent for a bit (apologies to those whose RSS reader just exploded - for the rest of you, rambling ranting vent below the cut)…

(more…)

Happy Valentine’s day to all of you, from all of us at Chez Watercooler! And from us to you, some chocolate, getting dirty, courtesy of our friends at AdHack (if I’m not eating much chocolate these days - because there is NO room for me to get any bigger and still fit into my wedding dress - I can at least enjoy some dirty thoughts about it):

I’ve been nutty busy with nothing very bloggable these days (work, gym and strata stuff mostly) and crossing things off the wedding to-do list whenever I have some spare time (the last list has been updated, for those who are curious about progress).

So in the spirit of relaxing and reconnecting, Neil and I are going to take some time tonight to just chill out together and take a first crack at both creating a bit of an inspiration board for the new design of our living/dining room and writing our wedding vows. Our shower last weekend was wine themed, so we’ll probably enjoy our fair share of libations during the process.

Are any of you planning on doing something special with your loved ones (or just yourself) today?

It might be less of a hassle.

This is what happens when an airline British Airways flies codeshare with goes out of business.

You lose your pretty good rate one stop flights (transfer airlines at Heathrow) and, if you’re unwilling to add 2 more stops and $700 per person, get this instead:

March 31
Depart YVR 15:05

April 1
Arrive LGW 10:10 (after a touchdown in Belfast)
Depart LHR 19:15 (after the lovely Gatwick-Heathrow bus journey)
Arrive BCN 22:15

Scratch that, the travel agent is a fucking idiot (when I called her on the fact that “the dates on these itineraries you sent me don’t match up” she told me I was wrong and she just typed the wrong thing - turns out I was right) and had to change everything, again.

Depart LGW 14:45 (at least there’s no bus ride)
Arrive MAD 18:10 (and overnight in Madrid)

April 2
Depart BCN 00:10
Arrive RAK 00:30
Depart MAD 10:30
Arrive CMN 10:05
Depart CMN 12:00
Arrive RAK 12:40

Hope GAP Adventures will change the first part of our tour, because we’ve now missed Day 1. Recover from that ordeal and enjoy our North African/Spanish Adventure just in time for:

April 18
Depart AGP 22:15
Arrive MAD 23:20 (figure out a place to sleep or party in Madrid)
Stay somewhere near the Malaga Airport

April 19
depart AGP 07:00
Arrive LHR 08:25 (and bus back to Gatwick - hooray!)
Depart MAD 07:35
Arrive LGW 09:15
Depart LGW 13:20
Arrive YVR 15:25

If things get fucked up again, I swear some heads are gonna roll. I’d just take the damn refund and rebook the flights ourselves if I hadn’t already looked and seen for myself that anything with a reasonable itinerary and arrival/departure schedule is at least $1500 more for the two of us.

I am just hoping that between the fact that it’s our honeymoon, and this atrocious itinerary, we’ll get some sort of upgrade!

And guess who gets to be in Orlando for work on April 20th? Oh yes, that’d be me! But damned if I’m not stopping home for at least 5 minutes first!!! Sheesh!

Sometimes just wanting it done (and not wanting to face one’s self the mirror after not doing it) is enough.

I really, REALLY didn’t want to run yesterday. What I really, REALLY did want was Sushi for lunch. And Sushi I got, along with agreeing to take over all the dog walking for the rest of the week if I didn’t run after work.

Speaking of Sushi (if I may digress for a moment) - despite the fact that I’ve been running 2-3 days/week and am going on my 3rd week of 2x sessions of getting my ass thoroughly kicked, I have been unimpressed that the number on the scale is not going down, and the pants aren’t yet feeling any looser. So I figured I’d start tracking what I’ve been eating (which I thought wasn’t all that bad).

And I found that indeed, what I eat most of the time is not all that bad. But I tend to ruin it completely with one disastrous food decision each day. For example: did you know that Gyoza is about 150 calories per dumpling? So 4 tiny Gyoza is about 20% of the calories I’m supposed to consume for an entire day? Me neither.

So now I’m using SparkPeople.com to track what I’m eating. And looking up what the caloric content for most foods are before I eat them. So far so good - though it’s only been one day.

Anyhow, back to the running. Last night we wrapped up week 5 of the Couch to5k program. It was a bit of an odd one.

Instead of doing 3 identical runs over a week, this week runners move into doing 3 progressively harder runs, going for longer runs each time. Day one is 3x 5min runs with 3 min breaks in between, day 2 is 2x 8min runs with a 5 minute break in between and day 3 is one 20 minute run.

Let that soak in again - twenty. minutes. of running. no stopping.

And let me remind you - this is on a program that, 5 weeks ago, had me running a mere 60 seconds at a time without stopping, and feeling like I was going to barf while my head and lungs exploded at the end of that burst.

To say I was a little nervous would be an understatement.

Anyhow.

I was all ready to brag about my 8 minute runs once I finished them, but I was foiled. I (usually) run on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays, and see my Trainer on Tuesdays & Thursdays. That particular day he had decided that he wanted to a cardio benchmark, and had me do a 12-minute run. With the caveat that I could slow down and walk at any point if I felt I needed to.

So I told myself I’d get to the 8 minute mark (since I’d be doing just that the next day) and see how I felt. And at 8 minutes, I felt… okay. So I kept running. For another 4 minutes. And it was fine!

I ran 12 minutes without stopping! At a 12min/mile pace!

I JUST RAN A MILE!

So the next day I did my 8 minute runs, and figured I’d save the bragging for after I finished the 20 minute run.

Run day came. And along with it, the promise of rain and snow. I put off the usual lunchtime run (when it was still pretty pleasant out), and opted for after work, hoping I’d feel more like running later on.

I didn’t. I wanted to do anything else.

But slightly more powerful than that, I wanted the run to be over with - and the only way to make that happen is to go out and do it already.

And so I did.

I ran.

For twenty whole minutes.

Without stopping.

And didn’t barf!

With tiny rainy snow-pellets pounding me in the face, and soaking wet feet. I did it.

And then I went home at ate soup. And skipped dessert. Stupid Gyoza.

I was pretty surprised the first time I was chewed out - no pun intended (you’ll get this eventually, I promise) - for expressing this long-held and apparently errant belief.

It doesn’t help much that the people “in the know” have been battling the stereotype for quite a while, so they tend to get a little testy and short-tempered about the spreading and proliferation of misinformation and misconceptions.

In fact, I find it hard to restrain myself (now that I am one of the “enlightened ones”) from correcting others when they trot out (oh, another pun!) the old, tired cliché. I even bit my tongue during a brainstorming session at work where it came up - because the first rule of brainstorming is that you don’t judge, correct, or otherwise trample on the ideas of others.

But then Alice mentioned it in her blog post a couple days ago, and I knew I could be silent no longer! I mean, she’s a pretty popular blogger, the potential for prolonging the proliferation of this particular piece of pop-trivia is just staggering.

So here goes - prepare to have your world turned upside-down:

GOATS DO NOT EAT EVERYTHING, AND IN FACT ARE REALLY QUITE PICKY!

There. Now you know.

What goats are is destructive. They will chew anything they can reach. The list of things they will swallow, however, is apparently pretty limited. A goat’s notorious pickiness is apparently the bane of many a goatkeeper.

Anyhow. I just needed to get that off my chest.

Also, this is what happens when you say “yes” to marrying a guy who grew up on a goat farm (and has the 4H Champion Herdsman awards to prove it). So really, you’ve been informed, and warned!

**UPDATE** February 14/08 - many things crossed off, invitations sent. This thing may just happen the way it’s supposed to after all!

According to the calendar (and all the wedding-based emails I’ve signed up for over the past year), there are screaming notices everywhere that this past weekend I just cruised through the 8 weeks before the wedding mark.

I’ve been so busy that I’m not particularly ready to acknowledge this, so instead of doing anything about it, I will instead present a list of things that I’m completely in denial about, instead preferring to tell myself that “I still have oodles of time for this:”

- Starting the process of fittings for my dress
- Buying underwear for said dress
- Finding jewelery to go with that dress A friend lent me a lovely necklace (something borrowed!), so now I just need earrings
- Picking out a tuxedo to match aforementioned dress Delegated to Neil. Notch Collared 2 or 3 button jacket, flat front pants, Red or Pewter vest for him (definitely red for his best man), no paisley. I think he can handle it.
- Having my veil made out of fabric from my mom’s old veil
- Getting a marriage license Delegated to Neil - God help him if this doesn’t happen!
- Booking enough accommodation for Neil & myself pre-wedding
- Writing our ceremony/vows
- Selecting wine pairings for the reception dinner
- Developing program content
- Finding and reserving rentals for things like table numbers, chair covers, etc.
- Putting together our guest book Mostly done, I just need a couple more pieces
- Confirming anything with the Florist
- Procuring thank-you cards (our shower is next weekend, so oodles of time really doesn’t apply for this one) Card were bought, shower was lovely, cards have been sent!
- Arranging babysitting for any kids at the wedding
- Figuring out how exactly Neil and I are going to get to and from the wedding
- Figuring out a rehearsal and rehearsal dinner schedule and venue Delegated to Neil
- Shopping at all for things we need for the honeymoon (we won’t have any time between it and the wedding)
- Booking transportation between Marrakech and Malaga, and a car while in Spain

And I’m sure there’s more, but I’m getting depressed thinking about it all. What I really want is a nap.

This is supposed to be an exciting time - and it is, I’m thrilled and having a lot of fun with everything, but I’m seriously suffering from a huge dose of procrastination.

If I never make a decision on any of these things, nothing can go wrong with them, right? (yes, I am fully and completely aware of what a load of bullshit that is.)

In the meantime, anyone want to go buy some Thank You cards for me? Or tell me where to find some pretty ones?