Garden of Thought

I'm packing my car with decorations and getting ready to drive down for rehearsal today (it's an hour and a half away) and now I'm seeing snow. Really, weather? You have to blinkin' snow? Ran to check weather predictions, looks like all will be clear by tonight thank God.

We have two hours today to rehearse and decorate, then tomorrow morning it's show time!

So far we've had one bridesmaid drop out, one set of grandparents snowed in and one set of parents (his) with pnuemonia, plus the summary the officiant gave of what she was going to talk about didn't pass the bride's inspection and they are scrambling for a different talk. Turns out his family didn't really invite anyone at all so it's all been informally through efforts by the snowed-in grandma and I have no idea at all how many of his relatives will be there. 0_0

My dancers are asking me "Covered bellies? Or are uncovered bellies okay?" and I have no idea. I'm just telling them to wear whatever they like at this point.

*Vizzini voice*: "Wait til I get going! Now where was I...?"

Egads, I swear they go out of their way to make things difficult in Boot Camp - even when they are on their way out the door. They had to get up at 4am, had graduation at 11, then had to literally run 2 miles to their barracks to get their luggage, then 2 miles back to catch the bus - and if they missed that bus, they were out of luck because it was a 3 hour bus ride and the plane left at 4!

Our guy managed to get the bus and caught the leg out of GA, but then it was delayed in takeoff so he missed the connection - which left 10 minutes before it was supposed to and then taxied around for over half an hour while he helplessly watched. He got stranded in Denver. >_< Late enough there were no more flights.

He finally straggled in this morning, thank God, I expect he'll just want to sleep around the clock to recover.

Wow, so many details in a wedding - I'm SO glad I've had some time ahead to work on this thing, here we are a month-and-a-half to go already. It reminds me of child-rearing, how you start all idealistic (MY child will never play with THOSE...MY child will only eat organic...) and end up just happy if they are safe and can give you five minutes peace at the end of the day.

We started off with "None of that icky tulle! Only real cloth table covers, real candles..." Now we have tulle swoops because frankly it's cheap and this is a big space to cover. Battery powered tea candles that don't have to be tended and will stay on for hours, and I spent yesterday ironing the wrinkles out of cheap organza table covers because 25 tables of real fabric was waaay too expensive no matter how we did it.

I swore I wouldn't use any of that cheap Dollar Tree garbage but here I am with centerpieces that are mostly made of Dollar Tree pieces. >_< They are pretty but my inner principled "shop local" person is generating some cognitive dissonance on my little Cognitive Dissonance machine when I really look at them.

Why are so many weddings notoriously covered in tulle and organza? Now I know!

What a crazy year coming up... I feel like a pack mule. I'm busy helping my son prep to move out this next week (hoorah, he finally managed to get a place! Or part of one. A room in a shared house anyway). It's just me and him to move stuff and the room is upstairs so hopefully that will go without too many mishaps.

I'm hosting not one but TWO bridal showers in Feb (one for relatives and then a tea for friends the following week) followed by...

The Wedding in March for my daughter and new son-in-law! With the three bridesmaids being a)in Japan b)working and super busy and c)incommunicado and living far away it means pretty much all of it lands on me. Again. Oogh.

The new couple then need to move from the coast back to the city area to be nearer to his base. Guess who's the main person available with a car to help out? Present!

On top of that, we finished all our loan approval stuff and are actively seeking a single-level house so I'll be moving and selling this house as well (please God, not during the wedding).

I'm looking forward to Autumn already because by then most of this stuff will over. :-p

My husband liked to juggle but hasn't done it much recently, so when I came across our old basket of koosh balls I thought I'd sort through them. Discovered the really old ones were getting brittle as the rubber had aged, kind of like old rubber bands, so when they were tossed they shed little bits of koosh everywhere. Threw the guilty ones into the wastebasket and forgot about it.

Woke up in the middle of the night to an unearthly glow coming from the wastebasket in my room. Half-asleep me was a bit wigged out for a moment before tracking it to a glow-in-the-dark koosh down among its brethren gamely lighting up their resting place; a kooshy apparition of koosh-balls past. I am half-inclined to keep it and do something with all the glow-in-the-dark rubber bits now if I could think of anything creative with them - any suggestions?

I'm having flashbacks to old Runescape, remembering when my kids spent serious hours one summer managing to briefly corner the apple pie market there. "I have successfully cooked an apple pie!"...ten of them, actually. Ten into the freezer for special events down the road! Takes longer than virtual ones but they sure do taste better.

My eldest is engaged(!!!!) and looking at March with lots of spring daffodils and bluebells for flowers at her wedding. 0.o He's a great guy, I'm so happy with her choice but it will be definitely an adjustment in my family as I'll have TWO sons instead of one and I get to add the infamous "Mother-in-Law" to my list of secret identities. That being right up there with "Landlady" in most people's minds it should be interesting.

Also at work I learned to make soap with lye (lye is evil but it does nice things to fats), which has been interesting to me as I never did take Chemistry in school so I never got the "be a mad scientist" out of my system when I was younger. This is why I like my espresso machine so much, it goes WHOOOOSH when it makes coffee and grand clouds of dramatic steam go up and it makes me think I should don an Albert Einstein wig when using it.

So! Fair warning I may ramble on about wedding decor or stuff as this year goes along. And soap? Yeah.

So, while merrily whackity whacking away I managed to trip over a branch hidden in the tall grass (hence the whacking) and took a tumble. While the only thing I injured was my pride I found I'd somehow managed to decapitate my whacker. 0_o I tried reattaching its brain but it spun off again as soon as it was started up.

The result is I just got a brand new shiny weed whacker out of the box (woo!) and managed to get it assembled and running. Bonus that it can take attachments and I also got a chainsaw-on-a-stick attachment for it to abbreviate said branches into firewood. This little cloud definitely had a silver lining!

A lady who has a business making/selling soaps, lotions, perfumes, etc. as "Midnite Oils" asked me to come work for her to cover while their regular assistant was in the hospital. I really love it, packaging soaps and sniffing all the nice things. This week when I showed up for my weekly round she tearfully told me the assistant had passed away. 0.o I now have the job but it makes it kind of awkward to be celebratory about it.

They're great people and I've used their products for years, hopefully I'll be able to pick up what needs doing quickly so I can do their old friend's job justice.

Just back from a nice performance with the Potpourri dance troupe. I intended to take a couple pictures but forgot, so here's me getting ready to head out instead - unfortunately doesn't show the coral/purple skirt but I'm really liking the tropical colors at the moment. Going to use the full outfit at a show in April so maybe I can get a couple "real" pictures then.