Married

We did it! We are now Mr. and Mrs. Bill Casey! Isn't that the craziest thing you ever heard?

Every once in a while, I look down at the ring on Bill's finger and think, "Why is my boyfriend wearing a wedding ring?" Then I remember...

Our wedding day was everything we could have ever wanted. The weather was beautiful, the ceremony was very special, and the reception was a blast. The dance floor filled up as soon as it was opened, and it didn't empty out for the rest of the night. The food was wonderful, and the drinks flowed freely. Notre Dame won their game just as we were getting ready to be introduced, and that meant Bill stayed in a good mood!

We are off today to spend a few days in Washington, D.C., on a mini-honeymood. Otto is heading down to my mom's house for a few days to stay with her. Keep her in your thoughts because this puppy could drive anyone crazy!

Thanks for all your well-wishes...photos when we get back!

Tomorrow...

So...wedding tomorrow! SO EXCITED!!!!! Today's plans include a pedicure, some shopping, and the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner! And then tomorrow we go to get our hair done and then GET MARRIED and then party the night away!

Next time I post, I will be a married woman!!!

T minus 3 days and counting...

It is currently 2:06 PM here in Bethlehem, where I am at my mom's preparing things like place cards and bridesmaids' gifts.

In 72 hours, we will have progressed down the aisle to begin our wedding ceremony.

In 75 hours, we will be drinking...heavily.

In 80 hours, it will all be over.

Are we ready? We will soon find out!

One week...

So a week from this very moment, I will be a married woman, enjoying my big par-tay! ONE WEEK! It's amazing...

When we got engaged last August, as we picked a date, it was so nebulous and far off and in the future that I wondered if it would ever get here. Come to think of it, when I started nursing school and thought of my eventual graduation in December of 2006 (this was back in July of 2003), it was also so nebulous and far off in the future that I wondered if it would ever get here. Now, things are finally starting to happen. On Thursday, I had my last official class of my last official class before my practicum. And tomorrow, I have my last clinical before my practicum. Oh, and did I mention that I am getting married IN A WEEK?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!!??!?!

I can't wait to rejoin Real Life. Things have been on hold for so long that I don't know what it will feel like to have Free Time. All I know is that it will feel GOOD!

And the new hair is a hit, thank you very much...an expensive hit, but a hit just the same!

Single Digits

We are down to NINE DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING, people! NINE DAYS! NINE DAYS!!!!

Just wanted to make sure you all knew how huge that was...

After 6+ years of thinking that this would never, ever happen, I now am nine days away from standing in front of friends, family, and God and pledging myself to the man who has become my best friend, along with all the other mushy stuff that being in love with someone entails. I can't wait to make it official and become the next Mrs. Casey.

Today, I am getting my hair colored professionally, which is an indulgence I gave up when I entered nursing school and started working only part-time. Somehow, I have managed to pay my bills in a way that means that I have some extra money in this paycheck, so I am going to use that to pretty myself right up. It will be so nice to be minus the roots and the gray hairs...and to have someone pamper me like that! It should make for a good day!

Look forward to more this week as I go further and further off the deep end!

It's the final countdown...

Harking back to the days when I tried to title every post with a song, sing along with me to the title above. As an aside, I should have named the posts liked they named episodes of Friends. This one would be called, "The One Where Mary Loses Her Last Grip on Reality."

Anyway, if you look over in the sidebar there, you will see that, as I write this, the wedding is eleven days away. In fact, eleven days from now, at this exact time, I will have stopped being M. Thom. and will have taken on my new identity as M. Case. We will be at our reception, celebrating with our friends and families. And we will be having a great time.

Here are some things we have accomplished on the path to the wedding. I have picked up my wedding dress and brought it to my mom's house. I have had my pre-Bridal appointment at the hair salon, where my short-ish hair got put into an up-do that I love. We have met with the priest (FINALLY!!!), who told us that we scored well on our pre-wedding inventory and he knows we will have a great wedding. He told us that in the 50 total minutes that we were required to meet with him before the rehearsal comes along on the night before the wedding. Our priest is really awesome...but he's also really busy, so we haven't spent much time with him. Today, I ordered a ring bearer's pillow and a garter set off on eBay. We also went on Friday to our local Irish store to buy Bill's wedding band, which was his birthday gift from me. Everything is moving right along here...and in twelve days, it will all be over! Crazy!

Oh, I also had that bachelorette party. The one where I threw up on a stranger. In my defense, the girls kept buying me shots, and then after I was good and drunk, they let me drink glass after glass of water...apparently several pints of water. Who thought that was a good idea? Drunk girl drinking copious amounts of water? Recipe for vomit! But I still feel bad for ruining that guy's night...

This week, I go to get my hair professionally colored for the first time in almost two years, and my mom and I meet with the coordinator at the reception venue to lay out our room and plan where things like the decorations and the cake are going to go. This is getting more and more real every day...and I can't wait until it gets here!

Look for more updates as the next few days speed by...but don't look too often because you know I haven't been a good blogger for a while now! Hopefully, the combination of the passing of the wedding and the end of nursing school will make me better at this!

Wake-Up Call

This weekend, we hosted a birthday party for Bill's older son at our house. This was the day after my bachelorette party (whose unfortunate end included me vomiting on a complete stranger in the bar...and that's all I want to say about that), and I didn't know how well I would be handling it. It ended up going fine, after a bit of a rough morning. I rallied, however, which is good because my mom was planning to take a picture that day to go in our signature mat frame that we will be using for our wedding in JUST 18 DAYS!!!

Bill and I were dressed in our Sunday finest...he in his Browns' jersey (Tim Couch, although he is no longer a Brown) and I in my Giants' jersey (Tiki Barber is my imaginary boyfriend). And we decided to pose up on the hill with our backs to the woods to have our picture taken. This is what one of those pictures looked like (let me say right here that it pains me to post this photo, but I think it's important for me to do so for reasons I will get to momentarily):



When I saw this picture, all I could think was, "When did I get so fat?" I look as if there is an entire spare tire resting around my waist. I look like a Weeble...or Humpty Dumpty. I certainly don't look like the person I see in my mirror every morning. Well, apparently, mirrors lie. However, photos tell a horrifying truth.

It was like a kick in the gut to look at this picture. I haven't stepped on the scale in a while because I have known that I would not like what I would see. I haven't been watching my eating at all, in spite of the fact that I am getting married IN 18 DAYS!!! Instead, I have been continuing my usual rather self-destructive pattern of living to eat, instead of eating to live.

Add to that awful wake-up call the fact that I picked up my wedding dress on Monday. I LOVE my dress, and in it I feel like a princess. It looks good on me as well, even though I am a little wider across the beam than I would like. But I think it would look even better if I could depuff a little and look a little less uncomfortable standing in it in front of the mirror. So off I went to Barnes and Noble, to buy some of those little pocket calorie count books, as well as a new food journal. I came home and dug out my Weight Watchers Points counter and food companion guide, and I have begun counting Points once again. I stepped on the scale this morning, and while the number wasn't as high as I feared, I can't believe I have let myself get to this point...and I can't wait to gain some control over it.

I cropped the picture and blew it up a bit to make it signature mat-ready. And there won't be any evidence of all that extra weight that I am carrying around when people see that picture. As for me? I will carry that picture with me to remind me that the mirror may be lying...but that photo certainly isn't.

It's a powerful lesson...now, just to learn from it.

Back in Black

Soooo...I post my 9/11 tribute and then disappear from the face of the earth. Yep, that about sums up what's been going on in my life lately!

Here are some random thoughts, bulleted because I don't have it in me to write in paragraph form:

• The wedding is in ONE MONTH!!! ONE MONTH!!!! Too bad the priest hasn't called back to set up all our meetings yet. Stressful? Hell, yeah!
• School is actually trying to kill me. I mean it. We just had our second exam in two weeks, and those suckers are hard!
• Otto continues to be cute, and he is getting better at not freaking out in the crate that much and also can be trusted to hang out in the bedroom in the morning after I get up and go to work so Bill can sleep on the weekends and this has cut down on all the fighting we were doing about it. Now, we are a happy little family. And when Bill's kids are visiting, Otto gets so excited that I think he will someday jump right out of his skin. So cute...and one of the main reasons I wanted to get a dog. Every boy needs one.
• I have my last two wedding-related appointments next week. I can't wait for this thing to be over.
• I have a paper due on Tuesday that I haven't really started so much yet. Must get cracking. Luckily, Bill is out of town for a Boys' Weekend in Cleveland this weekend, so I will have some quality time with the computer to get this done.
• The weather has taken a turn for the colder. Time for sweaters and Uggs. Can't wait!
• Some of my blogging friends have been forced to go underground with their blogs because of some repercussions that come from either sharing too much with too many people or sharing too much that was found by one unfortunate person. I don't think anyone really cares about the drivel that I right, so I am not worried about that, but it kind of sucks.

Alright, that's all I've got! Look for more coherent blogging sometime soon(ish...oh, who am I kidding? You get what you get!)!

**********

Edited to add: For some reason, bullets don't work, so numbers are what you get. I am too tired to try to figure out what the heck is going on! Why can't Blogger just cooperate? Why?

Surprise!

As we all know, I have been car-less this week, so I have been relying on the generosity of friends and family to get me where I need to go and retrieve me from where I needed to be. On Friday, I needed to be at work from 7 AM until 11 AM. My lovely and talented fiance dropped me off at work earlier than I needed to be there because he then had to head to his job over an hour away. My mom offered to pick me up after she was done with her bowling league, about an hour after I was done with work. With no better offers on the table, I settled into a chair in the lobby of the hospital to await her arrival.

At about 11:45, I received a text message from her that she would be there around noon. At about five minutes before noon, I headed outside to await her arrival on the curb. Right at noon, a car pulled up that looked just like my sister's. However, knowing that my sister was at work* and noticing that there were three people in the car and knowing that the Saab 9-3 is a popular car here where the yuppies rule the earth, I didn't really expect it to be my ride...until my cousin climbed out of the front seat and started making her way over to me. After my initial reaction of "Oh my God!" followed by "What the hell?" I learned that my shower is this weekend and since they didn't think they would be able to surprise me with the shower, they decided they would surprise me by picking me up at work and taking me out to lunch. The third person in the car was my best friend Amy. She is another of my bridesmaids. We headed to lunch at a Mexican restaurant, and it was mmmm, mmmm good!

I love surprises!

*she is sneaky, that one!

Mania...

Sometimes, when you live in the mountains and your husband-to-be goes away for the weekend, you are totally SCREWED if the power goes out, causing an inability in your alarm clock to wake you up for work. Sometimes, you wake up, and you think, "Hmmm...it's a little too light out for my liking." And you notice that EVERY digital clock in your house is a big, black, blank screen. And you jump off the couch (where you were sleeping in front of the now-silent air conditioner) and fumble for you cell phone and realize that it is 6:32, and you should have left for work, well, 32 minutes ago. After throwing on some clothes (working at a job where you wear scrubs = SO good not to have to decide what to wear) and throwing your toothbrush and toothpaste in your purse (because the electric well pump needs some of that newfangled electricity to get the water to come out of your faucet), you hop in the car while frantically calling someone...ANYONE...at work (not always easy during the change of shift) to let them know that your morning has not been a good one and you will be there, at the earliest, at 7:15, which is a full half hour late. Damn that move up into the mountains, anyway.

Luckily, my coworkers are understanding and would prefer I arrive even later than that and also alive. Luckily, also, it was Sunday, so I was able to go a little heavier on the gas petal and not worry about cops so much and also there was no traffic. Luckily, as a final also, my day got better.

Yesterday, my friends, was my VERY FIRST BRIDAL SHOWER!!!! And there are also some tricky people in my life! TRICKY LIARS! However, it's okay because, man, I was surprised!

My baby sister turned 26 on Friday, and the Big Event of our Sunday was supposed to be dinner out for her birthday. She was to arrive at 6:00 or 6:30 at my parents', where I was going after work, and we were going to head out. I work closer to my parents' than to my house (again about the mountains), so I went to their house to shower (ah, the running water) and change and wait for her and her boyfriend and also Bill, who was out of town for the weekend. So I am sitting around reading the paper, and the phone rings. It's my parents' neighbor, Barb. Barb's son got married a few weeks ago, so when she invites us over to see the pictures of the wedding, fresh back from the photographer, I think nothing of it and report that we are on our way.

She meets us at the back door. We go into the house. I walk into the kitchen...and right into a trap. About fifteen members of our family of friends are standing in the kitchen, and I about fall over as they yell, "SURPRISE!" It's a party! It's for me (and Bill, who is still out of town...sneaky, sneaky man)!

Apparently, the birthday dinner was all a big ruse to get me down there and to lure an unsuspecting me into their trap of margaritas and merriment. I was, of course, touched and thrilled. After an initial moment of near hyperventilation and tears, we got down to the business of fiesta-ing, complete with margaritas and queso and fajitas and tacos and margarita cheesecake and frozen strawberry margarita pie. There were games. There were gifts. There were good times, had by all (especially me)! And at the end of the evening, there was an actual showing of the wedding pictures because they weren't actually lying to me (much)! I feel very lucky to have so many people who care about me.

Of course, no shower is complete without pictures...and those pictures had something to do with what I have done this morning. I noticed that the surprised and blushing bride, who was photographed walking into the ambush, was looking a little, um, wide across the beam. The camera adds ten pounds? Well, it had better add more like fifty because I was NOT happy with what I saw.

So this morning, I decided to get up and take a walk. Have I mentioned that I live in the mountains? Well, here in the mountains, they don't specialize in flat roadways. They specialize, instead, in neighborhoods where EVERY street goes uphill, and I don't know how I didn't walk all the way to heaven with all the uphills I was doing. It was dirty. It was ugly. It was wheeze-y. It was sweaty. It was forty-five minutes long, and although I felt great (tired) when I was done, it was definitely insult added to injury when I had to finish up the walk with a trek up my hellish driveway. Man, I can't wait to get that thing paved!

How was your weekend?