A whole new world of entertainment

I'm not a private investigator, but I'd like to believe that I could be one.

My first foray into intensive online searches was in college, when one of my professor gave the class a list of tricky questions (the one that comes to mind is, "What is that smell when it rains?" but there were other more concrete questions, like questions about female pilots during WWII and questions about newsworthy events in the 20s) and set us loose in the library to find as many (accurate) answers as we could.

That day, I developed a deep and personal love for Google, and that love has continued to grow over the years.

I find that my online searching skills have practical purposes. My friend TA wanted to catch up with an old friend from high school but knew only his name and that he might be a teacher. I found the guy's email address online, and they were able to catch up.

Now before you think that I'm a borderline cyber-stalker, I need to point out that I use my powers for good. Or at least for curiosity. Don't you ever wonder, "Gee, I wonder where so-and-so is now--I wonder what they're up to?" A lot of times, Google knows.

But sometimes Google doesn't know, or it gives you search results for other people with the same name. If you don't have additional filtering criteria, you're out of luck.

Or are you? Recently, I discovered another tool to add to my PI arsenal--www.theknot.com. You can type in someone's first and last names and find out if they registered at any affiliated stores. The listings sometimes include the state in which their wedding took (or will take) place, and that information is very helpful for narrowing down search results when a person has a common name. Sometimes the listing also has the person's wedding date.

A couple weeks ago, my friend LS and I were talking about a guy we used to work with--we heard he got engaged but didn't know anything else. Naturally, I turned to the knot, and I found out that his wedding was in 10 days! Quelle coincidence! I emailed over my congrats and shared my own happy news with him.

So if you find yourself bored, fear not--entertainment awaits at the knot.

Scary dreams put to rest

This weekend I had my trial appointment for hair and make-up, and my scary dreams are now put to rest--the appointment was great, and I am really happy with the outcome.

I had never had my make-up done by a professional, and I was hoping to pick up some tips, but I wasn't facing the mirror and had my eyes closed for a lot of it (it's tough to watch someone put on your eye make-up), so I don't think I learned anything.

I had been concerned about the cleanliness of the make-up tools--for example, I didn't want a mascara brush that had touched someone else's eye to touch my eye, as well. Luckily, the make-up artist had a bag of mascara brushes, and she uses a new brush for every person. And she was disinfecting or wiping off the different brushes and applicator tools as she went, and that made me feel much more comfortable.

The end result was me, just with a bit more make-up than usual, but I think most of it was subtle (except perhaps my eye make-up, but a bride's eyes are supposed to be dramatic).

The hairdo turned out great, too, and I wore it the whole day without even a twinge of a headache. I also took a longish nap (the appointment was at 7:30 AM--too early for a weekend!), and it stayed put without being helmet-head-like. Bravo to the stylist.

I'm very pleased with how my hair and make-up will look for the big day, and I'm so glad I decided to do a trial run--now I know that my hair and make-up will look great.

This weekend, we also finalized our cake order. We're getting a mix of milk chocolate and white chocolate cupcakes, topped with buttercream frosting and a raspberry. Ben chose the flavor for our wedding cake (which will basically just be for show--we'll be cutting the very-small top tier and taking the slightly larger bottom tier home with us for freezing), which will also be milk chocolate with white chocolate frosting. The cake will have a beachy-theme with shells and brown sugar (which is supposed to look like sand).

What's the deal with the title?

You might be wondering about the title of this blog. If you're familiar with Queen, then you're likely familiar with the song.

The song is sort of a running joke between B and me, if you count his suggesting it repeatedly as our recessional song and my greeting his idea with a pointed stare and raised eyebrow as a joke. In other words, I was doing my best to convince him that we need a more appropriate song for our recessional, and that "Another One Bites the Dust" was not the first song we wanted played about us after we got married, no matter how funny it might be.

But that didn't mean I couldn't use it as the title of our wedding blog.

I'm not sure what will happen to the blog after we get married. I've tried to keep most of the posts focused on the wedding to avoid the hour-by-hour life chronical--nobody needs to know how many times I brush my teeth every day.

If I have sufficient material, I might change the focus to newlywed life, though as I mentioned before, I'm hoping nothing will change, so maybe there won't be enough material, and I will end up discussing the antics of love-deprived starlets or how awesome Grey's Anatomy is (I took a quiz on their website and apparently I am most like Callie--I didn't think I liked Callie that much--perhaps I ought to reevaluate that stance).

Anyway. The blog will continue to be a wedding-planning blog until the wedding, and maybe we'll even be able to update it while we're in France. And after that, it's anyone's guess.

Multi-tasking while showering

I usually shower twice every day, in the morning and at night. The evening shower is more to relax and get into the calm, pre-bed mindset, but lately, my evening shower has been serving a functional purpose--well, several purposes.

First of all, the tooth whitening continues. Yes, I started my tooth whitening over a month ago, and I did say that the whitening would take only a week. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out to be that simple.

The first trays did not go all the way up to my gums, and the problem was with the mold that was taken of my mouth that day. (The dentist office was perplexed as to how it happened, and my knowledge of the dental arts is limited, so I couldn't offer an explanation, either.) I had to make another appointment to have another mold taken, and then I had to make another appointment to pick up the new trays and make sure that they fit (they do). And of course my dentist is open only during banking hours, so I had to wait until I could work at home for both appointments.

But now that's done, and I'm back to the whitening process. I've been doing one round (for lack of a better word) per day rather than the optimal two, and some days I have to skip due to user error. (Too much gel in the trays irritates your gums, and it's best to give them time to recover.) I am nearly 2/3 of the way through my gel, but I probably won't use all of it so I can save a tube for touch-up whitening in a year or two.

I wear the trays during my evening shower, and I've recently introduced another activity to shower time--practicing French. A coworker lent me a 1-hour learn-to-speak-French CD that I've been listening to (and practicing along).

If you think speaking French is hard, you really ought to try it while wearing gel-filled trays in your mouth. And if you're like me, you speak your second-learned foreign language with an accent from your first-learned foreign language, so I am speaking French with both Spanish and American accents as well as a tray-induced lisp.

Watch out, France--here I come.

Congrats on your engagement - now face your mortality

An engagement is a milestone to celebrate, but I'm learning that it's also a time to start planning for a future other than your own. In other words, it's a time to face your mortality--and plan for it.

Morbid? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. Following the there-are-only-two certainties-in-life rule, it's never too early to plan for the future. I'm not advocating buying real estate in the nearby cemetary, but there are a few steps that I need to do to get all of my ducks in a row.

For example, today I passed in paperwork to designate Ben as the primary beneficiary for my 401k account. Before we get married, I plan to roll over the 401k account from my last company into my current account (just to simplify things).

Then there is the matter of wills. Neither of us has a will, but I plan to correct that issue soon. You can buy do-it-yourself will-making software, and it will be sufficient for our purposes. We also have to figure out if it's necessary (and if so, how to do it) to add my name to the title of the condo.

I guess we've avoided these adult responsibilities long enough--they won't be fun, but they will provide peace of mind to both of us, and that's what we're going for.

But--will anything change?

I recently read an article that discussed the concept of a disposable marriage (that wasn't their terminology, but that's how I viewed it). The idea was that if two people get married and then realize that they made a hasty decision and aren't compatible for a lifetime commitment, they can divorce and basically reset their lives as long as they don't have children. I am not endorsing this idea, but one concept that I took away from the article was that most of the people with quickie marriages expected that their lives would change dramatically after they got married.

In one situation, a woman expected her workaholic fiance to suddenly become a 9-to-5er after the honeymoon. Needless to say, her expectations weren't met.

Another woman got married because she thought it was the next logical step in the relationship and that if she got married, all of the problems in the relationship would be fixed. You don't need to be married to know that that is a flawed plan.

It seems to me that if you go into marriage with the expectation that everything will change (the unstated implication here is of course that the changes will be for the better), you are setting yourself up for disaster. If everything doesn't change, you're disappointed. If everything does change, what do you do if you don't like the changes?

I'm not approaching our marriage with the idea that everything will change--in fact, I'm expecting the opposite--that very little will change. Other than financial changes (merging accounts and all of that), nothing else is coming to mind. I asked B for his opinion, and he also thinks that our lives together will continue on as before with very few changes.

Phew.

Wedding dreams

During the first few weeks after B and I got engaged, my nights were characterized by crazy, ridiculous, stressful wedding dreams. I was late to the ceremony. I forgot to eat breakfast. The limo (hello, we're not even getting a limo) broke down. It was, quite simply, nightmarish.

Those first few weeks were the most stressful from a planning perspective, and eventually I calmed down and most of the dreams went away. They still return on occasion, though.

This week, I dreamt that I went to a salon for my trial hair and make-up appointment. The whole point of the trial run is to prevent hair and make-up nightmares from becoming a reality on the big day. But apparently it's been something that has me concerned because sure enough, my stress came out in full force in my dream.

The saddest part of the situation is that in hindsight, the dream wasn't that bad at all. The woman who did my make-up didn't do a good job, and I ended up looking like myself but with a lot of black eyeliner around my eyes. But it felt catastrophic at the time, and I'm pretty certain that I told the woman (in my dream) that she hadn't made me pretty enough. (Yes, I am ducking in embarassment right now.)

Unfortunately for him, B has also been bitten by the bad-wedding-dream bug, and this week he dreamt that he was late for the ceremony. He did point out, however, that he did make it, so the dream technically had a happy ending. My wedding dreams don't have a happy ending, unless you consider the dream ending a happy ending (and it is, though not in any kind of a satisfying way).

Maybe it's like that old theater adage--bad rehearsal, good opening (or whatever it is). Stressful wedding dreams, fabulous wedding day?