Oh, hi there...

Work is still crazy, the wedding planning is ramping up for the last month of insanity, and I'm three weeks and one day away from my vacation time. Woo. We have a (mostly) final headcount, catering confirmed, cake settled, communication re-initiated with the florist, and most of the photographer's questionnaire filled out. The big things are paid for, my dress is altered and hanging in the closet, and we've made a stab at the first round of thank you notes...

In many ways, I'm feeling better about how it's all coming together now than I was last month. In some ways I'm overwhelmed and bordering on apathy. I'm also amazed at how much sustained energy this planning process requires and every once in awhile I wonder if there aren't facets of our life that would be better served by this intense scrutiny and attention than one day's worth of festivities.

Work continues to be vexing, and in ways I can't elaborate on just now. I'm hoping that I will feel differently about it once I've had three weeks off and a very nice vacation. It's been unusually quiet this week, and I've used the extra time to write wedding-themed emails and catch up on sleep (since I've gotten sick).

Life around here is work, school, wedding, and sometimes WoW. It's gotten so narrowly focused that I have nightmares about fixing robots in my wedding dress, or showing up to my wedding with my toolkit instead of a bouquet. Awesome. We haven't quite reached fever pitch--where I'd have to save the plane of travelers headed to our honeymoon destination by decoding an esoteric logfile and sending firmware commands over RS232 from my laptop--but it's probably coming.

WoW is great stress relief. The more people bother me about details, the more I just want to sign on and melt faces or toss around my heal-y PoM ball. Our guild recently let me take on something I was significantly under-prepared and under-geared for... and we still finished it out, eventually. That felt good. Kinda like roping all of these vendors, families, expectations, and budget lines into one big event. But without the massive emotional investment.

Also... I merged our insurance policies and changed my beneficiary statements with HR. It's terribly unromantic but sobering. I've got even more financial and legal things to sort out in the next four weeks, each one less romantic and more pragmatic than the last. It's this stuff that hits home when I think of how soon the wedding is. Not in a dreadful way but in a serious, contemplative way. Giving up this fiercely independent streak of mine is difficult work.