scrawls
still cheaper than therapy*


blog*spot? hello?
has been, or blogger has been, or somebody has been fucking with the internet and messing up the title-lines and ... buncha savages in this town. it's only messing up the title-lines on blogs with self-created templates. and yes, sure, they're happy, they've got photo support now ... i quite deliberately am not using photos, all they do is fuck up my layout these days, thankyouverymuch ... i've been trying to work that paisley in, for example, for about a year, because i like it, only it hasn't fit, ever, and i'm starting to doubt it ever will, simply because i don't have the patience for it. i like a text-based page. very old school, back when lynx was the browser of choice ... and there were no fonts but fixedsys ... *sigh* but the fast loading makes up for it. because i need to check every three minutes if anybody new has commented and if a page takes three minutes to load ... not that it would ... not that that is the point ... or that i'm sure i even have one ... typing out loud. didn't get a whole week's worth of things to do, at work, while everyone is gone at a conference in florida except me and the part-timers (that aren't even here this morning, or maybe today, and are quiet when they are). Almost a whole week - tomorrow is entirely full, looks like, and i have mouse exsanguination / cranial dislocation training this afternoon, and we'll see how that goes, it's a good thing i'm cold-hearted, but ... hopefully i can convince myself i'm cold-hearted, right? because exsanguination doesn't, er, sound like it's going to be a walk in the park. eeeurgh. Am cold-hearted. they don't call me the ice queen for nothing. (okay, okay, that was a very long time ago. but still.) another post about nothing. oh well.

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one of those link-forwards, that's simultaneously funny and awful.

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Day-Of: the blur.
So instead of having attendants we had our families stand up with us, and we didn't really want anyone, but the parents had issues with this, and we said, okay, you do it then. And they were a little blustery for a while but came around in the end (really it wasn't that dramatic, and i think it was just something that had never occured to any of them before, but how do they honestly expect people to say, This is my Best Friend? Because it would all end in tears. But anyway it didn't take long to talk them all into it.) So sooner or later everybody is standing over near the little arch thing and m walks his grandma in and stands next to t, and i believe this is when grandma starts crying. and m's parents and brother walk in, and my mom and brother, and then our two flower girls, and unfortunately i think the one we'd trained to throw flowers at people took us a little too seriously and i'm not entirely sure what happened, as i was downstairs in the basement and not able to see, but i think she tried to throw flowers at somebody and maybe got nervous from all the people and wandered off to her grandma and was generally very cute, and the other flower girl was perfectly strewing her flowers (it's her third time! oh, she's such a pro! everyone thought she was so sweet) and then it was me and dad's turn, and i think this was when my mom started crying, and t said just a little bit and we went right into the unscripted quaker time and all different people talked and it was lovely and for sure mom was crying by now, and then t talked a bit more and we had vows and (note: from now on, i have a mil, and it is still an acronym, and means Mother In Law) mil was crying by now too a little bit. And i'd been crying since basically arriving at the site, and m had been too but not as much, so that was just sort of intermittent throughout. Not quite utterly in tears, but close. And we had vows and they were lovely and we had rings and neither one got lost and then there we were, married! whee!

and then we walked over around the crowd and i decided i didn't want my bouquet any more, only i certainly didn't want to do a Bouquet Toss with all the single women of marriageable age because i hate that, i hate it, every wedding i went to up to now (and sweet!, i never have to do that again either!) has it and i try to hide or go to the facilities or find someone somewhere else far away and every time they find me and make me go stand up in the stupid little crowd with all those giggling empty-headed cows and all i can hope for is that it's not coming at me so i don't have to pretend like i'm going for it, and i sort of lift one arm limp-wristedly so if there's a picture it just looks like i'm not reacting fast enough, or something, but sort of pretending to try to participate, ugh!, i hate that. so i threw the bouquet into the centre of the crowd where anybody, anyone at all, could go for it. And while i couldn't see it (i wasn't really looking and i couldn't really see straight anyway as i was kind of teary and plus i wasn't paying attention) it, um, hit a very dear friend of ours in the head who had just gotten engaged (whee!) and she was fine and it was funny, and so far i think actually she took the best picture of the bouquet itself, and it all worked out very well as far as i'm concerned at least.

And we directed the people towards the food and the beer and had lots of pictures and there were a couple of pictures, maybe, where i forgot i wasn't supposed to lean over, and was therefore a little more busty than i was really planning on being, but the hell with it, i am a bombshell, and the reality of pretending i'm not wasn't really working anyway. That dress fit me like a glove. But. So. Many pictures. And i'm sort of nervous about seeing the professional ones because i'm afraid my smile might have become sort of fixed after a while because it starts getting sore, holding your face like that for ages, i just don't smile that often in real life, you know? Or do i? anyway. no idea. lots of pictures. and then more. and then i guess there was beer and champagne and milling around outside.

At some point it was decided (and i'm not sure by who, but it doesn't really matter) that people should go inside for toasts, so for what seemed like a very long time somebody would come up to me (i was outside) and say you have to make people come inside for toasts! and i tried, i did, but i got distracted. A lot. so i wasn't very effective at making people come inside for toasts. but eventually it happened anyway and everybody got some food (the bbq was excellent, if anyone has an event in central indiana that might need to be catered, it was excellent, but i was happy and i don't think i was all that biased but i might have been) and there were assorted toasts, and at one point d, who was videogra... videotap... making a dvd of it all wanted to see how long m and i could kiss for and i think he got bored after a while. Because we can breathe through our noses. mmmmm. And there was a lot of champagne and the cake was really really good, like, really fantastic. Oh it was good. Half of it was yellow cake with raspberry filling and the other half was chocolate with bavarian creme filling and for a while all i'd had was the yellow-raspberry because it was soooooo good and i like raspberry but at the end of the night there was just a little chocolate left (it was more than half yellow, really, so they got eaten at about the same rate) and i ate the little bit of chocolate left and it was fantastic too. And there was plenty of yellow-raspberry to take home (not even counting the extra layer of it we saved) and munch on the next day. oh it was good.

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broccoly salad (edit)
mm. Much broccoly. Crumbly bacon (or, i suppose, those pink soy thingies for you crazy veggie types). Raisins, yellow or purple, or craisins, or grapes-cut-in-half, or possibly bits of dried apricot, or mandarin orange. Something crunchy, possibly including: sunflower seeds, cashew nuts, almonds, uncooked crunched up ramen noodles, or even sesame seeds if you're into that sort of thing. Dressing should have apple juice or something sweetish in it, or be japanese restaurant ginger dressing, mmmm. Green onions, or possibly coleslaw-cut-cabbage, as there's certainly nothing wrong with it. Maybe chicken or firm tofu (mmmm tofu). if you are a complete freak, utilize the ramen seasoning packets when assembling salad dressing (which should also include: sesame oil; cider vinegar; salt and pepper; just maybe a little bit of garlic; oh, and you know what would be good? Grand Marnier, or Amaretto, or hell, even maple syrup), if (if!) you are a complete freak. Many people are. i won't hold it against you.

Mmm crunchy crunchy.

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my formatting and greenness.
may be about to change, again, since somehow the titles of the posts keep fucking up the layout? vote on colors now. It's staying gray though.

ETA: n, is it working on firefox yet? Oh i hope she scrolls down to this.

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Day-of, prior to.
so if you want to get a manicure or a pedicure in central indiana, what you have to do is go to wal-mart, because apparently there is nowhere else to go, but the Den of Evil has a nail salon inside instead of an eyeglasses place, like ours. so. me and mom and the new-almost-MIL and my actual-cousin-once-removed-in-law (no, i'm not kidding) and my almost-aunt-in-law and my almost-grandmother-in-law and my almost-cousin-in-law all went and some of us got manicures (me, french) and some of us got pedicures and some of us got both (but i'd had a pedicure the previous week) and they wouldn't take reservations and it took For.e.ver. and while the wal-mart nail salon still has only southeast asians who all spoke a particular alternate language in common employed there (which i found a little weird) they didn't do a particularly good job on my french manicure, and in fact i did a far better job two weeks later (i.e., saturday morning) before the texas reception, and i kind of like knowing that i do a better french manicure (by far) than the chick in the nail salon, but it's a nail salon in a wal-mart in central indiana so it's not like it counts for anything.

So it took ages, but was fun all the same, i guess, and then we had to rush home and everyone had already eaten at the yellow house so i went down to the root beer stand all by myself, thinking, if i was gonna pull a jenifer wilbanks, this is when i would do it. i'm not good at eating alone. but. so. oh and while i was getting my nails done m was i guess downloading like 17 versions of pachelbel's canon in D to play prior to the ceremony? like an hour of it, i guess. so that m's grandma would not have to rush in to some crazy thing or something. because we'd been lucky enough to land on an unsecured wireless network at the yellow house, and even though i'd made a perfectly good cd of cello type stuff (alternating yo-yo ma and apocalyptica, i.e., the finnish cellists that cover metallica, though they have branched out now to selected other bands too) and i brought my lunch back to the yellow house and we sat on the little patio for a bit and then went inside and did hair and makeup (which wasn't really anything that complicated - but i think it was lancome mascara? maybe? some expensive waterproof mascara and boy, were they not kidding, it was waterproof. i could have gone swimming in it) and got everything and dashed off to the wedding location, namely, the summer camp of the culver academy, and not the mess hall as originally planned (bastards, but it worked out well for me, so screw off) but the building next to it which had turned out to be easier to decorate anyway and also had a nicer outdoors. and we had set up a little green room with the partitions to change behind and stuff, and i got dressed, and m had got dressed at the house (because you can wear a suit in a car for five minutes and not have it look all wrinkley and sad when you come out) and we were going to take pictures, only it was raining a little bit, and it stopped raining, and then it was raining again, and by the way for anyone getting married in indiana our photographer was awesome! we love her!, and we managed to get a pretty good quanitity of the pictures in, and then people started arriving and i had to hide in the basement. No, i'm not kidding. And m got to go outside and hug everybody already and so not fair!

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oh dear. Oh, this is not a good thing. the government - and even if i wasn't a punk/rebel-without-a-cause/person-who-has-problems-with-authority - can take your house. Without asking. And then give it to whoever it wants. "Supremes somehow shove head farther up collective ass, wave finger at everyone else." "Crazed lawmakers invade neighbors' kitchen - claim 'The state needs your countertop real estate'." "Back yard now water-hogging-bastard overpriced golf course." "liz starts fucking packing." jeez, what are they saying in montana about this? what are those people in connecticut going to fucking do? libertarians, where are you? if i can say no, soldier-motherfucker-asshat, you cannot come in my house, and by the way, get the fuck off my front porch, and then he goes to the mayor and they conspiratize and remove me from my property so they can build a casino, what the fuck? which is to say, what the fuck? what crack are they fucking on?

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(meta)
also, would like to point out: everyone is blogging food, and it's making me hungry.

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Hall decoration and Day-before
which it wasn't entirely clear that i was going to get to help out with - there was talk of making it be a surprise - but then i went and helped anyway and it was lovely. so we're in this one big room, and we start putting up all the tables and tablecloths and little boxes-with-fabric and glass-bowls-with-candleholders and fabric-daisies and such on the tables, and everyone's helping and running around and randomly sort of making it pretty. And the guys move the pool table. and it all looks very nice, and we put up all the christmas lights hanging from the ceiling, which is a real pain in the tail because there are all these rafters and we're wrapping them all - all - with christmas lights. Only not wrapping per se, but sort of dangling the lights off them to a certain height so noone hangs themselves on them but they're visible from most angles and ... yeah. And there are more christmas lights going on outside. And m's aunt C (different aunt C, but also lovely) was doing some magical thing to the head table that involved more christmas lights, and tulle, and more little vases-with-candles (which happened to be left over from another wedding the previous year). And that was very nice. and in the middle of it my family started arriving and everybody got to meet everybody else. And then it was lunchtime and i think we might have gone to the root beer stand.

also we moved into the Yellow House at some point. and it was very shiny and happy and colorful (which some people got to see, and which if you didn't, it's visible in some of the pictures, though i'm not sure they're online yet) and lovely, and m's and my room was green, and looking through the Crate and Barrel catalogue later i recognized several things ...

Then later there was the Rehearsal and Dinner type event, and there were large piles of yummy food, and everybody loved (i'm pretty sure it was aunt C's?) the broccoly salad. mmmmmmm. (note: broccoly salad has bacon, and raisins, and maybe sunflower seeds, and there will be a recipie posted when i get around to it. Remind me later.) And there was lots of lovely good champagne and several very nice toasts and more of my family got there and everybody got to meet everybody else and there was dessert, too.

Then later we (meaning me and m and t and b) all went down to the first hotel in Plymouth and had a small booze-it-up party with all the people that were staying there and we watched all of b's movies on the little tv screen and we may have accidentally shouted out bits of them and disturbed the neighbors, which was what the hotel people said, anyway, and they made us leave and go down to the next hotel in Plymouth where they were very friendly and (we had a great time on the group W bench) we had some tequila, maybe, and didn't really keep too much track of what else we may or may not have had. And some photographs may have been taken, but nothing particularly incriminating (as if being seen with me isn't incriminating enough..), and a good time was had by all, and then the four of us that were staying in the yellow house at that point and had to get up fairly early (or at least i did) went home to bed, and one sort of assumes the party kept going for a while.

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(my favorite plum)
i'm going to, eventually, get back to all the wedding stuff. Promise. but first, you know it's been too long since you've had a pear if, when you bite into one, you think, Mmmmm, it smells like a candle. now, i don't officially like pears - they get oxidized so fast and the thick skins get caught in my teeth - but candles smell good. and it wasn't like m was gonna eat it, either.

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wedding and honeymoon pictures
are en route. They're downloading from the camera RIGHT NOW. Only there are 490 of them on the camera plus three rolls on cd plus the ones my mom sent on cd as well. A few have already been uploaded (many, though not all - editing for Nice Photos, as opposed to Crappy Photos) to the yahoo fotos account, and many more will come. i'm not including the ones in which i'm not wearing a bra, which do *not* make the cut of getting onto the internet. (note: i did not say i wasn't wearing a shirt, don't get all excited ... i deleted those. i think.) in the meantime, here are some photos which people may enjoy seeing:and let me just say, while i'm here, THANK YOU THANKYOU THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU guys for taking pictures! i'm doing that 'check all' => 'order prints' thing on yahoo. and loving it. And, for the record, can i just say that this - very specifically - was what i wanted my wedding to be. And i totally got it.

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the drive north, arrival, and lunches.
and we drove and drove and drove and drove and drove, and it was a very long way (15h i belive, give or take), and at one point we stopped at a cheap little motel when neither of us had slept and neither of us could drive any longer. the drive was not quite as long as it was when there were two medium-sized dogs in the car with us. and i don't like combos as much as i did once (for some crazy reason...), but m still likes him some beef jerky (which i think has the texture of seatbelt), and we went through a good deal of frappucino. mmm. all of which is fairly standard. and we get to illinois and unpack the rental (because there was a mileage limit on it, we were borrowing m's parents' car for the actual duration) and pack the other car and go to indiana, which is another three hour tour. I believe this may have been Wednesday. yes. so we got there and said hello to everyone that was there and packed all the stuff upstairs to where we were sleeping, i think. And then i think we slept until thursday morning.

on thursday we had lunch at the root beer stand (mmm) and then our little appointment with the Employee of the State and the little old computer to do the wedding paperwork. T and B arrived and were sleepy and we packed our stuff downstairs and they went upstairs, and we had lunch at some point, and then G, a nice professor we knew from beloit but who couldn't make it to the wedding itself because he was moving to Boston for the summer, got there, and we trekked over to the sandwich place and they had lunch and it was very nice to see G again. He'd been somewhere in Africa and gotten a horrible intestinal parasite and lost tons of weight (that sounds more literal than i mean it to be, i think) and luckily there was a doc on the trip with him and she said, well, you've got a parasite, and he got the treatment he needed and lived to tell about it.

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beginning at the beginning: car trouble.
Starting wedding recap: Now.

we had to be in indiana on thursday afternoon at two for an appointment to get the marriage certificate. it turned out to be not much of an appointment - there was an Employee of the State that typed in our names and birthplaces and such into the old little computer and printed some things out and that was it - but you have to have an appointment for the paperwork. Maybe the computer takes a half hour to turn on. But. So we were planning on driving north starting tuesday morning and arriving there sometime wednesday between early early morning and afternoon. only on monday m's car broke down, wouldn't start, and when i went to go get him, the veedub overheated on the way home. And while we were waiting for it to cool down so we could drive it the other mile home i was a little panicky, i'm afraid, because having both cars break down almost simultaneously when we had to be in an entirely different part of the country in forty-eight hours and had no alternate mode of transport, that was a bad moment. Probably not quite as bad as i'm making it sound, but not a happy liz, there. so it eventually cooled down and we drove it home very fast, and then went into the flurry of packing everything that hadn't been packed yet, only we had no car to pack, because neither car of ours was going to be for sure going north at this point. And finally we went to bed and couldn't sleep at all with panicky.

The next day we went to volkswagen and arrived there before they were actually open and the Veedub service desk guy is great, which is good for me because the damn car breaks all the damn time, and we gave him the keys and he put some people to checking it out right away and i don't think those people had a very good time that day either, because we made it Very Clear that we needed a form of transport ASAP and i think i was calling the veedub guy about every twenty minutes once it hit one or two o'clock. They had a van to ferry m to work and me back home and i had nothing to do but play with the cd-maker stuff for wedding playlists (which i have no idea if they actually got used or not, but i don't really care, either) and panic. And finally around two i got the veedub guy on the phone and he said, liz, i'm so sorry, this isn't going to work out, but we'll get you a shiny new rental and you can take it north and veedub will pay for it since WE BUILT YOU A SHITTY CAR (only i'm not sure he quite said that out loud, but he was thinking it, and i was thinking it, and, well, there it is).

This is getting long.

So the ferry-van comes back and gets us and we go to the dealership and they hand us over to the rentacar people and the rentacar guy says, as he always does when i rent a car (i've, er, done this) "Are you planning on leaving the state?" and i usually say, No. but this time, we said Yes, we're going to indiana, and he had to get special permissions from the rentacar people and from veedub and it all worked out (when you say IM GETTING MARRIED IN FIVE DAYS AND HAVE NO CAR doors open) and we got a mercury sable. which is a medium-sized car. And we took the car home and packed it and got on the road and were sad that there was no cd player, and we had no tapes, because who has tapes. And then we were on the road and had transportation. And the deal with the rental was that veedub would pay $X a day until the car was fixed, and after that we were going to pay for the rental, and we said we'll pay an extra $Y a day to get a slightly larger car than we would otherwise have gotten, only veedub didn't know when the car would be fixed, so we weren't sure how much we were going to be paying for the rental and were not going to know until our return.

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Allegory
a term which i may be misusing, but what i mean is, This tweency little detail perfectly illustrates how awesome my job is. Probably, though, as a fact-based story, it fails to be an actual allegory and is instead just kind of small and illuminating. yeah, whatever. anyone know what word i'm looking for, here?

They have a drawer full of laboratory timers. and while this may not seem like a big thing to anyone else, this is huge. an entire drawer full of lab timers. those uber-neccessary little things that whenever you desperately need one, somebody's stolen or "borrowed" it - even though you etched your name into the little screen and scratched the hell out of it and beat it all up deliberately so noone else would think it worked. they have a wealth of them. a drawer. full. it's mind-blowing. And, it's ten fifteen, and ... well, nobody's here, which is also kind of nice. Oh, and plus, there's an espresso/cappucino/freshly-ground-automatic-coffee machine. And those skinny flat-screen monitors. And the nice people. And purple nitrile gloves. And leeeeetle baby mice that one can dissect under well-lit microscopes and examine under flourescent ones. And molecular biology. *swoon*

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LEFT TO DO

Arrange for all insurance policies to include you and your future spouse: health, auto, homeowner's, and life insurance.
Do paperwork for official documents if you are changing your name.
Within two months of your wedding, set aside some romantic evenings to write that stack of thank-you notes.
Take gown to be cleaned dyed (or have someone do it for you). Make sure the cleaner is experienced in storing/preserving dyeing wedding gowns.
Make sure aunt C. figured out what about the florist.

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back.
new husband (whee!). new job (also, i hope, or, we'll see, whee!). um. Am going to shortly be working on getting wedding photos uploaded to yahoo foto page, post-unpacking. Tonight, will be working on Trying To Get All the Gift Packaging Into the Trash-bin for Pickup Tomorrow. This will be a significant challenge. Then unpack, clean house, organize party at Revolution (hey, K, by the way, there was a shimmy happening on the piano-bar stage at pat o'briens in san anton around midnight on saturday. Though it might have been really sunday by then. no idea how it came about, but there it is.) for sunday, incl. drinks, food. Photos. Then, thank-you notes. Figure out new job. wish me luck. There will, at some point, probably be a blow-by-blow, lengthy recap of the entire Time i Had No Internet, and it might actually include the Time We Found an Unsecured Wireless Connection. why am i capitalizing? i think it's the new keyboard. um. ok. preview of Time i Had No Internet:Going to Fill Out Paperwork now. It's nine-thirty and i'm the only person, i think, in lab, maybe i'm going to wander about and see if i can find anyone.

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