new lesson learned

never start out your day looking at pictures of babies with trisomy 18. it will ruin even the best of mornings.

i am a lurker on this one woman's blog. she just just found out that her cousin's first child (in utero) has trisomy 18. anything with the word "trisomy" in it is bad. she had the above link to a trisomy 18 support page and there were pictures. sigh. they are not for the faint of heart. and they will definitely put any bad day you may be having in perspective.

this is despicable

if you consider yourself even the slighest bit of a democrat, read this article. it's long, it has a lot of numbers in it, but read it. then get pissed off.

here's an excerpt:
It's one thing to complain about paying taxes when those taxes are buying a bag of groceries once a month for some struggling single mom in eastern Kentucky. But when your taxes are buying a yacht for some asshole who hires African eight year-olds to pick cocoa beans for two cents an hour ... I sure don't remember reading an excuse for that anywhere in the Federalist Papers.

i hate my class

i am taking this biology class. if i believed in god, i would think that he gave me this class to test my patience, of which i have very little. my teacher is from nepal, which is pretty cool. and he's nice. and he's lenient (which irritates me, too, but i won't look a gift grade in the mouth). but he's of the teaching school of ben stein, a la ferris bueller's day off. he asks the class these open-ended questions and no one ever gives him a straight answer. but he'll keep asking anyway. allow me demonstrate:

teacher: so, predation! what are the different types of predation??! (he yells every question, like he's so excited to be talking about species population that we should be leaping out of our seats to answer him).
class: ...
teacher: c'mon! predation!! what are they different types?!?!? (now his voice is so high that beakers are breaking in the cabinets.)
class: ...
teacher: leeeeeeee---
class: ...
teacher: thal!! lethal! ok, what is another type?!?!?
chick on the other side of the room: murmurmurmur
teacher: YES!!!! now what is another type??!?!
me, to my lab partner: what the hell did she just say?

and so it goes. i can't imagine why i'm not retaining anything from this class. he also doesn't like to follow the book, so we're supposed to glean all of the information for our quizes from his lectures? i think not.

and now we're doing a population study on paramecium. counting little, itty, bitty things that swim at a hundred miles an hour. please. kill me now. and everyone is asking everyone else, "what are we supposed to be doing?" because he hasn't told us what we should be doing. he's just sitting at his laptop, uploading power point presentations that he thinks are funny to our class website. heaven forbid we actually try to learn something. at one point, i actually took out my ipod and started playing solitaire on it to prevent myself from falling asleep.

only 4 more months to go!

and another thing...

i refuse to buy any wedding magazines. they are full of crap i don't want and can't afford. and if i need to know where i can rent birds for a dove release in the future, maybe then i'll buy one.

i admit that i picked up a magazine, but it was FREE, so it doesn't count. and me and my sister ended up drawing moustaches on all the girls. :)

and i bought some books on how to make your own wedding flowers. i'll photocopy what i want and return it. i'm horrible and cheap.

it's been a while

there's a lot to do when you're planning a wedding in four months. but we've got the most important part down: the reception site. it took a lot, but we finally found one that wasn't outrageously expensive. it's part of a state park up in Zion with a hotel and beach front access. so we're going to get married on the beach and have the reception in their ballroom, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a beautiful view of Lake Michigan. i'm actually really excited about it.

and, of course, i'm reading all this wedding crap online about how you need a year to plan a wedding, blah blah blah. i called the drake hotel, which is pretty swanky, and they were available for june 9th. hello? i thought places that charged $149 a person for dinner were supposed to all booked up by now! they're all a bunch of liars who just want your money. the sad thing is that some of these brides are young and spending their parent's money, so they don't care what things cost... and places like the drake eat those people up.

but i'd like to think that as people start getting married older, they wise up. it's usually their money they're spending, so they don't want to piss it away on some crappy beef wellington and chocolate mousse. you wouldn't believe the affordable wedding places that chicago has to offer. i looked into the special use facilities that the chicago park district has on their properties. some places cost as little as $650 to rent out for 8 hours. but we didn't want to have to deal with getting a caterer and all that.

anyway, i'm glad i'm finding a way around paying all this goddamn money for just one day of my life. i just want to be married to scott. i was willing to do it at city hall, but he didn't think his parents (and probably mine) would like that. and i am looking forward to seeing everyone and having his family meet mine (they're both equally crazy).

tomorrow i go dress shopping. i had already taken a look at what salvation army has to offer in the way of used-up wedding dresses (and believe me, they had a lot), but after the cleaning and alterations, it would probably cost as much as a new dress (on my budget, anyway). i might totally cheap-out and go for a white bridesmaids dress. they're not as heavy and cumbersome. and i don't need an extra 20 pounds dragging on my body as i try to walk through sand (or grass) down the aisle.

also, to save money, i'm making my own invitations. they're pretty damn cool, if i do say so myself. when i have one completed, i'll post a pic for anyone who might want to see it.

and i think for flowers, we're going to go to jewel the day before and pick up some flowering potted plants for the tables (at $10 a pop) and we'll grab some bouquets for me and the bridesmaids and cut and wrap the stems ourselves. i don't need $1000 worth of flowers that are just going to die in a day.

cross your fingers that all this crafty cheapness works out. and if anyone else has any good ideas, please let me know!

couldn't have said it better myself

this article says it all.