Mark your calendars

Brian and I have selected a place and date for our wedding. We will be getting married on July 9, 2010 at the Newton White Mansion in Mitchellville, MD. We'd looked at it online a few times, checked out a bridal show onsite and then went back for our own tour yesterday. I love it. We'll have our ceremony outside on the lower patio, which overlooks the woods and a golf course (but mostly the woods). The picture below shows the back of the mansion and the brick courtyard, the wedding party will be in front of the fountain and the audience will face away from the building on either side of the fountain. We'll probably have cocktails and hors d'ouerves on the upper patio after the ceremony.

And then we'll move into the atrium, shown below, for the reception, although we'll have access to the whole mansion (including a side room that we think will be for the kids to hang out on their own if they want).

Now that we have that big detail out of the way, I think we'll slow the planning again. We talked last night about starting to look into caterers this June and I'll probably go dress shopping in July when my mom comes to visit. Honestly, now that we have a date and a place, I'm nowhere near as stressed as I was before. And besides, as Brian pointed out last night, we have nothing but time...or, at least, 465 days of time. :)

FYI

A quick way to get rid of any feelings of good will I might have towards you is to come into class, after having skipped school the day before, and complain about how tired you are and how wrong it is for me to ask you - an AP student - to write a one paragraph explanation of social welfare policy in the US.

Four days until break. Not that I'm counting...

If this is news, my life is not that interesting.

All the same, I am getting a haircut this afternoon for the first time since September. I thought that before I cut it off, I would let you all see how long it has gotten. Honestly, I don't think it has been this long since I was in middle school. I won't be chopping too much, but it needs a style and at least a few inches need to go. My hope is to have it this long, but also healthy by the time our wedding rolls around. Sorry, something more interesting next time, I promise.

Thanking the lion

Snow day tomorrow! We're getting hit with a pretty nasty snowstorm so no work for me tomorrow. I'm not thrilled about missing a day of instruction, but I'm glad for another day of rest and some time to work on grad school stuff. And while I'm pretty much over the cold, wet weather, I'm looking forward to March going "out like a lamb." Have a good Monday, all!

Thirty minutes

Today is all-day professional development for us, but my group finished much earlier than expected so now I'm all ready for class on Monday morning, all planned for all of my classes for all of next week and I still have half an hour until our final share-out meeting. So, here I am.

Has anyone else had a crazy week? Brian and I had a pretty relaxed start to February - we didn't go out and do a whole lot for the first two weeks, but then this week was out of control. Tuesday night we went to a basketball game (and watched the Wizards win, which was new and exciting), Wednesday night we heard Thomas Friedman speak, tonight we have dinner reservations at Founding Farmers (looks so delicious), and tomorrow night we have another basketball game (where, I suspect, we will see the Wizards lose to the Spurs). Plus, last night I had first semester parent conferences. And Monday we're going out after work to celebrate our second (!) anniversary. No wonder I'm exhausted (well, that and I'm not sleeping well because we both got sick this week).

Grad school is going well. I'm less than two weeks away from being finished with my third (of ten) classes. So far, I have a 100% in the class. I am excited and proud of this fact, but I am also incredibly stressed about breaking my streak now, so close to the end. Still, I think it might happen with the last assignment, which is a reflective essay. I seem to have a pretty hard time with those. Probably because they require you to be a much more touchy-feely writer than I am comfortable with. Still, it's been a pretty great run. And the course, on content-area reading strategies, has been incredibly useful.

Work is dragging on at a fairly good clip. I'm a little burned out, which is normal for this time of year. I think that once things warm up and the sun is shining on a consistent basis, I will start to feel better about my job. Such is the cycle of teaching, I think. I just need spring break to get here (end of March, for those of you playing along at home) and then it's a pretty easy ride to the end. Not to say that I will coast, just that, for whatever reason, the work doesn't seem as painful when the end is in sight and the weather is nice.

Wedding planning is sort of at a standstill. Pushing the wedding back to the summer of 2010 gives us a lot of breathing room, but now it's just about 18 months away and I want us to have some things finalized soon. We're having a tough time budgeting because neither of us really know what is reasonable and if we set a budget using the money we currently have saved, well, we'd be serving snacks to our relatives and sending photo links to everyone else. In the end, I suspect we'll plan a great event for all of the people who mean the most to us and the money issue will work itself out eventually. Still, as all of you know, it is a stressful process and I'll be glad when we have something in writing somewhere. Plus, I want the big stuff taken care of so we can focus on the smaller, more fun details. Because I'm a girl and that's how it goes.

I think this is a pretty disjointed post (and I feel like I used way more adverbs than necessary), but it was a nice way to pass some time. One of these days I'll get the pictures on my camera downloaded (nothing major, just lots of little things) and share some of those with you as well (I'm always envious of my friends' blogs that feature lots of photos - they are so much more interesting to look at than mine). Happy weekend!

Crankiness ahead

You've been in school for three and a half hours and you're already singing about going home on Thursday night? Give me a break.

Wanderlust

By every account, I have a pretty amazing life. I am engaged to an amazing person who makes me more than happy; I have a supportive, loving, well-adjusted family; I work at a somewhat rewarding job that I am very good at and that pays me well; I have a circle of close friends who support me, make me laugh, and never let me forget that I am loved; I am relatively healthy, live in a safe and welcoming home; and I am able to go to bed each night knowing what the next day will bring. All of that being said, I am struggling with a bit of restlessness lately. It's probably the same cabin fever that strikes so many people this time of year, but it is still driving me crazy. I am cranky all of the time, I don't want to do anything in particular, and yet I want to do something. It's a weird place I inhabit these days and I'm not sure how I am going to get away from it. Every day for the next few weeks, at least, play out exactly as they have for the last month or so with no real opportunity for a change. And even if there were an opportunity I don't know what it is that I'm looking for.

This sort of undecided restlessness is something that I associate with my generation, although I suppose that is a little narcissistic of me, and I wonder if it is a result of being in between two life phases. Not being single and just out of college and ready for anything, but also not being married and settled with established responsibilities. I do sometimes wonder if I’ll ever reach a point when I think, “this is me” and stop feeling like there must be something else. And I know I can’t be the only one.