30 feels pretty good so far

This weekend I drove up to 's house to meet up with my northern friends for some dinner and karaoke. I decided that I have little to no interest in seeing semi-nude men or women in a bar setting as some sort of rite of passage before getting married, but I did want to do a few things that Rich has less than zero interest in so that I could enjoy a bit of a "girls' night out" experience. So we met up with , , Shannon, Liz, and (for dinner at least before he fled the karaoke scene) to have dinner and then headed to a cafe in Annandale where we could reserve a private room to sing to our hearts out. It was a fine evening all around.

While we had the luxury of choosing whatever songs we wanted from the binders, the videos were a little ... odd. They all looked as though they were filmed in the late 80s and in many cases has nothing to do with the plot of the song itself. Some of my favorites were the stop-motion dolls during "Bohemian Rhapsody" and the Spiderman version of "Reunited (and it feels so good)." Even if they were germane to the plot, they were still bizarre, as was evidenced by the midget starring in Garth Brook's "I've Got Friends in Low Places." Click on the thumbnail to see all the photos from our evening.

I was pleased to have so many of my friends in one place at one time. While we couldn't get everyone together because of schedules, having absolutely all of those cool people in one place might have caused some sort of tear in the universe as we fashioned a new city of Coolville with a population of all my kick ass friends. Sacrifices had to be made for everyone's safety.

This morning at Kim's house I had the luxury of taking a few photos of some of the relics from her duffle bag of high school notes. There were so many complicatedly folded letters written with those damned fountain pens that leaked on fucking EVERYTHING but we loved because they were so unique. So in honor of my 30th birthday today, I'm posting some of the embarrassing crap I wrote 15 years ago to my friend who is still my friend today. I could write all about how where I am today is not necessarily exactly where I thought I would be when I was 15, but thankfully, I'm not that exact same person and have learned to fucking relax (most of the time) and not plan my life out for the next 15 years. Perhaps when I turn 45, we can all look back on the pictures from karaoke yesterday and have the same combination of wistfully smiling and cringing at ourselves.

embroidery machine questions

Ok, folks, I need advice. Tell me what kind of embroidery machines you have. What kinds do you covet? Is all the software really as crappy and tedious as I've used in the past? I see folks adding machine embroidery to their clothing and wonder if it really is taking them 45 minutes to an hour for each design or if they have some secret trick.

My embroidery machine is old and I never use it. I only use it for a sewing machine these days and even then I wouldn't mind finding another home for this one and replacing it.

Given their prices, I'm planning for a purchase I convince myself I need and will actually use.

holy crap we're getting married in under a month!

Somebody should do some wedding planning around here at some point! This week has been one of phone calls to places that seemed stunned we waited until the "last minute" to call them. It's been a bit of a nice test, though, because if they don't piss me off with some condescending statement about how we really waited too late for [insert random wedding thing here] but understand that I want them to call me back the same day because we're on a tight timetable, I'm more likely to actually hire them. No one is freaking out about anything, which is always good, and we're genuinely excited about all the cool stuff that will happen for our wedding. Also, as a testament to our relationship we haven't gotten into any fights about my insisting on a theme of "Enchantment Under the Sea" or his insisting on an orange tuxedo. But with the amount of crap we have crammed in these last few weeks, I do admit to being a big excited about our honeymoon as a chance to just lounge around by the pool and eat a lot of food.