“I thought we always planned to just elope?”
“We did, but then you proposed, and suddenly I wanted to have a wedding day.”
“Any explanation for that one?”
“I dunno…must be some kind of genetic switch that happens to women when they come into contact with diamonds.”
“Oh.”
Over the past few days, two big milestones have been passed. The first was on Saturday when I created a new folder on my laptop titled “Wedding stuff”. The second was today, when my better half revealed she had bought a binder and a notepad. The planning for the wedding has begun, and I am now looking at the people who had to plan D-Day with a lot more sympathy.
While it might sound as if I’m moaning, I’m really not. We’re still in the earliest of early stages and aren’t really so much planning as we are checking out what we like and taking notes, but it is fun. We’re both amused because pre-engagement we always said that we would just elope and come back married…only to find ourselves with wedding magazines already cluttering up the couch.
At the weekend my friend Lorraine (who recently got married – the photo of me in a kilt over at FlickrDoo was taken at her wedding) passed us a bag of magazines she had picked up over the months she worked on the planning of her big day. The bag is so heavy that the straps have snapped and the damn thing almost gave me a hernia carrying it in. In total there must be tens of thousands of pages in there. Millions of photographs. And how many articles have we found so far that relate to the groom? How many words have been devoted to the schmuck in the suit at the front?
One.
Yes, count it. Between zero and two. One single article that listed the duties of the groom on the day. I’m trying not to take it personally.
So we have started planning, and it’s scary and fun at the same time. It feels like the training wheels are off, and we’re thinking of ways to stamp our personality on the day because with all the services on offer now you could end up with a pretty generic wedding if you’re not careful (pre-printed invites, table settings, the works), and all I can do is look at her, sitting there beside me, and glance at the diamond ring on her finger. Then my heart pounds, but only in a good way.
I’m going to get married. To my best friend. I might have lost the “number of articles” competition, but I pretty much won the star prize already so I don’t mind. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s an article on cakes I really must read.
P.S. I promise I’ll stop being sickening soon. I still want to talk about the actual proposal (I have to explain the Stargate somehow) and some other stuff, but I promise that you won’t need huge doses of insulin to survive the sugar levels here for too much longer.
Pick one from the following statements:
Today I…
a) Took some time off work
b) Found a monument that looks eerily like a Stargate
c) Fed swans
d) Got scared by swans
e) Ran away from swans
f) Proposed
g) Had my proposal accepted
h) Got engaged
i) Kept a close eye on those damn swans
j) All of the above
Answers on a postcard, please. No conferring, and I must accept your first answer.
It’s 4.45 am as I type this, and as you might have worked out already, I can’t sleep. I have a big day tomorrow…well, today now. Possibly one of the biggest of my life, and the pre-game nerves have thrown my sleep pattern all out of whack. Try as I might, count as many sheep as I might, slug down as much milk as I might take, sleep eludes me. All I can do is go through my prep for tomorrow (I keep saying that – I should say later today). Did I get everything right? Have I thought of everything? Is it all in place? Then I fight down the impulse to go check everything for the zillionth time. And yes, I also have to fight down a moment’s panic because I suddenly think I should be rested and ready tomorrow, but I think the adrenaline will counter all of that.
I can almost hear you now. “What the hell is this guy talking about?” and believe me, I apologise for the frustration. One of the saving graces of my attempts at blogging has been that while I am never all that interesting, I at least strive for clarity in my expression. I assure you this turn to the cryptic is not part of some big Ulysses homage, in which the boiled egg becomes a verbal sudoku puzzle. This is just nerves rattling me. Hell, you think this is bad? This is me with the benefit of a spellchecker and a moment or two to reread things before I commit them to print. Imagine how I am in person.
Well, I promise all will become clear in the next day or so one way or the other. Normal service, however mediocre, will be resumed.
I’m not one for nature, but every now and again it throws one hell of a scary curve ball that shows that sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. Go read and wonder what’s down there – and if you like, go visit the page with the audio file and listen to it too. I’m not going to say anymore, just wonder.
And from the sublime to the ridiculous (tip of the hat to the inestimable Kottke.org for this one) with the Million Dollar Homepage. One of those simple ideas that has you slapping your forehead and crying out “Why didn’t I think of that?” at the top of your voice. Then again, what was that they said about one being born every minute?
Sometimes you just never see those blasts from the past coming. Sitting today watching Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (yes, my tastes in TV are just that bad!) and who appeared on it as a special guest but good old Mister T himself. That whoosh you may have heard today was me being whisked back to the 1980s, by the way. Sorry about that. When I was young I was a major A-Team fanatic, and seeing Mister T helping a team of builders do up someone’s house took me back to the days where Saturday tea-times were filled with gunfire, heroes being locked up in fully operational equipment sheds, crazy pilots and Cylon cameos in the opening credits.
It’s funny because MCF recently wrote about icons of the past, and how sometimes the time comes to let them pass. What he wrote was true, and was as usual excellently written, but I’d like to add something to that: sometimes the time does come to move on, one step at a time, but sometimes the nostalgia factor is hiding around the next corner, waiting to leap out on you and hit you with a blunt object.
Okay okay, last time I go back to beat the hell out of this particular dead horse, I promise. At least until the next time. Today two major supermarket chains promised to reduce petrol by 4p a litre at all of their petrol stations across the UK. Nice to know that the fucking retailers can do something while Gordon Brown – Chancellor of the Exchequer for the United Kingdom and the man who oversees the infrastructure that takes 67% of the price paid at the pump as tax – did nothing. Well, he probably had a cup of tea, did a little browsing and played some gameboy. However, in terms of actually doing something to help it has to be said his contribution this time around wasn’t exactly stellar.
We should not have to depend upon the mercy of retailers to salvage a situation when it looks to be moving towards becoming untenable. Retailers are not motivated by the goodness of their hearts or a sense of social responsibility, they are motivated by profit. Nothing wrong with that, because it’s what they are there for after all. Governments, on the other hand…
Come on Gordon. I voted for you lot. I even have a sneaking admiration for you and believe you’re going to be the next Labour PM. Hell, I even think you’ll do alright in the job. I believe in your positions and principles on most stuff. I like the fact that you and old Tone have made centre-left a viable position to take politically. The only thing I would ask is please, please please please start to act like the young, decisive and honest government we voted in in ’97. Please.
Last night I had the frustrating experience of trying to remember how to do something in Photoshop and failing miserably every time I tried. The entire experience was made all the more frustrating because while my failing, rusty memory couldn’t supply the information I needed, it could supply the fact that I definitely knew how to do it before. I started using Photoshop years back and am largely self taught: there is no greater way to learn than to muck about with menus, try out various options and see what happens. Well, no greater way than structured learning and being taught by an expert. That might win. Spending hours running into a brick wall in your own cerebellum though, that just sucks.
In the past I have created video and DVD covers for my own use, worked on books and promotional material for events and have even designed websites and other graphic elements for other people, but it all grew out of me just enjoying messing about with Photoshop. It’s a hobby that I haven’t had much time for lately and I really need to make more time to get back into it.
Today I spent about 20 minutes messing about with a silly design job, first in Fireworks and later in Photoshop, and I realised just how much I enjoyed the whole thing. It wasn’t anything great or impressive, but it was the first time for a long while (browsing and blogging excepted) that I have sat at a computer and purely enjoyed myself. I’m not the next big thing for the design world, but I have some game. The sad thing is, I had even more a while ago and it’s time to get them back…and I get to have fun doing it too.
The good: Spooks is back! Woo, and if I may be so bold, hoo! An excellent series, launching its fourth season on BBC One with a great two-parter. For those of you who may not have picked up on this show, please do so and enjoy some excellent TV. In these days of insipid, moronic, brain–death inducing reality TV I believe good programming needs all the support it can get. Be warned though, it pulls no punches, but it is a better show for it.
The bad: Driving around this evening trying to find a petrol station that hadn’t run out thanks to panic buying. Not being a panic buyer myself, I was royally pissed off when my usual payday routine of filling my tank became a trawl around town to find a forecourt that hadn’t closed because of the sudden surge in demand.
The good: As you might have noticed, it’s payday! Ahhh, payday: that sweet time where I am, at least for a short time, a rich man (biddy biddy bum optional). Of course that is before the bills come along and kick me back down into the fiscal doldrums like the prole I am.
The bad: With petrol prices going up faster than a rat up a drainpipe my payday “rich man rush” doesn’t last very long anymore. Furthermore, with big old Gordon promising no help from the government to bring the prices down, it seems it’s only gonna get worse. Gordon, on the off chance you’re reading this, thank you for the lesson: if I ever find myself in a job that pays a six figure salary and someone else pays for the petrol needed to shift my fat arse from A to B, I will immediately turn around and comprehensively kick every poor bastard at the other end of the economic scale square in the nuts. At a time when other EU governments are starting to actually stand up for their citizens, it’s good to know you’ll happily collect the fuel duty, shrug your shoulders and heroically blame OPEC.
The good: Scrubs season 2 is now out on DVD! Another quality show to enjoy.
The bad: Scrubs season 2 being sold out in my local supermarket, and by the time I had done the great fuel hunt, it was too late to look anywhere else. Oh well – at least it’s doing well enough to sell out quickly. Maybe there are some people out there besides me who don’t like reality TV.
The good: Not even feeling guilty as I use this lazy-arsed format for a blog entry. Hell people, I’m not even ashamed of my piss-poor structuring this time around, but I promise better in the future.
The bad: Firefox actually managing to crash on me (yes, that’s right, super-stable Firefox on super-stable Mac OS X: believe me, I was shocked because it’s the first time Firefox has ever gone tits-up on me so badly that I’ve had to force a quit) and losing my first draft of this. Yes, with links. No, I didn’t save it. Yes, this could also be filed under “The criminally stupid” as well as “The bad”.
The good: I look over at the couch as I type this, and I see my better half curled up on the couch, asleep. She dozed off an hour or so ago while watching TV, and when I look at her everything else just melts away and I can’t help but smile. Petrol prices? Pffff, who cares. That’s for tomorrow. For now all I can see is her.
Hell that’s not just good, it’s the best.
I’m having one of those very special days where everything I try to turn my hand to immediately goes into “frustrating” mode. I try to pick something up, I knock over three other things. I try to type any word, I get it wrong (about five times this morning I have had to retype several documents in which I refer to my working with various different studnet requests). One of those days that brings to mind a silly little rhyme someone once told me:
I can’t help but be utterly convinced that there is a truth in there somewhere. I’m not exactly the sharpest tool in the box, but if I was slightly more moron-esque I think my frustration levels would be waaaaaay down from their usual level.
And if anyone has any idea what a studnet would request, answers on a postcard please, or just stick them in the comments.