The Wedding: Act II - The Rehearsal Dinner

We'd worked very hard all week to make sure we were ready for Saturday.  So by Friday morning there were only a few things left to do: namely, the rehearsal dinner and the flowers.  We couldn't really do those earlier anyway because, unlike when we painted our house, we were going for Vintage Ghetto, not Gothic Dead.

My mom's side of the family (all from out of town) wasn't flying in until the morning of the wedding, so the rehearsal dinner was my dad's side of the family, most of MacGyver's family, and the few extra people in the wedding party that weren't MacGyver's family.  All in all it was a really fantastic time.  Since the reception was the part of the wedding I was most looking forward to anyway, this was a nice preview of what was to come the next night.

We did a quick run through of the wedding ceremony with the wedding party going over most of the important bits (emphasis on most) before everyone left for the evening.

Mr. and Mrs. B stayed after most of the guests left to help with flowers.  We had four bridesmaids bouquets to make, my bouquet, eight (?) boutonnieres to manufacture, and a handful of corsages.  It was about 8:00pm when we started.  Because that's how I roll.

We had all the flowers sitting in big five gallon buckets in my mom's laundry room  so we set up shop in there.  The bouquets actually went fairly quickly and they turned out spectacularly.  I didn't take any photos of us making them because, well, we were busy making them.  But I assure you that between my mom, myself, Mr. and Mrs. B, and my brother's girlfriend, we rocked those bouquets.

Here are some of my bouquet.  I don't think I have any that are just the girls' bouquets without the girls in them, so I'll wait until the next post for those.  The charms on my bouquet are of both of my grandfathers and one of my grandmothers who have passed away.  I found the hardware at Joann's and used sepia colored photos of them.  The pictures of my dad's parents are their wedding photos.  It was a nice way to honor them at the wedding.

The bouquets turned out pretty awesome.  The boutonnieres on the other hand...not so much.  After much fussing, my mom called for reinforcements.  One of her best friends, Mrs. H, is apparently knowledgeable about these things and offered to help us if we needed it.  She has been in my life as long as I can remember.  She's driven me to school when I missed the bus, and we stayed at her house a few times when my parents went on trips.  I love Mrs. H.  When Mom called her, she came straight over and set to work.  We used some leaves from the lilies in the large bouquet to lay the roses on and tied them all together with some floral tape.  Even MacGyver had to admit they looked pretty snappy!

My parents went to bed shortly after we finished the flower stuff.  I sat down to go through the wedding slideshow one more time and review the playlist for the reception.  It was about then that I realized MacGyver and my brother, Turbo, had been drinking since about noon.  It was now about 11:00pm.  I won't detail everything that happened in the next few hours, but it involved singing and dancing and other drunken debauchery.  I finally went to bed around midnight because the girls were showing up the house about 10am to get ready and I wanted to sleep.

I hadn't really been nervous about getting married in the months and weeks leading up to the wedding.  But I remember that the last thoughts I had before falling asleep that night were that tomorrow my name was going to be different, and that started to freak me out just a little bit.

Okay a lot.

Plain Diaper Cakes are for Sissies

My good friend, Mrs. B, is having her first baby in March and Mr. B and I decided to throw her a surprise baby shower last weekend.  As soon as she told me she was pregnant I started looking for fun baby craft projects and stumbled on this little gem.  

I was just kidding about that plain diaper cakes are for sissies thing.  Seriously though, anyone can give a diaper cake.  But a diaper tricycle?!  Yes, please!  By the way, people are selling these for a small fortune on Etsy if you're not feeling crafty.  I might need to get in on that, as a matter of fact.

Mrs. B is actually going to use cloth diapers, but I knew there was simply no way I was going to get that many cloth diapers made in time.  When we were painting her nursery a few weeks ago, I casually asked her if she would like to have a stash of disposables for emergencies and to keep in the car, etc.  

Heh, heh.  I'm so sneaky.

(Please excuse the weird focus on the pictures.  MacGyver is a much better photographer than I am.)  You'll need about 55-60 diapers, two bibs, two receiving blankets, a pair of socks, an angel food cake pan, rubber bands, ribbon, some safety pins, and a bottle that for our purposes you're going to pretend is also in the picture.  

Eh hem.  

You're going to make one large wheel and two smaller wheels.  For the larger wheel I used about 30 diapers.  You can adjust it to your liking.  You'll want enough to make it nice and sturdy.  Start by staggering the diapers about 3/4" apart and wrapping them around the center of your poor battered angel food cake pan that your mom gave you when you got your first place in college.  Keep adding diapers in the same direction until they start meeting the first diaper.  Then start pinching the diapers toward the middle and twisting as you add more.  When you've added all the diapers you'll have a nice pinwheel in the pan and you can adjust them until they are evenly spaced and looking pretty.

Gently press the bottom of the pan up from the bottom to expose the outside of your wheel.  This takes a little dexterity, but while you have the wheel lifted up, wrap a rubber band around the outside to hold it all together.

Then pop that bad boy out of the pan!  You'll probably want to adjust the diapers again after this as they can shift a little when you're putting on the rubber band.  Rinse and repeat two more times for the smaller wheels.  I used about 20 diapers per small wheel, but you can make them however you like.

When you've got all three wheels ready (how cute are these?!), carefully widen the centers of the wheels so there are holes an inch or so in diameter.

Wrap the ribbon around the rubber bands to cover them up and secure with a safety pin.  I picked diaper pins since I new Mrs. B will be doing the cloth diaper thing most of the time.

Take one of the receiving blankets that you had to go back to the store and buy after you accidentally cut right through the middle of the ones you were making for Baby B and threw a fish flopping fit involving naughty words that are not suitable for baby ears.

Eh hem.  Don't be like me.

Roll up the blanket into a tight roll.  I didn't take a picture of this (I was still mad about the first blankets I ruined), but if you fold the blanket in half and then roll it up, it's a lot easier and stays rolled tighter.  Either way, you want a long, rolled blanket.

Rinse and repeat with the second blanket.  

Thread one blanket through the center of the larger wheel...

...and pull the ends around and snake them through each of the back wheels to join in the middle.

Secure it with a safety pin.  Don't worry about making this part pretty - just slide it inside one wheel and you'll never see it.

Make sure the treads are facing the same direction on the back wheels or it will look weird.  You don't want weird looking tires, now do you?  I didn't think so.

Take the other blanket and feed it through the center of front wheel until the ends are even.

Lay one of the bibs across the front wheel and secure it under the ribbon you used to cover the rubber band.

I saw this bib on etsy and didn't have time to order one.  I used t-shirt transfer paper that you print on and iron onto fabric.  I have no idea how well this will work as a bib, but it's cute.

Do the same thing with the other bib across the back tires, and secure the ends inside the front wheel center.  This will become the seat.

For the visual learners...

Remember that baby bottle we were pretending was in the first photo?  Lay it on top of the front wheel with the bottom facing the front of the tricycle.  Pull the ends of the second blanket up like bunny ears around the bottle and secure tightly with a rubber band.

Wrap ribbon around the rubber band to cover it up, and put the socks on over the ends of the blanket for handle bars.  This tricycle is for a boy, but pink tassels would be fun on a girl tricycle!  Not that there is anything wrong with boys liking pink, I just haven't had a chance to ask Baby B if he likes pink and I don't like to assume.

Though as an aside, I picked green and yellow for the colors because I like them, and blue seemed a little cliche.  Halfway through making this I realized Mr. B went to OSU - long time rival to my alma mater, U of O - whose colors are green and yellow.  This made me chuckle.

(Read the subliminal messages, Baby B!  Come to the dark side!  We have candy!)

And you're done!

This took about 2 hours to put together start to finish, but I imagine it could be done in less.  It was a big hit at the shower!

Happy crafting!

Whaaaaaaat???

MacGyvery made me take down the other post I wrote a few days ago.  I'll repost it soon, but in the mean time, I give you this:

These little minions from the movie Despicable Me are hilarious.  I saw a clip from an interview with Steve Carrell about this movie in which he said that the moral of the story is that everyone needs 10,000 minions in their lives.  I couldn't agree more.  

MacGyver bought a welder a few months back, and has been playing around with some scrap metal.  He made the cake topper for our wedding, in fact.  We had an dual tank old air compressor that died sitting around in the basement so he took it apart and was trying to figure out what to do with it.  I immediately thought of the minions.  

My little brother loves this movie and we thought it would be fun to make him a metal minion.

(uhh...please excuse the hoard in the background)

I just want to say for the record that I watched MacGyver bend a strip of steel around a piece of pvc pipe to make the goggle.  With his bare hands.

We put the minion in front of the fire to try to get the paint to dry a little faster.  Linus was unimpressed.

MacGyver did all the welding and painted him yellow.

I used Testors model paints to paint the rest.  He turned out pretty cute if I may say so myself!

Turbo liked him.  I have no idea what he's going to do with a giant metal minion, but that's not really my problem.  Also important to note: you can put a giant metal cylinder into your carry on luggage and fly across the country (to Washington D.C.) and the TSA will not question you.  

But leave the nail clippers at home.  

Personal Planning Fail

Part of my job includes taking a 24 hour on call rotation once a week.  Sometimes this means that we are up all night, and then have to go to work the next day with our game faces on and be productive.  I remember a time when I was about 22 when running on an hour or so of sleep was no big deal.  Now, it just hurts. 

Since I've worked here, our shifts have gone from 8:30am to 8:30am the next morning.  Those of us in the rotation have been rallying for awhile to get that changed for the above mentioned reasons.  The idea being that if we were up all night, we wouldn't have a full schedule the next day and we could sleep in a little bit.  I'm all for preparing for the zombie apocalypse, but I don't think the folks accessing our services should have to worry about that when they come in to see us.  

I was one of the more vocal proponents of this change, and last week we were able to implement it for the first time.  This meant that my original Thursday morning to Friday morning shift moves to Wednesday night to Thursday night, 5:00pm to 5:00pm.  

Last night, while in the ER for the better part of 3 hours, I realized a fatal flaw in my planning.  

We have a meeting at 8:30am every Thursday morning that is directly related to the on-call rotation.  Which means that no matter how late I'm up the night before, I still have to get up and go to work for our staff meetings.  This is not a problem with any other shift.  How I overlooked that one is a mystery to me. 

This morning was compounded by the fact that I was up late on Tuesday night helping MacGyver get ready for his new job.

OOHH!  I completely forgot!!  MacGyver got a job!

I'm sleep deprived.  Please excuse me. 

Tuesday afternoon MacGyver got a call asking him to come in for an interview Wednesday morning at 7:00am.  The interview was about 90 minutes away, so he needed to leave about 5:00am to make sure he got there in plenty of time.  Tuesday night we were up late at the office doing some maintenance work (I'm running off with the office maintenance guy!  Tee hee!!) and then had to run around and find everything he needed for his interview.  We didn't get to bed until about midnight.  I made the mistake of going back to sleep after getting up with MacGyver at 5:00.  I think I would have been okay if I'd just made some coffee and powered through the day, but I didn't.  I went back to sleep, and getting up after two more hours was just brutal.  

Then I did it again last night.  Today, I'm running on fumes.  My dad emailed me this morning, and I responded to a lot of information that was never in his original email.  I just started making things up that I swear I read, but that weren't there at all!  He wrote back and was like, "uhhh, did you even read that email?"  

I take no responsibility for my actions today.

Luckily I was granted reprieve from future staff meetings in the morning if this should happen again.  Everyone was kind enough to say that I could call in my information and show up later.  

Oh, and the best part?  My car is broken.  And MacGyver has our other car an hour and a half away.  I'm riding my Pink Bicycle to work, something that I actually enjoy doing when the weather is nice.  But today I'm so tired that bicycling home seems like so much work.  

If my next post is written from jail for passing out on some stranger's front lawn with my Pink Bicycle, you'll know what happened.

National Lampoon's Family Camping Trip Part 1

Every year when I was a kid my family would go camping for a few weeks.  These camping trips are some of my favorite memories of growing up.  I remember going swimming at the lake every year, waiting to get out of my warm sleeping bag until I knew my dad and brother had the fire started and the coffee/hot chocolate made, driving through the Redwood forest and seeing those magnificent trees for the first time, that time I got the flu and had a horrible fever the whole trip and my dad threatened to throw me in the lake and I was so scared he'd actually do it, or that other time when my brother fell on a tree stump and wound up with some serious carnage on his back...

Ah, yes.  Fond memories.

Last year my dad mentioned that camping sounded like fun and I immediately jumped on the bandwagon and invited myself and MacGyver along.  Then I invited my brother.  Pretty soon we had a camping reunion in the works!  Dad booked the campground we always stayed at when we were kids.  We have a special campsite too, and Dad reserved it a year in advance.  I took time off work and my brother flew in with his girlfriend.  They live on the east coast so we don't get to see him often.  He's a real kick in the pants and I was soo looking forward to hanging out all week.

MacGyver and I packed our Exploder to the gills, and then shoved wine bottles in every nook and cranny.  Every time I pulled another bin out while we were unpacking it was like Christmas!  This was the first family camping trip in which alcohol was involved.  Wooo!

The first day or so of camping was fairly low key.  We'd all just come off of crazy, strenuous work schedules and I think we all needed a little down time.  But on Sunday, my brother, his girlfriend, MacGyver and I went to the sand dunes to fly his new kite.

Two things that are vital to this story that you need to know before I begin:

1. My skin would make an albino shield his eyes.  It's a glaring, brilliant white.  Actually, I bet on a clear day they can see me from the space station.  This means that I also sunburn easily.  Like, just me walking from my car to her office puts my dermatologist in fits.

2. MacGyver and I just found an amazing deal on a new telephoto lens for our digital camera, so we bought it.

Okay back to the story.  On this particular Sunday, the sun was shining high in the sky, as it is wont to do in July.  Our campsite was fairly shaded, so I was wearing jeans and a black hoodie.  I was also wearing sneakers because I wasn't thinking about walking in sand when we left the campsite.

There is a lake in the middle of the sand dunes, and a nice little swimming hole.  That day there were a fair amount of people playing in the water, and also sand-boarding down the dunes.  I had never heard of this sport before this weekend, but it looked like fun.  If you're into the whole running up and down huge, steep hills of sand kind of thing.  MacGyver and my brother went to go get the kite started.  I was advised that if I continued to stand where I was standing, I might find my head, or other various limbs, in need of intensive care.  Or a morgue.  So I moved down the hill a bit, closer to a lot of the families playing in the sand.

I realized shortly after arriving that I had not applied sunscreen before we left.  Please don't tell my dermatologist.  This meant I couldn't take my hoodie off and wear the much more appropriate tank top I had on underneath. I tried to keep my hood up to protect my head, but it was too hot, so I just adjusted the camera bag strap so that it pushed the hood up around the back of my neck a little more.

So there I was.  Standing out in the middle of these huge sand dunes, by myself, next to a swimming hole with lots of children, in dark sunglasses, black hoodie, jeans and sneakers on a hot, sunny day, with a telephoto lens on my camera, taking pictures of someone flying a kite several hundred feet away.

I'm sure it didn't look creepy at all.

I am rather surprised that people didn't try to relocate their children away from the Unabomber taking pictures of nothing.

I did get some pretty awesome pictures that day though.

MacGyver showing off his mad ninja kite flying skillz.

 I love how the guy in the background looks like he's running for his life.

I stalked this bald eagle for awhile too.  I've never seen a bald eagle that close before.  Really impressive - even for a bird.

OMG We're Getting Married!

After nearly 7 years of dating, this was a sentence I never thought I'd be saying.  In fact, for approximately 7 years I vehemently rejected the entire concept of marriage!

Nope.  Not getting married.

Thank you for playing.

And in the event that I accidentally did agree to get married, it was most definitely going to be the result of a long night of drinking, and would involve Elvis and a Drive-Thru Chapel somewhere in Vegas.

Alas, through a series of unfortunate events (which will not be detailed here in order to protect the innocent), Vegas was not to be.

(Sniff.)

Instead, we're going to have a wedding!!  There will be feathers and rhinestones and pearls (oh, my!).  And you, the fabulous folks of the Internets, get to come along for the ride!

Seriously though.  So far, the Internets have been a plethora of fantastic ideas and inspirations.  And since I am shamelessly stealing ideas from other people, it's only fair that I put my own ideas out there to be pillaged for others' use.  Unless my idea is especially brilliant.  In which case I will copyright said idea and pursue offenders to the fullest extent of the law.

That's all for now.

See you at the altar!

Love, The Anti-Bride

It's BBQ time!!!

Is it wrong to buy someone a birthday present that also somehow benefits you?

Personally, I think those are the best kind of presents. I look at them as investments. Eventually I too will reap the spoils of my efforts! Meet our new BBQ.





It was an early birthday present for MacGyver. They were having a great sale that I couldn't pass up. And yeah, it's chained to the house. That's right. Just try and steal it. I dare you.

No really, don't. I will cry.