Please Stop Yelling at Me

Soon after we set our wedding date I signed up with a wedding website that sends me little email reminders of the stuff I ought to be doing at each stage of the planning process, and each email includes a handy little countdown timer across the top telling me how many days are left until the big event.

At first the emails were like love notes from my new best friend, full of excitement and good ideas and encouragement, and they always had a cheerful "isn't this fun" kind of attitude. Back when there were lots of days left to go, I would get an email every week or two gently suggesting I take care of one task or another, most of which I blew off thinking I had plenty of time to get around to it.

Now the emails are being fired at me on a damn near daily basis and those previously gentle suggestions from my perky best friend have turned into a nagging tongue lashing from an ugly fishwife who screams at me over my failure to take action on some pretty mission critical stuff. These emails have taken an ugly turn, actually.

Oh sure, to the untrained eye the emails I'm getting these days might look exactly the same as those early ones but I am not fooled, not one little bit. I can see the dark underbelly and it ain't good. These emails look me straight in the eye and call me a slacker and remind me that it won't be pretty when everybody I know on Planet Earth shows up for a wedding and there's no minister. Or food. Or music. Or tables. Or chairs. Or cake. Like I don't already know that. Sheesh.

Even worse, they've taken on a mocking tone of voice sort of like Kathy Bates in the movie "Misery". And that little countdown timer at the top line screams like a banshee now. Really, it does--I hear it in my sleep almost every night. And I definitely heard a sarcastic "I told you so, you moron" when our first wedding gift arrived and I suddenly realized I had failed to order thank you notes.

And today the ugly fishwife email screamed at me that there are 59 days to go. I wish.

Since I let Morley talk me out of rescheduling the mission trip to Nicaragua--for which I am the official mission coordinator--I don't really have 59 days. I have to subtract some days on account of (1) my wedding planning abilities will be limited while I'm in Nicaragua since we won't have telephones or internet or other stuff, for example notepads or ink pens (2) we'll be awfully busy digging toilets or building pig pens or something equally non-wedding related and (3) I have to spend some of those 59 days coordinating the approximately 100,001 details for everyone else who's going to Nicaragua and what we'll be doing once we get there.

Basically here's the bottom line: I have to get everything done on the wedding before we go on the mission trip so I really have about 49 days max left to pull this baby together. Although Morley is willing to help out, he's still working ungodly hours at the office and simply doesn't have much time to pitch in. He did, however, put the postage on the invitations and drop them off at the post office. Didn't he do nice work with that? And I didn't use the sarcastic wedding fishwife voice when I said that either--if he hadn't taken care of that task your invitation might well still be sitting here on my desk screaming at me to mail it already for Pete's sake.

(Should I be worried that lately I'm hearing voices from inanimate objects? No? Good. My placemats are such liars sometimes. I don't know why I even listen to them.)

Anyway, my point here is that isn't easy simultaneously planning a mission trip to a third world country, working like fool to get ready to be away from the office for a couple of weeks, and planning a wedding with guests coming from two continents. And as an added bonus Morley's 60th birthday--an event that cannot go uncelebrated--falls smack dab in the middle of it all. Nah, I got nothing going on down here. How about things at your house?

Well, there is just one more thing going on but it's a fun one--planning for our commitment ceremony in England. It's essentially a second wedding ceremony that Morley's family, his old school friends and our new dear friends Les and Ros (whom we met on our cruise last January) will attend. It will be held in October at a castle about an hour away from where Morley's family lives.

Thank goodness Carol (Morley's darling sister Carol, not my friend Carol who is helping me with the ceremony here--you can never have too many Carols in your life) is doing most of the work in planning it. It will be a more intimate event than our USA wedding and we are both looking forward to it a lot. It will be the grand finale of the whole marriage process and a combination wedding, honeymoon, celebration and vacation. Plus, it can't hurt to get married two different times in two different countries in front of two different groups of witnesses. I reckon we'll be good and truly hitched after that, don't you?

Enough whinging for today--"whinge" being a new word taught to me by my future sister-in-law. It means "to whine". (I wonder what might have brought that up? Don't answer that). And now I really need to get busy and accomplish something if I want to avoid another tongue lashing email from the wedding planning fishwife tomorrow morning. The wench. I hate her.