What a project

The other day my mom called and said "Katy! Guess what KK got for you!?!?!??!" I drew a blank. What could be so exciting? I had no idea.

"Fabric swatches to match your bridesmaids dresses!!" This is something I know so little about, I hadn't thought to want to obtain something like that, let alone think to be gracious about it. Of course, upon finding out the difficulty and expense of obtaining such a thing, I feel immense grattitude. Yay swatches! I now know, as a proper woman should, that I can carry these little bits of fabric around with me when I visit photographers and caterers and florists so they can all look at them and say "oh! I have just the thing to match that."

I also got a phone call informing me that my wedding dress is in. My first reaction? Let's go pick that sucker up and walk around in it for a few months! Again, ignorant. They keep it there for you. In a bag. So your neighbors don't smoke cigarettes and make it stinky or so your apartment doesn't burn down a few weeks before your wedding. (Not like that happened to anyone I know...)

As if that weren't bad enough, Corey and I spent 6 hours registering for gifts yesterday. Six hours!!!! Shopping! I was very excited going into this excursion. I thought I would run through the aisles and scan things and just have billions of exciting gifts waiitng for people to buy me online. It turns out I just am not that hype about sheets and bath towels. Nothing seemed to match exactly, so I was obsessing that one company's misty blue was a totally different color family from another company's misty blue. Corey freaked out that a bath sheet was so much larger and more expensive than a bath towel. He refused to let me pick out a vacuum until he did more research. I can see already that purchasing anything with a cord will take longer than getting the new car, which was a six month process of master's level research and calculations.

So we ditched the frou-frou store and went to REI, where 4 of the 6 hours were spent climbing, hoisting, lounging, and building camping gear. Our REI helper turned out to be a cyclist and some sort of race promoter, so Corey said more words in one hour than I have heard him say in 5 years while I discovered to my shock that I am an extra small internal frame backpack wearer! Extra small! Additionally, though Corey is one foot taller than me, it turns out this is all due to his abnormally long legs. His torso is one inch longer than mine. I am a 16-inch torso, he is a 17-inch. He has a freakishly short torso and monkey legs, just as I suspected. This will make tuxedo searching more fun than fabric swatching.

I sometimes hate that he is so practical. I got to hold the bar-code zapper at REI and ran around scanning everything in sight. $249 snow shoes? No problem! $149 treking poles? Be still my heart! At every extravagant item, he would stop me and say "No, those are too expensive," as if WE were buying the stove or the sleeping pads. These are presents! People can buy them if they want, or look in horror at our list and want to murder us with their eyeballs. Someday, we will have $500 to spend on one item of camping gear and when that day comes, we will have the brand and size we want organized in a specific area, all because we put in 4 hours of hard work registering for presents. I think, for future reference, it was time well spent.