I know that wedding planning is exacerbating  the situation, but I have also suspected for years now that etiquette is slowly ceasing to exist. There used to be the days when the etiquette "rules" were ones people practically lived by - like in the the June Cleaver 1950's. Now in the days of email, texting and instant communication, grammar and spelling seem to have gone out the window along with etiquette and manners. We are under the 30 day mark until the wedding, the deadline for RSVP's to our destination wedding has long passed, and we are still trying to get definite answers out of people (including, ahem, some of the groom's only relatives - who are not elderly!) on wether or not they are coming. We sent out the Save the date's a year before the wedding to give people, especially our friends who might not have the means but we knew wanted to come, time to plan, save, get time off, etc. Now we are having a couple (groom's friend and his girlfriend, in their early 30's) who already RSVP'd, my dad spent weeks finding them a hotel room cheap enough so they could come, booked it for them, and now they are saying they don't know if they can come because they have decided to go to Vegas at the end of this month. Okay, they are perfectly within their rights to do so, but it still does not excuse the rudeness of the situation! Sorry to vent, and while I am by no means perfect, I think manners and etiquette should still have a place in this world! Any one else shocked at the lack of proper manners these days?? 

Today, only 45 days away from our wedding, my little (okay he's 16 and has almost a foot on me in height but he will always be my "little brother") brother sent me a wedding present that he bought for us himslef. I opened the card he had picked out, and it had two penguins on the front running through water holding flippers, one wearing a veil and the other in a bow tie. Right there I smiled and started tearing up and I hadn't even opened the card yet. Inside it read "You two are so cool together! Congratulations on your wedding" and he wrote "Congrats Mr. and Mrs. "P".... and there's more but I was just so touched! I'm eight years older than my brother, and haven't lived at home for more than a few months at a time since high school. And when I was at home, I feel like our age difference kept me less involved in his life than I would have liked to have been looking back. Now that I am getting married, there is this sense of losing who you are and a little bit losing your family. You take his name, have to split time between families, etc. My fiancee is an only child; both his parents are also only children, and sadly I feel like they don't get the connection I have to my two  younger brothers (his parents encouraged him to just have his friends as groomsmen, since they were "more important to him than my brothers"). But I'm going to change that. I want Brandon to be just as much a part of my family as I will be of his - and even though I can't go back and become more involved in my little brother's life as he grew up, I can go forward and make a huge effort to be there for him now and have a lasting relationship, even with our age gap and physical distance. It's pretty obvious from his thoughtful gift that he feels the same way. : ). And my two brothers and my cousin who is like a third brother to me are all going to be ushers at our wedding, and all have a part in the ceremony/reception and will be wearing the same thing as the groomsmen. I guess in closing my point is that family nowadays doesn't seem to get as much positive attention as it should. It's all about "think about yourself, be selfish, make your friends your family" and that's okay to a point but it's nice to have that connection to siblings, parents, family that nothing else compares to.

So I feel pretty silly - after posting my last diary on all of my planning being complete for my upcoming wedding I learned some pretty devastating news. Due to financial reasons unknown to my fiancee and I until Saturday, our wedding was cancelled by my parents and our budget was slashed by more than half. Needless to say I'm pretty devastated, worried about my parents (my dad had a mild stroke over this) and their situation as well as now being faced with having to plan a whole new wedding in less than three months. It's hard to spend the last year of your life planning something only to have it all fall apart as soon as you had it all figured out. It has really shown Brandon and I how much we love and care about each other tho and how we really do want to get married - dream wedding or no. I had even suggested the courthouse route and was thrilled to see Carrie and Big did the same exact thing! I guess it will take a few days for us to get over it and get back to the drawing board on all this...

After taking a trip down to Carmel last week to figure out more wedding details (and flying on the amazing new Virgin America) I realized that there are no more major decisions to be made concerning the wedding, short of figuring out table assignments. I feel a little weird about it - I am used to figuring out what I want to do for the wedding and now it's 101 days away and I have only pre-planned details to take care of. You know the sex and the city episode where Carrie starts dating Aidan and has nightmares because nothing is going wrong? I'm having wedding nightmares for the first time for no reason at all. The invitations were ordered, and are now in my possession and I love them. We had our tasting part deux last week at the hotel after a disastrous one back in Feb, and I can now say that we are going to have good food at the wedding. We picked our amazing cake which is everything we wanted, and had a great meeting with our florist who totally got what look I was going for, and met with the bandleader and picked out our first dance song. So for now I am still focusing on slimming down, I was so good the whole time on vacation, and then I had a three day fell-off-the-wagon weekend. I'm back on, and meeting with my trainer tomorrow! The exciting thing is that I tried on my dress yesterday and it is so loose! Gotta keep going  tho...I'll keep you posted!

Having recently been given and devoured a book entitled "Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl" by Debra Ollivier, I came across some interesting revelations about the French girl. She is self-possessed, she seeks sensuality. She practices discretion (a huge difference from our own culutre where we blab and gossip all day long almost), and she takes time (time? I'm sorry what is time?). In short, she makes me jealous! So okay, I can't pull a Carrie and drop everything and move to Paris - tho after reading this and also developing a L'Occitane addiciton I really am tempted! But I can re-read this book and apply some of the things that appealed to me, because adding a little 'je ne sais quoi' to this American gal's life couldn't be a bad thing. Plus I can work on buliding a nice lingerie collection. Read it, love it and live it like I have ladies! Au revoir!

I had a rock bottom oh no what I have I done epiphany today, realizing that my wedding is less than 232 days away. Sure it seems like thats forever and a day, but when you have gained over 4ty(!) lbs in over two years and now find yourself wanting to look like, um, your regular self for not only your wedding but the rest of your life, it seems like not enough time. Which is where I find myself. Today is day one of the serious diet. No more slacking, procastinating, cheating, lazing about. To make sure I stick to it, I'm charting my progress. I just have to keep telling myself I can do it. It's like a friend once told me "Nothing tastes as good as thin feels." Wise words!! I can look forward to savoring delish delights on the honeymoon as a reward for 6 months of lifestyle changes.

To shoe or not to shoe. That is the question ladies. The shoes in question are silver Manolo Blahnik "sedaraby". For all you Sex and the City fans, those are the shoes Carrie has stolen from her at a party in season 6. I love, love, love them, always have since I first saw them. It was shoe love at first sight. Now I have found them, in the silver, right in my backyard - Seattle, at Barney's. They are the perfect shoe for my wedding, and I know I will keep and cherish them forever (and I'll have to at the price they are). Now the problem is the price. Come Saturday (aka pay day) I will have the money, but after dishing out around $700, I won't have much of that money left. Although I do plan to put some on my credit card...Which makes me think "No! Bad Annie." But then again a girl lives once, and is making my first big splurge after a year working retail so wrong?

**I got them today!! I feel like a proud mamma : )**

Now don't get me wrong - retail can be fun. But it can be pretty hard to take sometimes. Like when I was told a whole week and a half before Thanksgiving that I will not be able to have Sunday through Thursday of Thanksgiving week off as I had planned for all of 6 weeks. Talk about a company pretty much embodying the Grinch! Now I have to pay an additional $200 dollars to fly home to see my family (apparently the concept of being from somewhere other than here is also totally foreign to them). I swear next year they will make it so no one can have vacation in October either because that too will be "Holiday season". Retail is killing me slowly! I have formally decided that if I am not offered the position I want and deserve with Bliss (which would take me out of the store which shall go unnamed...) by April - they will have no more Annie. Which means I may actually get a vacation once in a while. 

Looking for a new job has me down, which I hate. I wouldn't normally admit the following, but amongst a group of educated, smart, savvy women I feel some can relate: There are so many incompetent people out there, I don't understand how they function from day to day. This fact frustrates me when I search/apply for jobs which I could do very well, but am held back due to lack of a proper degree. So the message I am getting is that I could have majored in say, French, and even though it would have no practical application or make me any more well qualified for certain jobs, I would get a job based on that fact? It seems so silly. I went to college - for 4 years. Two at a private school in the Bay, two at a huge public school in Oregon. If credits from private schools counted at big public schools, I would have a degree, but as it turns out (surprise!) - they don't.

 I transfered, found out at age 21 that I had learning disabilities and ADD, got burnt out in the fall of 2005, and I dropped out. I didn't feel like I was learning anything worthwhile, felt like a degree wasn't (always) a true measure of intelligence or ability, and needed a change. Now I am having to face the prospect of taking a part-time job (which will hurt, hurt, hurt financially while trying to plan a wedding), spend all of this money and go back to school just to get some silly hand stamp for jobs that say "BA or BS required". All I am saying is, let me in there, I can do the job, probably better then most! 

Any sage advice for me ladies? I would love some!

My Save The Dates have been ordered! In a wierd way, now it kind of feels more real. It will probably hit me even more when they arrive and I have to feed them all through my printer, then stamp, address and send them all out. But I love a good DIY project! Also about the Save The Dates, I have this strange thing that seems to happen to me alot. I will have an inspired idea, a eureka kind of moment where stars align and I get some vison of something I should do, make, have, etc. Then, within a few days, weeks, months, slowly it begins to appear everywhere! Sometimes much to my dismay, sometimes it is very exciting. With my Save The Dates, I wanted them to go along with my "vintage chic" theme. I have always loved "big letter" style "greetings from" postcards (one such Califonia postcard graced a collage in my high school bedroom all four years). Most of these are vintage and just arent made anymore. But as soon as I had to think of what I might want to do for Save The Dates, it popped into my head that I should send out a "Greetings from Carmel" card. I found the original 1948 linen postcard on ebay where I promptly bought it, then scoured the internet untill I found a website that has the design and can print it on almost anything, including postcards. A few weeks later, I recieve my copy of Modern Bride and under "100 things we love" they had my idea (okay so it was from another website...but still!). It is nice to know that it was considered such a good idea that it was in a magazine tho!