Getting Ready . . .

These pictures are old but I wanted to put them on my blog, and amazingly, never got around to it before the wedding . . . I can't imagine why.


Making place cards for dinner:



Gift bags for our guests:



Folding programs for the ceremony:
Thanks Mom, Carol, and Tracy for all of your help!

Three Days and Counting . . .

When we were little kids, really, really little, because we still lived at the old house on Correy St., Karen and I learned an eerie lesson one day: Don't touch hot cooking appliances. It was eerie because simultaneously, while Karen was outside cooking something on the grill with Dad or Uncle Steve, I was inside cooking something on the stove with Dad or Uncle Steve, at just about the same moment, Karen touched the hot grill and I touched the hot stove. Not a good idea. So we learned a little lesson: Don't touch hot appliances! (Steve and my dad also learned a lesson - don't cook with little girls with shrill voices!) (As it happens, I like it better when I learn about the painful side of life vicariously through Karen - if she does it first, often I'll just decide not to do it - getting ears pierced, getting tested for allergies, grabbing the hot end of a sparkler . . .) (I also like learning other lessons from Karen . . . like how to tie my shoes, blow bubbles, drive a stick shift, and, hopefully, how to have a happy marriage.)

So why do I bring up this eerie story today?

Michael's mom and step-dad came to town today to help us get ready for the wedding. Since they are going to be in town for Thanskgiving, and since the idea of going out to dinner for my favorite holiday really depressed me, Michael and I decided we would cook a small Thanksgiving meal for Carol and Vern at our house. (Plus, it's practice for next year, when my mom says I'll be hosting Thanksgiving . . .)

To preface this next paragraph, I just want to say that I am pretty certain I have never, ever burned my hand while taking a pie out of the oven before. Ever. In 30 years. And I actually make a lot of pies. So, why, three days before my wedding, did my hand slip as I went to take the pumpkin pie out of the oven, catching my finger on the 425 degree metal rack?? 'Which finger?' you ask. My ring finger on my left hand, just above the knuckle. Are you kidding me?? Last night I think I drove my mom and Tracy a little bit crazy, because I was being overly protective of a fingernail - catching myself from breaking down cardboard boxes just in time to prevent breaking the nail on my right thumb - a nail that will be nowhere near pictures of my brand new sparkling beautiful wedding band on Saturday! I held my finger under lukewarm, cool, and cold water, so hopefully the burn mark won't be too bad by Saturday.



Well, if a burned ring finger is as bad as it gets, I think my wedding day will be pretty wonderful.

I'll be keeping my other 7 fingers crossed . . .

(by the way, the pie was delicious)

Busy

In March, when I told some of my professors that I had gotten engaged over Spring Break and was planning a fall wedding, they told me I was crazy to get married during my student teaching experience. Even at the time, I knew they were probably right, but Michael did not want a long engagement, and I didn't want to wait until the summer of 2010 to get married either, so we set the date in November and started planning.

Last Friday was my last day at my first student teaching placement. I love teaching middle school!



In less than two weeks, all of the wedding craziness will be over (except writing thank-you cards). I am excited about being married, I can't wait to see our as-of-yet-untaken wedding pictures, and I'm really looking forward to having an entire weekend without doing wedding planning!

Last weekend Michael and I went to Madison early Saturday morning to meet with Ubaldo, our fabulous cake decorator. I can't wait until everyone can see the amazing works of art he is going to make. After the cake, my mom and I met up with Jenny and we headed to Vera's for our final dress fittings. The seamstresses at Vera's worked wonders with Jenny's dress, so she's not drowning in excess fabric anymore. My dress is great too - it's amazing how much easier it is to move with the dress hemmed to an appropriate length! Jenny knows exactly how to get me into my dress (though the seamstress said Michael is on his own for getting me back out . . .) and after Jenny bustled the skirt I exclaimed something like, "Wow, I'll even be able to dance in this dress!" which is exciting considering how much we're paying the DJ.

Michael and I had brought a carload of food to my parents' house, because the other teachers surprised him with a wedding shower at school on Friday and sent him home with leftover cake and veggies that would have fed a small crowd. My dad was having a party to celebrate the completion of his new patio (see marksretirementblog.blogspot.com) so we through there was a good chance some hard workers would help us eat the leftovers - but my mom had made a pie and a pan of brownies, so we ended up bringing a lot of food back home. (Don't people know I'm trying not to gain weight before my wedding???)

After the feast, my mom took me to the hair salon, where I met Teresa, my wedding day stylist. I flipped through some books of hairstyles which were much more helpful than my stack of bridal magazines (the models in bridal magazines all have slicked back hair and very few of them wear veils) and Teresa helped me create a wedding day hairstyle. I may try to go with more curls on the big day, but that kind of depends on what my hair looks like Saturday morning.

When she was finished with my hair, Teresa did my makeup, which was almost as odd of an experience as my first (and only) pedicure, but I felt like she did a pretty good job of listening to what I wanted. I also learned that the brown tones that I like so much when I buy makeup tend to turn orange on my face (which I noticed in my engagment pictures) so Teresa stuck with pinker colors. I'm trying to get used to the pink . . .

The salon doesn't sell makeup anymore (they did 4 years ago) so Teresa explained I'd have to go out and buy more lipstick if I wanted to keep my lips looking great all day . . . which was kind of annoying. About 75% of the reason I decided to pay $60 to get my makeup done was to save the trouble of picking out the colors myself! My mom, Jenny, and I were too wiped out to go lipstick shopping that evening, although we did head over to Macy's where I picked out new wedding jewelery for my bridal party. The first set of jewelery I bought does not match their dresses, which should have been obvious to me when I got it in May or June.

We met my dad at the Great Dane for dinner and I came home to Michael many dollars poorer, but excited to look at the pictures my dad had taken of my hair and makeup.

On Monday I started my second student teaching placement. I have 120 new students, whose names I need to learn! I began teaching two sections of a World Literature class on Wednesday, which was a little bit sooner than I hoped to begin, as I'm still trying to figure out who everybody is, but it's actually easier to learn names when you're teaching than when you're observing. In addition to learning their names, I'm also trying to learn my own. My cooperating teacher thought it would be best if I didn't change my name three weeks into my student teaching placement, so on Monday I was introduced to the students as Ms. David. (I was introduced to faculty and staff as Katie-going-to-be-David-in-three-weeks-Buechner.) After the wedding I'll make the switch to Mrs. David. (When I decided to go as Ms. David my cooperating teacher asked, "you're pretty confident he's not going to leave you at the altar?" I have to admit, I'm a little bit superstitious, but at the same time, I'm pretty confident Michael's not going to have a change of heart in the next two weeks . . .)

Today I got up fairly early and made some additions to one of our wedding websites (you can find a link at the bottom of this page). Then Michael and I headed to Madison to meet with our minister and to figure out where to put the piano during our wedding ceremony. Unfortunately, although it had not been listed on the church calendar, there was a service going on in the church at our meeting time, so we were not able to move furniture around in the church to try to get the piano in the front rather than in the back. We're sure it will all work out, but I'm a little bit nervous because our original photographer, who was going to come to the rehearsal, and would have been able to tell us how our pictures would turn out with the piano in various locations, cancelled our contract because she has a medical condition that makes it difficult to see whether her camera is in focus. I guess that's the bad side of going with an individual instead of a photography company that has many photographers. We hired a new photographer on Tuesday (and are excited about the package we're getting, as this company's prices were discounted for the remainder of the year, so we're getting more bang for our buck this way) and we're excited to get to know these photographers, but they won't be able to be at the rehearsal, so we'll meet them for the first time on Saturday morning.

After our somewhat less productive than planned meeting with the minister, Michael and I went to La Brioche (where we're getting our wedding cake) for breakfast, and then he headed home, to rest up before his bachelor party, about which I know almost nothing, although there was a rumor of sushi. I went to my parents' house to figure out how much the wedding reception is going to cost. Then my mom and I went lipstick and shoe shopping, where I successfully found lipstick I think I like, and my mom was disappointed because she found a great, comfortable pair of shoes that were not available in her size.

After shopping, we went out for orange lattes at Steep and Brew, and made a plan for wedding day transportation (whoo-hoo, another item to cross off of my To Do list on The Knot). My parents were the excited recipients of a somewhat frantic phone call from my sister asking if they can come and visit for a week, since Adele's babysitter is sick. They took me out for dinner, and I came home, where I've spent an hour and a half on the computer, typing student teaching reflections from my first week at my new placement and finally catching up on my blog!

I'm sorry there aren't more pictures. Soon enough there will be plenty of pictures for everyone. I think the part of my wedding I'm looking forward to the most is looking through pictures for the next 50 years, which is strange since I hate having my picture taken.

I'll try to blog again before the big day . . . but I have a lot of reading and a lot of wedding stuff to do before then!

Catching Up

Here's what I've been up to lately:

Trying to make lots of good food while I still have access to fresh fruits and veggies.

Here's a pizza I made from scratch.



The recipe for whole wheat pizza dough came with my bread maker.



Next time I'll grease the pan, even though the recipe said not to . . .

At least it tasted good!

In addition to the quasi-disastrous pizza, I made two huge pots of vegetable beef soup recently. My mom and I found a place at her local farmer's market that sells really reasonably priced grass-finished beef. For $3.75 a pound they sell "soup bones" which do in fact contain a bone, but are mostly huge meaty slabs of yummy-ness. When I used to make beef and vegetable soup with bones from the grocery store I always had to supplement the soup with additional stew meat or whatever meat I had in my freezer. Not necessary with the Jordanal Farms meat. The first pot I made, which cooked down to four big containers of soup in my freezer, cost about $6.50 for the meat and $3.00 for some of the veggies from the farm stand down the street (corn, carrots, potatoes, and an onion). The rest of the vegetables (green beans, peas!, and tomatoes) came from my dad's garden and were free. Yum.

Sorry I have no pictures of my soup :(

I also got some incredible Italian Sausages from them (also reasonably priced) that made a great meal I might have blogged about before - I've made it three times now because we love it so much. The first time I was trying to use up zucchini, fingerling potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and basil. I threw in some garlic for good measure, and cooked it down into a stew-like concoction. I added some store-bought frozen meatballs to the mix, and it was really good. But the next time I used the sausage instead, and it was even better (and I felt better about what I'd cooked.) This time I didn't have any fresh basil, but I had some dried basil in my cupboard which worked out well enough.

Michael and I sent our wedding invitations out.

We went out for breakfast to our favorite local bakery/coffee shop on Saturday morning, after stopping by the post office to check the weight on our invitations and to buy stamps. We carried the stamps and invitations into the bakery, ordered, sat down, etc. While I was filling my coffee cup one of the employees asked if she had seen a wedding invitation in my hand. I expected her to say congratulations or something sweet. Instead, she sighed and said, "I don't miss that at all." I didn't think it was going to be that bad. After all, over the summer my mom and Michael's mom came up to help address the envelopes, so I thought the hard part was over. HA! It took us most of a weekend to get the directions sorted out. (Okay so we did decide to drive to Madison to make sure the directions were good, and while we were in Madison we might have stopped by Ginza for sushi . . .)


And I've been trying to keep Oliver looking good.


I swear he actually loves this! Usually I brush him while he's laying on the couch, but that evening he wanted to snuggle on the floor, and I got out his comb.

Yesterday I spent an hour and a half brushing him. He was in heaven.

Other than that, I've been working hard at learning how to make social studies relevant and accessible for 7th and 8th graders. I've been trying to implement different strategies to reach different kinds of learners. Some people learn best by reading independently. Others learn best through spatial representations of facts. Others learn best by listening. Some learn best by actively doing things - which could be in shop class but in my class it is more likely to be dividing the class into a House of Representatives, a Senate, and three smaller committees, and actually engaging in the process of making a bill into a law. On Friday we wrote 7th grade social studies constitutions. It was a low-key day because it was homecoming, and everyone was excited about the parade that afternoon - all of my students did remarkably well. This weekend I am creating guided notes for my students who need a little bit of help in order to be able to transfer ideas that they read in the book into their own words on paper. It's kind of tedious, but it feels good to know that it will help my students learn this stuff - and not fail the next test!

Finally, yesterday Jenny and I went shopping at the Tanger Outlets in the Dells. We'd never been there before, but we will probably go back. We found some awesome sales (buy one pair of boots at regular price, get two pairs free) and then we went out for sushi at the Ginza in the Dells. The sushi was awesome, even if the service was kind of slow.

Okay, I better proofread this and then get to work!

Back to School

Tomorrow I go back to school. My student teaching begins with several inservice days. I'm not exactly sure what to expect, as my cooperating teacher just learned within the last week that I would be in his classroom in September, instead of November.

For the last few weeks of summer I've been trying to relax and enjoy myself! Michael's mom threw a weekend of showers two weekends ago - a baby shower for Michael's step sister, Liz, on Saturday, and a wedding shower for us on Sunday. We played fun games at the baby shower, and fortunatley, no games at the wedding shower. It was a great weekend, with nice weather, and I think everyone had a good time. Thanks Carol!



I've been baking a lot lately. Especially since I borrowed my parents' bread maker on Friday afternoon.


Friday night I made a loaf of whole wheat bread. Saturday morning I made a loaf of pumpernickel; today I'm making a loaf of white bread, mostly because I ran out of whole wheat flour (I used some to make blueberry-zucchini muffins this afternoon) and hopefully I'll have enough bread to live off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the first few days of school, until I figure out where the refrigerator and microwave are . . .



The muffins are good, by the way. I found the recipe at Cooks.com, and was able to find both zucchini and blueberries at a little farm stand on my way to register for classes today. I didn't have enough flax seed meal to substitute it for the oil, but I did substitute fresh blueberries for the frozen ones called for in the recipe.


I also picked up an Amish-grown yellow watermelon. It's delicious.


Other than baking and making too many recipes with tomatoes in them (okay, really only two - tomato pie and tomato salad - Michael opted for Jimmy John's the other night instead of eating any more tomatoes) I've been spending the last few days of summer doing wedding things (writing thank-yous for shower gifts - although Michael did most of the work on those, organizing decorations, and meeting with the hotel to go over our plans for the reception, and to taste entree options), cleaning (I still haven't gotten to my desk, but I did take about 8 sweaters to Goodwill, along with several pairs of shoes!), and reading. I spent all day on Sunday reading Breaking Dawn. Some people I know really loved the Twilight series. Okay, so a lot of those people were students who I observed last semester during a teaching clinical. But still. These guys were really into the books. Personally, while I can see how appealing the would have been 15 years ago, I just didn't get the whole series. I think Stephenie Meyer is a good writer (and I'm not just saying that because I live next door to the parents of her publisher) but for the first three books, I really couldn't get my head around the relationship between Bella and Edward. I don't want to give up too much for those of you who haven't read it, but I was definitely on Team Jacob, not Team Edward. One of Michael's students said he wouldn't like the ending . . . Michael still has a couple hundred pages to go, so I'll have to wait a little longer to get his reaction. Personally, I didn't mind the ending, but it seemed to me like the series went from being "out there" to being "really out there and very hard to believe." But the ending could have been a lot worse.

I also just read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I wonder if I would have noticed all of the discussion of seeds and agriculture if I had read that novel before I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

And speaking of locavorism - the cover story of the most recent Time Magazine is about eating local foods and moving away from the Big Business of farming!

Time to do dishes . . .

Bon Jovi Rocks

In preparation for my wedding, and also because it's something I've needed to do for a long time, I'm trying to get in shape. My most recent get-in-shape efforts started when I was ordering a couple of books from Amazon.com. These books were exciting in and of themselves - they deal with using young adult novels in the literature classroom and using "literature circles" (think mini book clubs) in the classroom. I'm totally excited about these strategies in the classroom, and was going to buy the books no matter how much Amazon charged me for shipping - but Amazon conveniently told me that if I spent $4 more in my order, I would avoid a $7.95 shipping charge, or something like that. So I began to browse their bargain books. (I have been shopping on Amazon for at least 10 years but that was the first time I'd noticed the bargain section. Maybe it was new?) I found Bob Greene's Get With the Program for $5. I ended up saving money by buying the book, and when it arrived in the mail, I had a ready-to-go plan for getting in shape.

Yeah, weddings can be cause for major stressing out. But I wanted to get in shape the right way, not the crash diet way. So I read Get With the Program cautiously, keeping an eye out for too-good-to-be-true promises. I didn't find any. The Program is hard work - lots of aerobic exercise, then careful meal planning and eventually strength training. I was eager for the strength training part, but not so much for the aerobic exercise . . . but I decided to do what the book suggested anyway.

And amazingly, I became a jogger. Okay, not a great jogger. In fact, I'm a pretty poor jogger - I'm still thrilled if I can do better than a 10-minute mile - but at least it is a start! The first time I jogged, I made it a few blocks from home, and walked part of the way out of sheer exhaustion. I had timed myself, and this complete outpouring of effort had taken exactly seven minutes. There must have been something wrong with the clock!

After another jogging session or two, Michael started jogging also. He was much better at jogging than me, but we decided to jog together. In the beginning, he would take a different route than me, to get a longer jog in. But as time went on, we started to be able to go the same distance - and we kept increasing the distance every day. When it was still a struggle to go .75 miles in one outing, I remember saying "by the end of the summer I want to make it to Kwik Trip" (which is a gas station about 1.25 miles down a path near our house). About three weeks ago we made it to Kwik Trip. We can now jog over 3 miles in a night, if we want to.

Therein lies the rub. I have made it to the final phase of the book. I have reached the strength training portion, which I enjoy, but it makes the jogging harder. And Michael is doing is last week of grad school for the summer, so he has tons of studying to do . . . so last night I jogged for 1.25 miles alone, and walked home because my knee/shin/ankle was sore (from the strength training) and I was lacking motivation.

Tonight I knew I was going to have to jog alone again. I had already taken Michael away from his studies for an hour and a half beating him at Scrabble. (Okay, I beat him once by a few points, then he creamed me as revenge.) I really didn't want to jog, but I also didn't want to sabotage my efforts to get in shape. Fortunately, a little band from New Jersey stepped in to provide my lacking inspiration. I have a Gazelle, which is a low impact aerobic machine thingy (technical term), and sometimes I get in some of my 150 aerobic minutes a week on the Gazelle instead of jogging. (I prefer jogging because it is a more natural activity and I have a better sense of progress when I see the fast food restaurants flying . . .er . . plodding by.) Since it was 10:00 by the time I had finally gotten ready to exercise (I put my work-out clothes on at 8:30, did my 3 sets of four kinds of crunches, plus some other "functional exercises" as Greene calls them, and then spent an hour goofing off on the computer) I opted not to jog in the dark by myself. Being proud of myself for overcoming my inertia was not enough. I still needed help to get moving.

Fortunately Michael gave me an iPod for my birthday. And fortunately I've put a few of my Bon Jovi songs onto my iPod. (Not all of them. Putting songs on an iPod takes forever. Does that drive anyone else crazy?)

Yay Bon Jovi. I spent 40 minutes on the gazelle and got to listen to most of the Bounce album too. Jon, you're the inspiration . . .