Updates, My Sister’s Wedding, and My Australia Blogs



The Ricketts Family and Mr. and Mrs. Logan and Elizabeth Strong

It’s been a while…  I had a pretty good summer.  The highlight was going to Santa Barbara for my sister’s wedding!  I had gone to the maintaining phase of Atkins to make sure that my bridesmaid’s dress fit for the wedding, but I didn’t do too great of a job, because it was a little big.  Not a bad thing to happen to me in the grand scheme of things since it means I did lose weight, but hiking that dress up every once-in-a-while was kind of a pain in the butt!

 



 

Okay, I have to mention these things, but only because it is too incredible to not share.  Just about anything that could go wrong with my sister’s wedding did.  The only majors that didn’t go wrong were the cloths and photos! 

 

My boquet

(1) FLOWERS.  My sister had family friends who were going to take the flowers that they bought from a wholesaler and put together the bouquets, boutonnieres, flowers for the church, and rehearsal table centerpieces.  Elizabeth had been in CA in March to visit and do some wedding planning and went to the L.A. Flower Market.  A vendor from the Santa Barbara area told them that all the flowers that Elizabeth wanted for her wedding would not be a problem for him, he grew them all.  All they would need to do was call two weeks before they needed the flowers to order them.  They called three weeks ahead of time and left a message (with no call back); again at two weeks (with no call back); and again at the week before (with no call back).  Thursday night before the Saturday wedding, the guy finally called back and said that he hadn’t called back because he didn’t have the flowers…  Really????  The Saturday morning of the wedding, the family friends hit the farmer’s market and got flowers together…they were BEAUTIFUL and you would never have known that they were not what my sister had originally wanted!


Tabel centerpieces



(2) FOOD.  A family friend was going to be doing the dinner at the reception, but couple of weeks before the wedding, he had some serious heart problems and had to bow out.  In under a week my family had another family friend (who was a professional caterer) lined up and willing to do nearly the same meal!  The food was awesome and, again, you would never have known that there was a mini-panic about that!



Chicken penne pasta, mixed green salad, and garlic cheese bread



Dad's wedding cake:  yellow cake layer; chocolate cake layer, and funfetti layer



(3) CAKE.  Another family friend was going to make the wedding cake for Elizabeth and Logan, and she had made several wedding cakes for other friends from church before.  The Wednesday night before the wedding, her husband came over to let us know that Joanne had been to the doctor and she had pneumonia!  Her doctor had told her she couldn’t even leave the house, let alone bake a three-tier wedding cake!  We were in luck, however, as my dad bakes and decorates cakes as a hobby.  He had originally wanted to do her wedding cake, but thought it would be too stressful.  It probably would have been, but since he didn’t have that much time to be stressed out, it went well!  The cake was beautiful and yummy…go funfetti!




The teasing up...

(4) MUSIC, HAIR, and MAKE-UP.  Although these issues were not as major as the others, they did cause a little bit of stress!  On Friday at the rehearsal, we found out that the woman who was going to be playing piano and doing Elizabeth’s hair and one of the other bridesmaid’s hair had injured her back!  She made it to the wedding, but was in a lot of pain.  A friend of Elizabeth (who is a make-up artist) had flown in from Canada to L.A. for the wedding and was doing Elizabeth’s and another bridesmaid’s make-up…she got stuck in L.A. traffic coming up on Saturday, and she didn’t get to the church until about 1 hour before the ceremony!

The final product!



All-in-all, everything went beautifully and you would have never known anything went wrong, but I cannot believe how crazy those two weeks were!



I jumped off the “maintaining” phase, and back into the weight-loss phase…I’ve only lost about 10 more pounds since the wedding, so I think I may have caused a stall.  We’ll see how it goes, and hopefully I’ll be back to losing soon!



Since then, it has been pretty much the same-old, same-old.  I did, finally, get a smart phone, so yeah me! 

 

And last, but not least, I’ve been working (very sporadically) on my blogs about my Australia trip in 2010.  I wrote in a journal while my friend, Caytie, and I were there, and I am using that to write a blog for each day we were there.  So far, I’ve written about Sydney, the Blue Mountains, Canberra, the Snowy Mountains, a scary drive out of the Snowy Mountains, Bunurong Coast and Phillip Island, Melbourne, and the Great Ocean Road (to Portl Campbell, to Portland, and on to Adelaide).  I have recently begun writing about our stay in Adelaide.  We were in Australia for 21 days, and Adelaide was our 12^th day there!