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| 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!
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| 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!
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| 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!
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| Chicken penne pasta, mixed green salad, and garlic cheese bread |
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| 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!
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| 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!
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| 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 12th day there!
