What was I doing again? Something about a wedding?

Um, wow. Somehow life went and took hold of me since the last time I posted. I technically shouldn't even be writing this now, given the looming due dates staring accusingly up at me from my planner, but what the hell. What's the point of a blog if it can't provide a little procrastination, eh?

Just to update on a few things: Michael came out to Indiana to visit me the weekend before last, which was awesome. We went apple picking (surprising tough to do here - not many options), cooked yummy and voluminous food (I finished the BBQ ribs tonight, finally) and generally did nauseating couple things. Ahhh, good times. :o) Obviously, I didn't get much done that weekend, either work- or wedding-wise, but I'd been planning on it so it was fine.

Then this past weekend, I went to the 14th Mid-continental workshop on phonology (McWOP) at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. So much fun! Not only did I manage to give me talk without A) dying, B) getting pummeled by unanswerable questions, or C) saying "s-h" instead of "esh," the name of the symbol we phonetics/phonology people use for the "sh" sound (apparently this is a cardinal sin - they'd have revoked my Linguistics Society of America membership on the spot), a topic which came up a lot in my paper. Also, I got to know some of the other IU ling grads better over the course of the trip and I took a serendipitous side-trip to Wisconsin between the last talk on Saturday and the dinner party afterwards. Two states on my "Where I've Been" app on facebook in one weekend? Holla.

Anyways, now I'm back in Bloomington and it looks like my weekends will be available for things like school work (a good thing?) or practical things like grocery shopping (a very good thing) again. And of course, there's wedding stuff to do!

The first time I visited home after Michael and I got engaged, my mom took me to the bookstore in the Clarion mall and bought me The Everything Wedding Organizer, which has been a rather handy manual for all things matrimonial, almost none of which I knew beforehand. A lot of the details in this book aren't really that helpful because they seem to assume that you're planning one of those ducks-in-a-row, ice-sculptures-ordered-four-years-in-advance weddings. Since we're not, many of their "interviewing the videographer" worksheets and so on aren't really applicable. BUT it does have one nice feature (more than that, but this one especially): right in the beginning, it has a series of lists under headings such as "Six to twelve months before the wedding," "three to four months before the wedding" up to "the night before the wedding" and "the big day!"

These lists are great because generally, I have no idea how far in advance a lot of stuff needs to be done (if for no other reason, because everyone else will do them that far in advance, so you'll run into problems if you wait until a reasonable time). For instance, who would have thought that you'd need to order your wedding dress so far in advance? Not me, initially, and I'll certainly have mine (*knock fervrently on wood*) well before I'll actually need it (*still knocking on my coffee table*). Well, that's more or less taken care of, but there's lots of stuff remaining on that 6-12 months before list that I haven't even started to think about, such as contacting a florist. Damn. And did I mention that if we're getting married at the end of May, six months beforehand is the end of November? And did I further mention that between now and the 24th of November I've got more homework assignment and projects than I want to think about, a visit from Amber (!!) and hopefully one from Michael, and The Game? All in a month? Yikes!

Still, though, I feel like this whole thing is really starting to come together, and I'm actually getting a bit of a handle on work management for school. Once I get through next week things should be looking even better -- major deadlines next Friday are looming at the moment. Speaking of which, I should get back to work. Let's take a vote: Icelandic immigrant langauge in North America, speech perception of non-native accented English, grammaticalization in a Oceanic langauge family (can't remember what, exactly, probably a bad sign), or my take-home midterm containing four old psychology quals questions?