The title pretty much says it all. Blog posts have been few and far between. It hasn't been my intent. I've been quite busy lately. The primary reason is that I am getting married! I proposed to Alethea on Monday, May 30
th. This event alone should have been worthy of a posting. As most people know, after communicating this to family, I posted it on Twitter and Facebook. There is a lot of overlap between those who read this blog and those that follow me on Twitter & Facebook. I can only see who follows the post via signing up with your email address but I know there are many who follow via Google Reader or some other RSS type feed.
 |
| Us laughing during one of our engagement photos - Franklin, TN |
Back to the big news event. Alethea and will be getting married in one week (Friday 7/29) as I write this post (not sure what date I'll get this posted). I am very excited and am looking forward to spending my life with Alethea. We have spent quite a bit of time working on wedding related activities over the last couple months. I cannot say it has been stressful but it has been a lot of work. It isn't the wedding itself that stresses me it is all the little things that lead up to the big things that get to me at times. There are a lot of things to accomplish in a short amount of time. Of course, we have created multiple spreadsheets and to do list for various items. I even think we have to do lists for our to lists at this point :-). Our wedding itself will be a simple affair involving immediate family and a few close friends. This was a necessity since the place where we are getting married only seats 20 people. This actually made it somewhat easy to decide who to invite to the wedding. If we were having a more traditional larger type wedding we figured that we could have had over 200 people in attendance between friends and family. This is why we decided to have wedding events spread out over a few weeks and spend time with people versus one big wedding that can be just a blur since it often seems that the bride and groom are so busy that they don't get to spend much time with people on their big day. Our plans have also been influenced by the relatively short time frame of two months, cost, and the availability of both venues and people to attend the ceremony.
 |
| Doug & I pretending to get married at Skinner Chapel where Alethea & I will get married. |
The wedding event season for us started in late June. The first event was in New York City. In New York we got to spend time with some of Alethea's friends and with my cousin's family. It was a pretty good three night trip that involved a Met's game, a couple of nice dinners, and even a few tourist activities. I really like New York. I probably couldn't live there unless I played for the Yankees due to how expensive nearly everything is. It was kinda neat for me to look at the city in a different way now that I've been to so many more major cities around the world over the last year. New York actually is not even in the top 5 of the largest cities I have been too now. In the last month we've also had a get together with Alethea's family on her mom's side in Orlinda, TN. This evening we are going to meet with some friends of Alethea's mom and husband. On Saturday we are attending a wedding shower thrown by friends of my mom and dad here in Hermitage. Beside the wedding itself we have at least two other big events planed. Although not directly wedding related we have also been to Knoxville for a baby shower and attended a U2 concert here in Nashville which was awesome!
 |
| Us at a charity event otherwise known as a Met's game - NYC June '11 |
We have been so busy with planning the wedding and other related activities we haven't spent that much time planning out what we are doing next including the honeymoon. All I know is that it will include some international travel. Big surprise, right! Our longer term plans are still to move out to the Pacific Northwest with our top choice being Portland, Oregon.
 |
| Downtown Portland, OR , two years ago during my 1st trip |
Speaking of the future. I haven't entirely made up my mind on the future of this blog. The original intent of the blog was to be able to share with family and friends our round the world trip adventures. At times I didn't like writing the blog but I always felt it was important to document what we were doing as close to the time that things happen so years later I could look back and hopefully laugh at all the things we experienced. I do like writing entries once I get started and actually publish them. I hope to decide within a couple weeks whether or not to keep this blog going, shut it down and start a new one, or just stop blogging altogether for a while. I am leaning toward option two but that may change. Oh well, time to get ready for another wedding related activity!
