Fendi & Emo - Rockin' Your Stockin'

SANTA!  In the flesh! :D

Santa from across the room (and me in the bottom left corner)

Santa close up, we were trying not to be noticed... and I don't think we were caught!

So we have a lot of information.

This “morning” started at a bright and early noon-time.  We headed off to the post office to ship some of the “larger” presents or “completed” presents that are going to Oklahoma, and spent an obscene amount of money doing so.  Did you know they charge you for packing peanuts, and don’t tell you?  Yeah, we thought that was nice.   The rest of the day was spent traveling around a surprisingly small radius of Mesa, and not getting a ton done.  We had to go back home at the beginning of the trip because I forgot to put my engagement ring on when I woke up this morning (since I have to take it off at night to put medication on my hands) and Jason refused to do anything after the post office until that problem was fixed.  After that, we headed to Bookman’s because I was looking for  a DIY wedding book, as one of the places we wanted to look at basically let you do everything for your own wedding, which made me happy.  (And this has both pro’s and con’s and I fear I may be turning into Bridezilla, but I just have not liked most of the things that I have seen, and I want it to be perfect.  :(  Sadface.)  Anyway, we ended up finally finding a copy of Wedding Planning For Dummies, which seems to be chock full of DIY ideas and tips / tricks, and The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Weddings, which we skimmed through, and wow, it really is a survival guide, it has everything from the cake dropping, to someone objecting to your marriage to the wedding dress getting lost, and you not knowing how to dance!  I am seriously thinking of putting this in a glass case in a central location with an axe next to it on our wedding day,  so that should either side have an issue, they know where to go!  After that, we went to Hobby Lobby, where we spent a decent amount of time becuase the store is obnoxiously huge.  However, much to our benefit, they were having a huge sale!  I know we shouldn’t be buying things, but sometimes it’s just so hard, we are so used to living comfortably (not rich, but if we see something small that we want it’s usually no issue to get it, and it’s impossible to break that habit.)  We actually went there with a purpose: to find silk flowers.  But, since we have been to three places I think we may have to special order them.  However, we did end up picking up Jason a cute penguin etched glass ornament for $1, some purple glass candle holders for the wedding for 50¢ each (we probably should have picked out more) and some cute wooden picture frames for the kids (2 dog ones and 2 cat ones $1 each.)  Then we headed over to Joann’s to continue our quest for silk flowers, and paper goods (because we want to make our own invitations too but can’t find the right stuff for that either) with no luck, and headed home for a short break.

Skipping around, Tuesday night we went to an open house for The Palms on Southern.  It was cold, and rainy, but we went anyway hoping they were open.  They were literally 5 minutes away from us, it’s actually further to go to the grocery store we shop at.  They were decently priced,  and had the 3rd open, so here are some pictures:

We got a lot of information from this place as well.  They even convinced these cheap technology-geeks that we did in fact need a DJ and we can’t host our own wedding with an MP3 player, and we got a ton of resources from them with business cards and brochures for everything from cakes to DJs to photography.

Back to today:
After our romp around town, we went to another open house.  This one was for Chapel on the Farm.  The set-up is very basic and simplistic.  I fell in love with it online, and could barely wait for their open house today.  Everything was so quaint and cute.  This is the place that is pretty low on the price scale because they pretty much offer just the building for getting ready, and the reception site, which was fine with me (so far, we haven’t investigated the cost for the rest of the stuff we need.)  I fell even more in love with it when we got there.  It has a ton of history that I will spare you, for now… Here are the pictures:

After that, we headed home, where I made Crab Puffs for dinner, with artichoke… and here we are… :)

I’ll leave you with even more pictures, a little more in the Christmas spirit:

• You may or may not have noticed that I rearranged a few things.    Nothing major, just this there that over here… etc.  BUT!  I also added threaded comments so you can reply to specific comments instead of just to the post in general.  Since I have a whopping 2 commenters, it’s not a huge deal but I am happy.  :)  Also I added lovely little snow flakes for “winter” (not here of course, other places) but don’t fret, if they annoy you, they are gone in 13 seconds.  If you love them, just refresh.  :P  (If you are looking for something that was there, and now “isn’t” check the bottom of the page, it’s probably there.)

• Jason starts working with me tomorrow.  Not sure exactly what he will be doing, but I do know that alphabetizing is in his near future.

• While finishing up our Christmas shopping today, I was thrilled to find The Nightmare Revisited.  Not only is it awesome that they keep coming out with new Nightmare stuff (like last year watching it in 3-d was the best thing of the entire year!) but now it includes some of my favorite artists.  :)

Yay!