Licensed... To Kill ;)

Votin' and marryin'. God Bless America.

One very sweet Mr. Groom and I paid a visit to the Jackson County Circuit Clerk's office today to sign away our lives as we know it and become legally able to marry each other. :)

We'd intended to do this on the 1 month mark, yesterday, but well, you know how that goes...

The office was bustling with youngsters registering to vote, other happily engaged couples applying for marriage licenses and the booming voice of the Circuit Clerk himself, Mr. Joe Martin. Good Lord, that man has a loud voice. We could barely hear our clerk over his loud ass voice telling someone all the business that was going on in the office during lunch today. That's when I realized, he was talking to a Mississippi Public Broadcasting reporter. It's a shame Mr. Groom was in a hurry to make it back to work in our scheduled lunch break time, otherwise I was trying to make us stars by getting interviewed by MPB. Well, until I realized she was doing a story on voter registration.

Other than the fact that we first went to the wrong office (ironically enough, the office where you file for divorce), I think our marriage license application process went super smooth. We're definitely thankful that the blood test requirement was lifted beginning July 1 as a result of last year's amendment.

One note, I think I made the joke about being glad to now be, "Licensed to kill," a few too many times...

Did any of you have any funny stories from your experience applying for your marriage license? Please share, if so!

Enjoy the pics, y'all!

Little Kev signing his life away! To me! :)

Success! Licensed and ready!

Almost official, all we need now is the priest's signature on October 27!

Well, at least one of us is excited!
I think he's really bothered by my, "License to Kill," jokes. :)

What a ONEderful World

Where has the time gone?! I can't believe we're only 30 days from THE big day. So much has happened since this wonderful journey of engagement and wedding/marriage planning began 7 months ago. I've moved, Mr. Groom has moved, he's changed jobs, and we're adjusting to life actually having each other in it every day.

As previously indicated, we're so busy our heads are spinning and as I type this I'm meddling through things in my head and trying to decide on what shoes I'll wear for my friend Meg's wedding NEXT WEEKEND.

One month out and yes, most of the big items are taken care of... I'm still going crazy with details though, since I'm a top notch procrastinator and have yet to complete tasks that could have been done months ago.

I'm pretty pleased with how RSVPs are rolling in and I really hope I don't have to call and harass those people who I know are coming but find it impossible to stick a prepaid envelope in their mailbox. Don't make me throw my Emily Post book at you, really... Don't.

I plan/hope/really want to post some more in depth posts as the countdown continues. Don't worry though - once the wedding itself happens and I'm settling into wifedom, I definitely plan to post LOTS of recaps, especially on a few secret projects I have for the wedding. :)

Picture of us, the almost-weds, last week

Blogger Dodger

So as it turns out, I’m probably the worst blogger in the world. Either that or I’m still mastering my ever-on-the-resume-as-a-weakness time management skills. Now that I’m burning the candle at both ends with wedding planning, parties, showers, and work events, I’ve little time left to actually sit down and reflect on it and how exciting all of it is. And so it happens, that I have even less time to sit down and blog about these events. So in a few following posts I’ll try and catch y’all up. Try.

Here's an overview, but I PROMISE to devote an entire post to each shower individually.

In the past few weeks I’ve had so much excitement! The last weekend of August (8/26), I was given a shower by my aunts on my mom’s side of the family, Aunt Debbie and Aunt Sharon. The week following that we had an unexpected WEEK off of work due to Hurricane Isaac. 

That first weekend of September (9/1-3, following Isaac) Mr. Groom and I went to St. Louis for Labor Day weekend. We attended his pledge brother’s wedding. The bride, Ashley, is a crafting queen, and her wedding looked like my favorite blogs, magazines, and Pinterest all got together and had a big, beautiful baby. She and I have a lot of the same styles and ideas, so I loved it. There was another engaged-and-soon-to-be-married lady sitting at our table and we gushed over how inadequate we were feeling while checking out all of Ashley’s well thought out details and pined over how we wished we had the time to put it all together!

Sunday afternoon, I was given a shower by my ALMOST mother and sister-in-law, Shelley and Nicolette Kowalewski. It was especially sweet for me to meet a lot of the women for the first time that day, as they were bringing us nice gifts without ever having met me!

The next weekend (9/8-9) Mr. Groom headed out of town for another friend's wedding in Kansas City, MO. I had planned to go, but since my invitations were shipped late (and messed up with Isaac), I I had to sit that one out and spent all weekend hand-addressing each invitation. I did recruit some help for the stuffing, stamping and sealing stages of assembly. I may or may not have bribed my helpers with pizza and buffalo chicken dip. :)

The next weekend (9/15-16), I was given my third and final shower, by my Aunt Suzy and cousin/bridesmaid Amy Gibson and very special friend of the family, Mrs. Anne Blair. The bridal shower brunch was attended by almost all of my bridesmaids and it flowed right on into my BACHELORETTE PARTY! My Matron of Honor, Laura did an awesome job coordinating it and I never had any stress about it at all! We had an awesome time on Bourbon Street and I'll leave it at that. ;)

The following week (feeling all bloaty and regretting the weekend's diet splurges)on Wednesday (9/19) I took my bridal portraits with the super amazing Lisa Tilley-Newman. The worst part of that experience is waiting to see them! The very next day I helped my family pull off a surprise party for my Grandpa's 80th birthday!

The weekend following those two exciting events (9/22-23), I traveled down to Fort Walton Beach for my bridesmaid/friend/fellow bride Meg's bachelorette party. I'm in her wedding just 11 days and she'll be in mine 3 weeks later. 

I don't need to attach a screen shot of my calendar to tell you I've been absolutely bonkers. The hardest part for me is actually letting myself ENJOY these things I'm going through, and not just merely looking at the tasks and events as check-offs on my task-list.

Dinner Blogger Fail

So I've got some lovely drafts of posts I'd started for our first week on Emeals. Posts that you may have noticed never made it past Day 2... It went great, but I'm remembering why I decided to devote the blog to just wedding stuff until after the big day: it sucks up all of my time! Mr. Groom and I are having an awesome time "playing house" as I go over to our little "Love Shack" every afternoon, we cook dinner together, eat, then I leave to come home and do wedding work and he's left to clean up the dinner mess. :) I could get used to this!

This did not happen to me, but thought the pic was funny.

Now here I am having to do something I rarely do and that's confess my failure and defeat by not even completing one week of showing my devoted followers what we cooked each night! I know, I can hear the sobs you're bellowing from here. ;)

I'll fully recommend Emeals as it's working out great for us and a couple friends who joined at the same time as us, but I won't be blogging about it until after #October27.

And the TWO shall become one - 2 MONTHS left!

I absolutely cannot believe we're officially hitting the 2-month mark until the wedding. I had my first shower yesterday and it was lovely. I always enjoy getting to visit with my extended family including so many aunts and cousins. I'll have to post a more lengthy shower recap once I'm not in STORM PREP MODE.

The current path of #isaac
Note: The worst place to be is the North East quadrant of the spinning storm...

I'm trying not to be a drama queen about how this threat of Tropical Storm/Hurricane Isaac affects me. But honestly, I really don't want to deal with a storm while I'm 2 months from our wedding. My invitations are due to be shipped any day and I've got a list of tasks a mile long that I've got designated for everyday.One plus is I'm about to have two days of being trapped inside, so I can go ahead and start tackling some invitation addressing.

Anyway, we're battening down the hatches and Mr. Groom is 4-hours away at a training workshop for work. Can you believe it? He's lived here 3-weeks and we're having a hurricane and he's not even here!

Project Dinner Night 2: Eggplant Casserole

While the name of this dish may be casserole, as I was making it, I have to say it looks and seems a lot like a lasagna, minus the pasta, of course. I used a classic #momzilla trick and prepped all of my ingredients last night. So today when I got to the house, my casserole was ready to go in the oven. I did actually remember to snap a few photos of layering the goodies.

Bottom layer of eggplant with the meaty goodness spread on top.

This was the second layer of cheese. Mmmm...

Construction complete, ready for fridge!

Once again, your struggling cooking blogger has failed you! I forgot to take a picture of my beautifully finished baking casserole. I remembered after Mr. Groom and I had already gotten our servings out, so I did snap a pic, but I tried to hide the gaping hole in the horizon of the melted cheesy eggplant goodness.

Mmmm... Behold the cheesy eggplant goodness!

Speaking of which. My goodness, was this good!? For a cheese-loving-girl like me, low carb dieting isn't TOO bad. I can still have cheese! Well lasagna is one of my favorite dishes and pasta is a big NO-NO on low carb diets. So my expectations for how yummy this dish would be were met and exceeded! It had the meat, tomato sauce, and cheese of lasagna and the eggplant makes a wonderful substitution for pasta.

We WILL be keeping this recipe for future use. I did decide that for my next time making it, I would not use my lovely Pampered Chef stone baking dish. While it's awesome for a lot of dishes because it holds in the moisture of whatever you're cooking, we did not like that it kept all the excess juice from the eggplant and it left our casserole kind of watery


Up next tomorrow night: Hamburger Steak!

Project Dinner Night 1: Chicken Piccata

This isn't our plate, but I'm goofy and forgot to take a pic of ours.
Source: http://riverwalkaussies.wordpress.com/2012/05/

Well tonight proved to me that I have a bleak future in writing a foodie/cooking blog. I arrived at the house to find Mr. Groom finishing up cooking our first emeals dinner, I watched him cook, milled around the house, and ate our wonderful dinner... ALL while forgetting to take a picture so I could blog about it. Thankfully, my friend Google helped me find a decent picture of someone else's version of the dinner.

Other than my sweet fiance' forgetting that the whole object of the plan is to buy ingredients that will make more than one meal (he used the whole package of chicken rather than reserving half for a meal later this week, same with the mushrooms), the dinner was great. The upside to his accidental use of more ingredients is that we had leftovers for his lunch today. 

While my lovely photo source shows green beans accompanying the lemon and white wine flavored chicken, we had asparagus. I love mushrooms and capers and both were in this yummy sauce with our chicken.

Like I said before, eating a low-carb diet you get used to lots of monotonous dinners of chicken and vegetables, but I was glad for our first night we kind of stuck to that, but made the chicken a little more interesting!

Tomorrow night's dinner: Eggplant Casserole!