2016 in Review

2016 is generally regarded as a pretty crap year, bordering on cursed. (Possibly.) And while I'm a pretty optimistic person, I'd say that this bad reputation is well earned. From the rise of actually terrifying far-right politics worldwide to the election of a president who seems more likely to start a nuclear war with each passing day, 2016 hasn't given me all that much to applaud on the current-events front. But as I said, I'm a naturally sunny person, so I'll look for the silver linings wherever I can, and draw strength from the good things to keep fighting for a better world in 2017.

In that spirit, I present my own personal highlights reel for 2016:

How to Make an Awesome Wedding Playlist

Wedding planning is a very unusual task. Hopefully, you're planning a once-in-a-lifetime event, and yet you somehow need to accomplish a ton of tasks (negotiating vendor contracts, renting a tent, finding an officiant) that normal life gives you zero experience with.

Photo credit: the fabulous Marble Rye Photography.

Trashy Diva Mahjong Annette

After a week of pre-wedding whirlwind action and another week of honeymoon food-stravaganza-ing, I have an enormous backlog of Things I/We Did to blog about! Today, I'm going with a dress that's been on my to-do list for weeks: my new Trashy Diva Annette in Mahjong. Spoiler alert: I'm obsessed. Bonus: these photos were taken after my wedding hair trial!

Wedding Planning for Introverts

My wedding is two weeks from this Saturday and I've finally figured out what it is that I don't like about wedding planning: it's an introvert's nightmare! I'm a serial hibernator: I tend to really like alone time and often go off the grid with emails if I don't need to check them for work. This is not a useful trait if you're planning a wedding, which involves contacting a zillion people who want to ask you what you want about things you don't really care about. I have a hard enough time calling people that I know really well to catch up, and I often need to psych myself up for a while to call the cable company or  phone in a prescription to CVS. Cold-calling wedding vendors is basically a waking nightmare. When you consider that wedding planning is also lazy-person hell, I have twice as many reasons to not really enjoy the planning process.

A zillion invitations, painstakingly addressed in my ridiculous chicken scratch.

A Star-Wars-Themed Wedding Event

Has anyone else planned a wedding? I'm less than two months out from mine, and am just starting to realize that there are actually things I need to be doing. Of course, I'm dealing with that realization by writing a post about the bridal luncheon my sister threw for me while I was in New York a few weeks ago. Technically, this is productive!

I was planning to wear my beloved tomato-print dress, but after realizing that it was going to be a family-style meal at an Italian place, I 86'd the fitted-waistband idea and went with a stretchy ivory dress. Everyone from my bachelorette party wore their fascinators, and tried to limit the number of "…because I'm fascinating!" comments to a reasonable number.

Fun fact: this coat belongs to my sister, but in the past 10 years or so, I'm the only one who has actually worn it.