our first date as husband and wife

We went on a dress-up date Saturday. Most of our dates have been either (a) chill on the couch and watch 3 movies back to back to back, (b) go hiking, (c) grab some Sonic and hang out in a city park, (d) find a new recipe and cook together. I can remember 2 previous dress-up dates. A dress-up date means I wear a dress and Rodgers wears slacks. Once, I wore an orange dress and we went to Red Lobster. I got snow crab legs and Rod was extremely amused to watch me crack them open and eat them. The other was Valentine's Day 2008. I wore my black dress, and we went to a Mediterranean or Italian restaurant in Ft. Worth. It was a Thursday, but Rod didn't have class Friday so he drove up to spend the evening with me. I took off work the next day so we could make it a weekend trip. But, back to Saturday...

Last week was our first week of real world after the wedding. Two or three days, my allergies were pretty bad, so I took Benadryl as soon as I got home from work and was 90% brain dead. Rodgers had a lot of homework to do, being the week after Spring Break. So, we were in the apartment together for several hours, and had some quality time together, but I felt like we should go out and have some fun!

At our shower in Arlington, our hostesses provided a pad of paper for people to write marriage advice on. There were still hundreds of sheets left on the pad, so they gave us the blank pad of paper. It's very cute. We keep it on the bar and write notes to each other. When I got home from work Friday, it was my turn to leave a note, so I suggested that we go on a date, a "real" date, a dress-up date. Rodgers thought it was a great idea.

We had to go to Camp Tejas Saturday afternoon, but we got home in time to clean up, put on our pretty clothes (I wore a black knit dress with my patent leather teal wedges and Rodgers wore black slacks and his giraffe shirt, which I adore), and go out on the town. Well, we went to the mall. Apparently it was prom weekend. The place was crawling with teenagers in tuxes and formal gowns. We look so young, we may have appeared to be underdressed prom-goers.

Rod suggested that we go to this restaurant in the mall called The Cotton Patch, which we had never been to. I was so glad that he had a specific suggestion! He usually likes for me to decide. It was a great choice. We split blackened tilapia with a half order of bayou shrimp and a side of fresh steamed broccoli (my very favorite veggie), with spinach artichoke dip for appetizer. (We almost always split a meal at restaurants, unless it's somewhere that we know we want leftovers from!)

Then, we went to a movie! We saw Last House on the Left. All I knew about it was that it was based on the original of that title, by Wes Craven, which I had never seen. It wasn't scary like I thought it would be, but it was quite horrifying. Fortunately, the bad guys get what's coming to them, in a big way, and the good guys win. I'm curious to see the orginal now...

Anyway, it was a great night, and we looked soooo gooood. We should have taken pictures.

Official Pictures

[I am sensing that I may have neglected to post a link to our official wedding photos.]

Rachel's brother was the official photographer. I've always liked the crazy artistic looking wedding photos. They're so interesting to look at. And beautiful pieces of art for the living room. But for my own wedding, I wanted more natural-ish pictures. Plus, I didn't want to pay a photographer for something we could very well have done for free by a member of the family. I like Trey's camera better than everyone else's, so he won! We asked him to take pictures, and he graciously agreed. And here they are:

http://www.treyandamy.net/atkinson/Pictures/Pages/Rachels_Wedding.html

Also, some from the rehearsal and dinner, which was less rehearsing and more dinnering...er, dining:

http://www.treyandamy.net/atkinson/Pictures/Pages/Wedding_Rehearsal.html

59 second clip of end of wedding

We don't have the full video from the wedding, yet, but we do have the very ending of it, thanks to Rachel's aunt and uncle! I've just uploaded it to youtube. It is still in processing. But when it's done, you should be able to watch it here:

new bedroom!

We made a trip to IKEA yesterday. We were very excited. After depositing our wedding money in the bank, we were planning to complete our IKEA bedroom. (I bought the bed with last year's income tax refund.) So we got to Round Rock IKEA and, besides running into Kathy Forehand (my bff from college's mom) all we found was nothing. IKEA rocks, but ironically, Round Rock IKEA does not. They stopped carrying our line of bedroom stuff 6 months ago.

So, after lunch at Joe's Crabshack, we decided to make an impromptu trip to Houston because that IKEA does have our stuff, and one tank of gas is a whole lot cheaper than IKEA's shipping charges. We bought the wardrobe and a bedside table for Rodgers' side of the bed (I have a 2 drawer chest nightstand). Here are some pictures of our bedroom:

Angela and Hans gave us a beautiful comforter set. This is one of the shams. I think we will use it for winter. I used it for a few nights before the wedding and it was so warm, I think that we can use it without the heater on cold winter nights.

 

Here's our bed and Rodgers' little table. The quilt was made by Phyllis Binkley, who met Rod in Kenya when he was 14 years old. He calls her his California Mom. She is quite an artist! An interesting factoid: Rodgers and I both had the same picture of us framed, sitting by our beds, and now they are both sitting by the same bed. Mine's in a heart frame. It was taken at Claire's wedding.

 

The table, which Rodgers put together while I was fininshing the drawers for the wardrobe.

A closeup of the quilt. At the top is Deuteronomy 31:8 and at the bottom is Proverbs 3:5-6. She asked us for our favorite verses, and we gave her these. We like them because they remind us where we're going in life and how we're getting there.

And here's the wardrobe. It took a few hours to put together, and we set one of the panels in backwards, but realized it too late to care about disassembling the thing and correcting it. At IKEA, it said that the boxes containing the wardrobe (there were 2) weighed 250 lbs. One of the boxes went into the car whole; the other wouldn't fit with the first box there. Despite having a large trunk and backseat, the passthrough between the two is quite small. It wasn't tall enough to stack the 2 boxes. So we took the contents out of box 2 and stacked the long stuff on top of box 1 and arranged the other things around the sides of the trunk. The biggest part of the adventure was carrying box 1 up to the 3rd floor once we got home. I scraped the back of my leg on the concrete steps, which are coated in sharp bits of gravel. Other than that, we were amazing at getting that big, long, heavy box up here.

pictures

The aforementioned Facebook pictures are now available on my Picasa album: 

Wedding!

Also, some pictures from our pre-wedding-reception-shower-super-party in Arlington:

arlington shower

AND, some pictures from the Honeymoon:

honeymoon

done!

The wedding was beautiful and romantic. The 10% chance of rain became...it drizzled all afternoon. We set 11 am/noon as our point of no return. At that point, as far as I [Rachel] could tell, the morning mist seemed to be clearing up. So we were "on" for the outdoor wedding. Had it been torrential downpour, I would have opted for the alternate venue. As it was, we went ahead with the wedding in Pam's backyard. The reception moved into her house, which she seemed to be ok with.

Since I was wearing a huge dress and my head and bare shoulders were covered with a veil, I only felt the rain once. It was actually a huge drop of water falling from a tree branch overhead, directly into my left eye. It was a bit chilly, but not too bad (for me at least).

The aisle began at Pam's backdoor, which is in her dining room. So after the recessional, we just turned around in the dining room and had a great impromptu receiving line as all the guests retreated into the warm, dry house.

It was a great wedding. All week, we've been commenting to each other about how much fun we had and how much we loved our wedding. We really can't wait to see the video! We'll check with our videographer about when he plans on getting it online. In the meantime, there are a few unofficial wedding photo albums online.

Mom's Pictures
Aunt Sondra's Pictures

These links both came to us in emails, so I'm hoping that you will be able to access the sites without having been sent an email from the album creators. There is also a great album on Facebook, if you're on there and friends with either of us, we've both been tagged in it so you may be able to find that one, too.

10%

Chance of rain Saturday in Brenham has dropped to 10%. That's great news! Not so great news is the high is still only 54. I think we can cope with that. Just the MOHs will be cold. Everyone else will be fine. Maybe we can find something for them...like a heat wrap to go under their dresses. That might help...

2 days

Only 2 days to go!

Still watching the weather. It's not looking good, but maybe will be ok. I really don't want to use the alternate venue. But, if it's raining, I guess we'll have to. :(

Either way, we'll still be married. But, I want to get married outside. Mom says the rain is supposed to stop by noon Saturday. This evening, they'll have the hourly forecast for Saturday afternoon on weather.com. Right now they only have the hourly forecast through 5 am.

I had decided that the venue would change if it were cooler than 50 degrees and had more than a 50% chance of rain. Right now, the forecast is 53 with a 50% chance of rain "sometime" on Saturday. Once I have the hourly forecast, hopefully, we'll see that the chance of rain doesn't include 3 pm. Hopefully.

i work in a zoo?!

I just learned that Obama nominated John Berry to the position of director of the Office of Personnel Management, which Berry accepted. [OPM is over all federal employees.] So, what experience does he have which qualifies him to be the director of all federal employees? [here's the punchline] He was the director of the National Zoo. He was also once the executve director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

Hmmm...we need someone to be the director of OPM. Here's a guy who's in charge of 240 employees and 2000+ animals. He'll do.

I guess "civil service" means "jobs for a bunch o' animals."

It's true. See for yourself:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2009/01/new_opm_director_soon.html
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0309/030309ar1.htm

6 days

[Rachel here]

What are we feeling at 6 days left of singleness? Insane excitement.

Rodgers is so overwhelmed that he's been napping for 2 hours this afternoon. [Ok, the napping may be due to the fact that he doesn't get enough sleep during the week at night, so he sleeps all afternoon Sunday.]

He came to pick me up for church this morning. On our way down the road, he said, "This is your last Sunday before the wedding!" Yesterday, he reminded me that it was my last Saturday before the wedding. He has also been making up songs to go with the countdown. I have a sticky note countdown stuck to the hutch over my desk at work. Every day I peel one sticky off to reveal the next countdown. And now, there's less than a week to go! I'm only working 3 days this week, so I think it will be a very fast week.

We didn't do anything exciting at all on the last weekend of our engagement. Well, we haven't done anything exciting yet. It is only 4 pm Sunday afternoon, so there's still a little time for spontaneous excitement, IF Rodgers wakes up from his nap. He's opened his eyes to look at me periodically, but then he just falls asleep again. We have the A/C off and the balcony door opened. It's 84 degrees outside. The warm air coming in adds to drowsiness.

I've been keeping an eye on the forecast. I'm watching weather.com and accuweather.com. For the past week, they've been disagreeing about the weather for Saturday. One day one would say that it would be raining and 60 degrees and the other would say sunny and 75. The next day they would switch. Today, they're pretty close to the same. We have a 20-30% chance of rain, and the afternoon high will be 62-63. A bit cooler than I was hoping for. At least the chance for rain is low. But, with 6 days to go, I'm sure the forecast will change again.

the scoop on the webcam

We talked about having a webcam to broadcast the wedding live via Skype. Then, we realized that more people could watch it if we could somehow broadcast it here on the blog. BUT, now we're thinking that logistically it will be simpler if we just use a digital camcorder to film the wedding. We can get better quality and more varied shots. Also, that way, people won't have to get up in the middle of the night to see the live broadcast. We'll film it, burn it to DVD, which we will gladly send to those who want it, and then also post the video here, via youtube. But that may take a few days.

So, that's the plan now. I thought a live broadcast on Skype would be fun because then people could talk to us during the reception, even if they aren't there. However, this plan seems better. We can set up some Skype dates if some of you want to talk to us after the wedding.

one more thing

I love space! If they do find a planet that can sustain life, and one day put a colony on that planet, I would seriously consider going - maybe not to stay, but at least for a visit. But I doubt that will happen in my lifetime.

It's not that I really want to leave the earth. It's just so exciting to go to new places - especially places that most people have never visited.

twitter

I signed up for Twitter.

I saw in the news today that NASA will be launching a giant camera tonight, which will focus on one portion of the galaxy, watching the stars to see if a planet crosses in front of a star. Then it will estimate the size of the planet and its distance from that star. All this in attempt to see if there's another planet out there like Earth which could sustain life. Anyway, they're updating their Twitter with the preparations for launch, and I thought it would be interesting to follow that. So I signed up for Twitter.

I'll also watch the launch on NASA TV. But the pre-launch show so far was boring me. I'm now watching Wife Swap. It's obnoxious. But it makes me feel like a good person, and like I'm not crazy. :) They're incredibly unreasonable. And ridiculous. And irrational.

a thought for 02 28 2009

Everyone should get married in March. It seems to come faster since February only has 28 days.