I’ve never been into flowers. Isaiah started with flowers on our first date and has sent or brought me a bouquet for every major celebration since. Who could hate flowers after that?

I’m still not sold on flowers for the wedding, but a bouquet is pretty standard, so I’m considering it. I really like deep, earth-toned succulent bouquets with pops of color over peonies and carnations and all of those soft flowers that don’t seem to suit me.

What do you think of these as inspiration for our DIY bouquet adventure?

Photos: Blush Feminine Bouquet from The Bride’s Cafe, Minimal Earthy Bouquet on Once Wed, Intense Succulent Bouquet on Tara Guerard’s event blog, Bright Earthy Mixed Bouquet on Bridal Snob, Citrus Floral Bouquet on The Sweetest Occasion

Physical touch is a strange bird, isn’t it? I can go from being a hugger to an angry cat at touch. I have girl friends who love to squeal and hug and lay on one another’s laps and play with each other’s hair. I was like that too. I’m not sure what changed, but I don’t appreciate platonic puddles of cuddles anymore.

I have a few friends I don’t mind touching my hair or pseudo-cudding with a blanket for a movie, but strangers? No.

When I was in college, I wrote story after story about the connections I made with strangers. I held hands with my friends and we sometimes shared twin beds and it wasn’t a big deal.

But we moved at a strange time.

I didn’t let anyone in Texas into the “circle of trust” until recently. Now it feels like we’re too old to braid each other’s hair. When does a logical reason for sharing a twin bed come up after college?

I’ll never be the girl who wants to trade shoes and share clothes. I have immutable boundaries.

But it’s not weird to hug someone or share a love seat during a movie. The more you shudder at touch and withdraw from people who want to be close to you, the farther they’ll get.

Damn it, planning this wedding is turning me into a mushy ball of goo.

Image: Illustration Booth

Yo. It’s my birthday. I was going to say something cynical and introspective because that’s kind of how I feel.

But this weekend doesn’t deserve it. My mom took Isaiah and I to the rodeo this weekend, we went shopping together, Isaiah made a delicious, gourmet meal, and we watched a movie. I went to bed last night feeling full of love and pre-birthday anxiety like middle school.

I usually deflect any attention that falls on me for my birthday. When it’s anyone else’s day, I get giddy over picking out gifts, sending cards, giving hugs and buying dinners. This year, I have just been enjoying my family’s affection and it’s been…nice.

It’s weird, but I’m silently marveling at how amazing it is that my mom, like, birthed me 24 years ago. That’s pretty epic and impressive, right?

Isaiah, in the meantime, loves me for some odd reason I can’t figure out. Vinny has given me hugs for the weekend like he knows what’s up.

Basically, I’m 24 and I think this might be the first birthday I’ve just enjoyed.

O.M.G. This is fantastic. Please love this.

Image: Found on §OFÂ KÏNG 

Things:

• Finalizing the guest list.
• Getting sa-the-da’s out before the end of the month (we’re late!).
• Reading about wedding etiquette before we commit the unforgivable wedding-war crimes of improperly addressing invitations.
• Trying to decide if I like the $50 dress I bought enough to wear it for the nupts.
• Pinning wedding inspiration like a damned fool every day.
• Working out four mornings a week and loving it.

Hear those?

They’re action verbs.

We’re fucking moving on this wedding thing.

It’s refreshing and easy after three years of sitting around, waiting.

Wish us luck.

I don’t know what Feng Shui consultant was responsible for all of the gym locker rooms of the world…but the mirrors? It’s a little much.

I shouldn’t be able to stand around a maze of the locker room at the wall of sinkless countertops and see you, standing completely nude, facing the locker room.

The fuck is this? 

Another set of nips behind me, washing her hands after going to the bathroom, naked.

The fuck was that? 

Where’s your ingrained, American sense of shame about your body?! Didn’t your parents teach that nudity was one of Satan’s tricks to tempt you or something? Have you ever seen an H&M ad before? Isn’t that enough!?

What we really hate about other people’s nudity is not the nakedness itself, right? It’s their complete lack of awareness that they’re supposed to feel self-conscious and ashamed.

If I have to huddle in the corner facing the lockers after the shower and wrangle my still-damp legs into jeans while still wearing my robe and prepare my tank top ahead of time so there is only .485 seconds between when I am wearing my robe and wearing something else, then, damnit, you should too.

If you ask me? The appropriate level of nudity in the gym is calves. 

It’s always the 60-and-up crowd and the used-to-be-chubbsters who want to hang out with their poonangs out, too. They’re either getting used to their newfound fitness or they just don’t care anymore.

But when mine eyes have seen three sets of nipples before 8 A.M., you’ve officially encroached on what I need to have a good day: a distinct lack of nipple sightings.

What are your thoughts? Are you a bare-all at the gym kinda gal or do you get dressed in the shower?

My post on getting hired with super-powers was on Glass Heel yesterday. Here’s a snippet:

I recently began mentoring a college student. Like many other college students today, she wants to continue to graduate school.

Why? Because of the job market.

When I graduated a little more than a year ago, it seemed every other person went on to graduate school and the “every other” of us went out nervously looking for jobs. While many of the students I graduated with haven’t been hired yet, a lot of them have.

But that’s because they have superpowers, of course.

Anyone who knows anything about superpowers (or Wikipedia) knows you can only get powers in three ways: you’re born that way like Superman, something makes you that way like the Green Lantern or something natural happens and you evolve like the X-Men.

You can tap into your superpowers to get hired in the same way.

Read  the full post on Glass Heel: You Might Need a Super-Power to Get Hired

For years, my mom has given our family dog, Wishbone, ham bones after the holidays. Actually, wait. Every year, my mom cooks the most delicious, fall-apart ham for Christmas. After a few days of leftovers, she makes pea soup. It sounds pretty disgusting and I avoided trying it every year until last year. It’s actually the most delectable, hammy, vegetable-y soup/paste.

To make pea soup, she cooks the peas for hours in with the remaining ham and bone. When the meat falls off, she takes out the cooked, then boiled bone and gives it to the dog.

It’s the coup de grâce of puppy Christmas.

This year, she cut the bone in half and gave both pieces to us: one for Abby and one for Vinny.

Wishbone weighs 30 pounds. It has always taken him hours just to get the marrow out of the bone and he leaves it alone when he’s finished.

Vinny weighs almost 70 pounds.

Needless to say, the night ended with us scouring the house for the bone he had already eaten. Then we worried and yelled and blamed Vinny for not knowing better.

Then we Googled it. 

Can I tell you that if you’re ever modestly worried about your pets to never Google “can I [insert unmentionable crime against your pet here]?”

The stories all read the same:

• I woke up to my dog, dead in a pool of his blood, after feeding him a ham bone.
• I watched my dog choke to death.
• My dog needed $2,000 worth of surgery to get it removed.

We found my mom and asked her what to do. We all agreed we needed to go to the puppy emergency room.

Emergency hours for pet hospitals are double the cost around here.

We were looking at spending $200 just to get him seen. 

I called first, to ask if we needed to bring him in. The first woman berated me for giving him ham at all, meat, at that! How could I? Don’t I know dogs can’t process meat? Then she told me if we didn’t get him there within a half an hour, he would likely die.

WHAT? 

Dogs are carnivores. That chick was clearly bunk.

The second animal hospital said, “You might want to like, bring him, and stuff, because, like, maybe he, like, is choking, you know, and we just can’t, like, see it.”

Uh…

The third hospital said, “Don’t worry about it. If he gags, coughs a lot or throws up, come in.”

Okay.

But clearly, Vinny is our boo. We talk baby-talk to that boy. We snuggle for hours. We have a nightly group hug, and I’m not joking. We have cut date nights short to go back home to the pup.

If anything happened, we wouldn’t forgive ourselves.

We lost a kitten once to a disease he contracted at birth and it was devastating. There was no way we were going through that again.

So we got ready to leave and prepped ourselves for losing more than half of my monthly paycheck on retrieving a ham bone from his insides.

Just before we left, we searched online once more and found JustAnswer.com. You have to pay $30 if you’re pleased with the advice and we were. Instead of asking whoever answers the phone at the front desk of the animal hospital, we were able to talk to a real vet.

She told us it was safer to bring him in, but that he would probably be fine (in many more, doctor-ly words).

Once we calmed down, we found dozens of stories of people scared into bringing their dogs in after a similar mistake. Nothing was wrong, the dog was fine and they were out $400 – $1500 for the exam, x-rays and surgery.

The whole night, Vinny was a cheery, playful puppy. The next day, he was the same.

We hovered over his poo looking for shards of bone or blood like idiots.

He was and is fine.

Have you ever gone completely hysterical over nothing with your pets? Why do the pet hospitals exploit your panic for profit? We lost sleep, we could have lost financial security for the month and WTF WE WERE FREAKED OUT.

Don’t you think there should be some kind of hippocratic oath for veterinarians and the folks who make their appointments? Is there?

My rule? If you wear scrubs to work, you’re held to a higher standard. If in the human medical world, you induced hysteria by saying OMG you probably have cancer! How could you ever be out in the sun?! Don’t you know that’s terrible for you? If you don’t start this treatment, like ASAP, you’ll probably die — they would be dis-scrubbed. Or something.

In total, we learned one valuable lesson: no bones for dogs unless they’re raw and never chicken. I think we knew that before, but we didn’t really know it until it was 3 o’clock in the morning and we were shaking Vinny, squeezing his stomach and playing with the idea of inducing vomit in our little, lovey puppy.

Look at that face, though. Would you panic if it was in danger?

His new nickname: Vinny “The Hambone” Maldonado. 

JustAnswer is not a sponsor of any kind of our blog. We just liked using the service and recommend it.

It took me a while to find a few Tumblrs that I loved looking at every day. When Kathleen (The Mirthmobile) shared Dream Cats on her blog, I was determined to find Tumblogs that screamed to me.

If you can get over the lack of image crediting, there is inspiration for the taking on Tumblr.

From my reader to yours, I give you my five favorite Tumblogs.

Le Litter Box

If you like cats, animated GIFs and a meow mix of awesome inspiration, Le Litter Box is the Tumblog for you. Meg and Caroline find the inspiration you wish you found first.

CSA Flat File

Whether you’re a designer or not, print design inspiration from the CSA archives is sure to spark some form of inspiration in you. CSA Flat File is sponsored by the French Paper Co. and curated with extreme prejudice.

§OFÂ KÏNG

Sofa King (as in SoFuckingCool) is a mish-mash of inspiration, badassedness and things will have you going, “Ohhh, I remember that.” One by one, Sofa King is defiling pop culture from my childhood in the most delightful way.

Love Your Chaos

Sarah has an awesome sense of what puts a smile on your face contrasted with what will mean something to you or open your eyes to something new. Love Your Chaos has that “can’t-put-my-finger-on-it,” but I love it element I need from all of the Tumblogs I follow.

Soviet Postcards

Since my trip to Russia, I have been obsessed with Russian history, design and culture. Soviet Postcards and the owner’s other Tumblog Back to the USSR give me my daily source of Russian inspiration and I can’t get enough.

So tell me. I’m dying to know. What Tumblrs do you follow?

I’m not usually a fan of the wedding cake. I’ve never enjoyed a single slice of wedding cake. We were thinking of doing a dessert bar with a hodgepodge of the best desserts.

Because dessert is nothing to fuck around with.

But something about these cakes are drawing me to reconsider our vendetta against the wedding cake.

Ombre cake balls wedding cake via Brides.com

Winter wedding inspiration from Apartment 34

Caitlyn Ahern

Black and white ruffled cake via Bridal Snob

Great Wedding Finds

Rock’n Roll Bride

Yahoo found on Pinterest

Things this beautiful shouldn’t be eaten. Maybe we will stick with pies and cookies.

What did you do for your wedding desserts?