Hey! It's a new year!

Wait! Before you do anything else, listen to "He Never Said a Mumbling Word" by The Welcome Wagon. Here is a link for you.

I had such a great week! Sweet time with my fiance, with his entire family (all twenty-something of us packed into his parents' house for multiple days), with my brother and his precious fiance, five Christmases total, a sweet wedding (and seeing people I love there), and then a dance party with most of my best friends from college. No wonder I'm exhausted. But the best kind of exhausted ... unless you count the sadness from saying goodbye to Andrew this afternoon.

In a purely materialistic vein, I got some really awesome Christmas presents! Seriously. A compass necklace (that really works!) from Linja, a gorgeous pearl necklace from the south of France from Andrew, two beautiful aprons (I guess that means I'm a grown-up now), a yellow Crock Pot (a secret desire of my womanly heart), and ... Andrew's dad took the keyboard out of an old piano, mounted it, and built a frame around it for me! Whoa! it's awesome! I can't wait until I have a fireplace to hang it over.

It now being 2011, I realize that I'm getting married this year. Exciting, scary, still slightly overwhelming. I've been pretending, in light of Christmas, that I don't have a wedding to plan, but that illusion is now shattered. Full-force. I'm afraid of two things in regards to the whirlwind of planning such a huge event. 1) I'm afraid that it will take over my life and I won't be able to talk about anything else. or 2) I'm afraid that it will perpetuate my inability to make myself sit down and work on my poetry. I need to work on it -- for its sake and for my heart's sake. I never want to tell my kids that I used to write poetry in college. Please, no.

What'd you think of the Welcome Wagon song? A good one, eh?