I've Had Worse Ideas

Since becoming engaged I have done 2 things to prepare for the upcoming wedding:

• Bought 2 bridal magazines.
• Created a wedding budget. Without any numbers in it.
• Became so overwhelmed with the potential cost of the wedding that I shut off my laptop. And thought about hiding it under the bed so I wouldn’t have to think about it again.

Ok, so I guess I’ve done more than 2 things.

Thoughts that have run through my head in the past 24 hours so far regarding the wedding:

• Can I sponsor the wedding?
• See if Jameson will sponsor the bar. Lord knows that between Sean and his dad the sponsorship would pay for itself.
• How many banners could I fit in the venue?
• Tablecards with the sponsor logo and message aren’t that intrusive.
• So we make the best man give a 3 minute shout out to sponsoring company at the end of his speech – no one’s really listening anyway.
• Portillo’s caters. And they have a location in Buena Park – even better than ordering from the one in Downers Grove.
• Potluck for a party of 100… I’ve had worse ideas.
• I wonder what Jimmy’s doing the week before the wedding. He says he’s a sous chef…
• Single-handedly find cure for arthritis so G-ma can make the wedding dress.
• We will be in Vegas in August…

Holy Crap!

We're engaged. Sean proposed to me Friday night and amid my confusion and excitement I remembered to say 'yes.'

The setting was perfect, the proposal was adorable and the thoughtfulness that went into the elaborate planning (and ruses) all illustrate exactly why I love him so much.

As for the title of this post - I repeated that phrase at least twenty times over the course of the evening after I said yes.

Radio Free Madison, Day Two

I will pay good money to the person who can present me with a solution to my problem. My problem being that I can NEVER fall asleep at a reasonable amount of time during my first night in a hotel. I've been lucky enough to have a job where I get to travel and I have yet to fall asleep before 1:30 am and have a restful first night's sleep. Seriously - spread the word to your entrepreneur friends - i'm looking for an answer.

And apparently my laptop's possessed. While typing that last paragraph my cursor jumped into the middle of the paragraph on it's own and i ended up typing sentences in the middle of other sentences. It happened five times. In one paragraph.

Today was spent inside the Convention Center hearing a variety of speakers talk about niche marketing. I loved it. Maybe you wouldn't.

Cool thing I learned today: i belong in a niche that I didn't even know about: foodie travelers. There are companies within the travel industry that focus on culinary tours. How perfect?!? I eat my way through vacations - why wouldn't I want to take a vacation based entirely around food? Can't wait to google it and find some of those tours.

Radio Free Madison

Given that I lived in the Midwest for the first 24 years of my life, spent (practically) every summer and three-day weekend camping in WI, and logging an upteen number of hours driving between Minneapolis and Chicago during college - it's amazing that this is my first ever visit to Madison, WI.

Verdict: It's nice. It's Wisconsin - what else is there to say.

I'm here for work and will be here until Thursday morning. I'm looking forward to eating out at the various restaurants around the hotel and eating my way through this trip with my co-workers. Tonight I had seabass stuffed with strawberries. It was light, fruity - delicious.

The Clash Rocked It

New favorite venue: The Casbah in San Diego.

It's small, it's dark, it's AWESOME. For you Angelenos (sp?) reading this - it's about half the size of the Troubadour - so it's super intimate.

We saw The Black Angels there Sunday night. This was my third time seeing them and this is by far the closest we've gotten. It's going to be hard to go back to the Wiltern or the El Ray.

Random observation: when did Pabst Blue Ribbon become the drink of choice for the hipster SoCal boys?