My Crazy Fiance

So on Tuesday night Josh and I crammed in two pre-wedding sessions into one so went quite late (I'll do a whole separate blog on pre-marraige counselling later!).


This week Josh is staying with our friends Bryce and Liv and by the time he had dropped me home and gotten back to Bryce and Liv's it was almost 11.30pm.

Unexpectedly, Bryce and Liv have had a new front door put in during the day (it had been meant to happen months ago and apparently the builder randomly decided Tuesday was a good day to do it). Liv had left it open, Bryce had locked it forgetting Josh was staying and Josh doesn't have a key. He texts Bryce, no response. He tries banging on their bedroom windows, no response (they've both being sick and so were out to it).

So, instead of ringing Bryce, or coming back to my place with it's nice warm spare bedroom, the silly monkey decides he'll just SLEEP IN THE CAR. In 3 degrees and 100km hour winds on the top of a hill! After an hour, during which the car is being rocked by the wind and he is curled up in a foetal position in the backseat shivering, he works out this probably wasn't the best plan. Still being too stubborn to admit this, he doesn't think "this is insane. I'm going to wake Bryce up/go home" instead he gets mad at me for taking the tarp out of the boot so he couldn't use it as a blanket and does nothing, but freezes for the next six hours.

Liv wakes up at 5.30, realises Josh isn't there and goes "Oh my gosh, I bet Bryce locked the front door and Josh couldn't get in" woke up Bryce who found Josh's text on his phone, and went looking and finds Josh in the car almost hypothermic who managed to explain between chattering teeth that he "didn't want to disturb anyone."

I get back from a set of meetings to find four text messages from poor Liv apologising backward and forward for locking my poor baby out in the cold, but I'm mad at my martyr of a fiance who had about ten people he could have called, a key to my place which has a spare room and instead chose to do his best to freeze to death!

All the girls I talk to go "What?! That's crazy!" while all the guys shrug their shoulders and go "Yup, I probably would have done the same thing." I am madly crazily in love with this guy but this is one of those situations where I just go "huh?" Can anyone explain this man reasoning to me? Or share another Mars/Venus story?

When A Yes Really Means "Possibly But Only If I Feel Like It And Nothing Better Comes Up"

I've possibly ranted about this before. In fact, given that it's one of my pet peeves I'd say the odds are good, so a few of you probably know what I'm about to say.

Let me set the scene. I'm a pretty busy person. I have a job, a fiance and a wedding to plan. In between working late nights, pre-marriage sessions and wedding prep I also have various church commitments, like to see my friends and family and occasionally blow the dust off my laptop to write a word or four.

Between now and Christmas I have three free evenings left. Which was fine, I was happy with all of the commitments. I have a bit of a rule which is basically, if I've said I'll be at something, then I will be. If a better option comes up later, then I'm not going to trade you in and I'm not going to leave you hanging for weeks so I can keep my options open. The only exception is if something work related comes up that I just can't excape. Working for the PM there is always that possibility, but I think it's happened maybe once.

If something really big somes up that clashes (like a really important church meeting or the work Christmas party) then I might see if there's anyway that I can reschedule to manage both. But always far in advance, I'm not going to drop it on you at the last minute. Honestly? I just think that's really rude.

Which brings me to today. Weeks ago, a few friends and I arranged to catch up for dinner tonight. We're all busy people and don't get to see each other that often so we it was scheduled a long time in advance to make sure everyone could make it. Everyone said they could, we locked it in the diaries and nothing more was heard until today.

Then early afternoon the emails start. Sorry, actually have something else I need to be at. Sorry, already had a few big nights this week and don't really feel like going out again tonight. Sorry, spent too much money this week so can't really afford it. 

This is the point where I pretty much lose all sense of charity. For me it's in the same category as constantly being late - it shows a total lack of respect for the other person's time. I turned down being somewhere else tonight for you but obviously I'm the only one who actually gives a monkey's for keeping a commitment to being where I say I'm going to be, when I say I'm going to do so and the rest of you's yes is more of a "tentative but I'll let you know on the day if I feel like it".

Then, THEN, the thing that really causes me to lose it, is that if I try and communicate this, it's my problem for being Type A and anally retentive and I just need to chill out and then they get snitty and well, we all know girls well enough to know it's all down hill from there. The thing is I don't have a problem if people can't make something or if things come up and they need to reschedule, I'm just asking for a bit of consideration and giving me enough notice so that I can try and redo my plans. It's too late now to accept the other invitation that I turned down, Josh has made plans with the guys that I'm hardly going to ask him to cancel because my friends have bailed and so now instead of a dinner that I've been looking forward to for ages, my Friday night is suddenly an empty chasm.

Of course like any other anally retentive bride I could log-on to marthastewartweddings.com and start doing my table seating plan, or finally finish unpacking the last of our boxes, or a squillion other boring domestic/wedding related tasks but I was really looking forward to having some FUN!

I guess the biggest thing is that while these people matter to me, it feels like I don't matter nearly as much to them. So for all of you relaxed go-with-the-flow, plans aren't confirmed until you're actually sitting at the table, you just need to chill out people, that's what you're telling us structured, busy people who have put a priority on getting to spend time with you when you bail on something that has been on the cards for ages with four hours notice.

Maybe I'm completely overreacting and partially delusional but so far I can't come up with any other interpretation that is any better. Anyone else got any thoughts? I'd especially love to hear the viewpoint of people like my friends (who are genuinely great people) who really don't get what the problem is.

Friday Night Lights cont

For those of you still waiting for what the big surprise was - I've now updated Monday's post with the photos :)

Letting Go...

Yesterday I got rejected by the agent that I met in Colorado. The timing wasn't great. I'd sent my submission from my work email as Gmail had been having a mare that day and refusing to attach anything. So it's 9am in the morning and I'm sitting in a management team meeting and suddenly the Crackberry does its little dance and up flashes his email. I glance down and ka bang. Smacked right across the back of the head in front of six other people, without any of them even realising it.

There's nothing quite like having your heart churning with disappointment but the luxury of only about two seconds to snap out of it and get your head back into the meeting that you're actually being paid to attend.

It was a very nice rejection email advising me to "see this not as discouragement, but as a challenge" and then mooted something that has been at the back of my mind for the last few months. Maybe it's time to move on. Maybe it's time to stop flogging the (dearly loved) dead horse that is my first manuscript and start afresh with something new. Maybe its time is still to come, but after two years and rejections aplenty it's time to move on like it never will. I don't want to be one of those writers who, a decade from now, has never written anything else because gosh darnit I'm going to sell my first manuscript if it kills me and every agent and editor is mysteriously felled by a sudden case of food poisoning when I'm at their table at a conference.

It's a scary thing, putting three years of your life in a box and onto a shelf. Three years of drafting, then rewriting, then editing, then critiquing. Three years of sweat, tears and probably a few pounds added onto each thigh from chocolate consumption. Three years of creating and building and nurturing your characters. Of taking the critiques and the criticism on the chin and working and reworking and reworking, hoping that one day it will be good enough. Of having some people believe in it fiercely while others tear it to shreds. Of slowly realising that everyone is right - publication takes more than a great book. It takes a great book to meet the right agent/editor at the right time. And I'm not even claiming mine is anything close to that.

Thinking back to my days as a triathlete, it's pretty much exactly like putting in all the hard work, all the training, all the hard yeards, the early mornins, the long sessions in sleet and snow when everyone else is tucked up in bed, starting a race but, for whatever reason, never making it to the finishing line. Sure there might be other races. Sure maybe one day I'll be good enough to win one. But I really thought it might be this one!

And not only is that one going on the shelf, but two others as well. It's really hard to gather up much enthusiasm to write the sequels to a book that is probably never going to see the light of day. I'm pretty sure I'll come back to the third one, it's done really well in contests and I still really love the idea but I just need a break from the same cast for awhile. I adore them, but I need to take a break so I can come back and write it like the previous two never existed.

It would be easy to look back and think "well that was a total waste of my time" but it wasn't. I've learnt so much - about writing, about publishing, about doing something that I never thought I could - writing an entire manuscript. Not to mention the incredible people that I've met and connections that I've made.

And there's also something exciting and liberating right here. A blank page. New characters, new places, new situations, new twists and turns and voices and endings. No more rewriting the same chapter sixteen times. No more editing the same scene for weeks on end. A break from contests and rejections, at least for awhile. A new set of possibilities.

I have no idea what my new story is going to be about. I have a few half formed ones bouncing around in my head. I have a couple of semi formed characters with possibilities.  A line that sounds like it could be a winner if it found the right home. That's all.

So blogger world, sometime soon I'm going to do something that I haven't done on my Mac for a really long time.

File. New.

Besides, I'll have a new name soon so that feels like reason enough for a new book and who knows? Maybe Kara Isaac will channel some sort of writing muse that this Kara never had :)

Friday Night Lights

I'm at home. Saturday was my hen's party and so I'd made a date with my sister-in-law, bridesmaid and all round fun person to hang out since my brother was out of town for the night. I also had a date with an enormous batch of brownies :)

So I get home. Change from work gear into slob gear (aka trackpants, slippers and a really ugly polar fleece that I've had since last millennia) and pull all the brownie ingredients out (aka two boxes of Betty Crocker and some eggs).

Then Bec texts; "Your engagement present is here. Come over and get it!"
Kara: "I'm at home. I thought you were coming here?."
Bec: "No, you need to come here to get it."
Kara: "I'm making a brownie!"
Bec: "You can make it here."
Kara: "Can't you bring the present with you when you come here?"
Bec: "Just come and bring the brownie with you."
Kara: "I can't bring it. It's all mixed up in the bowl!"
Bec: "Come on. It's really really cool!"
Kara: "But are we coming back here."
Bec: "Yup, no worries."
Kara: "Okay, I'll be there soon."

Now my sister-in-law is one of the most easy going people in the world so it should have struck me as odd that she was being so high maintenance. Especially when the last time I was being so high maintenance to her was the night my brother proposed and I was the lynch pin of some complicated ruse involving keys that he had left behind that I couldn't pick up, she had to bring to me!

I did start getting suss in the car on the way over because I couldn't think of anything the present could possibly be that would mean she couldn't bring it to me, but that I had to go to her, especially when she had the bigger car! At one point I almost turned around to go home and get changed, thinking that maybe my hen's night was actually starting on Friday night and my and my slippers and polar fleece were about to get humiliated. Then I started wondering if they'd bought us some trick present, like some huge hideous piece of art. And then I gave up because it was Friday and all I wanted to do was bake brownies and eat batter, not unravel the inner gift workings of my brother and sister-in-law's minds.

So I get to their house, and Bec opens the door (note the gorgeous polar fleece - proving that this was not a night I was expecting any cameras to be nearby!).

In the centre of the lounge there's this long thin TV box, and now I'm definitely thinking it's some ugly art because I knew that unless Bec and Christian had won Lotto and not breathed a word, there was no way it was a TV.

So with Bec dancing around wielding a camera and chating "Open it, open it, open it", and me now convinced it must be a hideous piece of abstract art because nothing else could fit in there, I opened the box and screamed a scream that I only hope I can manage if some maniac with a knife is chasing me because it would send them to their knees...

This is my little sister Melly who lives in Australia

This is how far I jumped back when I saw her

This is me still hyperventalating two minutes later

And this is my scheming sister-in-law Bec who arranged the whole thing :)

Blending Tradition

Before I met Josh, one thing that I never thought about was marrying someone from a significantly different culture than mine. Sure I thought that I might marry an Australian, hoped for an Irishman (favourite accent) and could see myself being swept off my feet by some dashing American but it never, ever, occurred to me that I would be marrying into the Middle Eastern equivalent of My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

It's great and I love it even though I sometimes get overwhelmed by the sheer exhuberance and intensity of it all. I love the Assyrian culture and their warmth and openness and hospitality and focus on family and community. And man do the put those of us with sedate Anglo-Saxon backgrounds people to shame when it comes to how to party and celebrate. If you've seen the photos of our engagement party, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

The thing that we've been talking about, ever since we got engaged, is given that our cultures do things so differently, how do we make this both our wedding? How do we take the best of the celebratory Assyrian culture and blend it with the more traditional and create something that is uniquely ours. How do you mix the 600-1000 all singing all dancing, with the Christian ceremony and 150 sit down meal.

The one thing that I've learned as we've weaved our way in and out and around a number of traditions is never say never when it comes to your wedding. If there was one thing that I would have always thought I would have been non-negotiable on it's this - the opening of the church doors and the first time Josh seeing me being when I walk through those doors, on my Dad's arm, and down the aisle. Friends and family on both sides, Josh standing up front with the minister, the soaring church ceiling, the whole shebang.

But Josh's family has this tradition where the grooms family and friends pick up the bride from the bride's house. Much like my engagement party, I haven't quite got my head around this yet, but suffice to say it involves a lot of singing, a lot of dancing, a lot of noise, the mixing of both families, some form of feast and then the bride and groom head to the ceremony together.

So, there are two questions. Firstly - are we going to try and do this? Am I prepared to give up my thing about the first time Josh seeing me being at the church and my wedding day looking a whole lot different than I ever imagined? And, if we do, how? My parents don't live in Wellington, so it would mean asking some friends if we can borrow their house for about 150 strangers (to them) to sing and dance through. It would mean inconveniencing their neighbours (they block the street with the dancing procession). How do we get all the Australians to wherever it would be and then to the church (on time)? How do we make it work with the rest of the day? Who do we involve from my side? How do my parents feel about it?

So far we've reached a tentative yes on the first. It sounds like fun, an after our engagement party, I'm happy to admit most of their traditions are way more joyous than ours and this symbol of two families joining beats the mothers lighting the union candle by a long shot (no offence to those of you who did). As for the logistics. I have absolutely no idea how we're going to make it happen. But if you check back in early February their will hopefully be some awesome photos!

What about you? Been in, or at, any weddings with some traditions that you'd never known existed before?  How did they work out?

Gone!

I realise that I've been pretty quiet for the last few days. The reason? Well beyond the wedding dress meltdown, I was getting my manuscript ready to send off to both the editor and agent that I met at the ACFW Confernce.

I was determined to gt it to them in less than two months post conference (you hear all the time about writers who get requests a conferences for proposals or manuscripts who never follow through and you just want to kick them for squandering such a great opportunity). So as soon as I got some feedback back from my critiquer in the US I got stuck in. And Jaime had already sent hers so I couldn't let the team down!

This was the first time she'd seen it "relocated" to the US and pretty much all of her suggestions revolved around phrases that I thought everyone used, but apparently people living in the US don't! Holiday becomes vacation, rang becomes called and don't even get me started on trying to translate phrases like "spat the dummy", "lost the plot" and "back on form"!!!!

Then yesterday evening I finally reached a point where I thought it was ready to go. The hard thing about proposals is you know that it will never be perfect when it's sent into the ether. Despite having proof read it 435 times somewhere there will be a spelling mistake, despite having rewritten the synopsis about 200 times, the next time you read it, you will find another way to make it stronger, and despite having being anally retentive in your formatting, something will happen to it in cyber space that will make it look at the other end like you let a toddler loose in the font and font size functions.

There will always be something. But if you wait until you reach perfection, it's never going anywhere, so instead what you're aiming for a close enough to greatness whoever is on the other end will forgive the occasional mispelt word, or missed comma or that weird paragraph will TNR 12 has somehow morphed into Arial 8 and keep reading anyway.

So it's gone. With a deep breath and a prayer it got sent out into the big wide world last night. And Josh and I went out and gorged ourselves on garlic naan and butter chicken to celebrate.

I've heard back form the agent saying that they probably won't get back to me until January. I would imagine that it will be even longer for the editor. So worst case scenario - between now and my next set of rejections I'm going to acquire a husband and have a luxury Pacific Island honeymoon :)

Honestly, I have no idea what I'm going to do if I get another two solid rejections from here. But that's something that, right now, is sitting squarely in the "think about post-wedding, post-honeymoon, upon return to "real" life in 2010" basket!

The Dress

I have a confession to make.

I don't love my wedding dress.

There.

I've said it.

Quite possibly committed the ultimate wedding hari kari and am about to have cupid stab me with his arrow.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't dislike it. I even like it. I just don't have that warm goey feeling that this little girl princess part of me was always expecting when she looked in the mirror and saw the dress that she was going to walk up the aisle in.

Want to know what the problem is? Apart from it being nothing like the dress I always imagined I would wear (I always thought I'd go more for sophisticaled and elegant and this one is definitely more on the froo froo princessy side) The real problem? It's that I found my dream dress and did the pragmatic thing instead of the princess thing.

I did. I found my dream Maggie Sorrato dress in Sydney in June (the same day I found this one) and fell in love. But it was $2000 more than this one and, at the end of the day, I just couldn't justify spending that much money on a dress for one day. And this dress, well sure it wasn't all my dreams come true, but it was gorgeous in its own way, and everyone else loved it, and I didn't not like it and it was on S A L E.

And I know that I made the right decision, and it's not that this isn't a beautiful dress, and once I have hair and makeup and everything I'm sure it will all be fine, and since only three other people saw me in the dream dress it's not like anyone else knows what to compare it to, but the really spoilt part of me just really wishes that that was the dress I was wearing on 7 January.

Actually what I really wish is that I could have a fitting and be excited about what I'm wearing instead of looking around the bridal salon and wishing that I could have a do-over!

Three Years All For Nothing

Yesterday I discovered that I've been listening to the same music for the last three years for no reason whatsoever.

I'm sure this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, so let me explain. About four years ago my entire CD collection was stolen by some cheeky monkey out of the front seat of my car while I was getting some stuff out of the boot. To this day that still makes me laugh since I would say a stash of Christian music would have been the absolute last thing that person was hoping for.

It was a bit of a pain but, having been an early adaptor to the cutting edge technology known as the i-Pod, I still had most of my music. And so on I semi-merrily continued.

Then two years ago disaster struck. My iTunes lived on my work laptop. I would like to say I not only did this with the full knowledge of my IT team, but that one of the IT support guys actually loaded it onto my laptop for me. Then, someone who obviously had far too much time on their hands to dream up nasty things to do to poor hard working public servants, issued an edict than all non work related programmes were to be removed pronto.

I was named an offender of the edict and so duly two IT guys showed up to remove my iTunes (I'm really not sure what the second one was for - to hold me down if I tried to stop them??) and it was verily dumped into cyberspace.

And therein lay the problem. You see I don't own a pc, I'm a Mac girl baby, and someone who I trusted had knowledgeable told me that there was some major difference between Mac compatible i-Pods and PC compatible i-Pods and that the moment I plugged my i-Pod into my Mac, my entire library would be wiped, gone, finito, poof away to join i-Tunes in cyber space.

Having had my cds swiped by i-Pod was the only device remaining that housed my music collection. And it wasn't just any collection. It housed classics such as SClub7, the Spice Girls, the Backstreet Boys and numerous other pop bands that, while I might mock them in public, actually have music that is quite good to run to.

And so, for the last two years, I have been held hostage by an i-Pod trapped in 2006. The same 467 songs and 12 sermons for almost 1000 days.

Then last week I broke. I couldn't do this anymore. I no longer cared if I didn't hear one of those songs for as long as I lived. In fact wiping the thing would be a blessed relief from the torture of having to hear the opening bars of S Club Party for the 600th time.

Yes there were a few songs that I could still tolerate, that I wasn't sure if I would be able to get again, but on the whole, enough was enough.

So on Tuesday night, I finally did it. I plugged my i-Pod into my Mac and waited for the message telling me that, for my unfaithfulness to the Apple, my music had to go.

Want to know what happened? NOTHING. Well not nothing, but after a couple of moments thinking, up my i-Pod popped with all its contents intact, up popped my Mac Library with all its contents intact. Just sitting there, great friends, all harmonious in one happy screen. Not only that, but I can move things from my Mac library to my i-Pod and nothing happens.

N O T H I N G

I have been torturing myself with the same songs over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over for the last almost three years for absolutely no reason.

I almost cried.

And I can only say to the person who gave me that assured piece of i-Pod advice - you a REALLY lucky I can't for the life of me remember who you are!

Temporarily Relocated :)

Today I Am Blogging Over At http://www.internationalchristianfictionwriters.blogspot.com/ so jump on over and say hi :)

Skip This One If You're Already Bored Senseless By My Wedding :)

As I write this, I’m sitting here staring at four cases of wine that have just been delivered for our wedding. Yes, yes, I know it’s still two months ago but when it comes to alcohol acquisition Josh and I are taking a somewhat ad hoc approach. Also know as the see-something-we-like-on-special-and-buy-6-bottles option.

We figure this will hopefully be a lot more painless than getting a large bill in January when we’re already broke. So the great news is there’ll be lots to choose from. The not so great? If you happen to be at our wedding and find something you really really like - good luck getting any more!

Anyway, while I’m sure you’re all sick and tired of my wedding, so am I. And so I am going to bore you some more with “Kara’s Wedding Tips”

1) RSVP early. Yes E A R L Y. As in before the date listed on the card. If you know your definite answer, please just tell us. Especially if you’re a no!
2) Which leads me to the second, if you’ve said yes, you can say no but not like the day before unless someone is ill with the plague or something terrible like that). But if you’ve declined, you can’t turn around later and accept, no you can’t! Why? Because either (a) someone else has already been invited in your place or (b) the invite list was oversubscribed to begin with and they were secretly counting on your no.
3) Don’t ask the bride if she’s planning to go on a wedding diet. Especially not while eyeing her up and down. For all you know she’s been slaving away for the last month and you’ve just told her that all that denial of chocolate and hours on the treadmill are all for nought.
4) Keep your opinions to yourself when it comes to wedding dresses. Telling her all about how you went to a wedding last weekend and the bride wore this hideous meringue froo froo dress with puffed sleeves could have you lined up for a world of pain when she marches down the aisle in its replica (don’t worry I’m not – but it has happened!)
5) There’s a BIG difference between food allergies and preferences. Yes, I want to know if simply being in the same room as a nut is going to put you ten steps closer to the great hereafter. Unless you are my mother or my fiancé, I really really really really don’t care if you don’t like tomatoes in your salad, or have strong opinions about mixing fruit with meat or chocolate versus vanilla. It’s a buffet. Find something.
6) If I don’t tell you where I’m going on my honeymoon, it’s because I’m afraid you might show up.
7) I love you, I thank you for travelling such a long way for our wedding. But I just can’t organise anyone else’s New Zealand holiday. At the moment I can barely work out how to catch the bus to my new place. Yes I realise I work in tourism. I suggest www.newzealand.com
8) If another guest happens to be your mortal enemy. Suck it up. I’m not going to seat you beside them and there will be 150 other people there. Put on your big girl panties and get over it. (I say this because guys don’t ten to have mortal enemies, they have a fight, and life is all good again).

Anyone else got anything they think I should add?

Where For Art Thou Hairdryer?

This morning it took me twenty minutes to try and find my hairdryer. And that was after it took me 15 minutes to find some underwear.

I hate moving at the best of times. Not even when buff burly guys show up and pack everything and move everything for me. Though I would like it a whole lot better if that was what happened this weekend, along with someone to unpack the boxes at the other end.

Alas, this move was total chaos, to say the least. Aka the kind where you wake up on Sunday morning, look around you and think "I'm moving today and I have not packed a thing" and promply start running around your apartment in circles throwing things in boxes,w ith no rhyme or reason.

Which is why this morning I wandered around my new house able to find plenty of things that I either didn't want, should have thrown out or couldn't even remember owning, but nothing of any practical use. And yes, my hairdryer is still MIA, and yes, I'm a tad grumpy because of the very bad hair day that resulted.

The house, however, is gorgeous and I love every square inch of it. Hopefully I'll soon get around to taking some photos so you can all covet my new palace :)

On the not so great front, it's further away, and so tonight I am about to embark on a brand new adventure entitled "commuting on Wellington public transport". Wish me luck!

Also this week I'll be blogging about engagement party #2 on Saturday night which was about as different from the first as you could get, but still heaps of fun. And my friend Elizabeth made the most AMAZING cake in the world.

Finally, for today, great news - a bunch of us writing internationally have banded together to start our own blog. Starting from tomorrow, you can find a group of us blogging at www.internationalchristianfictionwriters.blogspot.com . It's a great bunch of people, lots of them are published, a few of us (me included) are lucky enough to be included on their glorious coat tails in the hopes that maybe, one day, we'll get to join their ranks. And if not, hey we get to have fun with some great and very illustrious company :)

So come say hi, we're kicking off with a book giveaway, and all going well it will just be the first of many many more to come.

You Are Cordially Invited...

When we started on this whole wedding planning thing I was warned about the invite list. This was usually by someone who got married in the last twelve months and their first-up “have fun with the invitation list” was accompanied by semi-hysterical laughter.

Foolishly, I wasn’t too worried. Getting married in New Zealand, and having my beloved blithely inform me that there was no way than any more than 30 people would come from Australia, let me 98% certain that I wouldn’t have to face pretty much any of the invitation list dramas that many of my friends had.

I’d already checked out my parents and they only wanted to invite a very reasonable 10 family friends, not even close to the 70 another friend’s parent’s insisted on – the majority of whom she had never met. I don’t have a large extended family and there was no expectation of inviting second cousins, or those people who you think you’re related to but you just can’t quite remember how.

Many of my high school friends had gotten married and, as I hadn’t been invited to their receptions, I knew I wasn’t expected to invite them to mine if numbers got tight. Ditto with church friends.

So I admit, I was somewhat smug that we would easily cruise in on our 115-125 guest list. No dramas. No fuss. In fact quite the reverse – I imagined I was going to spend far more time sad about the people who couldn’t be there, than stressing about the numbers of those who could.

Ha! And the universe laughed!

What was my fatal flaw in my reasoning blog world?

Yes, of course, it was the boy.

The adorable, earnest and obviously very unassuming guy who plainly had no idea how many of his friends and family either (a) loved him to distraction and wouldn’t miss his wedding for the world or (b) really really wanted an excuse to have a holiday in New Zealand and finally had one.

The people who Josh had sworn red, black and blue would sooner allow leeches to eat their extremities than get on a plane? Yup they’re all coming. The ones who he swore there was no way they’d be able to afford to come? Yup, must have secretly robbed a bank or won lotto or something, because they’re all accepting “with delight”.

At last time I check the “absolutely definitely no more than 30 from Australia” was 65. And all up, while the maximum our reception can seat 138 people, we have 160 invites out in the big wide world and NO ONE HAS DECLINED.

Cue hysterical laughter. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely thrilled for Josh that so many people are coming and fortunately for him, I am not a bridezilla, otherwise I would be having some kind of terminal meltdown right now. What on earth are we going to do if more than 138 accept? I have no idea. I figure we’ll work it out when that happens. Though I am beginning to develop a bit of a spastic twitch every time I open another RSVP and see “We are thrilled to accept…”

Even with all that, do you want to know what’s really lead us to the pinnacle of teetering on the brink of wedding chaos? The people who have invited themselves. I’d heard rumours of this phenomenon and, as with most other things wedding related, been entirely unsympathetic. As far as I was concerned if someone assumes they’re invited and you weren’t planning on inviting them, you just need to suck it up and tell them so.

I mean, be nice about it, don’t slap them down. But surely something along the lines of “Of course you’re welcome at our wedding, but unfortunately due to the size of the reception venue/combined size of our families/budget constraints/etc etc we haven’t been able to invite you to the reception.”

But people are sneaky! And I don’t mean that in a manipulative way. I just mean that a number of people have just assumed that they were going to be invited and, rather than checking first, have just gone ahead and booked flights and accommodation and then dropped the “Oh by the way we’re flying into Wellington on X for your wedding” bomb!

And I’m not talking about close friends and family who would be rightly offended if they weren’t invited. I’m talking about people so far down the list that if we’d been having a wedding with 600 people, they would have been invites #478-490! I wish I could tell you all the wonderful and varied ways that they’ve informed us they’re coming to our wedding but, on the off chance that someone who reads this knows someone and says “guess what I read in Kara’s blog the other day” and they realise I was talking about them I’m going to resist.

But if we end up with more than 138 people they’ll know who they are. They’ll be the guests in the roped off “standing room only’ zone :)

So since I can’t (for another year at least anyway) tell you the tales of my guests to be, can anyone out there cheer me up with any of your own (or friends/families) invitation dramas???

Good Byes and Other Sad Things

I feel bad. We totally ripped Josh’s Mum off her big goodbye to her first child leaving home (and the country).

To be fair, it wasn’t my fault. It was Sydney traffic, combined with a massive amount of rain.

Discovery of the weekend? Sydneysiders have no idea how to drive in torrential rain. It’s like they all slow down to 30k/hr and try to navigate around puddles, as if getting the underside of their car wet is unthinkable.

Which is why that, instead of checking in two hours before our flight and having a relaxed coffee at the airport with Josh’s parents before we flew out, we ended up doing one of those frantic kerbside jump, grab and sprints for check-in an hour before departure.

I felt terrible, standing on the kerb as Josh’s Mum started to tear up and attempt to say goodbye to her eldest child, whilst knowing that a prolonged emotional farewell could potentially cost us two airfares.

I was 17 when I left home to go to university. From memory my parents waved me merrily off at the airport with the joy of wooohoooo one kid down, two to go!

It was a mad weekend. On one hand it was crazy exciting in a surreal kind of way. Finally, after a year, long distance was over. No more time differences, no more trying to synch calendars just to talk to each other for 20 minutes, no more weeks and weeks between visits, and tears and airports and fighting over the phone and wedding planning over email and trying to live two lives in two countries.

On the other hand, it was definitely a big reality check in all the things that Josh is giving up to move to New Zealand and marry me. His family, his friends, his church, his job, his entire life as he knows it. And he handled it all much better than I would have!

So the next part of our story is going to be pretty interesting. Josh adjusting to a new country, finding a job, making new friends and everything else that comes with moving. Me adjusting to having my fiancé actually in the same city as me and no longer being the sole ruler of my own universe.

Honestly, right now it’s pretty blissful. Last night I got home from work to Josh cooking dinner for me and, as I type this, he’s packing up my apartment for my move this weekend before coming to take me out for lunch. Can't really beat that :)

P.S. In actual writing related news I just found out yesterday that I came second in the Inspirational Category of the Lone Star Contest.