Anniversary, Flowers and a Race

Happy October!! I think it's safe to say that Fall has officially arrived. I had both a relaxing and intense weekend. Firstly as you know, our 6 year anniversary was on Friday. I told you we had BIG PLANS, and I meant it. We had decided early on last week that all we wanted to do was stay. in. We have been running around nearly every weekend for the past month. Plus, I'm going to be in PA for the next 2 weekends so I really just wanted to stay in, have a nice dinner, and watch movies with Chris...which is just what we did! I came home, put on some Eva Cassidy, which is some of the most calming music in the world, poured myself a glass of pinot grigio, and made mashed sweet potatoes, risotto, and meatloaf (I had made and froze the meatloaf a few weeks before so that was just a matter of reheating, but still it was homemade!).

I loooove Risotto

We sat down and had a nice meal together. No rushing around, no t.v., no having to get ready for work tomorrow, just us. After dinner I rushed over to Stop and Shop because I had a hankering for pumpkin treats this weekend...I'm in full Fall mode. So I bought everything I needed to make pumpkin chocolate chip muffins and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. I made the cookies while we watched Get Him to the Greek (sorry if you liked it, but that was the worst movie I've ever seen) and went to bed at the decent hour of 12:30!

On Saturday, my parents came to spend the weekend. We headed right out to my flower appointment at Pedestals in Long Island. My parents got a little stuck in traffic coming out to New York and we were juuust going to make our 2:00 appointment if we skipped lunch. So, I called pedestals and asked if it was at all possible to push my appointment back to 2:30. They told me it was no problem. However, when I arrived...I felt rather rushed through the appointment because we quote "only have half the amount of time to do what normally takes an hour" unquote (I realize the actual "   ''s are unnecessary in this instance). If I knew I was going to be rushed through my appointment, I would have just had my parents meet me there! So not only was I extremely overwhelmed by picking out my flowers (because I don't really know what I want), I was a little annoyed, too.

We sat down with the consultant and he definitely knew what he was doing, but I'm realizing picking flowers means going by blind faith that the person's suggestions will look good, because heck if I know what any of this will look like! It's very "we can use this type of flower, with this filler, with this accent, and put in a tall vase that will sort of look like this" and I have pretty much 12 different images floating around in my head as to how this could look. I can only hope that I trust the consultant (which I did) with every suggestion he made and say "Yes, that's fine." Luckily, I would see a mock-up of my centerpieces 3 or 4 months before, so if I wanted to make changes I absolutely could.

No surprise here, but I'm going to check out a few more florists before actually signing anything. Not only to do some price comparison shopping, but for "idea" comparison shopping. Think about it: I was able to walk out of there with someone's complete floral vision of my day on paper. If I can get some other people's "visions" based on my colors and what I need, I can pull from each of those and hopefully have a better understanding of what actually is "my vision". So though it was overwhelming, I'm glad I at least have an understanding now of what I need for the wedding, what flowers fit well into my color scheme, and what to look for when I'm scouring over pictures. It was very helpful.

On Sunday I ran the DIVA Half Marathon on Long Island with my friends Mandy and Kate!!!I know this is supposed to be all about wedding, BUT I can't not talk about this amazing experience! Plus, all this running has to do with staying in shape for the big ol' dress fitting in January! We were fabulous and I couldn't be prouder of all three of us, especially Kate and Mandy for completing their very first (of hopefully many) half marathon!

The last half marathon I fully ran was the More Half Marathon in Central Park last April 2009 (I bailed last minute on this past April because of our engagement party, and before that in the Queens Half Marathon my knee bothered me so much I had to walk the last 4 miles!) Though I didn't get an "official" time for the More Half Marathon (due to excessive heat they had to call it a "fun run"), I'm pretty sure I clocked in at about 2:11. I wanted to at least do better than that this time around...so I was aiming for 2:10.

My official time ended up being 2:03:06!!! I seriously did not even remotely expect to knock off that many minutes from last time. All that crazy interval training and tempo runs I did following Hal Higdon's training schedule really paid off without me even realizing it! Here was my official time and placement:

I am so happy with my time and definitely have a new goal for my next one: To break 2 hours! I would absolutely do the DIVA half marathon again next year. It was a lot of fun, it was a great smooth, flat course, it was awesome getting a tiara and boa for the last mile (even though I held my boa because the feathers kept flying into my mouth!), it was very empowering, and I'd love to try and recruit more friends to do it with me and make it a tradition.


Read all about my whole experience running the DIVA Half Marathon on my running blog by clicking here.