Quickie

My brain seems very tired right now so this will be short...

My family is here! They arrived on Sunday night and it has been fabulous so far. We have been busy - real busy but it's all been good stuff. Been doing some shopping, some touristy stuff and a lot of EATING. My Mum is a killer Indian food chef - in fact she cooks really good food all around. I took my Mum to my favorite store called The Limited which has pretty well made and fancy clothes. I get all of my work outfits from there. Got her some outfits which she is very happy with and she looked so stellar in them! Not just stellar but hot! oooh-oooh!

Right now I am exhausted because we have been running around quite a bit but it feels great to have them here. Rich and my Dad are getting on fabulously - almost too well since they seem to be ganging up on me (in a friendly kinda way of course!). But it's all good. Not sure if I mentionned but this is the first time that the family is meeting Rich so to see everybody getting along so well makes my heart sing. All the more confirmation that my Richie is the one. :)

Saturday, my sister and bro-in-law drive in which will add two more in to the mix! It'll be good to have the three sisters together again. And my brother in law is pretty fun to hang out with. It'll be nice to see my Dad have his two son-in-laws to hang out with and cause trouble with as well!

So far I've taken them to downtown Chandler, the Queen Creek Olive Mill, the mall and David's Bridal :). We also made a trip to Costco today which they loved. Who doesn't love Costco?? I think that we want to take them to Tempe Beach Park and the Papago Park area tomorrow. They are not big museum kinda folks. Any other ideas on things to do here? Next week when Rich's Mum is in town I want to take everybody out on a hike and picnic to Saguaro Lake. My bestie Kelly will be there too! It'll be a big outing and I'm looking forward to all kinds of tom foolery. Yes, I just said 'tom foolery'.

And then in about 9 days I will be a married lady!! Bahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! Still got some stuff to take care of. OH. Update on the chuppah. Chuppah = 1, me = 0. It's true, the chuppah won and I lost. I went to Lowe's and got all the materials I needed to make this darn Chuppah and it cost me about $100! I couldn't justify spending that kind of money for a half hour ceremony so we are resorting back to the wedding arch which is fine with me...especially when it saves me $100! Who knew that it would have cost so much? Did I mention that my math has gone down the crap shoot since high school? That's why I work in social work - ha!

Speaking of which, although I am not missing being at work too much I am missing my peeps. :( We all get along so well at work and have such awesome camradarie. Well - for the most part that is! I guess there will always be some amount of running against the grain wherever you go. Oh well, the point is that I miss my buddies but the good news is that some are coming to the wedding so I'll be excited to see them oh so soon and dance to our heart's content! I wish I could invite even more people but we really are pushing it with our numbers. We're pretty over at this point. Ooops! Just too many friends - how can we complain about that, right?

Well that's about it for now. If I weren't so tired I would post pics of the family. OH - in other news... we got a video camera!! :) Yes that does mean you could even get to see a video of them in action...oh boy - watch out world!

Till later,
~kavita
-x-

Halloween pics!

This year for Halloween, Rich and I expanded our annual crew by one and headed to a house party. Rich by far had the best costume he has ever had! Me - I decided last minute to dress up so I ended up in your typical french maid costume. Next year I will prepare ahead of time and make me Bjork swan dress which I have always dreamt about! Here are some pics. :)

This guy made this pumpkin look like a cheeseburger. Isn't it awesome??

Stacey (a.k.a. Kim Kardashian) and me


Rich's gargantuan sized beard really complimented the Rabbi outfit he had going!

Jesus and Rabbi came together for a night of debauchery. :) ps - that's our buddy Ryan as Jesus.

Tune and some dude dressed up as Silent Bob. It was the BEST Silent Bob costume ever and I swear that it was really him. He looks identical!

The girls - Tune, Stacey and me.

This is the best pic!

French maid kinda went 80's with the gloves and the Madonna pose. :)

Hello stranger

Oh wait - the stranger is actually ME. :) I think this may have been one of the longest stretches of non-posting. And I know what you're all thinking....that's it's because that I've been sooooo busy with wedding planning. Well the awful truth is that I haven't been busy but just LAZY. LAZEE. LAY-ZY. Very lazy about posting!!

I know it was all a farce, right? You probably thought that I've been slaving away! I mean we have been up to stuff but so far it's going really smoothly. Really smoothly. T-14 days. Phew. Two weeks. Where did the time go, huh? Just where did it go? I remember when it was a month ago and suddenly we're 2 weeks away. Wow. Just wow.

We don't really have much left to do. We need to meet with the hotel one last time, meet with the DJ, check in with the florist. Need to write our speeches. Oh - need to make that darn chuppah! That thing will be the life of me - I swear! Oh we also need to print out and fold the programs. ps - OfficeMax is incredibly cheap if you're a good DIYer. I want to make some candle holders. Hmm...need to get my hair dyed again. Side note - it's amazing how fast my hair grows. Oh and one last dress fitting.

The nice thing is that I am now off of work for the next 3 weeks. 2 weeks to spend with my family and get final prep done and RELAX. :) And then 1 week off after the wedding to decompress and hopefully get away somewhere. We've procrastinated in finding a cabin up North so we'll see if that really pans out. Rich seems to think that we can have our 'get-a-way' right here in our own house. Of course....I have other ideas!

I have tiny anxiety about not being at work. Not that I'm worried about things being taken care of because I have a very dependable crew but that I'll have a piece of me missing for a couple weeks. Something to structure my days, keep me busy, something that I'm passionate about, yada-yada-yada. But of course - you can't really beat 3 weeks off. :) I think my boss might be worried that I won't come back because he keeps telling me to not forget how awesome work is. But he has nothing to worry about. I'll miss my work family these next couple of weeks and am jazzed about coming back. There'll hopefully be some cool changes to come back to as well! Very cool in fact!

So far I'm not feeling nervous. Not feeling overwhelmed. Probably more so than anything - excited and eager to party the night away with family and some pretty AWESOME friends. I'm thrilled about our song list for the party. I went through and picked out a load of crowd favorites. Knowing my luck, I'm probably going to be the idiot with a beer in hand, dancing solo on the dance floor, screaming the words at the top of my lungs! Haha! More so than anything though I feel pretty calm. I don't know how - seriously don't know how. I'm not doing any yoga or meditation or any tap dancing either. I just feel this calm energy flowing through me. Once in a while I'll take a look at our to-do list and think 'holy crap' but then it goes away real fast as I realize that it's just one thing at a time. :) And most importantly - I simply cannot wait to be a married woman. Can't wait to be up there with my Richie. I hope I don't do the ugly cry. I did that on our engagement night and my was that embarassing and awkward! Thankfully it was only Rich and the doggies but still....it wasn't pretty folks. :) And then I cried out of the blue at the Chicago bridal shower which let me tell you was WIERD because I hardly knew anybody there. I think it was more so because I was thinking so much about my family and how they couldn't be at the shower but still...I lost all composure and again it wasn't pretty.

Sigh. I'm rambling aren't I? I guess that's what you get when I don't post for a while! Just a rambling post. Ramble, ramble, ramble. Blah, blah, blah. :) The next couple of weeks will most likely be quiet from my end. My little sister (a.k.a. piglet) and my folks are flying in on Sunday night so I'm not sure there will be time to blog and there will probably be a struggle over computer usage too. :) ps - piglet - if you can fix our desktop it's ALL yours to use.

So if I'm not posting (which watch now, i'll probably be on here multiple times) I'll be sure to post the link of our photographer's blog after the wedding as she usually uploads a preview of pictures. Hopefully she doesn't catch the 'ugly cry'. (wink)

Love ya guys,
~k
-x-

Jipped!

I felt rather jipped after recently opening up a fortune cookie to find this...(ps - I can't get this picture to sit the right way up...it's like a wierd April fool's joke although it is October)...

Would you feel jipped too? :) Although I have to say that I did think it was rather cute! And thank you to everybody who supported the video blog post. I'm considering doing it again but not sure what to jibber jabber about!

Me in 3-D

Ok, this is a total experiment. I don't know what inspired me to try this out but I did. I videotaped my post for today. It's all wedding-related...blah, blah, blah. :)



I have to say that watching myself on video is an icky feeling. Blurgh. BUT...i think it was a good experience to see how maybe others see me. I obviously talk too fast (but my Mum told me this yearrrrrs ago). I also come across off more ditsy than I wish. Bahh! And...what is up with my accent??? In my mind it is still pretty British but I listen to myself and I realize how American I sound. What??? It was a bit of a shock. Maybe more than just a bit. :)

My one fear is that this video might be off-putting to you because I realized that some of you have never heard my voice and your vision of what I sound like might not match reality! I remember when I first heard Braja's voice on her radio posts and it was so different. Gorgeous, beautiful and enchanting but different than what I was expecting. Don't ask me what I was expecting b/c I simply don't know!

Anyway so here goes...

Untitled from Kavita Sequeira on Vimeo.

Wedding Update - it's a good 'n!

Ooooh, I am getting sooooooooooooo excited! I've been waiting to blog because I've been working on a couple projects that I'd like to show you. Are you ready?? :)

First, let me show you the flowers which I did not make (come on, I'm not that crafty!). We are getting flowers done through Safeway. They are such a BARGAIN! This is what our centerpieces will look like! Do you love it? I am SOOOO in love! Ok, maybe I should simmer down on the capslock, huh?


Guess how much each centerpiece costs? $17.99. Yup, that's it. For less than $20 a table, you can get this beauty! My bestie and I went to another flower shop that we were told would be a screaming deal. Umm no my friends - Safeway is a screaming deal! Our florist's name is Maria and she is uber-talented. I get to see the bouquet next weekend and I just cannot wait.

Looks at the vase - it's covered in vertical grass. Seeing flower pictures again put me in a state of bliss! It's so silly how happy flower arrangements make me. haha!

Sooo, let's move on shall we? As you might remember I made a guest book box a while back. To continue the crafty theme, I found an idea online to make a container for guests to deposit greeting cards. It was a stack of boxes with a slot for the greeting cards. Instead of painting the boxes, I painstakingly covered each side in scrapbooking paper. I tried to find really nice wrapping paper but didn't find anything I really liked. I used lovely shiny ribbon and painted a giant cardboard 'B'. Hobby Lobby is a great place to find all of this stuff.

Not bad, eh? The top box is velcroed on so I can easily remove it to get the goodies!

Next up, I had seen an idea in the DIY Bride book for a custom-made aisle runner. Now I looked online and these can seriously cost up to $200. $200!! I swear! Who has the money for that? Not me! But the crafty side of me was calling and I just couldn't say no so voila....personalized and hand-painted aisle runner!

I found the clip-art online and used Publisher to add our details...(see below)...

I blew it up to 30 x 30 and then printed it out. I taped all of the sheets of paper together and then traced the image on to the aisle runner. Then, painted it with acrylics. I ended up adding more swirls and flowers to it to make sure it looked jazzed up. It took many hours but it is soooooo worth it! I plan to cut out the design in to a square and get it framed after the wedding.

Weeeeeeeeeee! It's so pretty that I'm not sure that I will want to walk on it! Haha!


And to finish off the evening, my honey made us a very yummy and elegant dinner...shrimp risotto with squash. The risotto also had some very tasty pancetta in it. It was terribly good! Not too heavy, not too light...and not smushy at all which to be honest was what I was expecting. :) He did REALLY good!

Ahhhh. I'm tired. It's been a busy weekend! I have one more DIY project left - a scrapbook shadowbox to remember Rich's Dad at the wedding. I also have some bell jars to deocrate with ribbon but that won't be anything too hard. I'll literally be tying ribbon around the top of the jar! OH! WAIT! I forgot one more HUGE diy project.....I'm making a chuppah. hahaha - yes I am! That's my next project. :) This wedding stuff is just too much fun!

Vijay has a dream

I have mentioned Braja on my blog in the past and today I need to tell you more about her blog. I have been following Braja's journey for quite a while now. She is Australian and lives in India. Reading her blog is a soothing reminder of how beautiful India is and that's why I love her writing. Recently Braja was involved in a terrifying car accident where she and her husband narrowly escaped death. Reading about her recovery, not only medically but spiritually, has been awe-inspiring. What a fabulous lady! Today she posted about her desire to help the driver - Vijay- of the car as he begins to rebuild his life. Please read her post. Of course I know that to you Braja is somebody new but to me she is a buddy and she is looking to make Vijay's dream come true.

http://lostandfoundinindia.blogspot.com/2009/09/there-once-was-man.html

Thank you,
~Kavita
ps - I was going to blog about box-y looking cars today but that will have to wait until tomorrow. :)