I Second That Emotion...20 Days and impatiently counting

This week I'll be working on some blog posts for the Visit Mississippi Travel Blog. A few of my coworkers have been traveling the state and posting pictures. It makes me a little jealous because they went to some gorgeous locations - and well, I didn't!

I am this close to finishing the Delta itineraries. For the past few weeks I've been making changes, adding information and collecting feedback from all the proofreaders. Bless them for doing that for me! I've also been tackling the Pines Region, squeezing in a few scripts to read and doing location breakdowns for each one.

Filmmakers send scripts to film offices all over the country, especially to the ones that have good incentives - which means, they get tax breaks for spending a certain amount of money during production. So when scripts are sent into the office, they are thoroughly read and reviewed to see if the locations needed fit the descriptions of those in our database.

In other news, I am going back to the Delta to visit Cleveland on Tuesday with my coworkers to visit with the CVB and other folks, see the sights, eat some food! Cleveland has been designated a Cultural Corners Community, which is a grant program through Tourism and the state of Mississippi to help preserve and promote its cultural heritage significance.

Here's more from the press release:

The MDA Tourism Bureau of Film and Culture established a Certified Cultural Corners
Program in 2008 that identifies communities in Mississippi that have cultural heritage
assets of national significance in at least two of the following areas: American Indian
heritage, art and architecture, Civil War history, Civil Rights history, culinary culture,
literary heritage, and musical heritage.

And from out of no where,
without any warning at all,
here's a wedding hijack!!

The horror!! Ahhhhhh!!!

QB and I have decided to do some decor-related things ourselves to help the budget, so rather than paying the florist to make us an arrangement for $300, we did it for probably about less than half, at the very most.

If I do say so myself, I think the arrangements turned out well. I wasn't sure how I wanted to make it look but it worked itself out, really, in the form of layers. Judging from the altar inside of the church I wanted a lateral arrangement rather than flowers sticking out of a tall urn. There's already a tall cross on the altar and I don't want to detract from that too much.

So, when you stick them together, this is what it will look like:

As you can see below, I have put the arrangements on the top of our kitchen cabinets so they won't get destroyed by the feline element in the house (QB's cat, Eliza, is notorious, in many ways, but flower arrangements in particular...my cat, Greta, is the epitome of perfection, naturally, like her mother...) Also, please ignore the skeezy kitchen curtain that hasn't been replaced since 1972. That's next on our list!

Only the end result was in sight while I was "in the zone" and that thought of taking pictures of the step-by-step process occurred to me while I sat on the kitchen floor after the project was complete. Whoops.

I can tell you what went into it, though:

2 brown baskets
two squares of florist foam each (that was be cut and arranged to fit in the baskets snugly)
4 feather "sticks" each
1 orange baby's breath flower packages each
1 green colored baby's breath flower package each (this was really just background accent color that shows up in the close-up pic more than anything)
1 package of branches each (comes with 4 stems)
2 bags of moss (still have some left over)
Hot glue for moss

I also finished another project but will share more about that later because I have to pick QB up at the airport! Yay! He's home from D.C!

Ooooh.

With all the research and reading I've been doing, it's easy for me to feel a bit disconnected from life as we know it and also what is going on in the pop culture world.

Getting disconnected, unfortunately is easy for me to do and I don't like it, especially when I let myself get caught up in the "enough" spiral: What I am doing is not enough. (I roll my eyes just thinking about it.) So, from time to time, I hit bottom and have to re-evaluate, re-examine and replenish my well, rest and recuperate.

Here I sit.

I have several wells that got filled today:

My songwriting well
My guitar-playing/practicing well
My singing well
My special walks around the neighborhood with QB well
Loving on my fuzzy kitty well
My sleeping in well
My quiet time well

Namely my "indie rock well" has not been fed at all lately and I was excited to find this Portland, OR band from Ali Edwards' blog, which was mentioned in one of my all-time favorite blogs, Ordinary Courage, authored by Brene Brown. The band is called Blind Pilot and I'm in love!

Several months back, I set two very strong intentions and they were: writing and performing. During my current renewing phase, I am re-intentioning my previous intentions. Yes, that's right - I'm going to coin a new term and have my own re-intention intentioning session. It will ensure that I can play the guitar until the tips of my fingers are sore and calloused, sing my heart out for hours at a time, connect with other artists, and designate quiet time in which to write, darn it. I also want to find a few people who want to be in a band and travel with me. I'm going to work on that for next year - my own little tour through the South and beyond.

Coming soon will be more blogs about Mississippi travels along with the interviews and video footage we've been gathering from the Delta.

Arty, Owlie Wedthings

Now that invitations have officially gone out, I'm ok with posting the real thing below. They turned out so well! There is a man here we know through the Crossroads Film Society who owns about two or three old (seriously, old) letterpress machines and we found the owl face in one of his dingbat books. One of QB's friends at work designed the RSVP card and the map for us - and he did a great job.

I, personally, love owls because I've had a couple of run-ins with one in the neighborhood while I was doing a lot of my inner transition work and intensive life coaching last fall. QB and I saw one flying through the trees in our neighborhood park, so our little Hugo is around and watching over us. We think owls are great woodsy creatures and perfect for a fall wedding.

Also, here is what I've been diligently working on the past couple of weeks, so that people will find pretty invitations in their mailbox...I mixed two ink colors together to get a pretty brown metallic ink, bought a calligraphy pen set, a small paint brush to fill the resevoir of the nib and practiced a good bit first. Naturally, my technique became better the more invitations I wrote, but overall I'm proud of how they turned out and got lots of compliments.



Our "guestbook" at the reception is a great idea that QB came up with, which is for people to sign cards and "mail" them to us. That is a nod to his mom and step-dad (and other family members, as a matter of fact) who both work at the P.O. We bought a standard mailbox at Wal-Mart and my idea was to get vintage postcards off of Ebay, so that they could write special messages to us and stick them in the mailbox.

Below is the message:

My sign initially started out on one side of a Manila folder (above) and I was wondering if maybe I could cut it with pinking shears with a pattern, but then an idea popped in my head! I've been cutting out owl shapes from sheet music that I plan on hanging at the reception...why not cut out an owl shape for this sign as well? I had to draw and adjust for the size, but unconsciously I had written everything in a shape conducive to the owl shape! What fun! So, here he is! Isn't he lovely? :)