"I'm usually more charismatic than this."

I've been telling myself, over the past few months, that a lot of the reason I wasn't blogging was that I didn't have much to say; all that was really going through my head, at any given time, was "I hate school I hate school" and "I love Mike I love Mike," and I figured neither of those were appropriate blogging topics, mostly in that they're so incredibly boring. (For the record, though: I hate school, but I love Mike. Also for the record, I've given up on finding a clever nickname for him; he may appear later as "Mister Whiskers," but for now his real name will do.) I told myself that after the Semester of Doom ended I would come up with witty repartee, interesting life events, or at least something other than SCHOOL MIKE SCHOOL MIKE SCHOOL MIKE.

So here we are, with the Semester of All Hell Breaking Loose safely behind us, and with only a Semester of Research Without Coursework ahead of us, and what do I have to say? WEDDING WEDDING WEDDING.

And that, my friends, is just not interesting. I'm not one of those brides consumed with details and The Perfect Wedding, Just This One Day For Me and Me Alone, and for the most part I've turned the planning over to my mother, who is doing a fabulous job, but there's still all these pesky little pre-wedding life tasks to be taken care of--we have to move to a shared apartment, for instance; we have to get marriage licenses and buy wedding bands and get special temple recommends and visit/meet his parents and book a hotel room for the honeymoon and buy him a suit and me a dress and figure out how on earth we're going to fit them into the tiny bedroom closet in our new apartment; we have to juggle work and school and wedding RSVPs and just plain spending time with each other, and, really, how do those Perfect Wedding brides handle it?

And so, instead of the interesting person I thought I'd become after all my papers were turned in, I've become, at the end of this summer, a counting machine, with all my thoughts focusing obsessively on various countdowns:

29 days until the wedding

Let me tell you about the honeymoon we almost planned: couch surfing. Hilarious, right? We also tossed around ideas like camping (too many pine needles), a human nest (too weird), and a yurt at a nudist colony (too many penises). We've settled on a cabin at a north coast resort, which sounds blessedly private, normal, and free of both pine needles and extraneous nude male bodies.

7 days until Mike gets back

Can you believe he's gone off backpacking with a month to go before the wedding? It was planned well before we got engaged, so the timing is just bad luck, but I suspect I might die without him, if not from missing him then from the stress of moving and furnishing our place by myself. I even had to buy our bed alone, which I secretly hope he hates, since that would be the perfect revenge. Mike, if you're reading this: an extra-soft mattress would be just what you deserve.

19 days of coughing

It's the freaking acoughalypse over here, as I've spent the last three weeks with a cough bad enough to keep me awake at night throwing up. I've drunk Robitussin by the gallon, kept cough drops in my mouth at all times, and even--this is big for me, since I distrust all medicines and medical professionals--visited a doctor. She listened to my cough, said, yup, that sounds nasty, and prescribed me an asthma inhaler. An inhaler! I'm not having trouble breathing, I'm having trouble breathing without coughing. The inhaler is, you may have guessed, not doing its job. I'm convinced and secretly hopeful that I picked up a case of tuberculosis while in Vietnam a few months ago, mostly because, come on, dying of consumption just before my wedding? Now that would be charismatic and interesting.