Half a week to go (eek)!

On Monday I am still distraught about my hair.  My boss, Anne-Louise, went to Toni & Guy on Friday for her own appointment and tackled them about my horrible hair.  I am to phone Liz on Monday morning to see what she can do.  I phone at 10.00am (no, I’m not that restrained, I had a dental appointment!).  The receptionist says ‘bear with me’ and disappears, coming back on the line a little while later to say that Liz is ‘busy with a customer’ and can she phone me back. I leave my number.  At 12 she hasn’t phoned so I phone again and the process is repeated, except this time I’m told she’s very busy and won’t be able to fit in a phone call to me until about 4pm….  Great customer service or what?  So I take a long lunch and, after returning the hire tin for the top tier which we had borrowed (west of Cardiff) I go to another salon where one of the girls at work gets her excellent highlights done (east of Cardiff).  Thank goodness for little Smart cars that you can park anywhere…. I have a chat with a girl called Helen who agrees it’s horrible but is worried that any more colouring will cause it all to break off.  She gets a second opinion and they agree that they can thread more highlights through the worst bits and then give me a golden toner to make the whole thing more ‘golden’ than ‘rust’.  This Sounds Promising.

On Tuesday I return and they look after me very well – there’s a glass of wine, a cooling gel eye mask and an Indian head massage.  Very relaxing.  And at the end of it, I’m an acceptable blonde again.  I am SO relieved. She did ask ‘why did you go to a new salon just two weeks before your wedding?’ and then agreed I’d had rotten luck when she’d heard the reason…  Helen is now My New Hairdresser.

When I go to work on Wednesday everyone says I look like me again, rather than ‘Sarah with dark hair’ and I am hugely relieved.  I know it’s only hair, but it was HORRIBLE…  We don’t have anything weddingy we have to do on Tuesday evening, so I find myself making a chocolate cake to take into work, and Guy makes more chutney…  Seems neither of us can remember how to not do things for an evening!  I also write to Toni & Guy asking for my money back for the rubbish colour.  It’s £60 and that’s about 4 bottles of champagne, so keep your fingers crossed!

On Wednesday we go to IKEA for bits and bobs and then realise we don’t actually have that much to get.  But we eat there and it’s another night not doing anything weddingy!

On Thursday we make the chocolate cake for the middle tier… looking good!  We also work on the photo board (photos of me and Guy through our lives, looking remarkably similar – uncanny, really).  Some need scanning and re-sizing, and we need captions for all of the pairs of photos… hilarious looking through the old albums!  To give you an idea, this is both of us achieving the same hairstyle in 1978…

On Friday we marzipan the middle tier and make an enormous list of all the food we are serving on both Friday and Saturday so that we don’t forget to put anything out.  We’ve done that before!  Next we need to convert it into an enormous last minute shopping list…  I am absolutely knackered – I think it was all the ‘brown hair’ stress that did it (although going in to work at 7.30 for two days to paint the meeting room was probably unnecessary but I wasn’t sleeping and thought it was A Useful Thing To Do) so I head to bed very early and try to unwind…  I sleep for nearly 12 hours, so I guess I have unwound.

On Saturday, after I eventually wake up, we put another collar of marzipan on the middle tier (we find that two layers works best on sponge cakes) and then ice it with the green icing.  Almost a wedding cake!  We also finalise the photo board, check the second string of lights, buy disposable cameras for the big party and write ourselves Lists of Things To Do for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday…  It’s a glorious sunny day so I also top up the tan and we have a lovely dunk in the pool too…  unwinding nicely!

On Sunday we FINISH the wedding cake.  It’s not perfect if you really stare at it, but it’s very ‘us’ and we’re hugely pleased with it.  It’s a lousy photo because it’s indoors but the thing weighs a ton and we weren’t risking carrying it outside unnecessarily!

Guy and I are keeping with one tradition and not seeing each other before the ceremony so I’ll have to lug it outside to the marquee on Friday morning so that all our guests can see it while they eat their lunch.  We have booked Simon (Karen’s son) to sit in the marquee while we’re off getting married and make sure the squirrels don’t eat it….

We also make sure that the two cartoons fit the gate (they do) and … well, that’s about it.  We’re pretty ready, really!

Weight: Who knows?  With all the scaffolding the dress now fits, and that’s what matters.  However, it does mean that I won’t be having one of those ‘showing off the lacy underwear’ photographs…. What with the major construction work on the top half and the Bridget Jones knickers on the bottom half, it’s not something to be viewed by ANYONE!

Bruises: Cracker on my right knee where I clobbered a bistro table when my bosses took me out for a drink last Thursday.  Since it’s hot and I’m wearing shorts, Guy has seen it, and I’ve managed to convince him it’s got to go by Friday or it’s going to be on show.  Poor chap – he now thinks the dress is red, spotted, shows off cleavage (what cleavage?) and above my knees….

Hair:   Blonde again!  Phew, phew and PHEW.

Nails:  I am still managing to hang on to the broken one, thanks to Boots Superglue.  I have had it professionally mended twice, and both times it lasted less than 48 hours.  So now I mend it myself on an almost daily basis.  The rest of them are looking lovely, but there are still two marquees to put up…

Cake:  It’s finished!  It’s a little, er, wonky in places and I don’t think we’ll be taking it up professionally, but as it’s cost us about £80 instead of £600+ and we’ve had huge fun making it and it’s completely original, we’ve VERY happy with it!  However, we did decide not to use the two cats, black dog, melodeons, guitars and power tools that we had made to go round the bottom.  They’ll come in very handy when we are making a cake for someone with the same interests as us…

Roses:  There might be two I can use, otherwise zippo.  But it was fun trying, and I’ve got three new rose bushes!

Wrinkles: Plenty of wrinkles, and the Eyessential hasn’t yet appeared on Ebay because I couldn’t get the listing thingy to work… but I will do it eventually.  Not before the wedding though!

Unbridal moment of the week: Washing out dustbins.  We’ll need them for bottles, cans and rubbish at the weekend – there’s going to be a whole bin/recycling area going on.  Nice job!

Plan for the week: Test new lawnmowers tomorrow (mine broke last week – timing, eh?), clean house, clean cars, put up marquees, collect flowers, collect ordered food, arrange flowers, do last minute food shopping, make salads, cook beef, slice beef and hams, do nails again, get married.  Easy peasy or what?

And because you asked:

Something Old: My pearl earrings.  Only from Argos years ago, but they’re exactly the right size.  I am now living in fear of dropping one of them down the sink and having to hurtle into Argos in the full gear on Friday morning…  maybe I won’t wear them this week!

Something New: My shoes!  I have been longing to wear them since I got them, and I absolutely haven’t.  I guess the ‘boobs in a box’ are new too, but there’s not so many people I can tell about them!

Something Borrowed: Pearls from Jenny (Karen’s daughter) in my tiara.  She had an old string that needs re-stringing, so I have borrowed some for my tiara (ok, headband) and will have them re-strung for her afterwards…

Something Blue: I didn’t really want any blue, but it’s tradition and all that, so I am sewing one tiny blue glass bead onto the dress.  I went to Karen’s one evening in about February and we raided her bead box and found the most perfect little bead.  Which we then promptly dropped on the carpet…  We never did find it again, so I now have the second most perfect little bead.  I haven’t actually sewn it on yet… maybe I’ll do it Thursday evening when I’m restless!

And that’s about it!  At some stage I guess there will be a ‘how it all went and some photos’ diary entry, but it won’t necessarily be next Sunday/Monday!  Apart from the wedding on Friday and the party on Saturday, we’re doing brunch on Sunday for anybody who’s still standing….  I think by Sunday evening we might just be sitting in a heap!