Doing our best to stimulate the economy

So, anyway, I'm getting married this Friday. 11-11-11.

If the economic picture of the US has improved recently, I suspect economists will be able to trace it to the number of wedding gifts that have been shipped to Cheryl and me these last couple of weeks. Today when I got home from work there was a large box from Khol's sitting on the deck. I went inside and forgot about it. Cheryl came home, passed by the box, and only an hour later did we think, oh, right, there's a present sitting outside. I had no idea it was possible to reach a state of gift numbness, but we might be getting there. It's been like Christmas every day for a month. If stock in Bed, Bath, and Beyond is going up, our gift registry is the cause.

Not that we haven't been shelling out money of our own. Weddings these days have lots of little expenses that never entered my mind when I proposed marriage. I mean, I knew we'd be spending money on a cake, some fancy clothes, flowers, etc., but I hadn't anticipated that we would require personalized M&M brand candies with our faces printed on them, or 200 tiny plastic bags to sort them into, or the mile and a half of ribbon needed to tie up all the bags. We've also got a LOT of wine stockpiled. Cases of wine every where you look, including at the foot of our bed. Since we're trying to sell our house, I can only imagine that anyone who has looked at the property must have gazed into our bedroom and assumed we were alcoholics.

None of this is a complaint, by the way. I'm happy to report that we're not going into debt for this wedding. We've done things responsibly, and Cheryl has been a Jedi master of bargain shopping. In the end, it's going to be one heck of a celebration, for an event worthy of such celebration. I've been smiling all year when I think about it. See how happy we look on the candy?