This past weekend I got to unplug for a couple of days after a mildly crazy week by traveling home for a wedding. One of my childhood friends Rachel got married to a guy who I actually used to run cross country with in high school. Small world (but then again...it's a small town). The wedding was simple but really elegant. One of my favorite parts? The Ale-8 toast. Being a Kentucky boy, Ale-8-One is one of my favorite drinks in the world and to see it used by a lot of people wearing tuxes and nice dresses...it was beautiful. I wouldn't want to copycat it and do it myself, though I still have my sights set on a double doozie cookie cake.

Oh yeah, I was also given the privilege of doing some scripture readings during the ceremony. Pretty cool to be included in all of that!

It was weird seeing an old friend get married off again. These occurrences are happening more and more often, which I hear is the case for someone in their 20s. Rachel was actually my first girl friend to get married so it was weird having to change her last name in my phone's address book after the ceremony. I thought all of that was weird...but in a year I'll be in the same boat.

With wedding on the brain and having Megan and both of my parents all together in the same town simultaneously (easier said than done with all of us) the subject of our impending wedding played a huge role in nearly every conversation that weekend. Mom and dad are getting the wheels spinning planning the rehearsal dinner while we also talked other wedding details.

Wow was I naive about wedding planning.

Don't get me wrong, I knew a lot went into the process. But the amount of choices involved for just the rehearsal dinner...wow. There were a lot of decisions to be made just for the wedding pre-party. That's not even touching the wedding day itself. I know the talks we had about the actual wedding day just skimmed the surface of what's actually going to be planned out. I severely underestimated the whole process. Megan said repeatedly after we had to mull over different planning decisions "welcome to my world Drew."

After sitting through Rachel's wedding and noticing it was over in a flash, I immediately thought "wow...this is a lot of work for something that only takes 20-30 minutes." It'll be worth the work though. You only get married once and when you're marrying who I get to, it'll be worth every bit of stress that it may entail (most of that stress on my end being all the back-and-forth traveling next spring). In 354 days, we'll all get to exhale.