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Okay, folks - this is a big day in the life of alissaclark.com!

As you should know by now if you’ve been paying any attention, Tom and I are getting married this Saturday, September 2, 2006 at Loudonville Community Church. We’ll be heading to Cape Cod for the week and then back to New York City to take up real (and improved) life at home in Brooklyn.

So, I’m changing my name. I won’t be Alissa Clark anymore. I’ll be Alissa Wilkinson. (It sounds like a writer, right?) This URL has therefore become obsolete.

Therefore:
Update your bookmarks to tomandalissa.com!

We’ll be co-blogging there - I’ll be writing the vast majority of the content, as I spend more time in front of the computer, and Tom will be popping in and doing a good bit of photoblogging. We will also be adding richer content, including reviews of film, music, and books, combined photo albums, and general mayhem and fun. alissaclark.com will remain active for at least a year so that people can find me.

So update your bookmarks! tomandalissa.com.

Filed at 9:44 am under Links, Wedding
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I got stuck waiting at home this morning for the Verizon guy (::hates on Verizon::) until Tom got there. Not that I’m complaining. It can be nice to sit a little longer on the couch and monitor the Blackberry in my pajamas.

A few minutes after Tom walked in, he looked at me, and said, You know, we’re getting married in like, a week?

Yes, we are. A week and a day.

Filed at 4:23 pm under Wedding
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I am, in fact, alive. I had a blog post written up but yesterday was the day of the Internet Access from Hell and it never made it up. Verizon needs a kick in the pants.

To make a long story short, we bought a lot of furniture this weekend - a lot of it discounted. We assembled it last night and now we are awaiting the (cloudlike pillowtop) mattress delivery on Friday. I will be happy when I can sleep on a bed again. Our couch is a little . . . short (though otherwise surprisingly cushy). It’s great to have at least half the apartment in semi-order, and a DVD player and a TV and a couch. I feel like a grownup, albeit a grownup inhabiting a cute shoebox.

We also saw Little Miss Sunshine, which was brilliant and hilarious and off-kilter and the best movie I’ve seen all year, and Half Nelson, which was brilliantly acted but not as good as I wanted and expected it to be.

Dad update: he is doing outpatient therapy (which means if he’s feeling ok, he may even be able to make the wedding!), and he’s in good spirits when I talk to him but he’s uncomfortable physically and not really able to sleep. Pumping arsenic into your body isn’t the most energy-giving activity in the world.

I was out yesterday, working from home and awaiting the furniture delivery, so when I got in this morning I was thrilled to discover that our Bialetti Cappuccino maker (in silver, not spotted) was delivered, as well as our VillaWare Uno Belgian Waffle Maker (big pockets!). Wooha! As I told Laura, we are highfalutin’ peeps now.

Filed at 12:04 pm under Film, Wedding, Dad Update
3 Comments

We got our marriage license this morning. As we walked out, I said, “Wow! We’re so grown up! We’re old!” And Tom said, “No, I’m old. I’m 24. You’re only 22.”

Filed at 10:12 am under Wedding
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I just don’t have much to post today; August is exceeding quiet, and I’ve been scheduling and rescheduling a meeting today with an incredibly busy trader who is putting out fires left and right. So I’ve just been sitting around doing not too much, and my email has even slowed to a crawl, but it’s all good. I’d rather be paid to be bored than be bored for free, right?

Tonight I’ll go home and chug on through some more work for IAM - more fun, though I am much rustier on programming than I used to be. I did manage to get a pretty solid database structure together for them this week, and I just got a script working that logs users in and out, completely with mildly-encrypted password (woohoo!). I rock, verily, and sometimes.

After doing a little more with that, taking out my trash, and finishing a logo design for another client tonight, I think I may actually break down and read for a while. My brain is performing a meltdown from lack of real use, and I need to do something that does not involve sitting in front of a screen and jabbing at little black plastic squares.

I did, however, have some lovely writing-related news yesterday, and that brightened the day up considerably. A first: a real print article. (One of the profiles from the book I contributed to - Angela’s profile, in fact - will be in the next print issue of RELEVANT, and I’ll be credited under my married name, Wilkinson) But this is an article I’ve genuinely pitched and had accepted and not had the editor just quit returning my emails. Hurrah! More details when it gets closer.

I am slowly going through my weekly routine of eating everything in my refrigerator. I cleaned out most of the vegetables yesterday, though I have three yellow tomatoes in my fridge that need eating, and still have a bit of ice cream. I also suspect that a bunch of the food in my kitchen cabinets has seen better days (a lot of it was from Tom’s kitchen, which means it was bought when he lived in Boston, which was not recent) and need chucking.

Things have started disappearing from our wedding regstries! (Shameless plug 1 and 2.) We got the first one yesterday from some awesome friends:

We also have several wine goblets and the ice cream maker, which is good news for the future Wilkinson family. Tom is as in love with ice cream as I am with pizza, so now he can get it whenever he wants. Experimentation is the name of the game.

Lastly, the dude who made this hat has my utmost respect.

Call me a cold New Yorker, and then please, please, stop standing in the middle of the sidewalk.

Filed at 4:42 pm under New York City, Daily Goings-On, Work, Wedding
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People have had a surprisingly hard time finding the registry info on our invitations (?!) - they’ve been calling my parents, but now that they’re hard to get in touch with, I’m just going to link it here.

Amazon.com
Crate & Barrel

We’re aware that we didn’t register for much, and that some of the things we did register for are a bit on the expensive side :). We don’t have anywhere to put things, and we don’t need a lot of small things, so we just didn’t register for them.

Filed at 11:58 am under Wedding
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The wedding invitations finally went out late last week, and Tom and I spent the weekend in Albany picking tuxedos and meeting with our officiant, DJ, florist, caterers, and cakebakers. Lots of cool stuff set up but in the interest of keeping elements of surprise for those who read the blog and will be at the wedding, I’ll hold off on most details until after the wedding.

Speaking of that, people have begun to ask if I’m moving the blog after the wedding (since I won’t be Alissa Clark anymore). The short answer is yes, but if I told you the details, I’d have to kill you. Don’t worry, I won’t leave you all stranded.

In non-wedding news (well, not really), my dear friends Sarah and Sarah (no typo) are coming to visit this weekend. We’ve all been friends since we were little tykes in Sunday School and now we’re all doing the wedding thing together, so they’re coming to cram into my Brooklyn pad and have a grand ol’ time.

I have been secretly devouring fashion blogs lately. What is going on? I know that clothes aren’t important (I mean, consider the flowers of the field, and all that), but I do like being pleasant to look at and I like to think that I have a personality. ;) I was looking around the subway today and noticing how feminine women’s clothes have gotten in the last few seasons, especially with the whole dresses craze this year. So refreshing, and I still can’t get over how jaded I was after four years of RPI.

And along those lines, I was thrilled and delighted that the very selective Beacon’s Closet took five of my items (out of two monstrous garbage bags) - am I now a hipster?! - and I have a bit of store credit to play with. It’s the kind of place where the turnover is rapid, but I may make a few stops there to see if I can come up with some new clothes for le honeymoon in Cape Cod (yay!), or maybe some cute shoes. I am so low in the shoe department. The only sandals I own anymore are men’s Teva flip-flops from last summer and a very old olive green pair of Old Navy flipflops - oddly, also men’s. I need girly shoes.

I remarked to Tom yesterday as we were driving back from Albany that he lets me be a girl, and I love it. He wants a wife! I think a lot of guys want a buddy, but with feminine appendages, if you catch my drift. Ahh, I love my Tom. (I still love hockey and geek toys and once in a while have a sip of Brooklyn Lager, so hey, some things never change.)

Here’s my deep thought for the day (ha) - have you ever contemplated just how loved you are? Even putting the intense, unrestricted love of the Father aside (which is hard to do, but it’s such an underpinning to life that it’s almost unnecessary to say) - nearly all of us are blessed with families that love us, friends, children, dogs . . . the list goes on. And most of us are relatively unloveable in our raw state. I’m so glad this capacity was placed in our hearts.

It’s worth remembering.

Filed at 12:32 pm under Life, Faith, Love, Wedding, Girlyness
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49 days! 7 weeks! Wooha!

Filed at 11:33 pm under Wedding, Engagement
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Started pounding the B vitamins today. GNC tells me that they “replinsh B-Vitamins lost during stress - essential for energy production”. Let’s hope so.

Filed at 10:20 am under Daily Goings-On, Wedding
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Ok, my new official goal in life (this changes daily) is to someday have a job that lands me in Soho. It’s so much more intriguing and pretty than bland old midtown. This goes hand-in-hand with my great desire to someday have a job where I can dress creatively, and wear jeans on Friday. I have modest hopes and dreams.

Went to girls’ group again today. ‘Twas crowded and good. I order a big hazelnut iced coffee (black, of course) and an untoasted bagel with butter for a modest fee and smush around the table with twelve other girls, college-grad aged and up, and we chatter and talk about Romans and things like that. Bizzarely, I was able to drag myself out of bed at 5:30 am and would have been there by 7am but I inadvertantly got on the N train, which does not stop at Prince Street at 7am but continues on to Union Square and I had to take a cab back down. Whoops.

Currently reading Paste’s 100 Songwriters Issue and greatly enjoying it. I’m inspired to start backtracking and listening to all these musicians. I need a much broader base of knowledge before I can write about music well. I have a very deep knowledge of classical music and next to nothing when it comes to music from 1950 to about 2001. I barely recognize the Beatles when they hit me over the head (figuratively, though how cool would that be?). Must improve.

I did spend the subway commute listening to Damien Rice’s O. Tom downloaded Unplayed Piano (Rice & Lisa Hannigan), which I annoying forgot to transport to my iPod but listened to yesterday and loved loved loved. So I had to listen to O again, and it is tres fantastic.

After dinner last night, Tom worked on cleaning up his stuff that is at my apartment (i.e., DVDs, boxes of tidbits, office supplies) and I worked on getting framework laid down for a couple of big web projects that I’m tackling this summer. I am so glad to be back in the saddle, so to speak, and picking up web design again. I missed it.

But we had a total brainstorm about how we can rearrange the apartment once we have real furniture. We’re still trying to work out the details, but I think he’s brilliant. (He is.)

Someday, somehow, someone will return my calls about wedding reception sites, and we’ll have a wedding date. Labor Day weekend does seem to be the best candidate at the moment. Till then, stay tuned.

Filed at 10:02 am under Life, Music, Love, Wedding, Engagement
11 Comments