Final Countdown

It's the FINAL COUNTDOWN...da-da-daaa-daaaaa, da-da-da-daa-daaaaa...

Sorry about that.

It's officially 6 DAYS until Jemma and Steve's wedding and everything is slotting into place - Tom's suit arrived yesterday and it fits him great and he looks so handsome in it!! He really liked it as well, so I think that might be the suit of choice when it comes to be our turn, whenever that may be! (No pressure, of course). I'm so excited to see what everything looks like, the Portal Companion Cube cake, the game character name cards, the first dance.... ah it's all so exciting!

Things have been going well on the singing front too - we've settled on three songs we both like and that we believe are suitable for the church (it's only while they're signing the registers), and we can play and sing them quite happily. We've just submitted the lyrics for the vicar to give final approval but we've thought about it a lot and we're hoping he's ok with our proposed choices:

Grow old with you, by Adam Sandler (from the Wedding Singer)
In it for love, by Richie Sambora (guitarist from Bon Jovi) - the video's here if you're not familiar with it)
Don't wanna miss a thing, by Aerosmith

We've done them a couple of times in front of Tom's family and now they want us to play at his sister Jess's wedding next April, which is cool but we've come to an agreement that Becky has to sing with me, and Rob (Tom's brother and Becky's boyfriend) has to play guitar with Tom. That's a huge relief to me, as I'd forgotten how nerve-wracking it can be to sing in front of people you know, more so than strangers in my experience.

Unfortunately, timing is everything, and this last week I've come down with the symptoms of labyrinthitis again - grrr! So I'm back to being a dizzy mess but thankfully nausea is pretty minimal right now. It's the worst possible timing because I had a mega busy week at work with the launch of my first brochure of the year with the company (it looks so good!), as well as two days in London for various events, so I've had a combination of long days in the office, plus very early starts (of the 'up at 4am' variety) and very long days on the road to and from London, as well as staying up late with uni friends while I was there Friday night, none of which has really helped with the balance issues I've been having. Because it's been so busy at work, it's not been an option to take time off, but I'm hoping that now that all the major stuff is out of the way that I'll be able to chill a bit in the couple of days we have off before and after the wedding next weekend - wishful thinking I'm sure, but you've got to be positive!

I did speak to the chemist though as I'm not sure the drugs I'm taking are really helping the vertigo so I might need to go to the docs on Monday to get a new prescription or a referral to a specialist.  The drugs I'm also taking are also the kind that you definitely cannot drink alcohol with so that's a bit of a bummer with the wedding only 6 days away, but I'd rather be sober and not fall over in Church, than have a horrible reaction to booze. Again, terrible timing.

The other complication is that we were planning on going to Alton Towers with friends after the wedding weekend, but I'm pretty sure mega fast rollercoasters won't help the dizziness so I might have to sit out the rides which will be really annoying if I have to miss that. Sometimes life is just not fair.

And of course, when you're feeling dizzy and unsteady on your feet, cooking with gas and sharp utensils isn't exactly the safest of activities so I've not been doing much from my cooking challenge list lately, although I did manage hot cross bun pudding (bread and butter pudding but better - try saying that quickly!) before I got properly messed up by the dizziness. That was definitely a success so I'll be making that again next year :) I'm trying to minimize how much time I'm spending on computers, reading, games or TV right now so I'm not going to type up the recipe for this I'm afraid, but you can find it in Annie Bell's Gorgeous Desserts (in the festive section I think). Only thing I did differently was I used regular caster sugar instead if golden, and I used 1.5 tsp of vanilla flavouring into the custard mixture instead of laying a vanilla pod on top of the pudding, just because I couldn't find any in any of the supermarkets I tried that day, but I don't think that would have made a big different to the taste really.

One word. Yum.

Anyway, I think I'm going to leave the update there for now so I can have a break from typing.

Hope everyone else is well and I'll try and update this more often once the dizziness has calmed down a bit.
Ta ta for now,

Lettie x x