…and it’s only Tuesday. Let’s hammer out the bad news first, shall we? It seems that death abounds.

* My cousin Alphagal’s dog died over the weekend. I shall miss reading Modean’s entries on his dog blog, and it’s always heartbreaking to lose a pet, so my heart goes out to her & SNG.
* My best friend Kris’s grandmother died over the weekend of lung cancer. The good news is that this may finally be what scares Kris into quitting smoking. But still, it’s her grandma, and she’s (understandably) upset, so that’s no good.
* My friend Naina, who’s been having a not-so-fabulous year thus far anyway, lost both her aunt and cousin in a car accident over the weekend. Her uncle was in the car too, he’s stable in ICU. These are relatives that she was extremely close to – she usually introduced her cousin to people as her brother. And I’m pretty sure he was around our age, mid to late 20’s. So that’s just horrible.

In the category of not-really-good news, but not as bad as above:

* Dave’s kitties have a vet appointment this afternoon, because at least 2 of them have tapeworms. And if they share a litter box, that means they probably all have them. Gross, gross, gross. I’m just glad I’m not involved in trying to wrangle 3 cats into the car to go to the vet – that’ll be Dave & Steve’s fun afternoon task.
* We had our house appraised on Sunday, for what is hopefully the final step in the 2-month-long process of trying to get a home equity loan. We need the money for the deck that Steve is building, the driveway we want to put in (good-bye, gravel!), to replace the siding on the house, and oh yeah, to pay for our wedding, so it’s sort of infuriating that they didn’t tell us that we needed the damn appraisal until now, when we started this process back in mid-February. The good part of the appraisal: the house might possibly be cleaner now than it has ever been (I sort of went nuts at the idea of having a stranger evaluating our home). The bad part: it’s yet another delay in this ridiculously long & painful process of getting a loan. I have taken on the role of the Annoying Borrower – I’m calling the loan officer at least twice a day. “Have you gotten the report yet? Has it gone to the underwriters? When do we sign??” I figure that she’s the moron who didn’t inform us up front about all of the documentation that we were going to need, so I feel no guilt whatsoever in nagging her.

In happy news:
* We have an officiant for our wedding, an inter-denominational minister named Reverend Mary. I spoke with her yesterday and liked her immediately. Apparently she really gets to know the couples that she marries before the wedding, so she can make the ceremony very personal. She’s going to give Dave and me homework to do, sort of like a form of pre-marriage counseling, so I think that’s cool.
* Dave has made it 10 days with no cigarettes, so I think he has officially left the “trying to quit smoking” phase and entered the “has officially quit” phase. Yay!
* Last night, we got home and found that Steve had cleaned the garage – and he even built shelves on one of the walls so we have storage space! I was so excited that I could’ve kissed him. Except that he’s about to be my brother-in-law, and that would be weird.
* My old apartment, which I was still paying for because of weird lease circumstances, has been rented to a new tenant, which means I am officially off the hook, and I’ll get refunded for half of this month’s rent. That’s awesome.
* I am getting married in exactly 40 days. Whoo-hoo!