I know that it has been awhile since I have last written, but I have been busy. I have been trying to plan my wedding while go to school and work at the same time. I guess I could write how much school is driving me crazy, or something like that, but at the moment, I am going to write about my wedding.

Since the wedding is the ‘bride’s day’ I am sure that I should be planning most of this myself. Or at least, that is the tradition. There was no way I was going to plan this huge event all by myself, especially not when it will effect both of our lives. Nope, he is helping me with all the planning for this wedding and he is not even complaing. He really does not mind helping me and I am so glad for that.

At the moment we have the guest list finished for the most part. It might change every now and then, but for the most part it is finished. We also have the place where we are having our reception reserved for us. We really wanted to make sure we could get it reserved since we are getting married the same time so many people are graduating and having graduation parties. I know that it might seem like we have picked the wrong time to get married, but my younger sister is graduating next year, and we are trying to make things easier on one of my older sisters who lives in Florida.

I have picked out what dress I want. Unfortunately, it really does not exist, so my oldest sister is going to be making it for me. She had to spend hours upon hours to find a pattern really close to what I want. Tony and I had wanted to have some Star Wars in our wedding, but since we are having it our church, our Pastor said no. It wasn’t going to be the entire wedding party dressed as Jedi or anything. All we wanted was for me to wear Mara Jade’s outfit and Tony was going to wear Luke Skywalker’s black outfit. Oh, and of course Artoo Detoo as the ring bearer. Well, now instead of wearing the green outfit of Mara’s, I am wearing her wedding dress. Pastor does not know that my wedding dress is related to Star Wars in anyway and I am not going to tell him. Besides, what can he do? It is a wedding dress after all.

There are some other planning that we have finished all ready, and we have slowly begun to buy things that we are going to need for the wedding. I refuse to get stressed about planning for this wedding. My oldest sister was the one who paniced for her own wedding and then my other sister’s wedding, so I am just going to let her do the panicing and I will remain calm. At least, that is the plan.

Yesterday was finally the day I had been waiting for! It was finally July 1, one year since Tony and I started dating! I couldn’t sleep very well Monday night at all! Amie and I were at Tony’s grandma’s house Monday night so she could do my hair for today. It took two hours to do that and I even had about five inches cut off my hair a couple of weeks ago. (I miss my hair :'( !) But anyway, Tony came to pick me up at 10:30 yesterday morning and Amie had to stall him for a couple of minutes because I wasn’t quite finished, I still had to brush my teeth. I gave him the movie National Treasure and he gave me a white rose. His mom insisted on taking pictures because she said it was a once in a lifetime occassion to see me dressed up like that. I had Amie take some pictures with my camera also. We headed off to Defiance and had Ponderosa for lunch. I missed eating there, I really haven’t been there in years. After that we went to Wal-Mart so I could pick up Daddy’s Father’s Day present (The Ultimate Guide to Indiana Jones). At the mall, we walked around and visited the bookstore (I didn’t buy anything, though I really wanted this nice journal and a book called Twilight). We also saw Claire’s and F.Y.E. At 1:30 we walked over to the movie theater to watch Wall. E. We weren’t sure if we wanted to see Wall. E, Wanted, or Get Smart, but we decided that the other two could wait. We will most likely see them once they come out onto DVD, but Wall. E, I really wanted to see. We didn’t want to go home right away because I wanted to do something special, something different, that we wouldn’t normally do. While we were trying to think of something, we walked over to Jo-Ann Fabrics, to look at material for a Mara Jade outfit. It was then that I decided I wanted some craftbook stickers so I could put yesterday into my scrapbook, whenever I get around to it. I didn’t find anything I liked, so we walked to Wal-Mart where I found two things of stickers, plus two picture frames. We made a couple of copies of the pictures from my camera and now we both have a picture from this day, to put anywhere we want. Yesterday was the best day of my life! I didn’t want it to end, but I know that it had to. But at least it will always be in my heart and memory!

I love you, Tony. 😉

I have been thinking about how the authors are killing a lot of the more popular characters off more and more often in Star Wars. Chewbacca, Grand Admiral Thrawn (though Timothy Zahn didn’t know he was going to become a favorite), Anakin Solo, Mara Jade Skywalker, and I’m sure there are more that I’m not thinking about. I believe that once they kill off the some more, mostly Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia Organa Solo, they will have to stop going forward into the series. They will have to go back and work from there. Though I might be wrong because the Solo children (Jacen and Jaina) and the Skywalker boy (Ben) might have cought the younger generation. They might want to continue reading about what happened to them, but so many who  have grown up with Star Wars will most likely stop reading once at least when those three are gone. I might continue reading to see where they go, but it seems like they are redoing the movies (prequels). One of the Skywalkers is turning to the Dark Side trying to save something. In this case, Jacen turned to save the galaxy from war. Instead, he has just made it worse!

Yesterday I was talking with my friend, Rachel, about Star Wars, which is reall weird, since for the longest time she didn’t even like having it mentioned. But yesterday, she was willing to listen and participate in my talking about Mara and how I didn’t think that a poison dart should have been able to kill her. She was the Emperor’s Hand for goodness sake! She was one of his personal assassin and knew so many tricks to the Sith, though she never was one herself. She didn’t fall for Jacen’s trick that he tried to pull when she had the roof fall on top of him. Why should she be kiled by something as simple as a poison dart? If the Karen Traviss insisted that Mara had to die, than couldn’t she have thought of a way to do so that was fitting to the character?

 Rachel and I have deciced that Mara really wasn’t killed, because in the Legacy of the Force series, Mara wasn’t acting like herself at all. She was all passive and not willing to believe Luke when he tried to tell her that Jacen was turning to the Dark Side. Mara had seen the Emperor, had known Vader, she should have been the first one to believe Luke on this, and yet, for some reason, she wasn’t. She didn’t believe him until six books into the series. How can Mara change so suddenly in the books, from the woman that Timothy Zahn had created, to some different kind of woman, that someone else made her? Sure, she had a son, and yes, I agree that Mara would be protective of him, but the way I have seen Timothy Zahn write about Mara, she wouldn’t become passive and almost scared to do things. She would be active, ready to do whatever necessary to protect him. She had sent him off while he was just born to safety and continued fighting against the Yuuzhan Vong, to keep the galaxy safe. With all this, Rachel and I came up with the clone idea, though of course Tony doesn’t believe me. 🙁 Just because they had her funeral and she became a force ghost! Though we have been talking, and his friend said that we could bring her back with a Dark Jedi turning to the Light Side and sacrificing himself to bring her back, using the Force. That would be really nice. I could always write a fanfic and put it on one of those Star Wars fanfiction sites. I wouldn’t get money from it, but at least I would feel like I had some say in the way the authors are writing. Timothy Zahn wasn’t even told by Del Rey that Mara was going to be killed off. Talk about a shock when he read it.   

I have loved the character of Mara Jade ever since I first read Timothy Zahn’s book Heir to the Empire. In fact, I have all eight of his Star Wars books and they all deal with Mara some way. When she was first introduced, she wanted to kill Luke Skywalker, but later married him! Talk about some major emotional change. Going from wanting to kill someone to marrying them ten years later, is pretty good! Mara is one of the favorite characters in the Expanded Universe, and yet, they killed her off! And by her nephews hand, no less! Jacen Solo turned to the Dark Side and killed his aunt! The way the fight between Mara and Jacen went, Jacen should have died too! He had a ceiling collapse on him and yet he still survived! I understand that this was one of the easier ways to show that Ben, Luke and Mara’s son, was important, but so many people were not happy. The auther didn’t like that Mara died, and she killed her off! Timothy Zahn didn’t like how she was killed, but is willing to continue writing books with Mara in them! I just can’t wait for another book with Mara to come out! And with Timothy Zahn as the writer, makes me even more impatient! I have no idea if he is working on one right now or not!