Here's to Jennifer, the best Maid of Honor a girl could ask for

In order to preserve the, perhaps, most important saying on earth ("What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas) I won't go telling all the tales to you, oh readers, who no doubt view me as very angelic and very pure, but I shall tell you a few things. If a man is going to shave his body hair, he should give it a touch up before he, oh, say, asks someone to rub his chest. With ice.

The Venetian hotel does indeed look just like Venice, complete with Gondolas, fat Americans, and tourists taking pictures of absolute crap like pastries through the counter glass. "Here's us gambling! Here's a picture with an Elvis impersonator. Here's a raspberry pastry that I didn't buy but I'll be damned if I wasn't gonna keep it in my memory somehow!"

When you are in a hip club, one that your friends paid tons of money to get you into, and you have a table with nice liquor, and you've even been escorted down a special elevator by the VIP contacts and there's candlelight and a kickass waterfall outside, a couple excellent things to do are 1) place "worst pickup line" and "best biceps" stickers on strange men and also ask them if you can have their underwear, please, "I need it..." and 2) have one of the party attempt standing on the table covered in expensive glassware to send it all crashing to the floor, then apologize for like four hours to some European dude who doesn't work there, but hey, we were drunk, we didn't know.

Sitting in a spa (after a morning at the pool where everyone is drinking margaritas and bloody marys and is just so, so happy) in nice white robes after getting rubbed down in papaya scrub, lounging in the whirlpool with cucumbers over your eyes, and detoxing (before retoxing) in the steam room, coupled with memories of a night riding around in a limo drinking champagne with ten of your best friends is the greatest way to spend an afternoon ever.

Yesterday I awoke to dim light creeping through the drawn curtains of our suite in the Mirage next to my sleeping friend Abby, rolled over, felt something odd crinkling down in the nether regions, and pulled a crumpled dollar bill out of my underwear.

GUESS WHO'S READY TO GET MARRIED???

Arrival of the birds and today we go to Vegas

Yesterday I was showering before work when I heard a rapping on the very unfortunately-placed window that looks out from the bathroom to the backyard. I pressed my nose against the glass mid-shampoo, and there was J, pointing across the grass, yelling, "Who did that? Who put those birds there?" See, a month or two ago I arrived home from a night out to find my enterprising fiance on the floor with a saw and wood chips all around. When I asked him what he was doing, he replied, "making a fruit feeder!" - like, how could I not have known what he was doing? Who doesn't build fruit feeders from scraps of wood on any given weekday evening in order to attract the rarely seen Baltimore Oriole to his or her yard?

Every day, J would look outside at the feeder, hung carefully from a tree limb in the back, and exclaim, sadly, "No birds are coming." He religiously placed half-cut oranges and grape jelly in the proper places, and we waited for the Orioles.

But yesterday morning, BEHOLD! J looked at the feeder, almost forgotten now, and said, "Holy shit!" (he told me the story after my shower). THREE birds were perched there. J grabbed his binoculars and ran to get a closer look. But wait. They weren't moving. Could they be dead, he wondered? The orange was black and covered with fruit flies, maybe they died...and then J took a closer look. The birds, fake, were wired to the feeder, and attached too was a note from the greatest prankster ever, as he shall now be known.

This prank, you see, turned my morning from one of stress and worry about how to get it all done...what to pack...the unfinished items on all the to-do lists...to one of great gaiety. I drove to work under perfect blue skies with the sunroof open, drinking my coffee, playing loud music, thinking, "fake birds. Oh, man, fake birds!" The rug may go un-vacuumed but that's not what matters! And today we go to Vegas where my friends have planned this weekend for me, for us, I have no details about the agenda and am oh so ready for the great unknown...