Now that I’m not laughing hysterically and have had a night of sleep, let’s talk about the current wedding venue situation. Red Lion Restaurant sits right beside Boulder Creek. As I mentioned in my previous post, the bridge connecting the property to the highway was washed out. The unseasonably warm temperatures and subsequent rapid snow melt caused the creek to swell. When the bridge collapsed, the rubble blocked the creek to the point that a Flash Flood warning went out. The bridge remnants are now cleared from the creek, but the giant hole in the bridge remains.
There is evidently a rather treacherous back road to the property, but Boulder Open Space & Mountain Parks has limited the unpaved (and steep) back road to residents, contractors, and emergency vehicles. So, as it stands right now, unless my wedding dress was made by Speedo or transforms into a pontoon, we may have a problem.
My immediate plan is to call the onsite wedding coordinator. I’m sure she’s overwhelmed by panicky brides at the moment. I’m not planning on panicking about the situation. There are plenty of eventualities one can accommodate, but a collapsed bridge really is not one of them. I’ve been fretting a bit that I had forgotten something, but a bridge isn’t on anyone’s wedding prep list.
Now, I’m going to go to work, wait until Colorado business hours begin, and call a very overwhelmed wedding coordinator.
We’ve gotten nearly everything wrapped up for the wedding and hopefully, we’re done bleeding money for awhile. Oof.
Wedding dress picked up. This is a story in and of itself and I’ll post about it later. Suffice it to say that I would NEVER recommend getting alterations at The Wedding Shoppe in St Paul, MN. Their service for choosing and purchasing a dress, in my experience, was excellent, but the alteration process was less than optimal (and not just for me). I’ll share more of that story later.
Attendant’s gifts ordered.
Bridesmaids’ Jewelry – I wasn’t planning on buying jewelry for the bridesmaids originally, but decided that it would be a nice gift and take one more thing off of their plates. I stalked 1928 Jewelry for a few weeks and ended up finding some very pretty navy blue pieces on sale from the Blue Moon set. I also bought a faux pearl and crystal bracelet and earrings to wear with my wedding dress.
Card Box – Similar to the guest book, I just wasn’t sold with the easily available options and had postponed getting anything until I stumbled on a Wedding Card Birdhouse on etsy. It’s personalized and comes with one roof for the wedding (with a hole for cards) and another lid for the birds! Extremely cute and clever. I’m excited about it.
Discovered we don’t need a full kids’ table – only 4 kids attending.
Plane tickets to wedding purchased.
Going Away Dress – Purchased yesterday. We’ll need to leave our hotel pretty early the next day so I decided it would be significantly easier to have the wedding dress already under control. Since we were already at Bloomingdale’s* on a registry-related task, I checked out their plus-size selection. I found a lovely Jones New York Collection dress in our wedding colors – white with navy flowers with apple green leaves and centers. It seemed quite appropriate and it looked great with a fairly reasonable price tag (read as “on sale”). I’ll wear it with a cute pair of white sandals and then repurpose both of them for one of the dinners on our honeymoon.
Guest Book – I didn’t want a typical guest book, but still wanted to have a place for people to leave their names, thoughts, and hopefully, email addresses. I looked at the recipe card style boxes but it didn’t make sense to me beyond the day of the wedding. It would just be a dust magnet. Despite my leanings otherwise, I ended up going with a book as it made more sense in terms of keeping it. I found a lovely handmade one on etsy. It’s personalized with our names on the cover.
Matt’s ring picked up.
Turned in final paperwork for venue with best guess guest count.
Made final arrangements with vendors and altered orders based on the guest count.
Thank you notes! (Hooray for Matt writing them!) The list is ever increasing and he’s keeping up pretty well.
Now we need to pack for a week for pre-wedding, the wedding, and a week of honeymoon, as well as making sure the apartment is in a reasonable state. Somewhere in there, we need to spend quality time with the cat. Regardless of how much quality time we get in, he’s still going to make us pay when we return. I have no doubt in my mind.
Really, that’s the bulk of it. We need to finish our pre-cruise registration bits and print off or boarding passes and luggage tags, but hopefully, that’s by far the most complicated thing we have left to do. I’m really, really looking forward to the honeymoon, if for no reason other than we can both get some much needed rest.
*Just as an aside, prior to our setting up our registry, I’d never shopped at Bloomingdale’s but their customer service throughout our wedding planning have definitely won my business. They are one of the few registries that has a built in Thank You manager, as well as excellent service in person, including useful (and very few) phone calls (as opposed to annoyances).
I had a message from Bloomingdale’s to let me know that our dishes and towels were on sale. It felt extremely surreal. I’m definitely not complaining about having our registry items on sale just prior to the wedding. Sales are never a bad thing. It was more of an unexpected personal touch. I appreciate it.
As of this morning, my little experiment has cost me a sum total of $.05 for one click through after nearly 600 impressions. Not too bad. The click through was someone searching on my Dad’s more renowned name twin. Hope it was my Dad! Hah!
When I created our wedding website, I thought keeping it relatively low profile was best. Since I’m neck deep in the internet most days, it never occurred to me that someone would quickly forget or not bookmark the wedding website while also misplacing both pieces of mail containing the url. For ease of use, I should have created a subdomain. It would be relatively easy to remember, as opposed to ymmat.com/mattandtammy.
Well, of course, more than a few relatives have lost the url and I noticed in my blog analytics that people were landing on the blog in search of the wedding website. When I first noticed it, I decided cranking the SEO on the wedding site would be a good idea, but there are enough other Matt and Tammy weddings that it’s still more or less absent from search results. So, I had the bright idea of using Google Adwords. If I can’t help our guests out one way, why not try another?
The ad, as you can see is very simple. Our names, the date, and the website url. The url is unique enough that people will hopefully notice. Besides, how often do you see an ad for a wedding?
As far as keywords, I used our names, the name of our site: ‘Matt and Tammy’s Wedding,’ as well as ‘Tammy and Matt’s wedding.’ Additionally, I used a few permutations of my domain with various wedding-related words and our parents names. When Dad vanity Googles himself, he’ll definitely be surprised!
I placed the ads in search results only with a cap of $5 per day for a run up until the day of the wedding. Obviously, I’ll keep an eye on it and move my daily cap as needed. I’m doubtful we’ll ever come anywhere close to our $5, but it seemed like a good place to start. I’ll be curious to see if anyone clicks through. Even if they don’t, I know when people do come looking, our site will now show up in the results.
Things that have gone wrong:
- My wedding dress no longer fits properly. Something went dreadfully wrong with the alterations and must be remedied.
- I’m running out of time to get everything done before the wedding.
- Our guests don’t seem to be RSVPing. I may need to track them down.
Things that have gone right:
- The bridesmaids’ dresses arrived and look lovely. Here’s hoping they fit everyone perfectly.
- Matt’s ring is purchased.
- Matt’s birthday. Enjoyable dinner followed by ice cream at Izzy’s. We were going to watch a movie, but his parents called and then we got distracted by other things. Regardless, it was still a nice evening.
Things to do:
- Wrangle remaining guests.
- Make sure wedding dress fits again.
- Enjoy our shower on Monday thrown by work friends.
- Enjoy Memorial Day weekend trip to Michigan for our shower thrown by his family.
In just over 30 days, I’ll be in the midst of getting ready for our wedding. Nearly all the planning is done with a few stray pieces still lingering – kids’ table, table configuration type things, and the final paperwork with guest number. I still need to buy a guest book of some sort, buy our one way plane tickets to the wedding, and come up with something for cards.
I got all the invitations done in less than a week despite some serious hiccups in the production of them. I found a typo on the final which we all missed pre-printing. It’s subtle so most people won’t notice and not anything major. I figure if it’s the one thing that goes wrong, that’s lovely. We’re starting to get the RSVP postcards and amusingly enough, a few people have stuck them in envelopes despite the fact that we put postage on all the cards. People also aren’t filling in the ‘Words of wisdom for the bride & groom’ side of the card for the most part, which is a little sad making.
So far, most of the RSVPs have been ‘No,’ which isn’t unexpected. We invited nearly 200 and we’re expecting just over 100. It should be a good number and we’re excited.
One particularly unexpected thing is that managing the registries actually requires some work. Neither of us really processed the whole gift giving thing and I’m particularly terrible at asking for anything. We’ve had to be fairly thoughtful about including things. For both of us, our natural tendency is not ask for or include things, for a variety of self-editing reasons. It’s made creating a registry interesting, but I think we’ve gotten the hang of it. It’s an amusing problem to have though.
Wedding planning is a part time job, at the very least. I’ll be glad when my full-time job is the only one I have to worry about.
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