Five days from now, Matt and I will be dining on our first meal as a married couple, enjoying live music, and sharing our evening with our closest friends and family. Tomorrow, we head to Colorado to spend a few days pre-wedding with my family. Thursday night, his family and most of the wedding party hit town (and we head out to our bachelor/bachelorette ridiculousness at Casa Bonita. Yes, we’re that insane). Then on Friday, things really get into full swing – rehearsal, rehearsal dinner, post-rehearsal dinner festivities at Waterloo. On Saturday, we’re getting married (hopefully there will be a bridge by that time)!
As you can see, we’ve got a busy and exciting week ahead. Expect some silence around these parts. I’ll try to update with a few pics from Alaska while we’re on the honeymoon!
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.
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.
Let’s see. In the past week, I’ve gotten my finished Save the Dates (which look great!), split the band on my engagement ring, scheduled my first dress fitting, and scheduled time to pick out bridesmaid dresses (with at least two of my bridesmaids).
Let’s talk about the ring, shall we? My fiancé bought the ring in Michigan but the warranty includes resizing, etc through the Kay Jewelers family of stores. So, that’s where we went. We took the rings in to be sized in early January and two and half weeks later, they were ready. When we picked them up, the engagement ring looked fine, but the wedding band had a nick in it that looked like someone had hit it with a screwdriver blade. When I pointed it out, they took it back to be “buffed out,” but when that didn’t fix it, they swapped it out. No problem, seemingly, and no issues. Less than a week later, I’m fiddling with my ring and my nail catches on the back of the band. I look and the band is split all the way through. My nail had caught on the split. When I took off the ring, the band didn’t even look circular anymore. Back to the store.
The woman who assisted us before seemed genuinely horrified at the band splitting. The gentleman who helped us suggested that the soldering had split. The ring, obviously, is back in for repairs and reshaping. I asked how they would fix it and he said they could fix it via soldering. Hopefully, that’s true. I’ll definitely be checking it carefully. It bothers me that we’ve already had to take advantage of the warranty twice and I’ve been able to wear my ring for less than a week. Blah.
My week can best be summed up by the phrase “insanely busy.” Somehow in the midst of incredibly long, non-stop days at work, I managed to squeeze in a little bit of wedding planning – still finishing up music details and a few other things. Next project is bridesmaids dresses. I need to get that ball rolling.
For now, I’m simply happy to have survived. I’ll worry about things I still need to do tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m playing around with Bing’s recipe niftiness. Type in an ingredient and get a recipe. Clever and definitely a cool search enhancement. Bing is definitely making a play. They’re additions are clever and really showcase the power of intelligent search.
And in unrelated news, I really want one of these.
So, I’ve ordered three invitation samples so far and been happy with exactly zero of them. The first one was dreary and on flimsy, shiny paper that was completely wrong for the invite. The second one was a pocket invitation and the paper was just cheap and horrid. The last one, well, I liked that one by far the best, but it didn’t quite fit (Deirdre from InviteSite). The invite was close to the right apple-y green color, the price wasn’t horrifying, and I loved the feel of the homemade paper, but it just wasn’t me and it just didn’t fit the feel I was trying to capture.
So, I was still hunting and finding all the recommendations I could for print shops and presses and whatever else. Then, I saw a blog post talking about stationary from Minted.com. I browsed through all their invitations, looking longingly, as always, at the letterpress and found…
I have, once again, ordered a sample and have all my toes and fingers crossed that it will prove to be significantly closer to what I want. I also ordered a sample of the La Fete Save the Date (in chartreuse). They aren’t what I want for an invite, but they’d make a fun Save the Date. I’d love to use one of our engagement photos but I don’t think the timing will work out since I’d really like to send the Save the Dates before the end of the year.
Hopefully, I’ll get the samples this week and they’ll be exactly what I really want! Hopefully.
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