Posts Tagged wedding
A little over 30 days to go
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.
Moved, dates saved, not unpacked, and pictures
Posted by Tammy in miscellaneous & sundry, personal on March 20, 2010
Moving is complete, thankfully. We’re not unpacked yet and won’t be for awhile. We don’t have enough bookshelves for our books. They’re still in boxes stacked up in the den. The apartment feels absolutely huge, which is a welcome change. We can actually put the boxes out of sight and at least give the illusion of being moved in (until you walk into the den).
Save the Dates are mostly done and mailed. I have 26 addresses that we’re still missing. Before doing them, I’d forgotten how much work calligraphy is. I remember now. Handwriting all of the addresses took rather a long time. It’s why I ended up doing them in bursts. Matt’s going to run the last of them to the post office on Monday. Hopefully, we can get the rest of the addresses this weekend – or at least most of them anyway.
So back to the subject of the new apartment, I did mention it felt huge, yes? We’re on the top floor (the 4th) and the ceilings are extremely tall. In comparison, my last apartment was a hobbit hole. This just feels immense, in a welcome way. My television and entertainment center, however, look rather dwarfish. They were purchased for a teeny apartment. It’s a problem for another day, but I’m on the lookout for ready, cheap solutions furnishings-wise. We’ll figure something out. In the meantime, I’ll cheat by finding an extremely tall fake plant to put on top of it or something (not really). The cat, who is adapting quite nicely, would eat the plant. I’m sure of it.
Last, but not least, we had our engagement pictures taken on our speed trip to Colorado last weekend. She’s already finished with them – all 182. The session was a blast – Tattered Cover bookstore right across from Union Station. We used both locations and the pictures are great. Denver’s LoDo lent itself nicely and Ashley Davis, our photographer, is fabulous. We enjoyed ourselves and you can tell in the photos. I’m laughing in nearly all of them. Now, we have to pick out a handful for our various needs. It was a good experience and I’m quite glad we chose her for our wedding. I can’t wait.
It’s been a busy week
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.
Early Adopters Anonymous
Posted by Tammy in geekery, miscellaneous & sundry on January 27, 2010
I’m an early adopter. I’ve been an early adopter since before I was the only girl in my dorm with a computer. I love technology and gadgets and cool geeky toys. I have my iPhone 3G, my PS3, my Roku, and my Kindle. There’s some functional overlap that’s happened over time. My Roku eliminated my cable TV use entirely and now, my PS3 offers the streaming Netflix functionality that drove my Roku purchase. I’ll keep them both because there’s always going to be more than one room in the house and you never know what kind of cool content Roku might offer next.
So, enter the iPad. It’s shiny, right? It’s a giant shiny gadget calling out to me and my insatiable geekery. But y’know what? Not seeing it. If I were a college/grad student and all my text books could go on the thing complete with graphics, maybe. But even then, the inability to multi-task is really capping my enthusiasm at lukewarm. No multi-tasking, no Flash, no HDMI, no widescreen movies, no webcam, no cam at all, and an additional $30/mo bill for me to have access to the web on the fly? No.
I can get on-the-go multimedia on my iPhone, which is also, shockingly, a phone. I’m already paying for it and adding a dataplan for the added functionality makes sense. My Kindle offers me instant gratification but doesn’t make me pay for it. Granted, it’s black and white at the moment, but that covers 99.9% of the books I read. My Kindle, which isn’t the DX, fits in my purse nicely – a not large purse. It is similar in size to a paperback. I’m not going to start carrying a bigger bag just to fit an iPad, which I can only use periodically whilst out and overlaps the functionality of my iPhone which I purchased from you previously. Carrying and paying for both monthly seems silly. And it certainly isn’t like the iPad can replace my MacBook Pro. I can’t very well play WoW on the iPad, can I?
Unless there are some developments between now and release, I won’t be in line and I won’t be buying one in the near future. I’m an Apple fan, don’t get me wrong, but either I’m not the target audience for this particular product (while I am for the vast majority of their products) or they missed the boat a tad on this one. Bummer, that.
Oh also, my wedding dress came in! This is unrelated, but more exciting for me than the tepid iPad news.
A week in review and some geeking
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.
I’m a bad blogger
Posted by Tammy in miscellaneous & sundry, personal on January 17, 2010
My poor neglected blog. It seems between work, planning a wedding, looking for housing, beginning to move, the holidays, and a long list of other To Do’s, blogging has fallen to the bottom of the list.
Let’s see, I’ve…
- Chosen an invitation vendor and finalized the Save the Dates,
- Mostly finalized booking music,
- Still haven’t wrangled the bridesmaid dress issue.
- Bought wedding shoes (and a back-up, more comfortable pair for the reception – <$50 combined cost. Hooray)
- Met the entirety of his family
- Continued my trend of sleep deprivation
Today, I’m going to actually finish the book I stared nearly a month ago. We’ll see how that goes.
Invitations and more invitations
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…
The Mod Victorian Frame invite
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.
Forget the invites! I’m using notebook paper.
Wedding invitations. Engraved, letterpress, thermography, and digital. Every shade of paper under the sun, except the color you actually want. A bazillion colors of ink, but the color you like isn’t available on the paper you want. The invitations are customizable except for the part you don’t particularly like.
And they’re all ridiculously expensive.
*sigh*
Oy, the din
The choice of wedding venue for us was something of an odd journey (as I mentioned in an earlier post). The restaurant we ended up choosing has a lot of sentimental value in my family and I’m very excited about having the wedding there. One of the advantages is having a choice of ceremony sites. We can have the ceremony on the lawn or beside the creek. Sometimes, the spring run-off chooses for you and the creekside is flooded but we’re hoping it won’t be. The trick to having the ceremony creekside is blocking out the noise. See, the creek (and the highway which is just across and up the hill make a sound system a necessity.
According to the wedding planner at the restaurant, there’s only one company/person she’s found that can successfully cancel out the noise and do sound for the ceremony. In the midst of all the life stuff, I hadn’t had a chance to call so I turfed the responsibility to my Dad. He called and found out the cost for handling the sound for just the ceremony. It was higher than I expected, I suppose, especially since I’m planning on keeping the ceremony very short and sweet, but it just isn’t something where we can’t skimp.
I’m not sure why the price of this one thing is catching me. It isn’t more expensive the anything else. Perhaps it’s because it’s the one place where I don’t have a choice. It doesn’t mean we’ll have to skimp somewhere else; it just bugs me a little. I suppose I could have the ceremony up on the lawn, but there’s just something extra special about having it next to a creek in the Colorado mountains. I think the extra bit of cost is worth it.
