Return of the Wedding Dreams

Last night I dreamed our wedding started late.

We kept delaying it by five minutes to finish the last little things, and five minutes turned into hours. All the guests were sitting patiently in white wooden folding chairs in a big dark room that looked like a conference room, and I was running around behind the altar, in a little prep room, making a list of the things we still needed to do and realizing we'd forgotten almost everything.

We hadn't confirmed the location with the photographers, so they weren't there. We hadn't written a ceremony with Mo. We hadn't written our vows. We had forgotten the booze for the unity cocktail. We didn't have music set up. We didn't have a chuppah. We weren't in our wedding clothes. We hadn't discussed the reception at all, so there was no food, no music, nowhere to sit.

So I tried to write vows as fast as I possibly could in a way that would encapsulate everything we wanted to say (which makes sense--the ceremony's the most important part of the day for me, and the vows are the most important part of the ceremony, so of course that's what I'd want to get done first).

I didn't ever get to the ceremony part of the dream. One of the last things I remember is Nate suggesting that he could "throw together" a chuppah at the last minute and me worrying that it wouldn't look nice,
This is a classic example of how my brain manifests subconscious stress. In high school, I would dream about being late for class because I didn't know where class was, and everyone being mad at me and therefore not telling me where class was, so I'd just run around looking for it, getting later and later. In college, after I stopped living with Julia (the roommate from Hell), I woke up crying in my sleep, which had never happened before and hasn't happened since. Dreams have always been my way of releasing steam my conscious brain isn't ready to admit is there yet.

So yeah, maybe I'm a bit stressed about wedding stuff. Really, I'm stressed about how damn much money this thing is going to cost, and whether or not people are going to have fun, and a bunch of shit I seriously should not care about. I'm not as interested in the wedding  minutiae as I am in the actual relationship/marriage stuff, but I haven't ever thrown a party this big before, and I guess I'm worried that people will think it's lame, rather than awesomeand original and fun and touchingly personal in a quirky-yet-spiritually-significant way.
So yes, I guess it's time to get this planning shit well and truly under way. 

Prenuptial Braindump

Okay, so, our engagement party is over, Great Western is over, I think it's time to actually start doing wedding-related shit. Here beginneth the brain dump:

Phew. This is probably post-party exhaustion, but I'm wiped out today, and generally not feeling so hot. Pre-period body changes have made me extremely clumsy, overly emotional, feeling gross because I'm breaking out everywhere, my boobs almost too sensitive to put in a bra, and generally Ready To Be Done with it all. Of course, I was supposed to get my period last weekend (the Saturday before the party) but being stressed out and in go mode has delayed it for a few days... and hopefully not much more than that. I don't really want to have my period at war, thanks. Also, all that nice relaxin has made my back go out worse than it has all year, including fun-filled spasms. It's probably also a reaction to starting to de-stress after this weekend... fortunately, that mostly got wiped out at the chiropractor yesterday and I'm feeling stiff, but not dying.

Things I Learned from Throwing My First Party

• When my parents tell me we haven't bought enough food, DON'T LISTEN. Your eyes and the size of the Costco shopping cart are true compasses.
• Make sure I actually get to spend time with the person/people with whom I am throwing the party. I saw lots of guests at the party, and not much of Nate.
• Your guest list will never be final, nor will it ever be set in stone.
• There are people in your social group who have done this before, better, and more often than you. These people include your family. Use them. Don't be afraid to delegate; just delegate to people you trust.
• If you're going to speech, prep it before the party.
• If you can't prep your speech before the party, Mo bullshits as easily as breathing.
• Sometimes Nate gets stressed out about party-planning too.
• White wine sangria.

Don't let the bullets fool you, our party went really well. We had some last-minute no-shows and some folks changed their RSVP's to No, and my parents decided when they showed up at the house that we hadn't bought enough food, so they went back out and got more... and now we have leftovers for days... but the party itself was great. It was really great to get to finally introduce my awesome family to my awesome friends, and we were totally loved on during the party itself, so I floated on a nice cloud of happy community lurve for the next day or so.

My mom surprised us by giving us one of our engagement pictures, blown up to 8 x 10" and glued to a big piece of posterboard, for our guests to sign. We got signatures from almost everyone, and we're going to frame the whole shebang and hang it up in the apartment. I was really touched and pleased by Mom's thoughtfulness--I keep being surprised when they do these wonderful wedding-related things (visiting so often to help us look at venues, giving me my Grandma's wedding ring--well, that was a request from her to my mom, but still--talking with me about wedding plans and marriage in general). I think part of me still expects them to disapprove of me getting married at this age, but that seems to be entirely in my head now.

Having Nate's family out was great too. They got along famously with my family, and held their own during a traditional Bauman/Day family Drunken Dinner at a restaurant where we drank waaaaay too much wine, sang in harmony with each other, and threw things. Yep, typical us. There were some issues with Josh, Nate's little brother, but nothing to write home about. I'd been anticipating some drama with him, but it ended up manifesting in a different way than I'd thought it would, and Nate and I got some good conversations out of it, so it all worked out in the end.

And people came! They came to the party and drank beer and played kubb and hugged us and bantered and generally had a great time! My parents seemed to really like everyone, and Nate's parents said it was easy to talk to everyone and that everyone made them feel welcome, even though they were in the minority 10% of folks who didn't know anyone at the party other than us. I was really floored by how much people helped out--my mom, dad, and Linda all handled a lot of food stuff, Rachie, Monica, and Kim all did a bunch of food presentation stuff, and the boys did a lot of shopping on Friday and Saturday. It was really incredible to see the community come together and help us out with stuff, unasked.

We're so blessed.

Venue Acquired! ...and a food dilemma

So we've FINALLY found a wedding venue (yes, we've only been engaged for five months and we've got over a year to go, so there isn't much finally about it. But still, I'm an epic procrastinator, so I want to get all this shit done as fast as possible. Bear with me. FINALLY.) We're going to use the Museum of Ventura County. It's really pretty in sort of a mod-Spanish style way, it has indoor and outdoor options, it's totally decorateable, and it's (for Ventura county) fairly affordable.

We just have one issue--food!

The venue has 3 recommended caterers, which is to say, 3 caterers you can use without having to pay a $500 fee. This is the only issue I have with the venue--the only reason I agreed to go with it is because they have three caterers you can choose from, not just one you're required to use. Having good food at the wedding is a pretty high priority for me, but I'm worried about how much the catering is going to cost. We calculated the cost for the mid-level caterer to do a meal for our guest list and it totaled up to the remainder of our budget. So we'd have photographers, a venue, great food, and no decorations, invites, clothing, gifts for the bridal party, rentals... you get the picture. That ain't gonna fly.

We're waiting on a quote from the "value" (AKA, cheaper) caterer, but I can't imagine it's going to be less than $3500. So, here are our options:

• Swallow $500 and self-cater. I absolutely don't want to self-cater, but it's the cheapest option. I don't trust myself, Nate, or our fridge to stand up to preparing food for 150 people the week before we get married, so this is pretty much off the table, but it is, technically, an option. 
• Move the wedding to Friday, rather than Saturday, and pay half as much for the venue, freeing up extra funds for catering. I'm okay with this option, but I'm worried it would be really inconvenient for our families and half of Team Bride, which is coming from 5 hours away--they'd have to take more time off work/school, and that could very possibly suck for them in terms of time, money, and getting behind on work. We'd also have to do the wedding in the evening, and with a lot of folks coming north from LA, would all the guests make it? Traffic's pretty heinous on Friday afternoons, and I'd hate for any of the folks I love to miss the ceremony... or to have to leave work early to make sure they make it at all. 
• Move the wedding to Saturday afternoon, rather than evening, and do tapas/appetizers instead of a full meal. This is another option I'm fine with, but I'm worried my more traditional father would freak out at the idea that we wouldn't be feeding our friends a full meal. 

What do you guys think? I'm kind of at a standstill here--any of these options would work, but I'm not thrilled about the potential screw-ups or problems with any of them.

Wringing my hands about wedding rings (ooh, I punned!)-- Part Deux

So when last we left our heroine (me), I had given some cashola to the jeweler I lurved in Ventura as a promissory payment on a custom ring... of some kind. I was torn about teal-blue diamonds vs. sapphires and feeling kind of guilty about spending so much money on such a frivolous thing and debating the moral implications of buying diamonds, even ethically sourced ones, and generally wringing my emotional hands about the whole situation.

So I got a call from the jeweler yesterday, and he told me he had ordered some diamonds for me to look over, but the color variations weren't as diverse as he thought I would like. I went in to take a look this morning, and he was right. I was hoping for a five-stone ring that had a very light stone, a medium-colored stone, a dark stone, a medium-colored stone, and a very light stone in a line, but when we put the diamonds next to each other, they all looked like pretty much the same shade of teal. Teal's my favorite color, and the stones were beautiful, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.

So long story short, I looked at the sapphire ring again, I looked at the diamonds, I mixed up the order of the stones, and finally George (the jeweler) suggested we put a couple of sky-blue diamonds on the ends of the line of teal stones. I took out the two middle stones, bumped the lightest color teal stones into the second and fourth positions, and put two sky-colored stones on the end, and voila--colors I loved, the gradations I wanted, and stones I didn't have to worry would wear out in fifteen years, like sapphires can. Sold.

Until recently, I'd been wrestling with buying a diamond wedding ring. I trusted the jeweler when he said the diamonds were ethically sourced, but I felt guilty about spending what, to me, is a good amount of money on a purely symbolic item. I felt like diamonds are so stereotypically decadent and chi-chi, would I really be happy with a diamond ring, or would I look at it and think I could have had something almost as pretty without the pricetag? Would I feel guilty about spending money other folks didn't have on something that was, on some level, a status symbol?

So I was driving to work on Thursday and it occurred to me--I'm paying for this ring by myself, with money I earned. Doing so isn't going to keep me from paying my bills or put me in debt. Nate's not helping me with it. My family isn't helping me with it. I'm choosing to spend money I earned with my own work on this.

All of a sudden, the ring changed from a petty concession to capitalism (and my fixation on sparkly things) to a symbol of my independence and capability. I'm spending money I earned on this ring, money I worked for. It's not an indulgence or a stereotype, it's a token of achievement. It's a symbol of my ability to take care of myself, to commit myself to a marriage as an independent adult.

That doesn't suck. :)

Pre-weddin' depression?

Things are not necessarily well in Sarahville.

Wringing my hands about wedding rings (ooh, I punned!)

In which I do some emotional handwringing about wedding rings. Sorry, kinda long, kinda fluffy.

This Sunday we went up to Santa Barbara and looked at the SB Unitarian Church as a venue. It was probably a little small for our needs, but it was really beautiful. The whole building is sort of a Spanish mission-style building. I'm uncomfortable getting married in any church, even an awesome one like the UU church, but we could have the ceremony in the courtyard outside, where there's a nice fountain and lots of green grass. If we don't book the parish hall, I think we'd save some money, too (that's the 'chapel' where they have lots of ceremonies and weekly services, and is this big dark long room that has a very Catholic church feel to it and kind of creeps me out--fine if that's your thing, but my spirituality eschews indoor worship and clergy standing up dictating God's opinion to people, so I'd feel completely dishonest being married in a place that made me so uncomfortable).

I didn't exactly fall in love with it immediately in a "OMG THIS IS IT!!!!!" kind of way, but as we walked through the grounds I started scheming and imagining and the place really grew on me. I could imagine decor, and in my head I started arranging furniture, and I started getting really excited, so when we left and Nate said he thought the place was too small for our estimated headcount, I got really bummed.

I think part of the reason venue shopping is stressing me out so much is because I think it's one of the aspects of planning that's the most critical and has the possibility of being the most restrictive. It's hard to avoid the big wedding-in-a-box places around here, and I have a really hard time visualizing decorations and colors and whatnot without a space to work in--that's just not how my brain works. I feel like we're sort of stuck until we have a venue, then a lot of my questions will be answered for me and I can start the more fun parts of planning because I have some of the bigger nitty-gritty stuff cleared away.

Nate keeps telling me that it's too early to stress myself out, but I have a tendency to leave things for the last minute, and that's the last thing I want to do with the wedding. I don't want the whole process to be a nightmare, but I'm worried that if I don't stress out now, it's just not going to get done. :( I know to a certain extent perspective is a choice--I could choose to be stressed out about something or I could choose to go with the flow, but I can't seem to let go and let wedding stuff just happen, or even to approach the planning I am doing with enthusiasm and a joyful heart. Maybe it's too personal, maybe I've heard too many horror stories, maybe I feel like if I want shit to be important and meaningful I have to break my back to get it. I'm not sure what the source of my perspective is right now, but I'm not thrilled with it.

Dolphins again

Last Friday, Nate and I collected a local friend, went down to a beach, and had a handfasting. 

This was one of those things I knew wanted to do even before we got engaged. There isn't a lot of tradition I'd consider part of my cultural heritage, but pre-Christian Celtic traditions have always rung true for me, just like I find myself drawn to the deities my ancestors probably worshiped in my own spiritual practice.

As I got into wedding planning and began to be confronted head-on with what before had been solely a conceptual understanding of how much inanity and demeaning tradition goes into planning a Western wedding, I wanted to do a handfasting more and more. Back in the day, before the Church took over marriage and then capitalism took over the celebration, this was what they did. This was all they had, all they needed. Marriages worked for a year and a day, or for a few years, or forever, or not at all. 

We dressed up fancy and drove out to Spinnaker. The song our friends had their first dance to came up on the iPod, which I took as a good sign. The next song was "Bad Romance," and I decided not to take it as any kind of sign at all. We stood on the beach together. We debated whether we should call animal control about the sea lion flopping listlessly around on the warm sand. We watched another pair of dolphins slicing through the waves. We sipped beer and ate a spice cake I'd baked that afternoon, and our friend tied our hands together with the cords Nate made--three colors for him, three colors for me, one thick ribbon to symbolize our commitment, seven strands in total. 

We exchanged vows, which we'd kept private before we spoke them (which caused my control freak brain no end of nervousness). Mine were very direct and legalistic, but also lighthearted ("...to support you; to laugh with you (and occasionally at you); to have epic slow-motion fistfights with you as a means of settling our differences...") , and his were more of a recollection of where our relationship had come from, what we had gone through, and where we were going now. Unplanned, I promised to have very serious conversations with him while slow-dancing around the living room, and he promised to always slow-dance with me at the grocery store. 

We kissed. We finished the beer. Our friend joked that "Your handfasting will self-destruct in three hundred and sixty-six days." and we laughed. And we grinned. And we kissed.

There was a sign by the sea lion which said it was there all the time and was being studied by the Channel Island Aquatic Mammals Institute (or something like that) and that we should just ignore him. He looked very comfortable on the sand.

Baby's First Wedding Squee

Hokay, so--I found a photographer, well, a pair of photographers, I love. I talked to Nate about it. He liked them too. I emailed them. I expected to hear nothing. Apparently in the world of weddings, no one ever gets back to you and you have to chase them down (in the world of Santa Barbara/Ventura weddings, this is so far been untrue for me. Every single vendor inquiry I've made has been followed up on quickly. I guess it pays to live in one of the two most expensive places to get married in the US. Pays someone, anyway.)

So, we hear back from the photographers, and they say sorry, we alternate every other year between LA and Seattle, and 2012 is a Seattle year. We could come down, but we'd have to charge you a travel fee... and since you're in California, it's a flat fee, not a full rental-car-airfare-hotel kind of fee. What do you think?

We thought yes. Even with the fee, the number they gave was less than any other photographer I've looked at so far. It's still a heck of a lot of money, but hey. Photography is one of those things that's important to us, so we'll pay to have it done fr srs legit.

Anyway, nothing's set in stone yet, but it was really gratifying to hear back so quickly, get such a great price, and have such nice communication with the photographers. :) I sent them a response email introducing us, talking a bit about our wedding, and asking a couple of questions, and we've been trading emails for the last couple of days. They seem really prompt and happy to answer all my questions, and we're looking at setting up scheduling an engagement shoot sometime this summer. Eeeeee!

So Nate was subjected to my very first Wedding Planning Squee on Monday night. Like, with dancing and wiggling and going of "Eeeee!" I have to say, since checking out the wedding-in-a-box venue, I've been a bit wary of wedding planning. I had really been striking out with research and such on venues, I'd had some budgetary issues, and I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and like this wedding thing was going to be way more work and fraught with way more difficulty than I'd originally planned.

And yeah, it's going to be a hell of a lot of work, and stuff isn't always going to turn out as quickly, easily, or cheaply as I feel like it should. But this thing? This particular thing? Seems to be working out perfectly. :)

"Be your own well of happiness. Don't let anyone poop in your well." --this chick

After yesterday's srs post, something light

Have some tasty dress inspiration. Sadly, I can't give credits for these photos, but none of them are mine.

A not fun post

So on Sunday morning, Nate and I went and toured a local wedding banquet place. We liked the style of the place okay (well, we liked the reception room--I wasn't a fan of the ceremony site), and they seemed well equipped for food, booze, and music... but we didn't love it enough to pay what they were asking for it, and something about the wedding package deal still gives me the heebie-jeebies. I thought I might feel better about it once we went and saw the place, and it's true, they were much more flexible in their packages and rates than I thought they would be... but I left feeling like they were trying to pitch us a bunch of stuff we didn't need or care about, and feeling guilty and inadequate for not liking what they had to offer.

Weddings While You're Planning One

I took a few days off work this week and took a trip up to the Bay Area. 

Tuesday afternoon, I got all dolled up and headed out to the event that had prompted this trip in the first place, Kristen and Ryan's wedding! Kristen's a friend and former roomie from college, and I actually went to 8th grade with her as well. We've done our separate thing for the last few years, and most of our contact has been on the internet, so I was surprised and honored to get an invitation to their wedding. And the wedding? Was awesome.

It wasn't about the decorations or the food or the dancing, although all of those things were great. It was about the community coming together to celebrate the people they loved. It was about the tiny flower girl doing stiff-armed five-year-old dances until she was falling asleep on her feet because she was so excited. It was about post-ceremony croquet to commemorate their first date. It was about the beginning of the ceremony, where each of them acknowledged and thanked their parents, and every single person in the audience cried.

I kept taking little pauses during the reception and thinking This is it. This is how a wedding should be. Meg Keene occasionally talks about the wedding magic, the thing that makes weddings happen even when caterers don't show up or rain ruins the photoshoots or you didn't get any sleep the night before because you were up finishing the last of your projects. There was wedding magic all the fuck over that place.

And waterproof mascara? Worth every fucking penny.

A post too silly even for Twitter

I seriously cannot fucking wait to marry this guy.

A Wedding at Work?

So one of my few frustrations this early in the wedding planning process is the lack of a nice, readily available reception site. We want to do our ceremony on the beach, and our reception at a second site (we can't do the reception outdoors for a couple of different reasons, or I would be all over it).

I'm looking for a site that doesn't offer a wedding "package," ie, a site that will let me reserve the space and not force me to use their vendors or charge me for non-optional things I wouldn't want to do anyway.

One of the options which has cropped up has been the place where I work. It's a pretty good option for the following reasons:

• It's well within our budget for the venue (meaning it's free for employees, minus the cost of having the entire building cleaned, which comes up to a few hundred dollars).
• It's a really pretty area, even if the room itself leaves something to be desired (there's a ZOMG my eyes my eyes oh please stop the burning kind of ugly mural all along one wall, but we could cover it with sheets). The reception itself could be partially outdoors, overlooking the ocean, which would be holy crap beautiful.
• We could use the vendors we wanted, rather than some crappy caterer or rental company that was only still in business because it had a contract with the venue.

The downsides are a little less easy to quantify:

• The site itself has a kind of industrial/corporate vibe that I'm not thrilled about. Lots of exposed concrete and glass--I was imagining something more casual and rustic for the wedding.
• There's a definite ick factor to getting married at work. I mean, really, working here is fine, but I don't have a lot of meaningful memories here that would make it special, and I definitely have had a few months of stress and difficulty here.
• There's also the (unlikely) scenario that we make the reservation and I end up working somewhere else before the wedding and we're stuck trying to find a new venue with less than a year to go. That would suck.

So I'm really not sure what to do. So far, work seems to be the most economical option, and would let us use the vendors we want, but... it's still work. I'm not sure how to make that okay in my head.

Stress is not doubt.

Why is the wedding already freaking me out?

*Giggle*

Me: "Sooooo we're thinking of having a Firefly-themed wedding reception."
My mother: *Long pause* "Does that mean I get to wear red cowboy boots?"

Guess I don't have to worry about scandalizing my family with my non-traditional ideas. Well, not my mother, at any rate. 

A nod to tradition. Kinda.

When we were first discussing getting engaged, Nate and I had a conversation about names. He said he didn't care what I did with mine (he'd already had a woman change her name to his, and clearly that didn't turn out well), but he didn't really want to change his.

Nate's last name isn't the one he was born with--he was legally adopted by his stepfather in high school, and had spent a couple of years before that going by a hyphenated version of his biological father's last name and his stepfather's last name, which his mother had taken when they married. Like a lot of Nate's family history, his name is simple on the surface with complicated underpinnings. He loves his stepfather, he likes his last name, and he wants to hang onto it, so the option of both of us changing our last names to a mutual one is off the table.

I'm fine with that. My main concern at the time was that he didn't have strong feelings about what I did with mine, because I had already pretty much made up my mind.

I'm keeping my last name. It's something I've planned on doing even before Nate and I got together, and there's an added bonus that I don't really like the way my last name sounds with his anyway... but you know, even if he had an awesome last name like "Bonesaw" or "Runswithwolves" or something, I'd still probably hang onto my birth name.

It's always something I've been pretty certain of, I think in large part because my mom kept her last name when she married my dad (they were both married and divorced from other people before they met and married each other and had me and my brother). My brother and I both have our dad's last name, and our mom's birth name as our middle name.

When I was little, I would go through the school phone books we got every year and look at my classmates' parents' names. Whenever I saw a woman whose last name was different than her husbands, I felt a shivery sense of pride--like those women, and my mother, were making statements about themselves just by ignoring tradition and doing what they wanted.

I asked once my mom why she had kept her birth name when she married my dad, and she said she'd changed her name for her first marriage, reverted to her birth name after the divorce, and didn't feel like changing it a second time. That, and she didn't like the way her first name sounded with my dad's last name. For her, it was that simple--her commitment had nothing to do with what name was on her driver's license, so why not hang onto the one she liked?

I've always liked the symbolism of keeping my last name--expressing that, like my husband, I'll still be an individual and independent person as well as a committed partner. It makes me feel strong. The fact that doing so also honors my mother and the choices she made makes me extra happy, because my mom is awesome.

And it gives a snarky explanation to anyone who demands to know why I'd keep my last name: "Because it's tradition!"

On a lighter note...

Today's wedding theme idea: "But will it blend?"

Also, Nate and I were walking back from the car yesterday from fencing practice and both our hands were full, so we linked arms. After a couple steps, Nate looked down at me and said "Remember--keep God in the middle." 

A Good Wife! A Good Wife! A Good Wife! Like You Wanted!

So I had me a realization on Saturday.

Wedding thought of the day

Slightly Firefly themed wedding.

Geeky, yes. Also awesome. Also, if there's anything that I like at all in the current "vintage" trend that seems to be sweeping the wedding/decor/fashion world, it's a grungy old-world Western kind of look. :) All the other vintage stuff kind of drives me crazy, but if we rocked the Firefly stuff, I could wear something like this:

This moment of vanity and geekery brought to you by a slow day at work.

Transmission ends.

Okay, I follow a couple different wedding blogs. Offbeat Bride is my favorite (see the badge in the sidebar), but I also dabble in A Practical Wedding. A lot of the time, their posts have too much emotional handwringing for me, but every once in awhile (especially when the woman who runs the blog, Meg, writes something) I read something that either really hits home or really sums up my own experience.

Today's post is one of those.

I sympathize so strongly with the feelings of fear, despair, and hopelessness that Meg writes about as she works a soulless job and her husband tries and fails over and over to find a job in an economy that's spiraling out of control around them. Graduating college into a recession and spending my first year and a half as an independent adult supporting two has changed how I think about money, how I think about work, and how I think about myself. For better and for worse. I hope the better sticks and the worse fades.

And I glad our story, like Meg's, has so far had a happy ending.

Um.

So people talk about weird shit when you mention being engaged.

Nate and I are in St. Paul's Episcopal church, picking up our weekly CSA box, and we meet up with a coworker of mine, Bill. He manages the organic farm where the CSA food is grown and is basically a priest-in-training at the church. He's a very chill, laid back kind of guy, and the church is very liberal, so I actually enjoy talking with him about his faith and the process of learning to be a priest.

So we're there in the church hall, chatting with Bill, and in comes a small, brown-haired woman who was probably in her mid-forties. She and Bill hug, Bill introduces me and Nate as CSA subscribers and mentions that we're recently engaged.

"Oh, really?" she beams up at us. "Okay, one word of advice from an old married person?" And here she steps back and looks at each of us. "There's you? And there's you. And?" She looks up at the roof of the hall. "There's God."

She points at each of us and up at the ceiling, then roughly sketches the sign of the cross. "You here? And God in the middle. You just leave room between you. For God."

Nate and I looked at each other. We're all for God and all, but probably in a different way than she imagined. We finally said "Uh, yeah! Will do!"

When we got home, Nate suggested we keep communication between us instead.

I'd hit that.

Thinkin' thinkin' thinkin'. 

Clothes make the man

So every time I ask Nate what he wants to wear for the wedding, he says "Top hat and tails."

Now, it's an accomplishment in and of itself for Nate to have an opinion about what he's wearing--his default setting is "shirtless with flannel jammie pants." His outlook on life is pretty casual in general, so I was surprised to hear that he had an opinion at all about what he would be wearing... but I wasn't really surprised to hear he wanted to wear something fancy-pants.

Nate likes to dress up, likes to look nice (good little Leo!), and generally completely subverts the stereotypes about how men never ever give a shit about what they're wearing and have to be shoehorned into their formalwear by the long-suffering women who deign to put up with them. That's one of the ways we completely upset the gender stereotype--he loves to dress up and I always feel awkward or uncomfortable. So when he says he wants to wear black tie formalwear, I get a ball of nausea and ice in my stomach--that's so not me.

But, you know, it's not my wedding, dammit, it's our wedding, so if he wants to dress up all fancy, we'll make it work. There had to be a way to coordinate my laid-back hippie beach wedding dress idea with Nate's penguin cosplay. Right?

So I got to thinking. And it occurred to me that associating a top hat and tails with black tie attire is a very modern convention--it's about as formal as men's formalwear gets. But roll the clock back a couple of hundred years, and tailcoats and hats on dudes were worn in much more casual situations. What if Nate rocked a tailcoat with a sort of archival, costumey quality?

Enter the Edwardian tailcoat.

If we designed something for Nate that was kind of evocative of Colin Firth's costumes in the A&E (six hour marathon) Pride and Prejudice, only hopefully without the terrifyingly crotching high-waisted pants, and made it in a color, rather than just black, that might work. I wouldn't want to do a perfectly period design, but I'd want to distance it somehow from modern tailcoats. I'm hoping to do something tea-length and not-too-fancy myself (with a dash of color or two), so I think we might have found a workable compromise.

Nate and I have begun tackling the first logistical nightmare of our wedding planning adventure--the engagement party.

Mangagement ring!

So Nate and I went out to dinner last Thursday night (burger and martini night at the Sidecar, woo!) and I popped the question.

Today's Wedding Theme Idea

"Mayonnaise-Based Salads."

Think about it. Egg salad. Chicken salad. Macaroni salad. Potato salad.

Best idea EVER.

Musing on tradition, and how much weight moral outrage gets in wedding planning

One afternoon last week, I found myself napping on some friends' couch in Long Beach for a couple of hours. It had been a long couple of days, including two trips to LA and back, some hospital visits, lots of nerves and worrying, and finally a happy ending. I was completely wiped out exhausted and prone to falling asleep wherever I was sitting, which, in this case, happened to be our friends' house. When I woke up, Adrienne had retrieved their toddler from preschool and Jeff, who works nights, was awake and sociable. I showed him my engagement ring and Nate and I squeed about wedding stuff briefly, and in a flurry of conversation about naming children, family traditions, and cultural traditions and expectations, we came across my opinions on lots of modern traditions.

I had just asked Nate if there were any naming conventions in his family (Nature willing, we'll be reproducing someday, and if I'm marrying into a family where every firstborn daughter is named Euphegenia, I want plenty of warning). He said he couldn't think of any, and I said okay, but to let me know if he could... and that if he wanted to adhere to those conventions, I wanted to know that, too, so I had time to mull it over. This prompted a comment from someone (and I'm not being intentionally vague, I'm just completely exhausted and my memory is bad) about being surprised to hear that from me, because I'm usually pretty anti-tradition.

The website lives!

We've officially completed our first co-task! We sat down, went through all the templates on mywedding.com, picked one out, and have the teeny tiny rudiments of a wedding website.

Also, welcome! This blog? Officially and entirely completely about wedding shit. It will all be this trivial, silly, self-absorbed, and childish. I make no excuses. There will, occasionally, be a contemplative post or two around here, but the vast majority of it is going to be the lightest and fluffiest of posts. Enjoy.

There will also be frequent use of the word "motherfucker."

Strange Encounters

It's funny how getting engaged pulls people out of the woodwork.

I'm thinking specifically of a few friends from high school, none of whom I've heard from in the last four or five years. I saw a couple of them at group functions once or twice during college (mostly at winter get-togethers hosted by a mutual friend who stayed in touch with them), but never one-on-one, and we never kept up communications independently.

How it all went down

This is the proposal story in its entirety. It'll almost certainly get cut down for Facebook and emails. Really, it's quite long.

Guest list, round 1

Preliminary total from our first draft "include everyone you've ever met and talked to for more than 10 minutes" spreadsheet: 213 people, not counting our extended families. On the other hand, it includes all the people who a) probably won't travel out to the wedding, b) I know and used to hang out with a lot but haven't seen in years (college roommates from sophomore year, etc.), and c) people I don't really want to invite, but will if politeness dictates.

That might, might, might be manageable, but I doubt it. And frankly, I'd like something smaller. We'll see.

I am such a cliche.

I had my first wedding dream last night. All I remember is having a big, vision-obscuring headpiece a la Lady Gaga, having about fifteen bridesmaids, some of whom matched and some of whom didn't (and some of whom I haven't seen in the last five years), and the ceremony being about fifteen seconds long. Then I had to go update the drivers on my little pink netbook, like, right after the ceremony. 

Oh, and there was a big banner covered in hearts that said "MR. AND MRS. [His Last Name]" on it. *Headdesk*

Ring sizing and Conversations with Mom.

I'm working on the bigass engagement post, but just wanted to jot a few things down.

I dropped my ring off at the jeweler to be sized yesterday, which was way more nerve-wracking than I'd anticipated. I know it's just a thing, I shouldn't be so attached to it, but I love the hell out of my engagement ring and I didn't love the way the jeweler talked to me--he was pretty bored-looking and dismissive and tried to get me to size my ring down smaller than I wanted originally. I was very direct about what I wanted, and he wrote down the correct size on the order sheet, but it didn't do a lot to inspire customer confidence. I know sizing a ring he didn't make is a small-potatoes job for him, but still. They've done good work for me in the past, so I have no reason to expect them to screw up the ring, but the combination of being nervous about having it altered to begin with and the way the jeweler acted doesn't exactly encourage my confidence. :/

I moved the ring Nate got me for Xmas over from my right hand to my left, which helped. It's still a silly thing to worry so much about.

On a brighter note, my mom seems to be coming around to the whole engagement thing. My mom and I are really close (like talking on the phone 4 or 5 times a week close), and I know she'd been and, to a certain extent, still is nervous about me getting married so young. I imagine telling her we planned to wait a year or two to get married helped assuage her fears, and last night on the phone she said she'd had some time to think about it (we'd been out of town for the weekend and I hadn't spoken to her for a few days) and was actually getting excited. She went far enough to ask if we were planning an engagement party and said "Okay, and I'll help you plan it. I'm the mother of the bride, that's my job." which made me and Nate laugh--her initial reaction to the engagement was "That's wonderful! ...But you're only twelve!"

We haven't spoken more about it in detail, but I'm really glad to hear she's slowly getting on board with the idea. As Nate said when I related the conversation to him (after laughing) "Your family loves you so much!" to which I responded "They love the shit out of me," and it's true. 

Warm fuzzies

The drive to work has officially become "Holy shit my ring looks great in sunlight" time. Seriously, I've been super busy this week, but I have to take some time to get some pictures this afternoon for Facebook and Picasa.

I also have to find time to write down how it all went. I have to get crackin' at work right now, but I definitely want to take some time to write and remember. I have a feeling things are going to start to go very fast.

It begins!

Yesterday at around noonish, I created this blog.

Yesterday at 5:00, I got proposed to.

I have a feeling I know what most of this blog is going to be about. For now, anyway.

:D