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?