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:

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.

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 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.

*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. 

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.

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.

Today's Wedding Theme Idea

"Mayonnaise-Based Salads."

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

Best idea EVER.

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.