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May 31, 2007

Wedding Woes

Gaaaaah. The nice, pleasant Save-the-Date solution mentioned below was sent to a friendly, InDesign-savvy person for print-prepping, who kindly did the work (and redid it so certain relatives weren't cropped out) for free. Then, I found a printer online called GreenerPrinter that seemed perfect. They have a fantastic interface, real-time price quotes, and 100% recycled paper. I was so happy to have a solution like that, even though the cost was, oh, five times that of the local print shop.

I placed my order, approved the proof, and waited for the agonizingly long two-day shipping period for my masterpiece to show up in print form. I printed labels ahead, even though I haven't exactly figured out the whole invite list yet. Today, the package arrived (as UPS said it should -- the tracking tool is quite addictive when you're waiting for something important). Cute label, cute stack of postcards. But. The damn cards are 1/4 inch to short on BOTH sides. All sorts of things are chopped off. No one else will notice, but for that price, and a very standard size, the damn things could at least be cropped correctly.

I called and complained in a rather ridiculous way -- I claimed I was doing this for "a person" when it's obviously me, since my name is on the damned card and the order. I was offered corrected cards via overnight mail the next day, but I'll be on a plane to another city tomorrow, so that's out, and it would sort of defeat the eco-friendly purpose anyway, although it's such a small thing it doesn't really matter. I was also offered a measly 10% discount, which I took.

I'm thinking that this may be the beginning of a LONG string of similarly disappointing wedding-related mishaps that I take too seriously, though. Expensive mishaps, too. I really don't think I should be allowed to have a wedding. I'm too detail-oriented and obsessive.

Posted by csageday at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2007

This weekend....

...one of my oldest friends, Liz, is getting married. To celebrate, Mom dug up some photos from Miss Carrol's -- the nursery school where we met (see class photo on top) -- and various Halloween exploits (notice the scary hair? That was a daily tragedy, not one limited to Halloween, although I usually forewent the added color), and we produced the following...

Congrats to Liz and Colleen -- two people who actually read this blog (and, gasp, comment!) from time to time, and so deserve a special tribute!

Posted by csageday at 04:23 PM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2007

Status

I meant to write about our gradual descent into wedding mania here, but the mania makes it hard to keep a blog up to date.

I'll stick to the highlights.

1. Wedding dresses are scary. The wedding industry is scary. In ads, brides in the most expensive gowns routinely look like they are miserable (think drugged, depressed, angry), and one designer includes a gratuitous naked man in all the photos. Or maybe the dresses come with naked men? Another dress has a "removable modesty piece" -- can't remember what that was, exactly. Wish I had time to write about all the ridiculousness.

2. We have a date: The easy-to-remember and rather close 09.08.07. We were hoping for a small, simple, fun wedding upstate -- you know, a simple dress, some good wine and decent food on a lawn somewhere near a lake, tipsy family, etc. Riiiight.

3. The wedding industry found us out. I was hoping to wear my Mom's dress (very simple, very 70s), but I somehow landed myself a brand new dress from the most commercial, ridiculous, Cinderella-style wedding emporium in the world (Kleinfeld's, for the uninitiated, which Mom and I were ostensibly just going to for kicks). The dress is vintage-looking, but new and not cheap and I'm still conflicted about that.

4. We are now in the land of tent rentals and Save-the-Dates and caterer meetings. I have this reminder on my Google homepage, that is counting down at an ungodly rate:

5. With the Save-the-Date, we had a brainstorm. We thought we'd do a vintage style travel postcard. We'd find something on the web, alter it, and impress our friends with our clever retro kitsch-iness. We never found quite the right graphic, though, and so a simple project has taken over a month and is just now starting to look like this:

No, I'm not sure who all the people are, but I think they're related. At this rate, we may get the invitation out before the event itself.

6. On theknot.com (which assumes at least a year of planning, naturally, and is really not a site I should be looking at), the majority of my "checklist" items have little overdue exclamation points next to them.

7. We love indiebride.com's message boards. Sane people!

8. We're trying to be eco-friendly about this. A book called "Eco-Chic Weddings" was just published and has been helpful, and I really meant to follow all the advice, but then I ran off and had an affair with Kleinfeld's, so who knows how things are going to turn out.

9. I seem to be in a state of constant anxiety, but I'm not entirely sure what the next steps are. If I had my way, everything would be like the STD (a wedding acronym that is actually used!) -- I would just wait around until the right solution presented itself, instead of settling for the first thing that comes to mind. Three months doesn't really allow for this sort of flexibility, though. At least the website is done, since building a website was a great way to procrastinate on the more important tasks, like figuring out how to feed people in the middle of nowhere.

Posted by csageday at 01:36 AM | Comments (1)

May 06, 2007

The News

On the Friday before Easter, Derek and I went to Veselka (site of our first date eleven years ago). We had our usual soup and pierogis and were getting ready to leave when D pulled a ring out of his pocket and proposed. I said yes. There are plenty of stories that lead up to that moment, but they don't really matter -- we're just happy to be making things official, and we're feeling very lucky to be together.

Posted by csageday at 11:50 PM | Comments (5)