Monday, January 26, 2009

KILT!!!!

Mr Wonderful's kilt is here! It just came in the mail today, and I cannot wait to see it. (He said I can't see it before him, so I have to wait until he comes home for "lunch" before we open the package.) This is no cheap mass-produced kilt, either. It's a custom kilt, with his clan tartan, all the way from Scotland!

In other squee-worthy news, we've decided on our rental cabin for our Vermont honeymoon. We'll be staying in Bristol, right on the river, very near Lake Champlain and surrounded by trees. I cannot wait! Also, Mr Wonderful talked to our preferred officiant this morning, and he is available for our wedding date & said he'd be honored to perform the marriage ceremony for us. :)

Everything is coming together and I am so happy. Now, if I can just find a wedding band to go with my lovely engagement ring...

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Wedding update

I had a little meltdown last week. Mr Wonderful and I had decided to go with Scott's Seafood Restaurant for our ceremony & reception, because they had a lovely partially covered patio with a large rock waterfall, and the food was quite good. I'd emailed the event coordinator and gotten the OK from her on the date & location, along with a preliminary estimate on the cost. So I emailed her back with my specifics and asking to meet to sign contracts & give them a deposit. And then she called me to tell me that, oops, she'd forgotten one word in her email to me: "Not." As in, we can NOT do the wedding on their waterfall patio. Oh, but they would be happy to let us have the ceremony in front of their tacky painted lattice arch and have the reception in one of their private rooms.

That was NOT ok with me.

So I kind of freaked out, because we are under the gun here. We really need to nail down the date ASAP, because Mr Wonderful really needs to submit his vacation request by the end of the month. If he doesn't, then he would probably still get the dates off that we want, but if someone else had requested the same dates off before him, we'd be screwed. The end of the month is the cutoff date for vacation requests (from May 2009 - April 2010) to be evaluated based on seniority.

I didn't have a good backup for Scott's. We'd looked at some other places, but the only one that we seriously considered was a winery that we looked at a few months ago and decided was going to cost us too much. Well, after talking to Mr Wonderful, we decided to just go with the winery after all. It's probably not going to cost us much more than Scott's, and it was our first choice anyway, so it will be a lovely spot. He called & spoke to the events manager (who he actually knows personally), and our date is free! He's heading out there tomorrow to sign contracts and give them a deposit.

I really am not good at dealing with this kind of stress. I was totally ready to just say "Fuck it!" and drag him off to Vegas. But he has made it very clear that that's not an option. Thankfully he's more than willing to pick up the slack when I start going nuts. He has lots of ideas of his own, and he's happy to plan & make phone calls and stuff. (It's a good thing, too, because I hate talking on the phone.) Thank goodness I've got a partner who can take up the reins when I can't handle it anymore.

Hope


I feel so happy and hopeful. This is the dawning of a new age for our country, and I feel so lucky to be a part of it. :)

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Planning frenzy

My mom is up here visiting for a few days, so I took the day off of work yesterday and we did some wedding stuff: we visited the bridal salon and ordered my dress (see previous entry for a photo of the dress) and we met with a wedding planner. Now, generally speaking I'm pretty comfortable with planning the wedding details on my own, but when it comes to the actual wedding day, I want someone there to run the show. I want a control-freak proxy to make sure that people are where they're supposed to be & things get delivered on time, and I need someone to help my mom wrestle me into that crazy lace-up corset dress. So we met up with a lovely young woman who's been doing event planning for several years, and officially started her wedding planning business three years ago. I think she'll be a great asset and having her take care of the minutia on the big day will allow me to relax and enjoy things.

We're deeply into the wedding planning stuff now. Mr Wonderful & I are hoping to nail down a location within the next couple of weeks, because we can't really move forward with anything else until that's done - invitations, photographer (even if it's a friend, we need to make sure he is available on our date!), catering if necessary, music, cake, flowers...everything depends on the date. So that's our #1 to-do this month.

I broke down and ordered a wedding planning binder from Amazon today. I think it will help me stay organized with all the things I need to keep track of, and plus it's fun. Mr Wonderful was laughing at me earlier, saying how I'm really "getting into this" now when my initial reaction was "let's just elope!" I'd still prefer to elope, but if he wants a wedding, then dammit, I want a wedding that doesn't suck. One that's pretty and has great food. So that means I need to plan stuff, and that means I can't just go with the first option that comes along. Therefore I need organizational assistance, and a pretty wedding organizer binder sounds like just the ticket. ;-)