Luna de miel

Or, in English, HONEYMOON! It's finally time for our honeymoon, and I am so excited.

You may recall that we had originally planned to get married in early October. When we moved the wedding up to May, we couldn't take a honeymoon immediately after for a couple of reasons: 1) we had no money (because I was unemployed) and 2) Mr Wonderful didn't have a week off from work (because we rescheduled at pretty much the last minute). So we took a "mini-moon" and went up to the Gold Country area for an overnight at a B&B. Mr Wonderful had already requested a week off from work to go on our honeymoon at the originally-scheduled time, and we decided to keep that block of time set aside and hope that we'd be able to go on a real honeymoon when the time came around.

My mom & stepdad then offered us a week at a timeshare in the northern Lake Tahoe area and we happily accepted, so by the time I got a job offer, our honeymoon was already planned. Luckily my new employer was fine with me taking off that week (unpaid, of course, but at least I get to go), and now that time is almost here! This weekend, we're heading off to the great blue lake, to watch the leaves change colors and relax. I'm not even going to bring my computer. If we need a map or restaurant recommendations, I'll have the iPhone with me, but I don't even want to be tempted to check my email or play games on Facebook or anything. Just a week alone with my hubby, and maybe a little knitting or a new book to pass the time when we're not (*ahem*) otherwise engaged. ;-)

I can't wait!

Monthaversary

It's been a month since our wedding, and not much has changed in our day-to-day lives, except that I'm starting to use my new last name. I finally got the marriage certificate from the county last week and was able to go to Social Security & DMV and get my name changed, and although I don't have the new documents yet, I was able to change my bank accounts and am getting started on the long process of changing the name on all the bills.

I ordered a photo album from snapfish, and am eagerly awaiting that arrival, but the video arrived today! I've uploaded some highlights from the ceremony to youtube:

Sand Ceremony


Vows


Ring Exchange

Wedding photos!

Just wanted to drop in real quick to give y'all a link to the wedding photos. I keep getting more in, so there may be more added to the Flickr set , but I wanted to get something up fast for those who couldn't make it to the party.

Also, you might want to watch our first dance. :)

Enjoy!

Two weeks

We're two weeks out now. Most of the stuff on my to-do list is done, but I'm a bit worried about my wedding shawl. The border is taking a LOT longer than I thought it was going to. I've jut got to keep plugging along with it and hope I get it finished in time. I'm planning to spend most of the day tomorrow knitting; I hope I'll be able to get the first end finished (I'm about halfway done with the first end now, and truly, it takes forever to knit this part).

I got another RSVP today, and this brings our total guest count to EIGHTY-FREAKIN'-FIVE. Oh my god you guys, I cannot believe it. I can't believe that my tiny 30-people-max wedding has morphed into this enormous party. I am so excited, though! A whole bunch of people are coming that I truly never expected to come; people I haven't seen in years are showing up! And about a third of our guest list is kids, which I think is awesome. What could be more fun than a bunch of families playing in a park for the day?

We are totally planning a bunch of fun activities, too. We've got hula hoops, frisbees, bubbles for the little ones (including a battery-operated bubble machine), coloring books & crayons, and a "guest book" that is a big blank sketch book where people can write advice, draw little pictures, whatever. We're bringing some other games for the adults & older kids, too - cribbage, liars' dice, etc.

I just can't wait for the day to get here!

Testing, testing...1...2...3...

This weekend I did some cupcake trials. I bought a couple of mini cupcake tins, some liners, and a few boxes of cake mix (because I am lazy and don't want to make everything from scratch).

First I made a batch of lemon cupcakes - I added lemon zest to the plain yellow cake mix, threw in some lemon juice in place of some of the water, and then made a simple glaze of lemon juice and powdered sugar. The mini cupcakes turned out great - they cook in 13 minutes at 350, and cool in about 5-10 minutes, so they're ready to frost quickly. Unfortunately the frosting didn't hold up very well; it kind of melted into the cupcakes by the second day, so they looked all patchy and odd. I think I may have to switch to a buttercream frosting (ugh), but if I do that I'm hoping to find some passionfruit puree to use as flavoring. Mr Wonderful & I went to a catering/wedding fair event a while back that had a lemon/passionfruit cake sample we both loved, and I'd like to be able to reproduce it. It would require a bit more work though, as I'd have to pipe the frosting on the cupcakes.

I also tried making chocolate mini cupcakes. I used a Devil's Food flavor of cake mix and when I made the "plain" chocolate cupcakes, they tasted like nothing much. Even the kids didn't like them. However, I did also spice up some of the batter towards the end of the batch, with cinnamon, orange liqueur, and a bit of chili powder. The cinnamon flavor came through, but the orange and chili powder were completely lost. I think I may need to use cayenne instead of chili powder and only use the orange liqueur in the ganache. The ganache was a whole other story - my first try (with half the chocolate chips) turned out grainy & gross; I used Barefoot Contessa's method of melting the chocolate & cream in a double boiler. The second try turned out perfectly; in this instance, I heated the cream just until it boiled, then poured that over the chocolate chips and let it sit for a couple of minutes before whisking together. The cupcakes were super easy to frost with the ganache, too - you just dip them in and swirl a bit, then pull them out and the frosting is beautiful and glossy and smooth. Even better - they still look beautiful the next day. :)

A couple other updates: I found the perfect shoes on sale at Kohl's, ordered my bouquet & Mr Wonderful's boutonniere from a local florist (yay, white tulips!), and we figured out the music situation. Tomboy has a boombox that is battery-operated, has detachable speakers, and has an auxiliary input that accommodates an iPod. We tested it out last night, with batteries & everything, and it worked beautifully.

Wedding & job update

Oooh boy, things are in full swing now!

Still no job, but I've been doing some contract work for individual clients and for my old supervisor, who quit working for The Boss and is now opening up her own consulting business. So there's some money coming in. In fact I'm hopeful that I'll be able to just do consulting, as that would solve my issues with telecommuting quite nicely.

The wedding is set for May 2, at a large regional park. We've reserved a lovely picnic spot with a bunch of picnic tables, BBQs, a small deck for dancing, and a beautiful flagstone patio area that will serve quite well for the ceremony. I built a wedsite & found a free web host, and then sent out email invitations. We're doing a potluck BBQ reception, telling guests not to bring presents, but to bring food instead. I'm actually really excited; this is just the kind of wedding I would have wanted originally - something fun and laid back that we could invite all of our friends & family to. We're getting a great response - most of people we've invited are coming, I think.

My dress is in, and it's gorgeous and needs almost no alterations - just a bustle and maybe to tack down the sleeves to the elastic underneath. I made a beautiful silk flower hair clip for about $10. Mr Wonderful is renting a jacket for his tux, and we're getting some of the more esoteric accessories (sporran, hose, etc) at the Scottish Games in Woodland on the weekend before the wedding. And the kids? Well, Kohl's had an enormous sale and we ended up getting Tomboy a dress and Rugrat a pinstriped suit for less than $100. Awesome.

We got our rings too. Mine is a just simple white gold band, so it doesn't compete with my engagement ring. I already had a tungsten ring purchased for Mr Wonderful, but then he lost about 20 pounds and it ended up being too big. Unfortunately you cannot resize tungsten, so we bought another tungsten ring for him (one full size smaller!) on Overstock.com, for about $50. So now if he gains weight, he can wear the bigger one, but if he stays all skinny like he is now, he can wear the new smaller one. They're very similar; just the celtic knot pattern in the center is different.

There's not much left to do -- find a solution for music (speakers or boombox, battery-operated, that will accommodate an ipod), get a bouquet (Grandma has graciously offered to pay for my flowers!), decide on shoes (whether to buy some new ones, if I can find something good and cheap), find someone to do my hair, and figure out the cupcake situation. My wedding shawl is well on its way, and if I continue knitting a full repeat each day, I'll have it done in plenty of time. I'm working my butt off at the gym, so I should be in better shape than I have been in years when I walk down that aisle. Oh, and we have to get our marriage license.

Things are falling into place, and I am so excited! I'm not nervous at all about marrying Mr Wonderful - there hasn't been any doubt in my mind about him. I just can't wait to make things official, and to celebrate with all of our friends and family. :)

Mmmm...fooood.....

Mr Wonderful and I are now at the point in the wedding planning where we need to make a decision about a caterer. And the best part about this is that you get to run around meeting various caterers and tasting free food.

On Sunday, we went to a caterer-sponsored "wedding faire" kind of thing, where there's a few vendors hawking their wedding-related shit (like photographers, officiants, etc.) but mostly it was a way for the caterer to get a bunch of people in one room and show how awesome their buffet can be. And I gotta say...not so impressed with the food. The problem with a buffet is that it always feels like you're at Bob's Big Boy smorgasbord, and the food has been sitting around for a couple of hours and picked over by a few hundred people, even when there's only like 50 people in the room and they are constantly bringing out fresh food. It still LOOKS ghetto, no matter how much you pretty it up with fancy table linens and stuff. And it still pretty much tastes like cardboard, because they are serving food for the lowest common denominator. You know, you can't make anything too spicy, because people have varying levels of spice-tolerance. So everything ends up tasting pretty much the same.

We really only liked two things about the event: one was a table setup (flowers, napkins, etc.) that I took a picture of on my phone, and the other was a cake sample that was absolutely delicious: lemon cake with passionfruit buttercream. It sounded like an odd combination, but it was so light and bright and uplifting - really an excellent flavor combination.

Tonight we're heading out to Concord to meet with a caterer & do a tasting, and I'm in discussions with a couple of other caterers as well. It's difficult sometimes to schedule the meetings because Mr Wonderful works swing shift and when he's got the weekend off, we have the kids. So it's a bit of a shuffle, but the catering is the most important part of our wedding, as far as I'm concerned, so I'm willing to spend extra time and actually go out of my comfort zone and talk to people on the phone (gasp!). Truly, I hate talking on the phone. I'd so much rather email - you always have the option to revise your statement before the person actually sees it. I just feel so stupid when I have to talk about something - I can never get my thoughts straight before something dumb pops out of my mouth.

Anyway, so...caterers. Anyone have a caterer they've used for a special event and thought was absolutely fantastic?

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...

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.

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. ;-)

Wedding dress shopping

This past weekend I took Tomboy and went shopping for my wedding dress. I tried on lots of different styles - strapless, a-line, princess, mermaid, trumpet, lace, plain, embroidered, beaded, silk, satin, taffeta, blah blah blah. My favorite one was this very simple taffeta dress with tip-of-the-shoulder straps, some very flattering ruching along the bodice, a lace-up back, and a moderate train (yes, this is moderate!). Bear in mind that this dress, being the shop's sample, is two sizes too big for me, so mine will be significantly more snug. And the color is ivory, although the camera's flash makes it look like it's white in the picture.

Click the photo for more wedding dress pictures (this one and others I tried on).