K-Squared Ramblings

Wedding write-ups

We’ve both just posted write-ups of the last two days over on LiveJournal:

• The Bride’s Perspective
• The Groom’s Perspective

We made it!

Thanks to everyone who helped out with the wedding on Sunday, and thanks also to everyone who came!

It really was like a play – one with no rehearsals and only a half hour of blocking. (Sometime last week it hit me that what I was really nervous about was that this was the Actor’s Nightmare: performing a lead role in a play you barely knew and hadn’t rehearsed.) And like a play, it had its share of things that went wrong behind the scenes, but all the important things worked!

No, we’re not off on a honeymoon right now. Getting the wedding together was enough to plan, so we just spent Sunday night in a really nice hotel (the Surf and Sand resort in Laguna Beach) and went to Disney’s California Adventure today. (We’d never been to it.) We’ll work out where and when we’re going when we’ve got the time.

To anyone who’s curious: the Surf and Sand is very expensive, but it’s very much worth it. The view, the service, the amenities and the food are all fantastic, and there’s a lot of the resort we never even saw just for lack of time.

Anyway, I’m going to post a few Strange World photos and then go to bed.

Megajelly

In case you were wondering, this is what 5 kg of jelly beans looks like:

Things we’re not registering for

I got this ad a few years ago in my Science Fiction Book Club mailer and kept it for the fall-on-your-ass-laughing value. What with the picking out of china patterns that goes along with modern weddings, it seemed perfect to trot out now.

I’ve tried to find out if it’s possible to get just a set of mugs, which it wasn’t at the time. Maybe I should start hunting around on eBay……

This is why you plan ahead

It seems that Benton County, Oregon, has decided to stop issuing any marriage licenses until the state makes up its mind who can and can’t get married. For now, straight couples in the area will have to go to the next county over to get married.

The rationale, of course, is that they “need to treat everyone in our county equally” — even if it’s not clear whether they’re allowed to let one class of people marry.

So I suppose gay marriage can negatively impact straight marriage after all: (1) Longer lines at the courthouse might deter spur-of-the-moment weddings. (2) Confuse the clerks enough, and they’ll just throw up their hands and say “Come back tomorrow!”

Not that either is likely to happen here in über-conservative OC, but I am glad we’ve already picked up our license.

Registry

For those who are wondering, we’re still in the process of registering. We’ve got a partial registry at Target so far, and by the end of the week, we’ll also be registered at Robinsons-May.

(It’s been kind of tricky, since we already have a lot of the things people tend to register for. You know, toasters and stuff. So we’re trying to choose things we haven’t gotten around to picking up, or things that are worth replacing with newer/better equivalents.)

We keep talking about registering at Fry’s, but we’re not sure they’d even have a wedding registry!

Songs Not to Play at a Wedding

Remember the song “How’s it Gonna Be” by Third Eye Blind? When it was new, a lot of high schools apparently chose it for the prom theme, proving that teenagers don’t actually listen to the lyrics (it’s a breakup song), which should mitigate parental concerns about explicit lyrics.

Anyway, Katie and I were talking about this the other day and started tossing around titles of songs that would be just plain wrong to play at a wedding reception.

• You Oughta Know (Alanis Morissette)
• Paradise by the Dashboard Light (Meat Loaf)
• Song for the Dumped (Ben Folds)
• Closer (Nine Inch Nails)
• Brick (Ben Folds Five)
• Playboy Mommy (Tori Amos)
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Deep Blue Something)
• Anything But Down (Sheryl Crow)
• Back to Good (Matchbox 20)
• Me and a Gun (Tori Amos)
• Anything by Liz Phair
• Best I Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning) (Vertical Horizon)
• Guys Like Me (Aimee Mann)
• Anything by Evanescence or Linkin Park
• Melanie (”Weird Al” Yankovic)
• Almost anything by They Might Be Giants
• Don’t Stand So Close to Me (The Police)
• Eleanor Rigby (The Beatles)
• I Touch Myself (The Divinyls)
• Anything by Rammstein
• Gollum’s Song
• Anything by the Chipmunks
• I Don’t Like Mondays (Boomtown Rats)
• Anything by Nirvana
• I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying (Sting)
• King of Pain (The Police)
• I’m Still Remembering (Cranberries)
• One More Minute (”Weird Al” Yankovic)
• If I Were Brave (Shawn Colvin)
• Jumper (Third Eye Blind)
• Yesterday (The Beatles)
• Roxanne (The Police)
• I’ll Never Tell (Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Once More With Feeling)
• Anything by Garbage
• Positively Fourth Street (Bob Dylan)
• Torn (Natalie Imbruglia)
• Taxi (Harry Chapin)
• The Freshmen (Verve Pipe)
• Power of Goodbye (Madonna)
• Waitress (Tori Amos)
• Total Eclipse of the Heart (Bonnie Tyler)
• Uninvited (Alanis Morissette)
• Unsent (Alanis Morissette)

We’re not sure about The Highwayman and Lady of Shalott (Loreena McKennit), since the subject matter is wrong, but they’re quiet and unobtrusive.

This is an open list – feel free to add your suggestions! The idea is not just to get something that isn’t appropriate, but something that’s especially inappropriate (breakup songs, twisted relationships, put-down songs, etc.)

You’re not helping

I am honestly in complete confusion as to why all wedding vendors and personnel seem to feel it’s necessary to rebuke us for not arranging everything a year in advance. Sure, we procrastinated like nobody’s business, but we were already getting this at T minus 6 months. What do they do with people who have 6-month engagements, tell them they’re really getting off to a bad start planning their lives together? It’s not like we can say, “Oops, my bad, we’ll remember that for next time.” This is a field where what everyone says doesn’t always go, and the 10% who don’t follow the rules seem to have the best time and come out the least scathed. So it’s natural that I, as one of the 10% in most other arenas, would attempt to bull my way through this. In retrospect, that was a bad move, if only for the flood tide of social censure I’m enduring just because bouncy people make me nuts and I like to avoid them.

But anyway. Do these people not talk to each other? Do cake decorators never speak with dress shop attendants and find out that all their wedding planners give people the same advice? More importantly, do they think this is in any way endearing to the customer, or that it’ll make them want to recommend the facility to someone with better planning skills? Especially when the customer is sick to death of being told how insufficient she is and just wants the thing around the corner to knock her cold when it comes at her out of the promised nowhere so she can wake up after the wedding and go on with her life.

Invitations Away!

90% of the invitations are in the mail!

Now if we can just track down the rest of the addresses and spellings…

Doin’ the Wedding Flip-Flop

We started out with the intent of not doing everything ourselves, since that way lies madness and lack of free time. Then we found out just how annoying 90% of wedding vendors are and how little patience we have with large doses of that, and switched to coordinating everything ourselves. When it became obvious that if we continued in this vein we wouldn’t be having a wedding, we sucked it up and started vendor-hunting again. Only this time, they’re twice as annoying since all of them are now programmed with the auto-repeat loop of “It’s just around the corner! You’re really cutting it close! It’s almost here! It’s really down to the wire! It’s just around the corner!” and have been for the last six months. I’m beginning to feel my eye twitch whenever someone says any of the above.

This includes my family. Read the rest of this entry »

He’s my b– oh wait, f– ummm….

I’m not the only person in my workplace to be planning a wedding. One of the guys has about 10 days left till his and I envy him his lower stress level. The weird thing is that he still calls his fiancée his girlfriend. I wonder how long it’ll take his brain to upgrade to “wife.” If it takes more than a few days, I think she’s going to get pissed. Then again, they’ve only been engaged about six months, so they’re not highly trained to say fiancé(e). Unlike me and Kelson. I wonder how long it’ll take us to adjust…..

Dress!

Ordered it last weekend. It’s got everything: full coverage up top, pretty beading, short train, and it’s not blinding squeaky-clean wash-me-out white. And it’s made for the height I am in my shoes, with an adjustable lace-up back, so with any luck, I won’t need massive alterations. It’s got this split top skirt thing going, with beading along the edges, that I really can’t say why I think is cool. I never thought I’d be one to go for the Disney princess look, but it works. The one offputting note is the beading is blue. Don’t get me wrong, I love blue. I’m probably the only female in America never to have put any thought into her nuptial proceedings beyond some fuzzy mental photos of a church and a white dress, but I know for certain the white blur never had any color on it. Oh well. Just means I don’t have to paint my toenails blue (though I think I will anyway). Now, if we can just get a location so I don’t turn into a dressed-up cliché……

Things they don’t tell you

Aaagh. Every time we try to get something going on wedding planning, we find more reasons to scrap the whole thing. Last month we got soured on a whole lot of aspects with one series of tours, and we just managed to get ourselves out of the house on the subject again today.

I had vowed at the beginning of this to avoid David’s, the Wal-Mart of bridal stores, like the plague. However, being this close and having nothing to show for it but a pair of shoes, toasting glasses, and a cake server has begun to freak me out, so I braved the place. I remembered walking in and being accosted by a plethora of pushy, smiley salestwigs who wanted us to try on all sorts of stuff. Not this time. Turns out the place is having a sale, and as a result was completely packed. And sometime between 2000 and 2003, they made appointments mandatory for bridal tryons. So here I am, getting wonderful upper-arm exercise pawing through the racks, trying to get the attention of someone who won’t even take the time to ask if I have an appointment, and nobody bothers to tell me that I need one. For half an hour. So they’re off my list, again.

Then we get home and there’s another piece of paper spam for a hotel offering reception sevices. Since there’s no way my hair could make a standard-time-slot morning wedding on time, we’re looking at afternoon, which means a dinner reception. Their cheapest dinner is $31.95 a plate, not including 19% gratuity and 7.75% sales tax, which makes it $40.97 a person. And depending on what the “chef’s choice” of vegetable might be, Kelson might not be able to eat it. No, thank you.

Vegas is looking pretty and shiny again.