We’ve both just posted write-ups of the last two days over on LiveJournal:
We’ve both just posted write-ups of the last two days over on LiveJournal:
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.
In case you were wondering, this is what 5 kg of jelly beans looks like:

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……
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.
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!
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.
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.)
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.
90% of the invitations are in the mail!
Now if we can just track down the rest of the addresses and spellings…
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. Continue reading