Saturday, February 26, 2011

Running of the Tables

When we went to visit Guayma's, I was a bit sad to discover that we are going to have to have long tables instead of round ones.

I know a lot of you love long tables, but I'm just not on that bandwagon.  I like round tables.  I think it's so much easier to talk to people when sitting in the round, an idea proved repeatedly in my BookWorlds classes in college.  Besides, round table are cute.

But this is how it has to be, and there are some advantages.  I was starting to envision floral arrangements that would work better with long tables anyway, but the biggest advantage is now we have an excuse to get table runners.

I used to think table runners were stupid, but I have since grown rather fond of them, and they work way better with long tables than round in my opinion.

I'm not positive I want to take on making fabric ones.  And by "making," I mean selling my first born to a friend who can sew so that she'll do it for me.  But I'm thinking there might be alternatives, like a line of flower petals along the table perhaps.

This might be kind of cute too:


Wrapping paper table runners.  Cute, huh?  This would be cheap and easy, and I'm definitely a fan of that.

However, with the right kind of fabric, they could look quite nice.

I rather like the way my friend Laura's worked out:


Lace wouldn't really work for us, but they're cute, and the color is about what we would be looking for.

These are cute too:


The sheer blue feels sort of watery to me which definitely works for us, and it makes them look a bit different.

Anyway, I don't know if we'll do it or not.  This is a project I wouldn't mind falling by the wayside if we run out of time/money, but it would still add a nice touch to the tables.

Thoughts on table runners?  Worth it?  What kind would/did you do?

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Another Baby Post

It has officially been 4 - 6 weeks since my surgery (my projected recovery time).  I dearly wish I could literally laugh in the faces of the nurses/doctors who told me I would be 100% healed by now.  Ha!  Well, at least I can work out now if not as much as I'd like.

Anywho, when I went to the doctor 2 weeks after the surgery, we started talking in earnest about controlling endometriosis and preventing infertility in the long term.  I almost started crying while explaining to her why I didn't want to take Lupron, a drug that basically puts my entire reproductive system on hold and would essentially make me menopausal.  My mom had a really rough time with menopause, and while it has become clear to me that our reproductive experiences have been very, very different, I can't risk the stress right now.  I'd say until we're settled in jobs in one place, and until after the wedding, that's not an option.

But when I saw the doctor again this week, she brought it up again, and I've started thinking about it more long term.

Daniel and I both definitely want to have kids.  That's one of the big things that we have always whole-heartedly agreed on.  And yet, we also agree that we are sooooo not ready to even thinking about it for a while.  Like, until we're both set in our careers, and we've paid off a decent chunk of Daniel's loans.

Now, I have to think about it a little differently.  I was worried about having to choose between myself and my future unborn children before the surgery, but it turns out I have a lot more of a decision to make now.  Without Lupron, I have a moderate risk of not being able to conceive.  With it, that risk diminishes greatly.

But here's the thing:  stress aside, menopause has a lot of side effects, and since the whole point of taking the drug is to get rid of hormones, I wouldn't be able to take them to balance it out like most menopausal women.  Obviously, I'm most worried about anxiety and depression, but there are a lot of other effects that do not sound like fun, including hot flashes, mood swings, decreased libido (which I have enough problems with already), and bone loss which is the thing I'm most worried about long term.  When it comes down to it, I feel like taking Lupron to save myself for my potential fetus would deprive me of a normal life in my twenties just so I might have a better chance of getting pregnant.

I just don't think it's worth it.  And I don't know how I feel about that.  On the one hand, yay women's empowerment and not living for your kids.  On the other hand, I like kids.  A lot.  And I want to have my own.  And so does Daniel.  And it would be really great to meet the child we would one day make..........But, I think my life is more important.  And Daniel thinks my analysis of the situation is sound and that he would probably make the same decision in my situation.  So I don't think I'm going to do it even though our chances for kids will be significantly decreased, and he supports my decision.

Of course, I can always change my mind later.  The longer I go before either taking Lupron or having kids, the higher the risk that irreversible damage will occur.  But I figure I've probably got a few years at least, and the doctor said that she was concerned, but that there wasn't an imminent threat or anything like that.  And I think there's another decision we can make that might work better for us.

My former baby plan was absolutely no children before 30, and even then, it would best to draw it out for as long as Daniel will let me (I sound like such a guy, right?).  But now, I'm thinking maybe it might be better for us to try earlier, assuming of course that we are prepared for it.  Basically, instead of waiting 7 years before even thinking about it, it might be better for us to wait 5 or thereabouts.  And at this point, it's probably going to take a long time to conceive anyway, so it might be best for us to start a little early.

I don't know.  We're definitely not going to rush into anything we're not ready for.  But it's something to think about.

And as much as it sucks to have to think about this kind of stuff before we're even married, I'm glad that I know--not just think, but know--that we know what we're getting into, and we're on the same page.

OK, you may now bring on the sympathy :).

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Dinosaur Math Cake

OMG, this is so hilarious, I just had to share it with you.


Background necessary:  you guys know I'm a geek ("Hey, geekish tendencies!" I remind myself), so math on a cake = (hehe, see what I did there?  Yeah, my fiance's sense of humor is getting to me) haha, funny.  I wouldn't do it, but hey, it's definitely different, so props to them.  But I was trying to figure out what was going on on the top there until I read the description:  "here's the cake from Nathalie & Mathieu's geektastic woodsy wedding made to feature their favorite mathmatical equations, their dogs and their dinosaur cake toppers!" (source).  Dinosaurs?  But they're covered in feathers...ohhhh!

A friend who also happens to be our officiant used to work at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, and ever since we took her dinosaur tour, I have been telling her that she ruined my childhood by telling us that scientists now think that dinosaurs were even more closely related to birds than we thought.  In fact, at least some of them were probably covered in feathers.

So basically, that makes this the geekiest cake I've ever seen.  It's got math AND current and updated scientific theory.  Trippy.

But there's more where that came from!  If you thought any of that was funny or clever, you should really check out the rest of Offbeat Bride's Geeky Wedding Cakes post.  There were definitely some lol ones...if you get the gag (don't worry, I won't tell anyone you recognized the Star Trek font or instantly knew a portal cake when you saw one).

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Overcoming the Stress Monster

For more than two weeks, I've been packing to leave for San Jose.  For the first time in years, I'm actually on top of it.  And STILL I had a bunch of crap to do at the end and got super stressed out.  I mean, like, really stressed out.

In a word, I snapped.

At everyone in my house, that is.

Who had done absolutely nothing wrong and had in fact been offering their help for weeks.

And now I feel really bad.

Anyway, I bring this up because I think this is good practice for the week of the wedding.  No matter how on top of it I am, and let's face it, I haven't been on top of wedding stuff lately, it's going to be stressful at the end.

And I cannot let what happened today happen then.  That would be really bad for me, the groom, and everyone around us.

But the one thing I can say for myself is that I cooled down quickly.  Normally, when something like this happens, it ruins my day.  Not today.  I cried, I screamed...and I calmed down.  I apologized.  I moved on.

It's a good first step.

Next stop:  not letting it happen in the first place.

Friday, February 18, 2011

No Thought Gets Left Behind

Blog, I am using you.  I am using you because I have nowhere else to write down the awesome quote I just thought of that would be awesome to use in our ceremony.

Our ceremony will largely consist of touching passages from really geeky stuff.

And so it begins:

"This is my family.  I found it all on my own.  It is little and broken, but still good.  Yeah.  Still good."  - Stitch from Lilo and Stitch.

Ok, perhaps too short, but I love that quote, and that movie actually, because it's real (in spite of the aliens).  It's not perfect, not even close, but as Stitch says, still good.  Yeah.  Still good.

I wonder if we have any friends who can do the Stitch voice?

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Married Underwater? My Parents' Wedding

As you may have figured out by now, OffbeatBride.com and I are pretty tight.  In fact, it's really the only major wedding website I read besides WeddingBee.com.  This may be somewhat due to the fact that my parents had the ultimate offbeat wedding.

Not many girls can say that her parents got married underwater.

In fact, I've never met anyone else who has.

It all started with a dive boat.  My mom was being set up with another guy by a friend.  They were supposed to go scuba diving together with some other friends, but no one showed up except my mom and dad.  They decided to just go together.

A year later, they had the most offbeat wedding I have ever heard of.  This includes Dia de los Muertos weddings, Medievally costumed weddings, and truly Geektastic weddings (with dinosaurs!).


So how, you may ask, does one get married underwater?  It's simple really.  Be scuba certified.  Have the groom's brother, who is also scuba certified, become a minister of the Universal Life Church (or whatever the thing is that makes it really easy to be a minister--I should probably find out about that, haha).  Do the ceremonial ceremony bit in a boat, then hop over the side in your gear, and finger spell the "Do you?  I do"s.

They kept this on the boat in case anyone forgot.

My mom would have liked to do all that under a glass-bottomed boat so that the guests could watch, and they would have loved to do it at Catalina since they spent so much time diving there.  Alas, their budget was pretty small, so the guests had to stay a little closer to home.  But hey, at least they were dry.

Before we get into the picture bit, let me apologize for the atrocious picture quality.  They are old and covered by plastic, and I had to take pictures with my camera because the scanner is broken.  I've kept them small so that the pain on your eyes will be a bit more manageable.  Also, I have no idea who took these photos, but somehow I doubt they'll mind me reproducing them.

OK, on with the show!

It started on the beach.

My mom would have liked to have a white wetsuit since the dress wasn't happening, but again the budget intervened.

All dressed up and ready to go!

While they headed into the ocean, the guests watched from the beach.

I love the bridesmaids' clothes :).
 
 Almost as much as I love the vintage bathing suits.  1980, all I can say is "Wow, things have changed."

Everyone watching as someone in the boat holds posters to tell them what's going on (The Vows, The Kiss, etc).

Meanwhile, the padres were busy getting married.

The Ceremony Begins

The Only Photo of the Ceremony Backdrop

The Witnesses
(and my ghostly presence drifting through time to capture it with my Canon PowerShot...while wearing pajamas and a towel...at least I was prepared!*)

When the deed was done, they returned to the shore to celebrate.


Now, my mom may not have had a dress, but she did have a bouquet.  A very themed bouquet.  A bouquet made out of kelp in fact.  But no one would ever throw such a bouquet, would they?

 And you thought the traditional bouquet toss was bad!

BTW, no one should have to see their father half naked on his wedding day.  Creepy.

The original reception plan was to hang on the beach and eat, but it was really windy that day, so my parents retired to their favorite Mexican restaurant in the area.


Classy

It may not have been the traditional day, but they certainly had a good time.

Mom, Aunt, Don't Know, Dad


Do you ever dream about having an offbeat wedding?  Was your parents' wedding memorable?

*Come on, someone else out there is a Hitchhiker's fan, right?

Monday, February 7, 2011

ABOUT FREAKING TIME!

I am here to announce that FINALLY, 14 months into our engagement and 7 months before the wedding, we OFFICIALLY have a ceremony location!

God, we are so sad.

In our defense, our initial plan fell through, so we had to wait until we could go back up there to find another one, and I had surgery right after that, so things were kind of working against us.

But being 400+ miles from our wedding will plague us no longer because Daniel got a job, and we are moving to San Jose in 2 weeks.

Much, much closer to the wedding.  I am definitely relieved for that.

But for now, let me introduce you to our ceremony spot.


This is where I will start the walk down the aisle.  Hopefully, my dress and shoes will get along with the stairs.


This is the main lawn where we will set up chairs.
*All Personal Photos

And this is the view our guests will have as we get married.  Except the trees will not be dead during the summer, and we'll probably angle it away from the pier.

It's not the ocean, and it's not perfect, but it will do nicely.  Especially because it is way cheaper than it could be.  We like it.

How sad are we?  Was there anything important that you could not seem to get done?

Sunday, February 6, 2011

A Cake Is Born

You might remember from my tasting exploits in Chicago at Cream Cake Company and Bittersweet that I am quite enamored with cake.  Enough to lie about where and when I was getting married just to get free cake.  Yeah, I feel kind of bad, but not bad enough to regret it.

You might also recall that once Daniel and I decided to get married in NorCal, the question of where we would get our cake was answered for us.  There was no way we were going to give up getting our cake at Katrina Rozelle.

So when we were last in the Bay Area, we stopped by Katrina Rozelle for our cake tasting.  I dearly wish I had not felt like I was going to die while we were there.  I might actually have gotten some pictures if I hadn't been so delirious.  But even though my ability to smell was essentially nonexistent at the time, it was still some of the best cake I have ever tasted.

It was both very easy and very difficult for us to choose a flavor.  All of the cakes were so freaking amazing that it was hard to turn them down.  It felt...wrong to deny any of them.  Nonetheless, there were two that immediately stood out to both of us, and one that dominated even those two.  Imagine luscious devil's food cake (chocolate for those of you who are not as obsessed as I am) with a filling that perfectly blends chocolate and caramel, topped with rich chocolate ganache-like frosting.  Good as god, sweet as sin.  The perfect balance.  Especially for us, since Daniel is as great a lover of caramel as I am of chocolate.  From the first taste, we knew this was the cake for us.  The perfect blend of the things we love.  And so our cake will be the Erica Torte.

Choosing the inside was easy, but the outside required more time.  We've been looking at cake styles for a while, and we had an idea of what we wanted.  Though our tastes do not entirely coincide, we both like fresh flowers, particularly orchids.  Daniel doesn't like roses for the cake, and I didn't really mind our cake's flowers differing from the other arrangements, so we decided to go with these flowers:

Martha Stewart may be a bit crazy, but she sure does have taste.

They work with our colors while still standing out, and these flowers are just different.  We like them.

As for the arrangement, I originally was really set on something like this:


Ignore the different sized layers.  I like flowers on top and then small groups of flowers on alternating sides of the lower layers.  However, that just didn't feel right with orchids.  As we looked through pictures, we were both pretty taken with cascades of orchids, especially on smaller cakes (and with our $3.50/slice cake-cutting fee, we're going to have to have a small cake) like this:


We both want a round cake and hate those little beady things around the edges, but other than that, we liked this one a lot.  In the end, we decided to format our cake like this:


Imagine this as a two-tiered, much smaller cake with our orchids and a thin blue ribbon of marzipan instead of the dreaded beads, and that's our cake.  I rather like it.  It would have been nice to have a bigger cake, at least a three-tiered one, but I guess with all of the other food we're going to have, it's not really necessary anyway.  It'll be cute, and it will taste amazing, so we're happy.

But I must leave you with the image that we couldn't afford and that looks totally different from all of the other cakes I like, but that I completely and utterly fell in love with anyway:


Imagine it all round, three-tiered with the vines covering the whole thing.  Le sigh.  It is so beautiful.

Anyway, do you love cake as much as I do, or did you decide to go a different route with dessert?  I'd love to see pictures of your cake or ones that you found particularly appealing.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Oh, you want an invitation? All right, if we must...

Being in a state of immobility and until recently, lacking the ability to sit up straight for my than an hour, I haven't done one bloody thing for the wedding since the surgery.  I haven't really done anything useful since the surgery.  But today, the two-week mark, it is time to jump back on the "useful member of society" bandwagon, and I did so the most painful way possible:  I started looking for jobs and invitations.

Oh how I do not care about invitations.  Daniel and I agree that this is an area where every expense should be spared and as little time as possible should be wasted.

I do want to have them, and I'd like them to be nice, but that's pretty much the extent of my interest.  I will never understand people whose ultimate wedding goal is to make their own invitations and have them be perfect.  I am just not crafty like that.

So my invitation inspiration folder is filled with cheap, easy invitation-making websites, the kind where you fill in some text, and they send you the printed version.  Easy, peasy.

Thus far, we rather like this one:

(Daniel won't let me put the "sanity" part in the actual invite :( )

Simple, elegant, and appropriate.  Not particularly original, but we're not particularly concerned about that.  I'd be ready to order after less than an hour's search if it weren't for one little practical detail that I actually care about.

As you all know, the guest list and I have a hate/hate relationship.  The stress it causes me extends to the actual guests and their ability to return their invitations on time and with the proper number of people.  As in, I dearly do not want people to invite people who were not actually invited by writing their names in on the RSVP card.

To avoid having to have the "um, actually, that person wasn't invited" talk, I came up with a plan a while back.  This plan involves having personalized RSVP cards with the names of all of the invitees written out on the card, so you can check "yes" or "no" for each person.  No room to write in names means no uninvited guests on the RSVP card, right?

Unfortunately, sites like 123print.com do not seem to have this kind of personalization.  My first foray onto Etsy.com seemed like the logical solution, but it has yet to produce satisfactory results.

And so I turn to you, dear readers.  Help!  My requirements are simple:  I want cheap invitations that do not require me to do anything more than type in their text but that allow enough customization for me to produce the personalized RSVP cards described above.  And I don't want them to look like crap.  That's pretty much it.  Ideas?  Websites?  People?  Do you know anywhere/anyone who can do this for me?

Classy Wedding by the Sea