Wedding Thoughts

Posted on by Jordan

I don’t know how to launch into this really, but I feel like Heather and I have been doing a certain amount of reflecting on things now that we have the majority of the plans for the wedding nailed down.

Its been surprising how difficult it has been, and looks like it will continue to be, for us to ask people to help out with the wedding. Not every job, the “in the wedding” ones were easy, but the “would you be willing to stick around and clean up, because we are going to be heading for our honeymoon” ones are tough. On the other hand the idea of a few poor souls getting stuck with putting the church back together after our big day haunts me too, so I think we are fairly motivated to continue to find a few more people willing to pitch in there. Getting more… um I would say “grunts” but that seems like a bad choice of words for a wedding… lets say “helpers” is the sort of thing that we can keep working on right up until the day of. I also know both of our extended families are awesome, so we shouldn’t worry too much about things being left undone, but a few more people on deck would make me feel better about it all.

The other topic that we are becoming increasingly sure of is that its going to take a while to pay off all our debt, build up a solid “emergency fund” and then save enough to think about buying a house. Its not like Ether of us had a significant amount of debt, but the Dave Ramsey class really inspired us to get that 100% paid off and take a different approach to buying a house. Through all of that we kind of ended up with the realization that it might be nicer to get cash instead of the stuff we registered for in a lot of cases. It just seems kind of out of line to say that… so you can all pretend you didn’t actually read this second paragraph 🙂

We had our last pre-maritial class with Scott last night, yet another pre-req knocked off the list before the wedding. I think we met six times, and while nothing we did was earth-shattering, I think they were really helpful for Heather and I to go through. Its kind of interesting to have someone sit down with you and talk about your relationship with each other. Its impossible to maintain perspective, but I think Heather and I have tried to stay realistic about what things are going to be like next year… I guess we will find out soon enough.

-Jordan

Sixty Days

Posted on by Jordan

Today is November 24th, and there are 60 days until the wedding. I find it interesting that those two metrics line up today. I guess it has a lot to do with the fact my “days remaining” countdown will say zero the Friday before the wedding.

The other fact about today that I find a little hard to really accept is that Christmas is only 30 days away. As much it has felt like the engagement has drug on forever, the year is screaming by.

We are in pretty good shape as far as planning goes I think, nearly everything is lined up and ready. I will have to start calling groomsmen here for tux measurements, and I guess we just hope the bridesmaids are on top of picking out dresses, but at least Heather and I have nearly everything we are responsible for rolling.

-Jordan

More Picture News

Posted on by Jordan

I got word from Heather today that we have a location for wedding pictures!

After nearly a month of persistent calling, Heather managed to talk to the right person at the Durham Western Heritage Museum. We have a reservation there, I don’t know what that means really except that we know they will let us take pictures the day of the wedding.

After being painfully cold while taking the engagement pictures, our sense of urgency about finding an indoor location went way up. The botanical gardens are still an option, but that is still a large unknown because we don’t know how it will be decorated. There is a chance we will really like what they have in January, but my fear is it will end up looking more like a jungle safari if we tried to take pictures using their indoor area. Some of the times I have seen their indoor display setup its rather claustrophobic, very cool to look at, but it just wouldn’t work for group pictures.

Heather and I had initially ruled out the DWHM because its not all that interesting visually. After failing to find anything better we were still pursuing it, but after the cold of engagement pictures, and realizing the average temps in Omaha for January are something like 19f it became a must. I still wasn’t all that interested in it, until after we saw the results of our engagement pictures!

Some of the pictures we took I thought would look cool at the time, but many of them didn’t seem like a great backdrop. I was pleasantly surprised how amazing the pictures came out, and have a lot of faith in Cherie to produce some amazing shots even with what I considered “bad” settings inside the museum.

Its another relief to have that nailed down so far before the wedding, as our initial plan had been to almost wing it if we didn’t like the decor at the botanical gardens. With a fairly short time window, and the possibility of miserably cold weather I am glad we change that.

-Jordan

Slow Day….

Posted on by Jordan

Not a whole lot happened today…. Makes posting hard

If I haven’t mentioned before, having Heather living in Blair kind of sucks. We don’t get to see each other anywhere near as often as we would like. Not to mention the Sprint-has-horrible-service-at-the-Gutschow-farm problem that keeps phone calls short and painful.

oh, and oil closed under $50 / barrel today… We wont even talk about the stock market. Not that I am changing my policy of aggressive investing, but there is a little sticker shock if you do the math on whats been lost over the past year.

-Jordan

A Ring for Jordan

Posted on by Jordan

This is sort of old news, as Heather and I picked out the ring over a week ago, but I hadn’t mentioned it here.

I was waiting to post anything about the ring until I had pictures of it. The problem is that its really shiny, causing the flash to reflect and wash out the picture. I think with a tripod or something to help me hold the camera steady I might be able to get something workable, but I couldn’t freehand it. (As with about 100 other things, the tripod is already on our registry, so I won’t know if I should go buy one until late January) I suppose I could have rigged something, but never mind that….

The ring: Its silver in color, actually made of palladium has curved sides, and no designs or etching. In reality my being unable to provide a picture isn’t to important, its a basic men’s wedding band. Beyond its appearance, I have to say its an interesting thing to have bought. I wore it a little, tried washing my hands etc, seems like its not going to fall off too easily. I don’t know how long it will take to get used to wearing the ring. I was expecting it to be really strange, but based on an hour or two the day I wore it, I think I will adapt rather quickly. Now if January would just get here so I can find out 🙂

-Jordan

Kansas City

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I went to Kansas City over the weekend, to calibrate her dad’s birthday.

As with every trip we have taken to KC, it really felt like we didn’t have nearly enough time, but it was still a lot of fun. I will skip the play-by-play, but I can tell you that we watched a lot of football, and had a lot of really good food.

Some of the football was live, when we attended the Cheifs game on sunday. It was my first pro-football game, and a really fun expereince, even if our team lost.

-Jordan

Engagement Pictures MK. 3

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I, with the help of her family, chose a picture we wanted to send with the wedding invitations.

Our photographer, Cherie, did a great job of getting the changes to the text etc. that we wanted done quickly enough we could order the picture Sunday.

The picture we chose:

It was really quite hard to pick our favorite out of the set.  I am really happy with this one though, and I am excited to have the last thing taken care of so the invitations can go out.

Nearly all of the work for the invitations has been done by Heather’s mom, I don’t want to sound like I am taking credit for any of that… Its just exciting to have that all moving forward, one more thing that had to happen before the wedding almost complete.

-Jordan

Lasagna Update

Posted on by Jordan

I mentioned a day or so back making lasagna, only I ran out of time to actually bake it. Wednesday night, I went to Blair to visit Heather and her Grandmother. Heather had taken the uncooked pan out to Blair the night before, so they baked it for that night.

the recipe is called: “World’s Best Lasagna.” I don’t know if it lived up to that claim, but it was very good. I have also had it twice as re-heated leftovers now, and its still very good. It takes way to long to make, and I don’t know what changes like using a canned sauce would do to the quality of the dish…. It was a  fun thing to try, but the prep time is a little over the top.

Just thought I should follow up on that 🙂

-Jordan