50 Days!

Posted on by Jordan

The wedding is just 50 days away now!

(actually 49 if you use the count I have been using in the past… 49 days and 7 hours remaining right now….)

its still a long time, but starting to feel like its going to be here soon. I am also starting to think Heather and I might actually make it. She has been in Blair for over a month now, but we have managed to find reasons to make the drive one direction or the other pretty frequently.

Heather has a whole gambit of showers lined up, I don’t know for sure what I will be doing those weekends, but I am sure I will think of something. Did I mention I am playing WoW again? “leaving” only lasted like 48 days or so, but thus far I haven’t really gotten into it as much as before. Yeah, so back to the wedding countdown…

There is a *LOT* of stuff going on between now and the wedding. People have kind of made fun of us for having so much of the wedding planned months in advance. When you realize there aren’t any more open weekends between now and the wedding, it starts to seem pretty practical. As much as we have done, I still expect some frantic last minute things come January. At least for now we can feel like we are mostly ready and enjoy everything that is happening in December.

The other fun thing that has started happening is people are RSVPing, and just using the website more. Its exciting for me to see the increased activity, although perhaps I am too easily entertained.

-Jordan

Oil!

Posted on by Jordan

Sorry, this may not be the most interesting topic for today…

I just saw that oil closed below $45 a barrel today, its mind-blowing in a way. It was brushing $150 over the summer, and now look at it. Back a month and a half ago I thought to myself “its going to have to drop below $40 before it comes back up” but I didn’t say anything because I figured everyone would say I was crazy. Now it starts to look almost possible, although maybe the reasons its staying low aren’t that awesome. I know people, who should know better than to make hard predictions, who said things like “I guarantee oil will be above $100 / barrel by January.” I am probably too nice to beat them over the head with those words come January, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it.

Gas in Omaha, 89 octane with 10% ethanol is going for $1.57 a gallon right now too, in case you wondered.

check back tomorrow, maybe I will have something related to Heather and Jordan 🙂

-Jordan

Christmas Decorating

Posted on by Jordan

This post is a few days late in coming, but if you wondered what Heather and I did over the Thanksgiving holiday, the answer was “decorate for Christmas!”

(there is also the detail of Heather having to work Friday to earn an extra day off so we can actually go on a honeymoon, but we don’t talk about work here…)

On Thanksgiving day, we had a nice meal with just Heather’s parents and sister in Blair. Then that evening, more of the Gutschow family came out to the farm, and it was decided that the tree needed unpacked and setup. With a lot of people that job went remarkably fast. Without Gigi there, decorating kind of had to stop once the tree was out because nobody really knew where the rest of the decorations were, or how they should go if we found them.

Friday I was able to go to the Nebraska vs. Colorado game with Jim. The initial plan was for Heather to pick me up in Lincoln after the game, and we would proceed to Kearney to meet up with some of my family for some more Thanksgiving. Heather got off work earlier than expected, and I told her to just head out. My thinking was that the game would be mostly decided by the start of the fourth quarter. If you saw the game, you know that didn’t turn out to be the case… Anyway, I had a lot of fun at the game. I really love going to games at Memorial Stadium. I do feel pretty dumb for missing the end of that game, but hindsight is 20-20 I guess.

Saturday we helped unpack and assemble the Marlatt decorations, a rather large project. Fortunately there were a lot of cousins around to help out. The continued trend from Blair was that my grandparents weren’t home ether, leaving us to kind of guess sometimes on how decorations should go. I think we got most of it handled pretty well.

Sunday, after church we decided we hadn’t had enough decorating and headed to Target to get a few things for the apartment. They had a little three-foot tree and some properly sized decorations for fairly cheap, so now my(our) apartment has a little holiday feel to it. The only really sad thing about having decorations at my home is that Heather doesn’t live there yet. It makes things feel really “home-ish” but its still just me living there… I shouldn’t complain too much though, I get to see Heather quite a bit 🙂

-Jordan

Invites Mailed!

Posted on by Jordan

I had nothing to do with it, Pam (Heather’s mom) did all of the work to get the invites sent out. All the same I am really excited to know that has happened. For starters I think the invites look great. Pam hand-addressed all of the invites, and the ones I saw looked absolutely amazing. On top of that, we have a great picture included in the invite. I suppose it might be a little narcissistic to be sending people pictures of myself, but Heather is in there too, and I think the picture looks so cool 🙂

If all that weren’t enough, mailing out the invites basically means this website is “live”!!! Granted its been online for months now, but only a few people knew it existed. We will find out very soon if my PHP hack was good enough to handle the RSVP section, its more or less out of beta though… should be fine 🙂

I guess maybe I am excited about nothing, all the same its another milestone. This has the added benefit of starting the process of getting RSVP’s in, everyone says they aren’t too reliable, but still we can sort of see how many people to expect.

-Jordan

Even More Pictures!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I were handed a DVD with all our engagement pictures on it Sunday. Before we had just a few pictures… maybe 20 from our photographer. The DVD had something like 130+ pictures on it.

Heather did a great job of digging into the full list, and picking out her favorites. She then did a little work cropping and tweaking on the shorter list. All I can say is that we have some amazing pictures, and it was really fun to get to see them all.

you can see a few of our favorites in the Gallery

-Jordan

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