Three Years

Posted on by Jordan

This post is a few days late… but that doesn’t change the fact that the date seems worth noting.

(Roughly) Three years ago:

 

We took a basic photography class on the actual day of our anniversary. Perhaps not the most romantic thing we could do, but we both learned a lot and enjoyed the class. I may expand on this later, but while I am thinking about it, it was somewhat embarrassing how little we knew about our camera. On the other hand, Heather is able to turn out amazing pictures just by letting the camera automatically configure it’s own settings, so maybe it wasn’t that much of a detriment.

Three years… A lot has changed in that time. I don’t think Heather and I could have ever guessed we would be where we are, doing what we are doing today three years ago. Makes thinking about the future seem both exciting, and futile as we aren’t going to see the interesting stuff coming anyway 🙂

To put it simply we have had a great three years, and can’t wait to find out what the next has in store 🙂

 

-Jordan

Gallery Down

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Yeah, so the upgrade didn’t go so well…

As it stands right now the gallery isn’t working at all.

I am going to try and restore from backups but the file system on the server is a mess right now.

Just thought you might be interested, or perhaps you tried to click on a picture link and got nowhere.

-Jordan

Website Work!

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I think I mentioned quite a while back that I was hoping to get a chance to revamp the main heatherandjordan.com site.

I have finally completed step one of that process by setting up an archive of the site in its current state. Not the most exciting thing ever, but I wanted to preserve the old wedding site. Anyone wanting to look is free to check it out here, but I should warn you that, unless something is broken, it will look exactly like the main site. I guess if you find a broken page let me know… I know the RSVP page is a little goofy, but I didn’t want to bother re-writing the php right now.

Sadly that was the easy part, as now I have to figure out what to replace the wedding pages with on the homepage. Hopefully I can come up with something soon.

-Jordan

Website Thoughts

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I am setting here, watching it snow again. I think it’s time to re-vamp the website here.

I will move the current wedding site off to some sort of archive area, so it can still be viewed. I just haven’t figured out what to do with the base domain.

My most recent project was a website for friends of ours Casey and Carson.

That site was basically just massaging WordPress, using a theme somebody else put together and just tweaking it. I would like to do something more ambitious for my site. I just haven’t figured out what yet.

I am also really tempted to change the robots.txt settings so that google can index the blog. Not that I really desire more traffic, it just seems silly to hide from search engines.

-Jordan

Punt!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I made it back from Florida!

In the next day or two I hope to get a nice summary post up, but I am still recovering from the trip.

This post is mainly just to say I don’t see any hope of getting the gallery hosted on this site ordered properly in a timely manner. Having admitted that fact, I just pushed the entire Picasa gallery online, neatly side-stepping the entire issue.

The gallery can be found here

I plan to have a link to those off the main site in a day or so too.

For people wishing to order prints, I hope to get a handful of the best pictures from the wedding hosted here, in their full resolution glory, for that purpose. In the meantime, I can always e-mail them out if somebody knows what they want.

-Jordan

Mid Week Updates

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I went to the dentist today! I really don’t have much of a story to post. Its odd though, I went almost six years without going to the dentist, and when I finally went in had a grand total of two cavities. Six months later, I go back in and have two more cavities. The worst part is that I eat so much less of the kinds of things that would encourage tooth decay now. The only consolation is that the cavities were declared “minor” whereas the ones I had before required hours of grinding to remove.

In less dental related news, I feel really guilty about not having pictures posted on the website yet. Heather nearly had the photo set for the CDs ready, and I was going to load the same set to the website. Unfortunelately somehow I broke the smoke and mirrors that Picasa uses to do its “I auto-save as you work, but don’t write out to disk until you click save” as you edit pictures. Lucky for us it only damaged something like three pictures. Between that and the sheer number of thank you cards Heather still has to author, enthusiasm for the photo project has been pretty thoroughly sapped. I still hope we can get something started on that before the end of this week.

-Jordan

The Kansas City Reception

Posted on by Jordan

The last wedding related event is complete!

And what a fun event it was! I haven’t had time to get any pictures cleaned up to post, but wanted to get a post up anyway…

Heather’s parents did all the work to put together a reception for us in Kansas City. The timing was about perfect. Five weeks after the wedding, Heather and I had time to recover, but were still kind of in the wedding mindset I think.

The only negative was the weather. I suppose you could argue we got lucky with the wedding, but it was still annoying to have the only snow in months land on KC the day we were expecting people to drive in from all over to see us. Fortunately, the snow wasn’t too bad, and to our knowledge, nobody had any trouble outside of having to drive slower.

The event itself was kicked off by loading roughly 30 Gutschow friends and family into a bus, and driving to the location of the restaurant. Heather had expressed some skepticism as to the necessity of a bus before the event, but it turned out to be a really fun addition to the day. The mood on the bus was a lot of fun, and it gave a few more minutes to see people before the official event.

Once on location, Heather scrambled to finish up an epically long slide show of wedding pictures wile I configured a projector to display it. We managed to have everything ready before the official star time.

Once things got underway, everything kind of became a blur. It was so nice to see everyone, and I still cannot believe how quickly time passed. We never had time to talk to anyone as long as we would have liked, and probably failed to get around to everyone we should have. The number of people there was amazing, considering the snow, and the fact that many of the attendees had also been at the wedding. Heather and I were amazed by the dedication and support people showed towards us.

After the official event, we rode the bus back to the house, for more time with family (mostly Gutschow, but my parents and a few others came too!).  I can’t say as I really enjoy being the guest of honor at any event, but it was laid back enough to be rather enjoyable.

Heather and I cannot say how grateful we are to our parents, for everything they did to make the events surrounding the wedding, not to mention the wedding, come of better than we could have ever hoped for. We are also glad its over, as fun as it was, this past weekend left us both exhausted 🙂

-Jordan

note: The slide show from this event will be the core of a web album in the making, coming “soon”!

!!! PICTURES !!!

Posted on by Jordan

We have pictures from our wedding!

Well, ok we don’t have them yet, but they are posted on our photographers website. We expect to have a DVD with the full sized versions of the pictures for us to play with soon. For now you will just have to go check out the website, instructions here.

Heather and I are so happy to finally get to see them! There are some really great pictures, and so many we didn’t even realize got taken.

-Jordan

The Honeymoon Day Two (Counting Backwards)

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The second to last day we were in Colorado, was our most ambitious day. We planned to ski and go on a sleigh ride.

Our gracious hosts at the bed and breakfast had recommended we try a nearby mountain that was considerably smaller than Winter Park. That sounded like excellent advice, given Heather only had one other trip under her belt and I was planning on trying skis instead of a snowboard.

Let me just say that was some great advice! The ski area “Solvista” only had 3 lifts, small to say the least! It was perfect for our needs though. We got equipment and lift tickets, and headed out to conquer the mountain. The thing I hate about skiing, is that one of the hardest elements happens at the start: getting off the lift. I managed to wobble my way away from the dismount point, and Heather almost pulled it off too.

Neither Heather nor I were feeling too confident for the first run down, so we took our time. I was very glad to have taken skis as they are just so much more maneuverable at low speeds. After two trips down the mountain, we were ready for a break, and it was lunch time. I should again mention how awesome the smaller ski area on a week day was. Our car was parked less than 100 feet from the front door of the main lodge.

After lunch we made one more trip down together, stopping to document our “who can look like the biggest dork” contest:

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Heather thought she had a solid lead, but ultimately couldn’t compete with:

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We had a lot of fun skiing together, but by this time Heather was ready to call it a day. I took a few more quick trips down the mountain, just to see how well I could really do on skis. I still prefer a snow-board, but I found I was comfortable on about the same blue runs in skis as I would have been on a board.

We had just enough time to make it back to our cabin, clean up, and head back out to where the sleigh ride started. The sun had just set when we left the cabin, and it was fully dark by the time we made it to the ranch. The temp readout in our car said -6f. Every other night we were in Colorado the temperature was in the high teens when we went out at night. Suffice to say, the hour-long sleigh ride was perhaps the coldest experience of our lives.

It was also amazing! The sleigh was fully loaded with twelve people, everyone wrapped up with lap blankets, and move slowly through the forest near the ranch. The trees had a perfect coating of snow and, the stars and the moon were beautifully clear through the openings in the trees.

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(note the frozen faces in that picture… we were so cold)

After the sleigh ride, there was a dinner in the somewhat rustic mess-hall. It probably would have been really nice, if the temperature were 20 degrees warmer. The room simply did not have sufficient heaters for the cold conditions. Dinner isn’t quite as relaxing when you eat it while wearing your winter coat and hat. It may not have been a romantic candle lit dinner, but I think it may have created more memories for us to look back on later 🙂

-Jordan

Marriage License And Picture News

Posted on by Jordan

After two plus weeks of waiting for something in the mail from the county clerk, we double checked with our pastor to make sure things had been mailed in properly. They had been, and mailed in promptly at that! He mentioned that we should check with another couple in the church who recently got married, because they had some issues. They strongly recommended we call, because apparently two copies of their “certified marriage certificate” got lost in the mail before they just went down to the office and picked one up.

Heather called the clerk’s office today, and found they had records of mailing our certificate just four days after the wedding. It seems the US Postal service has a special bin for loosing marriage certificates in. I will be making a special trip down town to try and obtain a copy of the certificate. If all goes well, Heather can begin the process of changing her name etc. that she has been dreading for months now 🙂

Also over the weekend, picture news!

We talked to our photographer, and she expects to have our pictures completed by this coming weekend! I don’t know if that will include posting pictures on her website, but it should at least include giving a CD of digital copies to us. I hope that means we can have a few pictures posted somewhere on this site over the weekend. Given the lackadaisical posting here though, we might be a little late getting pictures out. I will say though, Heather and I are very excited about the pictures, so there should be ample motivation.

-Jordan