Wedding News! (We Should be Legal)

Posted on by Jordan

With sixteen days until the wedding I made it to the county clerk’s office to get started on a marriage license. Normally you can just walk in the day before the wedding and take care of that. With the vacation days remaining crisis Heather is facing, and the fact that they close at 5:00pm, we really can’t use the normal option.

The wording on their website is less than clear, and I thought initially that if both of us couldn’t be there, we only had the option of mailing the form in, and then involving a notary. After a phone call a week or so back however, I found out that I can get the form half done, in person, just by walking in.

They are located very much downtown, meaning I spent more time trying to find a place to park than I did in their office. Ether my luck with government offices is holding up, or Wednesday mornings aren’t a real busy time for issuing marriage licensees, so I was able to just walk up to the desk and talk to someone. The young woman was very friendly, and I really didn’t have to do anything other than raise my right hand and solemnly swear that the information on the sheet was accurate. Kind of odd, I only sort of managed to not have the worlds dumbest grin on my face while attesting to the birthplace of my parents.

Heather still has to sign the form in front of a notary, and then I have to return with the form so they can issue some other form, but at least we wont ever have the form somewhere in the mail.

-Jordan

Wedding Update

Posted on by Jordan

The wedding is now less than twenty days away.

Over the weekend, Heather discovered that the person who was set to arrange the flowers for the wedding isn’t going to be able to do them. The whole point of using silk flowers to begin with was to save money, and save headache because they would be done far in advance of the wedding.

Goal one remains intact, but goal two wasn’t going too well back in November when the flower lady said she didn’t want the flowers dropped off for her to work on until after the new year. Apparently she was low on storage and expecting to be busy with other things over Christmas. Sometime between then and now she apparently decided we had canceled with her, and moved on to other things. Unfortunately Heather didn’t discover this until Saturday.

On the bright side, she found out we needed a plan ‘B’ for flowers while she was in Kansas City, and while a number of her bridesmaids were in town. They put together a group of people with some experience doing flower arrangements and completely finished the flowers in one session Sunday! It created a frantic weekend for Heather in the midst of a shower, but in some ways its less stress than hoping the flowers would be done in time if we had gone with the lady that didn’t want to start until now.

My only wedding related progress was to book a hotel room for the two nights before the wedding. Heather seems to think she needs a place to stay before the wedding, and kicked me out for those days. It was kind of odd, I don’t think I had ever booked a room over the phone before. I am sure I could have figured out some way to do that online, but I wasn’t sure I would get linked with the wedding properly.

Sunday night, Heather returned from the KC shower/girlsNight/flowerArranging with her Civic packed to the gills with boxes. Again, I am overwhelmed by the generosity people have shown us, and amazed at the cool things we were given. I also don’t quite know how we are going to fit it all into the apartment, but Heather and I managed to find homes for nearly everything she brought back. We only had to stay up way later than ether of us wanted to, but at leas the “new stuff” factor provides enough excitement that it doesn’t feel too much like we are just forever putting dishes away. 🙂

-Jordan

Wedding Planning Update

Posted on by Jordan

Saturday marked the five-week point in the big countdown. I thought I would mention a few things Heather and I got taken care of over the weekend.

First off we placed the Tux order. I have actually had all the measurements for  a week or so, but getting them all standardized and in one place took a while. Once I had that, I still had to find time to actually swing by the shop. Heather and I went on Saturday. It was probably a good thing Heather came though, because although we had sort of picked out tuxes, there was still some color selection to be done. The shop still didn’t impress me really, but considering this visit wasn’t paired with a car breakdown, I left with a much higher opinion than I had the first time.

The other significant item Heather and I knocked out was sending out the “please let us know if you can come to the rehearsal dinner, and if so what would you like to eat” e-mail. That should be simple enough, but running down e-mail addresses still took a while, not to mention actually picking what should go on the menu. That task can’t be 100% checked off the list I suppose because now we have to monitor our inbound e-mail and figure out if we have information from everyone.

I might be counting trivial things as newsworthy, but its still nice to feel like we are staying on top of things before they hit a crisis point.

-Jordan

Tuxedos

Posted on by Jordan

I have not yet placed the order for Tuxedos for groomsmen yet, but I finally have info from everyone. Several of my guys took a while to get me their information, but really we still have tons of time for that.

I sat down today to type up the information everyone had given me onto a single document and made kind of an interesting discovery.

Well first let me back up, finding every one’s information turned out to be time consuming. In theory, I should have been able to grab it all really quickly, thanks to the fact that I had all the e-mails in gmail. I thought I had stared (gmail’s term for flagging) every e-mail that came in with tux info. Turns out I hadn’t remembered to do that. Well, no problem, gmail has really good search options I can just search for “tux” right? No because a few of the e-mails don’t actually say the word “tux” nor are they replies to an e-mail that does. So I figured I can just search for e-mail containing a term like “overarm” or “out seam” and get them all… Only several of the measurements were sent in as scanned images of the form the shop used, so there isn’t even any text to search for.

Eventually I found every one’s information, and started typing up my master sheet to hand off to the tux shop. That’s when I found out that apparently tux shops cannot agree in what order the measurements should come in. That may not seem shocking to you, but I had just figured that considering how long tux rentals have been around, they probably all used the exact same format for their measurements. They don’t… They don’t all use the same order for their measurements, and some of them don’t seem to use the same terminology. Beyond that a few places seem to have been more ambitious, giving 2-3 more dimensions than the other shops. It made it annoying when my goal had been to produce a listing of each guy with the exact same information after each.

roughly half the forms I was sent lacked shoe size. I guess the shops figured everyone knows their own shoe size, but interestingly enough, although I know these guys well enough to ask them to stand up with me in my wedding, I don’t know their shoe sizes. I guess I will be making a few phone calls over the weekend to wrap this process up 🙂

-Jordan

The Only Thing Missing…

Posted on by Jordan

I know I talked about decorating the apartment last week, but I wanted to post a picture of our little tree, and a few words. First the picture:

The tree is about three feet tall, nothing too exciting really.

It does however, represent the first time in the eight years I have lived away from my parents house that there have been Christmas decorations in my apartment. I cannot tell you how much it starts to make the apartment feel really home-ish, and warmer somehow. At the same time, it only makes me wish Heather and I were married more. The (our) apartment is really starting to feel like home, and yet Heather isn’t here.

yes, it is very possible there will be 46 more days of “oh woes me” posts like today, sorry 🙂 It’s our blog, and Heather and I are really feeling sort of like little kids waiting for Santa… Not really sure we can survive the anticipation much longer, and sure we will explode if we aren’t careful.

Hopefully Christmas provides some distraction 🙂

-Jordan

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

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