The wedding is just 100 days away now.
That seems like such a huge number, but I am sure it won’t have seemed that long by the end.
On the bright side, I think Heather and I have gotten nearly everything taken care of for the wedding. Heather and her mom deserve most of the credit for that, I really haven’t done too much. All the same, its exciting to feel like we are ahead of the game for planning.
Now if the day would just get here 🙂
-Jordan
Trying to get all the remaining addresses found to get to Heather’s mom so invites can be sent out.
I have no idea how people did this without text messages and Facebook… I guess it just took a lot longer.
We also need to start building a list of people to ask to help out day of the wedding:
Not that I think people would complain that much about being asked to help out, but that list may be one of the harder parts of the wedding planning… I hate asking people to do stuff I could do myself (not that I can be the groom and cut the cake for everyone, but I am fully capable…)
-Jordan
As of today the website is shall we say out of beta. All pages are completed, the last one to get finished was the registry, and that is done, complete with nice deep-links straight to the online versions of our lists.
I am toying with the idea of adding a second section to that page, or a sub-page with a few things listed that just can’t go on a registry, but managing that list could be hard.
-Jordan
Sunday, I did sound at church, so everyone opted for second service. My parents, Bethany, Andrew, and Heather all came to Church. After church, Heather and mom had a chance to talk some about what plans we had for the wedding and decorating the building. We then headed to lunch. We had lunch at Le Peep, a breakfast / brunch / lunch place, where Andrew faced the dilemma of biscuits and gravy vs his restaurant standard cheeseburger. In the end he wound up with the burger, and seemed pretty happy with it.
After lunch we said our goodbyes and everyone headed home. Everyone except Heather and I…. we said “hey Target is right here, lets just register and be done with it.” So our next stop was Target.
Registering at Target: Let me start off by saying the system they have at Target is roughly 100000.5 times better than Bed Bath and Beyond’s. To start off nobody sits you down and tries to tell you how bad you need to have $100+ a place sitting china on your list. Second, and this won’t be as big of a deal for everyone but we just typed in our own information, and I prefer typing to having to fill out forms with little blanks and bad labels. Finally, the scanner they gave us had a real user interface.
The BB&B scanner was a 8 line LCD screen, a keypad, and a scanner. If you want to remove something from your list, scan the bar-code on this piece of paper! If you want to put two of an item on your list, it’s easy! Just remember to press ‘M’ then “enter” then the number of items you want. No the on-screen text wont really help you, and if you press the wrong key… well you wont have any idea if the item you scanned is even still on the list, the screen will just display some dire warning about incorrect UPC codes. Whats that? you wanted to see whats on your list? Go home and check on our website! We here at the store can’t even tell, but wait a day or so for the website because we have to type up that form you filled out a minute ago. Need to remove the item you scanned 2 items ago? Have we mentioned you can edit your list on the website? Because we don’t really have any access here… oh and isn’t this china shiny? Why are you scanning that item again, you clearly already scanned it… oh because you wanted two of them and though our interface was “clunky” well sorry, you will have to go through the user interface.
The Target scanner was basically a PDA with a pistol grip, but it had a very well done user interface. The scanner felt better in your hand, the scan beam was brighter, making it easier to aim and it seemed to pick up UPC codes with less waggling. The display was large, color, and a touch-screen, with nice options so you could add multiple items, browse your list, remove items at will, or just marvel at the pleasure of holding a device designed for the end-user. Also, scanning something twice? Adds two of them to your list!
I know I didn’t say much about the scanner when I mentioned getting registered at BB&B, but that was because at the time I just assumed the scanner was suppose to suck. In the end I guess maybe the scanner didn’t change the fact that there wasn’t a ton of stuff we felt we could use at Target, so BB&B may have the last laugh in the registry department.
Some people say doing all that is “fun”… to me its still shopping… I get to do it with Heather so its not so bad, but I am glad we are done with it. As of right now we have a grand total of 200 items across all our registries, and from what the lady at BB&B said, that number is much too low, and we will have guests complaining. I think at this point I would tell them to please come to the wedding without a gift, or write us a nice card that we can look at when we aren’t so overwhelmed. Just the card would be fine, I really don’t know what I would do with a gift-card at this point, assuming most of the list was already taken I literally don’t need ANYTHING more from those stores. Include cash if you insist on giving us something, we can speed up paying off one of our cars.
-Jordan
Managed to find some time last night to make some quick edits to the website.
My proofreader and picture captioning expert was way too sleepy to do much by the time that was all done, so the pictures still lack captions.
At this point I am just happy that my enthusiasm hasn’t dropped off… I was afraid it would be painful to keep tweaking things at this point, but I still enjoy getting things going.
-Jordan
Well we aren’t done setting up registries yet, but Heather and I did get started on that project last night.
Our plan was to start at Bed Bath and Beyond, register there, and then head to Target and be done registering in one night.
The lady who set us up at Bed Bath and Beyond had other ideas. I will admit some of the things she told us were really quite helpful, such as the list of things you might want, or her advice about how many things to have on our list vs. number of invited guests. I am pretty sure we did not need 10 minutes of explanation of how awesome the china was. After we finally got the scanner and got turned loose it quickly became clear that even without the fine-china pitch, we were never going to make it to Target. The sheer number of choices we had to make was painful. Even if it was only a few seconds for each item we walked past, it still required thinking “do we have one already, if so is the one we have a candidate for replacing” or “would we conceivably use that if somebody gave it to us” It just got harder if there were options within a class of item (how do you pick between 3 kinds of muffin tins?).
Two hours later, I think we have Bed Bath and Beyond completely covered.
Its kind of hard to know what to put on the list, Heather and I aren’t moving into a house, and storage is somewhat limited in the apartment we will be staying in. Cooking is at least something we have enjoyed doing together, and will definitely work well in an apartment. In the end I think we have a pretty good list of things that would be useful to have, and if I can stop feeling bad asking for half of it everything will be grand 🙂
-Jordan
I probably wont get the website updated until Thursday, but we have a hotel holding a block of rooms for the wedding.
Heather talked to them, and they got us a block of rooms at a discount, so I think its going to work out pretty well.
looking at reviews, trying to answer my moms question on the phone last night, it looks like:
its one more thing checked off the list for the wedding, and another section of the website I can count as done (as soon as I *do* it). I find it fairly satisfying, even if it was a simple thing 🙂
-Jordan
This post is a few days late because I was slow getting the images off my camera… better late than never right?
Saturday and Sunday Heather and I looked into cake options for our wedding.
First up was Hy-Vee, but after a phone call by Heather we found out the “just drop by whenever” time frame they had given her wasn’t really going to work because the only person who could talk about wedding cakes was going to be gone in a few minutes, but she was nice enough to explain some of the basic details of what they offer, overall cost and cost per serving. The actual sit-down with them is still pending.
Next up was The Cakery, an aptly named specialty shop. They had a really good array of mock cakes showing some of their basic styles. Seven to nine full-sized wedding cakes takes up a lot of floor-space, but it was helpful to actually have something to look at, because translating the idea you have in your head to something you can talk about is surprisingly hard for something as iconic as a wedding cake. We got there a little early so had plenty of time to look at the example cakes before they sat us down to look at their library of pictures from different wedding cakes. Again they had an amazing wealth of examples of cakes, and fairly good presentation in the book. On a tangent, let me say that some people do some ridiculous cakes. I really don’t know how many guests you would need to eat some of those cakes, but I am thinking 500+ for more than a few in that book. Okay, back to the cakery, did I mention they had four small cakes for us to sample? I was the designated cake tester (verdict: “meh, its cake”) so I ate while Heather tackled the challenge of getting herself and the decorator on the same page for a cake design. We left there feeling like we had a really good idea what the cake should look like.
Its at this point that my Escape failed to start.
Our next, and Final stop was Wheat Fields, a destination so legendary among Omaha denizens we recruited additional party members for our expedition.
Or maybe it just worked out that Pam (Heather’s mother) and Elise (bridesmaid) were both in town, but it was nice to have them along. Wheat Fields is a bakery and restaurant, and standing in the bakery / lobby area it was easy to see how it gained the reputation it has. We then stood nearly-drooling over all the fresh baked deserts and breads for almost 20 minutes waiting for the sole cake decorator to appear out of the back room. She was a grandmotherly lady, a little flustered at first, but she knew a lot about cakes, and how to plan one for a wedding. They had maybe 30 pictures of past wedding cakes, mostly bad. At this point things were not looking good for Wheat Fields in the selection process, but then they brought out the cake:
I cannot begin to impress upon you how richly this cake deserves its reputation. Hands down the best cake I have ever had, no question. They were all pretty good but their flavor “wedding cake” is the one everyone is talking about if they say something about a cake from Wheat Fields.
At this point we haven’t technically chosen a cake option, but I can tell you Wheat Fields is the leading contender. When your reception consists of only cake, its hard to not rationalize getting really really good cake for it.
I do wonder what our though process would have been if we had done these stops in a different order. Hy-Vee was helpful because it established what cheap-but-professional-and-good cake would cost. The Cakery gave us a great set of examples to realize the range of options in appearance, and figure out what we actually wanted for a look. Wheat Fields changed our minds from the idea that “cake is cake” to thinking that there was some really good cake out there. We literally finished our interactions with each place thinking we would probably just go with them, but what the heck, lets try the next one.
in closing, you should come to my wedding! There will be cake! 🙂
-Jordan
So, Heather bought her wedding dress last night. I suppose I knew these things, but two things really hit me as she was shopping, and even more so once she bought it.
There are a lot of reasons to look forward to the wedding, but I never expected this would be something on the list 🙂
-Jordan
149 days untill the wedding…
complete:
In progress:
To do:
I am sure there are other things in all categoies I have forgotten, but this post can serve as perspective 4 months from now when I don’t think we are making progress 🙂
-Jordan
Nelsons 