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

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!

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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

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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

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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

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

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