The invitation blitz and other drama

I knew this would happen. I could see it coming and I did my best to avoid it.. But of course it happened anyway. The last few days have been all INVITATIONS INVITATIONS INVITATIONS. It's been crazy with everything else that's going on.

Last Friday I didn't have to go to work, so I planned to focus on invitations all day. But we were also going to have friends over for dinner, and I also felt pressure to pack to move and clean and do laundry. Plus we had to pack for visiting his family for easter weekend. James was supposed to come home from work in the early afternoon to help out, but work was too crazy for him and he couldn't get home until 5 or 6. We had to cancel on our friends because it was just too stressful for me to do it all by myself.

I spent as much time as I could on Friday on the invitations. I caligraphied all the envelopes and the reply card envelopes myself, so that was a major time-consumer. And I finally got my parents' invitation list, so I found out how many invitations I needed total - which was 35 more than I expected.

On Saturday we drove up to Arroyo Grande, and we got started an hour later than we planned. Then we had a major drama on the road - we had our bikes on the back of our car for the honeymoon (we're dropping things off with his parents, which we will pick up after the wedding to take on the honeymoon). But then on the 101 west, we're in the fast lane and hit a bump in the road, and James looks in the mirror and says "Oh shit!!" My bike had fallen off the bike rack! We took the next exit and alerted 911, then circled back on the highway to where we dropped the bike. When we were on the east side of the highway, I saw a car on the west side being put on a tow truck with its hood mashed in, but it looked like too much damage for a a bike to cause. When we drove back around and got on the west side, that accident was cleared and we didn't see the bike. We got off the highway again and called California highway patrol. After a looong time on the phone, they got us hooked up with a police officer who told us the bike had been hit and was trashed. He said that there were several accidents as a result of the bike but that no one was hurt. He also told us that as the bike was falling off the car and bouncing around, no one hit it. If anyone had, we'd be liable. But once the bike came to a stop on the highway, if people hit it, it was their fault for not paying attention or driving too fast. And that's apparently what happened, so we didn't get ticketed and we're not financially responsible for any damage. The cop didn't even take our information down. That was a huge relief, and the fact that no one was hurt was an even bigger relief . We're glad we did the honorable thing and didn't just drive away since there was nothing to tie us to that bike. But all of that drama meant that we got to AG three hours later than we'd planned.

After the usual hugging and chatting and all with his family, I immediately set to work on caligraphying the envelopes, and James worked on stamping all the 35 new invitations. We were able to chat with the fam as we worked, but pretty much all of our time there other than meals and church on sunday was spent working on the invitations.

Easter was nice but too brief - we went to church, had an early afternoon dinner, then we had to leave for LA. We weren't even in AG for 24 hours. Crazy!!

On the drive home, we stopped at the beach where we went immediately after we got engaged. Yay! It was nice to go back and it was beautiful there.

Then last night, we were up to 2 am working on the invitations. We got 50 of them out into the mail this morning. The invitations are surprisingly time-consuming, especially since I'm checking each envelope before it gets sealed to make sure everything's inside that needs to be inside, and we're keeping a list of every invitation that goes out the door so we know exactly who's gotten one. We don't want to accidentally overlook anyone. And putting the ribbon around the invitations is a delicate process... more on that tomorrow. Hopefully I'll get some pictures of the invitations and the invitation stuffing process tonight, so I can post pictures here.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-chaaanges!!

So much is happening so quickly, I hardly know where to start.

James and I spent most of the weekend gathering up everything we won't need for the next two weeks, loading it into boxes, and stashing the boxes in our parking space in the garage. We moved our car out to the street so that we could use the spot to get a good visual of how much stuff we have. It's a lot more than we thought!

We also tried to check things off our "To Do While in LA list," which included visiting the cookie place in Westwood Village, where they have delicious homemade cookies for 35 cents and yummy cookie ice cream sandwiches for $1.50. The lines are always huge there since it's right by UCLA. We also hiked up to the Hollywood sign, which was what we did for our second official date. We wanted to go back to where we had our first official date, which was at the Hollywood Forever Cemetary for their summer movie nights. They project old movies onto the side of a building and everyone brings blankets and picnics and sits out in the grass and it's lovely. Unfortunately, the next season of movie nights doesn't start until late May, so we can't do that. And Sunday night we went for a bike ride down at the beach and went to our favorite little Italian restaurant for dinner, then biked home. I won't miss an awful lot from LA, but biking with James to a restaurant, particularly Mama D's, at sunset by the beach... I'll be sad to see that tradition end.

Add to that the fact that we're still working on our wedding invitations, and I have to hand calligriphy every envelope and reply card envelope, and you get a pretty busy weekend.

On top of that, we weren't sure if we were actually moving yet!

We hadn't received our written offers from the Boston Raytheon, so we hadn't resigned at the El Segundo Raytheon yet. We weren't sure if we'd get the offers in time to give our bosses fair notice, so we emailed the Boston Raytheon on Sunday and told them that if we didn't get offers soon, we'd have to miss their April 27 start date, and start at the beginning of the next pay period (which is their policy), May 11. It was absolutely ridiculous that they wanted us to start at the end of April, and here we were on April 5 without anything concrete, when we had schedules to hand off, an apartment to pack up, movers and temporary housing to arrange, oh and a wedding to plan. And a honeymoon to set up. It was pretty aggravating.

I guess our email really lit a fire under their butts! On Monday James got a formal offer over the phone, and by Tuesday we both had written offers that we signed and faxed back. Monday night, we both sent in our formal resignations, which was a bit scary! It's so... final.

Also on Monday, we found out some exciting news about the house! The sellers accepted our offer, which we placed early last week when we were sure we were getting offers. (Although, it was still a bit nerve-wracking when by the end of the week we didn't have offers yet, and our bid on the house was in.) Now, our bid goes to the bank, which will decide whether it accepts our offer. The owners owe the bank quite a bit more than what they were selling the house for, and we under bid that number, so the bank might not be too keen on our bid. But, the house has been on the market for over 140 days, so they may be eager to just unload it. We'll see.

Now, James and I are trying to arrange our temporary housing and our moving company. The company that Raytheon recommended quoted me $4000 or so. Yikes. I found another company online that was closer to $1000, so James was interested in using that one. I googled their name and found lots of negative reviews. In fact, most of the reviews included the words "scam" and "theft" ...soooo we decided not to go with them. We found a more moderately-priced company with good reviews, and that's the one we chose. We'll have to rent a U-Haul to get our stuff to their station in Compton, then load our stuff ourselves into their semi. We're only paying for the space we use, which is nice, and the rest of the space will be used for commercial hauling. Then in Massachusetts, we'll have them deliver our stuff to a Public Storage, where we'll keep it until the house opens up.

As for temporary housing, I looked on Craigslist and couldn't find any sublets or month-t0-month rentals within a reasonable distance to work. At least, I couldn't find any that didn't involve renting a room in some creepy person's house. So we'll be going with an extended stay hotel. It will only be a studio (the suites were much more expensive), but it comes with a fully stocked kitchen, a full-sized refrigerator, a sitting area with a TV and DVD player. We're going to get it for the seven weeks that we'll be in Boston prior to the wedding. Hopefully, by the time we return from the honeymoon in mid-July, the house will be ours and we can move in.

And now that we're all set with the jobs, we're finally able to plan our honeymoon. We want to take a cross-country road-and-camping trip. We were either going to do it before the wedding, if they let us start in July, or after the wedding, if they'd let us take a month off. They chose option B, so we're looking at a June 22nd to July 11th trip across the country. Now that we have the dates nailed down, we can start reserving campgrounds. Except for one minor detail: Yosemite national park and Yellowstone national park are all booked up. Yellowstone lets people start reserving campgrounds a full year in advance, and for Yosemite it's six months. So trying to find a camping spot a mere two months ahead of time is not going well. We're going to try to find camping spots in state parks, but if we can't find anything other than KOA, we'll stay in hotels. If that happens, we may have to do our camping at different places in our trip. For instance, we're planning on going to Minneapolis and Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and I thought we'd stay in hotels or bed and breakfasts, but we may camp there, instead. We'll see. With all the other craziness that's going on right now, planning out the honeymoon is on the back burner for now.

Another day, another blog

Lately I've been hankering for change, and in the coming months I'm sure to have plenty, what with moving across the country, starting a new job, buying a house with my fiance, and getting married. Oh, and getting a puppy and a shelter cat, too.

Phew! I think that's about all the change a girl can handle.

But there's something else needing change, too: my blog.

Dun dun dunnnn.


I initially started out, long ago and far away, on blogspot. But then my sister and just about everyone else seemed to be on Livejournal, so I ditched my old blog and started up on LJ. Well, now it's been a few years and everyone's jumping ship for Blogspot. I'm not one to follow trends (you'll never catch me wearing ridiculous footwear like Uggs or Crocs just because they're popular!) but in this case, I think everyone's right.

I read a lot of food blogs and I'd like to start my own. (Although mine would just be about food that I made from recipies, I'm unfortunaly not badass enough in the kitchen to create my own food - at least, not yet.) And by the way, what do all those food blogs have in common? Not one of them is on LJ. Don't ask me why. But LJ just doesn't seem to be the venue for my blogging anymore. And I don't want to maintain three blogs (life, wedding, and food), so I'd like to have all three in one place. We'll see how it goes.

This won't be the easiest of transitions, though: I have two (TWO!) blogs on Livejournal, and I'm not exactly sure how to transfer the entries here. Here goes nothing..

Whoo, it's not that far away now! There's still lots to do yet, but I'm trying to focus on one thing at a time, or I'll drive myself crazy.

James and I went to New Jersey for a week in March, initially for the purposes of wedding planning but ultimately the week became more about visiting the Boston area for job searching and house hunting than it was about wedding stuff. But that was good too, since we got (verbal) job offers and found a house we'd like to buy, and we'll need both when we move back East. We had hoped to move back after the wedding and honeymoon - we've been planning on the honeymoon being a cross-country road-and-camping trip from LA to Boston to get the car (and a carload of stuff) across the country. But the jobs want us to start by the end of April (that's THIS month!!), so we'll have to move much sooner than anticipated. We're packing up like crazy and getting ready to hire a truck to haul the majority of our stuff back East. Luckily, the new jobs will let us take time off to have the honeymoon we want (more details on the honeymoon plans later). But things are a bit stressful since we haven't received written offers from the Boston Raytheon yet, so nothing (including our start date) is set in stone, which means we can't buy plane tickets or order a moving truck or find temporary housing for our first month or two over there. Not knowing where we're going to live in three weeks - or even, really, what coast we'll be on - is unsettling.

But we did get some wedding stuff done while back in Pitman. We met with the florist and finalized most of the details. We're still waiting for the mothers to pick their dresses so we can coordinate their flowers with the color, but other than that the flowers are all decided. We also spontaneously stopped by the caterers, and they very graciously stopped what they were doing to answer a few questions. We finalized the details of the menu and found out that we can have our guests hold sparklers outside as James and I make our grand exit. Exciting!

Also, I got my Martha Stewart on. James and I went to a crafts store and loaded up of silk flowers and cute baskets: one to hold programs, one each for the mens' and womens' bathrooms, and one to hold the sparkelers for the end of the night. The silk flowers match the fresh flowers that will be used throughout the wedding: Peonies will be the featured flower of the day, hydrangeas will be in flower arrangements and bridesmaids bouquets, and freesia will be in my hair and bouquet, and they'll be the sole flower in James' boutonneire.

The finished product!

It was fun to do, even though I burned my self quite a bit with hot glue.

The question of shoes

I'll admit, I kind of forgot about shoes. With all the things to decide, from flowers to dresses to food choices and whatnot, the question of what shoes my girls and I would be wearing kind of got put on the back burner. It wasn't until my sister emailed me about it that I realized that they'd probably appreciate some direction so they can go ahead and buy, borrow, or know that they can use what they already have.

I'm not going to be dictating that they all need to have matching shoes - or even shoe styles. I don't care if one girl wears a strappy sandal, one a flat, one a peep-toe pump. All I ask is that they be silver, not flipflops, and not clunky platforms. (I doubt any of my girls would choose clunky platforms, but I had to say it just in case.) I'm determined that they will be able to wear the shoes again, which is why I told them no dyables, since matching the shoes to the pink in their dress would mean that they'd probably never wear the shoes again. Plus I hate dyables. And if they already had silver shoes that would work, I see no problem with them using those instead of going out to buy something new. At first I was wishy-washy about the color, since I thought a champagne-colored shoe would look fabulous. But in looking at shoe stores, there aren't many shoes in a nice pale gold or champagne color - they're mostly blazing bright gold or dark bronze and I didn't think that would look right. And I didn't want the girls to have to struggle to find the right shade of shoe, so I went with a color that's readily available and would still look lovely with the dresses - silver.

So I emailed my girls with some suggestions:

which launched a bit of a back and forth with my bridesmaids firing shoe suggestions to each other. It was fun! I love looking at shoes (although actually shopping for and trying on shoes usually ends with me getting fed up and/or bored or tired of it).

And thinking about bridesmaids shoes got me thinking about my shoes. I want to wear flats since they'd be much more comfortable for all-day wearing, and because James and I are the same height. I love some of the shoes that the girls and I found yesterday, but with a three-inch heel I'd be towering over him. Which would make me feel awkward and I don't want to be awkward on my wedding day. Plus I never wear heels so I'd probably be a bit wobbly in them. So flats it is.

But nice dressy flats are hard to find. I was hoping to have pink shoes, but that seems to be impossible. I think I'll be going with silver, too.

I just got an unpleasant shock - I sent my parents a bunch of links to silver flats on zappos.com, but when I went to look at them to post the pictures here, every link said "We're sorry, that product is no longer available." WTF?! Boo. So I found some others, which are above. I've never purchased shoes online, but I may have to - I've been having a hard time finding any silver flats in stores - at least, any flats that would be nice enough to wear with a wedding gown. But I still have plenty of time, so I'll keep looking in stores for the time being. Buying shoes online seems risky to me - just because the shoe says it's your size doesn't mean it'll fit right.

Dewey or Don't We?

Last week was a whirlwind adventure back on the East Coast. We flew to NJ on Friday the 20th. We spent Saturday through Monday at my parents' house in Pitman, doing wedding planning stuff and planning our trip up to Boston. James also fixed my parents' computer, which took an obscene amount of his time. Oh, and we were forced to go to church with my parents on Sunday, which lasted almost TWO HOURS. It was terrible. Even my dad was bugging my mom to go home towards the end.

While we were in Pitman, my dad mentioned to James that we should consider buying a house instead of renting when we move to Boston. At first James thought my dad was crazy, but the more he thought about it, and looked at where the housing market is right now, and how low the mortgage interest rates are, and how the prices will eventually start creeping up again... the more he liked the idea. So we drove up to Haverhill, MA on Tuesday, and stayed with some very nice friends of my parents (yay free!). Wednesday, we met with a real estate lady and saw some properties. Thursday we had our interviews (I got one too!), which were very successful, and more house-seeing. Friday we saw a few more houses before we drove back to NJ. We never got down to visit Beantown, but we'll have plenty of time for that in the future.

One of the houses we saw on Wednesday was a little two story Victorian that's very similar to the one I grew up in, which my parents still live in. It's cute and quirky, and we love it. It does need some work, the floors especially need sanding and refinishing, and all of the wood trim downstairs needs to be stripped and either repainted or refinished. But it has a nicely sized backyard where we could have a pretty substantial garden, and it's cozy and the livingroom and master bedrooms were sunny. And there are two full bathrooms. The kitchen is teensy tiny, but there's a large room right off of it that we could use to extend the kitchen a bit with some strategically placed islands or something, with plenty of room left over for a dining area. (The ad calls it a "fabulous eat-in kitchen," so they must be considering the larger room as part of the kitchen.) We would eventually want to remodel the kitchen to make it bigger.

And it's a much more manageable price - we could afford more, but it would really put a strain on us, and we just don't want to spread ourselves to thin. And we like the idea of working on the house and fixing it up and making it really charming.

The other houses we saw were either in the same price range and therefore tiny and cramped and, oddly enough, sometimes with only one bathroom on the opposite side of the house from the bedrooms. May not seem like much of a big deal, until you have to get up to pee at 4 in the morning in the middle of winter. Or the houses were more expensive but had their own oddities - weirdly cramped livingroom/diningroom areas thanks to the chimney from the furnace randomly in the middle of the room, or master bedrooms so small they could hold a king sized bed and that's it, or TWO sump pumps in the basement. One more-expensive house had weird linolium tiles in all of the bedrooms - it felt like a hospital in there!

So even though the Dewey St house has some issues and will need some work, none of the other houses were perfect, either. We thought we'd be getting quite a deal if we went for the Dewey house. There was a lot of debating and weighing our options and looking at our finances and talking with parentals for advice. A more expensive but nicer house that still has some issues, or a less expensive house that will require a lot of work (and some unknown amount of money) to fix up? We kept coming back to the house on Dewey Street. We both just had a good feeling about it and we could both see ourselves living there.

We went back to see the Dewey house again on the last day, and we decided to do it. We filed the paperwork to put an offer on the house, which the real estate lady is holding for us until we get formal job offers from the Boston Raythen (we had verbals, but we didn't want to pull the trigger on this until we were absolutely certain we have jobs). Those should be coming soon, and our offer on the house will be going in as soon as we get them.

I have pictures of the interior, which I will post if and when the house is ours, but for now: