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.