I’ve been neglecting this blog lately, and I am sorry about that! I won’t make excuses — anyone who reads here often knows the month of June was a crazy month over here, and that’s enough said about that, right?!

I’ve had a lot of ideas roaming my head about how to write a post about our wedding.  Nothing I’ve come up with seemed to do the day or the experience justice, and seemed sappy and boring, if I’m being honest.  I heard from several sources that they’d never seen Alex or I look so happy.  I think that sums it up best!

Then I thought… you know what’s never boring or sappy?  Talking about the things that went wrong at the wedding.  Things that went wrong are always a source of entertainment, especially after the fact, right?  So I will now present my list of things that went wrong at our wedding, in no particular order.

** To be clear: there weren’t that many things that went wrong, and most of them I either didn’t notice, or didn’t think about how bad it could have been, until after the fact.  It was downright shocking how smoothly the wedding went, and I credit the people at Tappan Hill for that.  This post is not intended to suggest the day was anything less than perfect.

Item that went wrong #1: Our officiant didn’t show up.  I’m not kidding!  15 minutes before the ceremony was supposed to start, I was sitting in my bridal suite with my sister, trying to stay cool (it was about 90 degrees the day of the wedding), when a guy I’ve never seen before comes in to tell me he’s going to be standing in for our officiant because the guy we hired had car trouble.  In retrospect, I think it was really “car trouble,” because I’d bet a lot of money that the guy really had double-booked himself, and for some reason our wedding was getting the crappy end of the stick.  In the end it didn’t matter, because the guy who came was licensed and had the ceremony the guy we hired wrote for us, but I shudder when I think about how bad it could have been.

Item that went wrong #2: A while back I wrote about how my florist and I had a miscommunication about what does and what does not constitute a pink flower.  I loved the flowers at my wedding, by the way, they were everything I pictured them being.  I had my bouquet preserved, which ought to tell you how much I loved the flowers because bouquet preservation does not = cheap.  Somehow, though, PINK flowers wound up on our wedding cake.  Really pink – I’m talking flaming bright magenta-pink.  I was so sublimely happy at the wedding that I really didn’t care.  But I care now that I see the pictures of the gorgeous (and delicious) wedding cake with stupid pink flowers on it (see below).

Item that went wrong #3: Mom, don’t get upset, but I totally forgot to put a penny in my shoe, even though you came and found me specifically to give me a penny to put in my shoe.  I had my something old (my pearls, which originally belonged to Alex’s grandmother), my something new (my dress, and a bunch of other stuff), my something borrowed (my hair band, borrowed from Tiffany, who wore it on her own wedding day a couple of years ago), and my something blue (my shoes… duh!), but when I thought about it the next day, I realized I definitely set that penny for my shoe on a table and never picked it back up.  Oops.  Good thing I’m not particularly superstitious.

Item that went wrong #4: This one is a corollary to item #1.    We went away for 2 weeks after the wedding, and expected to come home to find our shiny new marriage license sitting amongst our mail.  Too bad, it was not!  It was no where to be found, actually.  It took 4 calls/emails to our officiant (the guy who was supposed to be our officiant, not the one who actually showed up) and a call to the town clerk’s office to find out the license NEVER GOT MAILED OUT TO THE TOWN CLERK.  This was immediately rectified by the guy we paid to officiate our wedding, and we now have our marriage license.  It was a bit upsetting there for a while though!

I’d also like to mention, now that the wedding is over and I sit and think about all the wedding-related things I stressed about and planned for the last year, it all seems so silly!  We definitely had the beautiful wedding we wanted, but in the grand scheme of life some of the things I found myself getting upset over now seem… tiny.  Not worth having gotten upset.  Did anyone else experience this post-wedding epiphany, or is it just me?

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a list of things I’d like to tell you all about, if only I had the time.  Today I’d like to tell you all about the #2 thing on that list: the weirdest gift I have ever received.

Let me say this first, though: I am all for the concept of it being “the thought that counts.”  If someone wants to give me, or Alex, or both of us, or anyone a gift, it doesn’t matter to me if it’s large or small, round or square, normal or… weird.  So it’s not what this gift actually was that warrants a whole post about it.  It’s the “?!?!?!” factor that warrants the post.

I’ll take you back to the week before my bridal shower…

We had been receiving mail all week, because it was also the last week to RSVP for our wedding.  We had also been receiving boxes all week, as several people who could not attend the bridal shower had been kind enough to send gifts to our apartment.  So the presence of an envelope in the mail, decorated to make it known that it was something related to the pending wedding, was innocuous to me.

And then I opened the envelope.

Inside I found a card, from a person who is somewhat involved in the wedding, with the following message:

“Heard XXXXXX store accepts expired coupons.  Happy Bridal Shower!”

The card was stuffed with EXPIRED coupons for XXXXXX store (I’m not putting the name of the store, because I don’t know if this whole expired thing is true, and I don’t want to start an internet rumor!).  There was no corresponding gift card, or gift.  Just the EXPIRED coupons.  Oh, and they were expired coupons that had been pilfered from other people’s mail, because not a single one bore the name of the card-sender.

I don’t believe this person’s intentions were at all bad – quite the contrary.  But what do you say to someone when they send you such a thing?    Do I send a thank-you card for the EXPIRED coupons?  Is it a do-it-yourself gift, meant to help me get a $5 discount on something I buy myself?  I still don’t know what the appropriate response is!  All I do know is, this is hands-down the weirdest gift I have ever received.

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I don’t cry.

I know a lot of girls say that, but in my case it’s very, very true.  I especially don’t cry for HAPPY reasons.  Funerals, yes… weddings, no, if you get my drift. I’ve mentioned this about myself before (read about it here and here).

Why do I bring this up for a third time, then?

Because this past Saturday my bridesmaids threw me a wonderful bridal shower, and to make the great shower even better, they gave me one of the best present I’ve ever received – and succeeded in getting me to cry in front of everyone at the shower!

A bit of background information here… I have 6 bridesmaids.  For the most part, they don’t know each other.  Most of them don’t even live in the same state – as me, or each other.  They are scattered through Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Texas.  Each bridesmaid represents a different part of my life.  That wasn’t done on purpose, it’s just how it happens to shake out.  Lisa, my maid of honor, is my sister.  Heather is a friend I made while working in my other life as an optician, and she also became my travel buddy.  Tiffany I met at my very first job, and we stayed friends after she moved away and eventually got married.  Jen was my bestest friend in high school, from the very first day of high school (mostly… there was an incident where we were lab partners and neither of us trusted the other to be in charge of the lab report… but once we squared that away we were best friends forever!).  Whitney was my first roommate in college, and my NaNoWriMo buddy.  Jessica was my second roommate in college, who always seemed to be having boy troubles when I was.

Here’s why this is relevant: the 6 of them got together and made a scrapbook for me as my shower gift from them.  They each were sent a page of a scrapbook, and decorated it with their pictures and memories and inside jokes about our friendships.  They also made pages about my bachelorette party, and about me and Alex, and they left a blank page for me to fill in about the bridal shower.

I had NO CLUE they were doing this.  I’m still shocked my sister managed to get all 6 of them to put it all together.  And so when Lisa handed me the scrapbook, the final gift I was given at the shower, I opened it up, realized what was inside, and proceeded to cry.  Like, really cry.  I’m not talking one glistening tear on my cheek.  And then I cried when Lisa started photographing the scrapbook once the shower was over.  And I cried again when I got it home and started looking through it on my own.

Have the floodgates been opened?  It’s possible!

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I’ve been horrible about posting lately, and I’m sorry! Unfortunately, there’s a chance I will continue to be horrible about it for another week or so, because Alex and I made a big decision last week and it has created loads of extra work for us in this last month leading up the wedding.

We put an offer on a house. And it was accepted… just in time for the tax credit! We couldn’t be more excited, but now we’re scrambling to get everything done so we can close on the house in time for the tax credit deadline.  Will I write a post detailing the whole experience?  You bet!

By the way, buying a house 4 weeks before your wedding definitely falls into the following category: things you probably shouldn’t do if you want to remain sane.

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

My bachelorette party was this past weekend! I’ve been resistant to the idea of a traditional bachelorette… strippers, drinking until you can’t remember, etc… so I was curious to see what my bridesmaids would come up with instead. I knew the date of the party, but I was not aware of the full extent of what was planned. My friends did not disappoint!
The girls picked me up in a super-stretch limo at 9am Saturday to hit the Shawangunk Wine Trail’s Pasta Primo Vino event for the day. I know I’m biased, but I thought this was the greatest idea ever. It was relatively cheap for the tickets (although I suspect the limo was not cheap), and we got to hit 7 of the 11 wineries on the trail for a wine tasting and pasta dish at each. They do this event every year, along with others like it year-round, so if you’re interested you can check out the website here.

It took a little over an hour to get from where I live to our first stop on the wine trail, so the girls planned a few games as entertainment during the drive. My favorite? They sent Alex a questionnaire of 38 things they wanted to know about him, and I had to guess what his answers were. They gave me a few “prizes” as I got questions right – the biggest shock was when my sister handed over a bag filled with all the lingerie, and the shoes, needed to fulfill his “dream outfit.” *BLUSH*

My sister had also organized everyone so they were all wearing coordinating shirts, announcing that we were a bachelorette party in a slightly less tacky way than usual. Here are some examples (they got one for me to put on, too):

One of my bridesmaids also did her part to make sure the wine pourers knew to “accidentally” give me a bit more than the 1-oz. standard for wine tastings:

It was a fantastic day, exactly what I had pictured, so I can’t thank my friends enough! (Except by calling them rock stars in the title of this post.)

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

So much has been going on the last couple of weeks, I almost completely forgot that Alex and I were scheduled for a meeting with our floral designer today to inspect our centerpiece mock-ups!

They came out gorgeous – I couldn’t be happier with them, really. Check them out:

Sorry for the not-so-great images – I didn’t have my camera with me (since I almost forgot about the appointment), and the camera on my cell phone really stinks.
Our wedding doesn’t start until 7:30 PM, so we’re going with a lot of candlelight to give some ambiance to the night.  Those are cymbidium orchids floating in the water, in purples, blues, and greens (NOT PINKS!!!).

Any thoughts about these centerpieces, or about your experiences with wedding flowers?

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I’ve been holding back posting what our wedding invitations actually look like because *some* people were upset at the thought that I might post them here before all our guests received them in the mail.  Judging by the steady trickle of response cards we’ve been getting in the mail lately, I think it’s safe to assume all our guests have now seen the invites – so here they are!

In case you didn’t catch the post, there was a bit of drama with the printing of these invitations, but once everything was taken care of with that, I have to say that I LOVE them!  Lisa, my little sister, has been doing all the graphic design for the wedding (I’ll be posting more and more of her work as we receive the printed versions).  One of my favorite things about the invitations is how she incorporated the pattern of the Pleiades, one of my favorite star clusters to check out with binoculars.  It’s not perfect, but you can see it a bit in the larger star clusters in the corners.

The stars made an appearance on the response cards and other enclosures, too:

Lisa also found these really pretty envelopes to coordinate with the starry night sky theme all our wedding stationery has, and we got silver Sharpies to write out the addresses.  The best part?  Our invitations were under $200 for everything!! (OK, so maybe that’s not the best part, but it’s still awesome.)

If you’re interested in Lisa’s design work, you can contact me through this blog for her information.  Her website is currently under construction!

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

The calendar that sits on my desk at work is the Forgotten English 2010 Calendar. I found today’s entry both entertaining and appropriate, so I’m sharing!

March 23, 2010
bed-vow
Definition: Marriage vow. – C.T. Onion’s Oxford Shakespeare Glossary, 1911

Andrew Waterman’s Almanacks of the 18th century considered March 23 a fine day for marriage.  William Fielding’s Strange Customs of Courtship and Marriage (1942) offered some examples of antiquated wedding vows: “Among the early Anglo-Saxons, the bride was taken ‘for fairer or fouler.’ She promised, among other things, to be ‘buxom and bonny’ to her future husband.”  Florence Howe Hall’s Good Form for All Occasions (1914) recommended this bachelorette party entertainment: “Since the bridesmaids’ luncheon is intended to be a gay and merry, rather than a somber and melancholy affair, it is well to ask one or two of the guests to arrange some amusing feature for the day. Thus, if a bride has many admirers, a dance of the rejected suitors would be appropriate. These could be represented by two of the company. They should be furnished with large bandana handkerchiefs on which to weep copiously. After treading a slow and melancholy measure, each should break a stick over his knee in accordance with the old tradition.”

The things they did back in the day crack me up sometimes! (Special thanks to Whitney, both for giving me this calendar, and making sure I noticed today’s entry!)

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Does anyone have a really fabulous recipe for lemonade?

You see, life has just thrown an extra-large quantity of lemons at me, and I need to find some way to make something out of them to keep my sanity.

As I sit typing this post, it is roughly 2 months and 2 weeks until Alex and I tie the knot.  Everything is all set up: all our vendors are confirmed, my dress is ready, the invitations have gone out.  We’re good to go.

… Or so I thought.  Apparently all the planning and organizing and thinking things through in the world – because if I’m being honest, I have planned and organized and thought through this wedding more than I have ever planned or organized or thought through anything in my life – will not prevent everything from unraveling around me, making my cozy cocoon of completed checklists shred to pieces before my eyes.

Don’t worry, nothing has happened to stop the wedding from happening.  Everything with Alex and I is great.  But I would say that arguably the worst thing OTHER than the wedding not happening has occurred.  We found out last night that we have to move… TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE WEDDING.

Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal.  But for us, it is.  We aren’t just moving a few streets over, or one town over.  We have to move to a whole other county.  That whole other county is 50 miles north of where we live now.  It’s also 50 miles north of where the wedding is.  Our current lease, in a bizarre twist of fate, ends 5 days before the wedding.  We’ve known for some time that we weren’t going to renew the lease for another full year because we’re buying a house.  The hope had been that our landlords would let us stay here month-to-month until the end of the summer, but now we’ve been informed that they aren’t interested in letting us do that.  So we have to get out by the time the original lease ends.

Life’s a bi%ch, isn’t it?

This new development throws all kinds of big hairy monkey wrenches into the month before the wedding.  For example:

• All our gift registry delivery details will now have to be changed, since we won’t be here anymore if packages get mailed to our home address.
• We have to add at least 1 extra night on to our hotel stay the weekend of the wedding, since we have many people coming in from out of town, and it seems pretty darn crappy for us to not be around to see them before the wedding.
• Alex will have to drive MUCH farther and longer to pick up E for all the wedding events, something that gives both of us agita.

Worst of all, we will be coming home from our honeymoon and living with one of my parents until we have the home-buying stuff settled and closed.  We always knew we’d be living with one of them for a few months while we waited – we just didn’t know we’d start our lives as newlyweds there.  It’s more than a little bit depressing (although we do know that this means we will save more money than we expected, which is not a horrible thing).

Bottom line: I currently feel like the rug has been yanked out from under me and I can’t find the ground to steady myself.  Maybe I should be asking for a recipe for hard lemonade…

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Not too long ago, someone made the following comment within earshot of me:

“If the engagement ring is any less than a carat, it means he doesn’t really love you.”

All I could think was, what is wrong with this person?  I initially shrugged off what I heard as someone being entirely too materialistic and unaware that other people could hear them, but the more I have thought about the remark, the more it has bothered me.

Who, exactly, is it that gets to decide the rules of what is and what is not a respectable symbol of a man and woman’s intention to spend the rest of their lives together?  I looked into it a bit, and the general consensus seems to be that DeBeers decided to run an advertising campaign promoting diamond engagement rings around the end of the 1930′s, and that combined with Marilyn Monroe’s famous “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” raised diamonds to the status symbols they are today.

So, whatever, now a man is supposed to buy a diamond ring for a woman when he asks her to marry him.  I’d be lying if I sat here and wrote that I did NOT expect Alex to go buy me a diamond ring when he decided to propose to me.  But I also don’t think that is the only way to go.  I think it’s equally nice to give a girl a sapphire ring, or something else that is equally meaningful to the couple, as a symbolic, outward sign to the world that you are betrothed.

It’s not really that it’s supposed to be a DIAMOND that bothers me.  It’s the attitude so many people have about the expected SIZE and EXPENSE of the diamond that bothers me.  For example, many people seem to think it’s necessary for a man to spend at least 2-3 months’ salary on an engagement ring.  Other people, like the person I overheard talking, think the engagement ring ought to be as big as possible, and that certain smaller-sized rings are utterly sub-par.  I don’t know where this “wisdom” came from, but it seems horribly flawed.

Don’t people care about their MARRIAGE and their future AFTER the wedding?  Because if you’re asking a man to invest that much money in a ring, he probably isn’t going to be able to invest much money in anything else for a while after the proposal.  It seems perfectly ridiculous to put that kind of financial pressure on a guy, who is probably already completely nervous about pulling off the proposal right, and about getting married and being a good husband.  Not to mention, the engagement ring is supposed to symbolize love and commitment simply because he went and bought the ring and gave it to the girl!  Who cares if all he can afford is a quarter of a carat because he’s a waiter working his way towards a PhD, or a struggling actor, or a retail store employee?  Isn’t it the thought that counts, and not the net worth of the ring in this situation?

I guess my point is that the people who have these crazy guidelines in their heads really seem to be missing the point of the ring in the first place.  I’m not advocating that a man should go grab the first cubic zirconia ring he sees – by all means, save up what you can and put thought into the process!  But going into major debt, with no hope of being able to pull yourself out, just to buy an engagement ring is ridiculous.  It’s also ridiculous to go into debt to put a child into pre-school, or summer camp, or to go on a dream vacation, but that’s really another blog.

My point?  It would be nice to see more people focus on the endgame when it comes to engagements and weddings, rather than on the materialistic crap (for lack of a better word) that so many people parrot to each other.

{For the record, my own engagement ring is not too big and not too small, and my fiancee was intelligent and bought it in such a way that he does not owe anyone money for it, and hasn’t for many months.}

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.