Let Them Eat Cake

We just had a really big (OK, huge) decision making weekend. Thinking about all the "details" makes my head spin. One thing we decided on is the cake. Red velvet it is. We haven't decided on how we want the cake to look just yet, but there is plenty of inspiration out there.

One thing that has not escaped our notice is how inflated wedding prices are on everything. The cake is no exception. Regular cakes start at $3.00 per serving. Same cake as a "wedding" cake and it starts at $5.00 per serving. Is there some sort of magical ingredient in the wedding version that makes it cost more?

More Bridezillas

Andy and I have watched this clip together, and we are absolutely appalled that any human being could possibly act the way these horrifying women manage to, especially the Spawn of Satan, a.k.a. "Valerie" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ8PL9f3g6s#t=2m35s) . The behavior exhibited on this show sickens me... like, literally makes me feel nauseous.

After our initial laughter and subsequent revulsion, the fianceé and I have agreed that any similar behavior from EITHER of us will be a pretty definite dealbreaker.

Laugh and cry, my friends:

The Dress

I've been getting a lot of questions about what kind of dress I'll wear. What color? What length? What style?

I have plenty of time to find the perfect dress, so I haven't really spent a lot of time focusing on that. I would like something no frills, knee or tea length, and in an ivory color. I'm just too white to pull off a white dress.

I have also decided against getting ultra fussy with accessories. I'd rather have my hair done nicely than covered up with a veil. I will opt for a nice pair of earrings and probably skip wearing a necklace.

As Rick said before, we want to be comfortable so we can enjoy the festivities with our guests and being too done up just isn't our style. Stay tuned, I might ask for opinions once I start looking at dresses.

Getting the Ball Rolling

After a few days of playing phone-tag, we have finally made an appointment with the Sales and Catering Manager of the Ashworth Hotel in Hampton Beach to discuss pricing and details of our reception, as well as a tour of the facility. Andy will be coming back to New England for the last weekend of September, at which time we will be staying at the beach and spending some quality time with my Mom and Dad.

Next step is to start making a list of the 1 billion questions we will need her to answer. I'm looking forward to it. This will be the first concrete step (aside from the obvious "me proposing and Andy saying yes" thing) that we will have taken to officially start making wedding plans.

After our meeting, we're thinking of taking an early fall ocean cruise out to the Isles of Shoals. I've never been out there, I imagine it is beautiful.

We Are Going to Dance and Have Some Fun

So... while we are in the limbo-like process of nailing down dates and details for our big day, Andy and I have been putting some thought into the incidentals of the reception. Things like shoes, theme drinks, favor packages-- the details that will make our wedding special, unique, and personalized.

Of course, one of the most important "details" is our choice in music. We have already decided that there will not be any Hokey-Pokey or Chicken Dance, none of that corny stuff. Our goal is to pick music that is fun, uplifting, and clearly dance-able, while still making sure it's music that holds some special meaning to us and, of course, is also enjoyable for our guests. In the past few weeks, we have been compiling a sort of "rough draft" of song ideas that we think would be fun for everyone without resorting to the tired wedding reception cliches.

Thanks to a site I just discovered called MixPod, we're able to publicly share the playlist with you here. Keep in mind that it's just a list of the available songs for the pleasure of blog visitors... what you see/hear here may not necessarily be the same versions or edits we ultimately choose.

So, here's what we've come up with so far... keep checking back as we continue to add to it:

We would love to hear any thoughts, questions, comments, suggestions, et cetera.

Feel free to leave a comment, or contact one of us directly.

 

Wedding Weirdness

Andy and I are fascinated by interesting lists about bizarre things. It all started when I introduced her to Cracked, where breaking their articles down into numbered lists is standard operating procedure.

From there, it became kind of an off-and-on nightly ritual for us to find an interesting or funny list from Cracked or some similar website, and read it together. At some point, we discovered a site called Oddee.com which seemed more like an aggregate site that collected lists of stuff that had already been published on other sites. A bit lazy, in my opinion, but honestly, the best way to get a wide-angle view of some of the most insane things ever unleashed on the internet-viewing public.

It recently occurred to me that over the years, Oddee has collected several lists of bizarre wedding and wedding-related stories and features. Most of these are too insane to wrap my mind around, others seem really fascinating and innovative, and still others are just pathetically depressing lessons on "How NOT To Do Your (proposal/ceremony/vows/dress/DJ/et cetera)". After recently re-reading through some of my favorites, I thought I'd share a few:

10 Most Bizarre Wedding Rings

 

Cute idea, but a little less than tasteful.

 

7 Wedding Proposals Gone Bad



Whoops.



World's Strangest Marriages and Relationships



This guy married a pillow. Seriously.



You can find many, many more of Oddee's lists of strange proposals, weddings, etc. here. Enjoy.

It's nice to look at all the insane choices people make in this world, and all the horrible failures, and be fairly certain that Andy and I will not be counted among them.

Something Blue

I saw the coolest thing in one of the wedding magazines I picked up on my last trip to MA and I thought it might be perfect for our reception. This couple had a blue and white winter themed wedding and they served their champagne with Blue Curacao. Since our colors are blue, sand, and chocolate brown I thought it would work just as well for a beach wedding.

My Wedding Shoes

Andy and I are very set on the idea of having a much more casual wedding atmosphere. In fact, we are hoping for it to be more like a celebratory party than any kind of formalized sequence of events.

In that spirit, we have been discussing what we're going to wear. Thanks to numerous bridal and wedding-planning magazines, we realized that it would be perfectly fine to do whatever we want, as long as it's tasteful and somewhat consistent.

I am looking at going semi-formal. Nice pants, jacket and tie. Probably not going the tuxedo route. They can get pretty uncomfortable. Most of the weddings I've been to have included me as a member of the wedding party, which meant tuxedos. In nearly every case, I can recall removing at least the jacket and vest or cummerbund, and untucking the shirt so I could dance more comfortably during the reception.

When it comes to wanting to dance for hours, though, the most important thing is the shoes. Formal shoes, especially rentals, are amazingly painful after a few hours. Sure they look great, and they have nice slippery bottoms for dancing enhancement on polished hardwood floors, but they HURT.

Not wanting to approach our special day as something whimsical or to be taken lightly, I asked Andy what she'd think about me adding my own special "sauce" to whatever outfit I chose, by adding some custom-made Converse All-Stars. Anyone who knows me well knows that this particular style of shoe is a staple of my casual wardrobe, and I felt it would be a nice touch to personalize the wedding plans.

She seemed supportive of the idea, so I went to Converse's website and started designing some shoes using our theme colors: A light blue (theirs is a little more saturated than what we chose, but oh well), sand, and dark brown.

I wanted brown laces too, but Converse doesn't offer them.

Here's a 360º view of how they turned out so far. (requires Flash)

Memories of the Beach

When I was little, my parents took me to Ocean City, MD just about every summer. Some of my fondest memories are of those trips. Riding all the rides at Trimper's on the boardwalk, drinking the best lemonade ever, going through the Haunted House, and just having a blast in general.

I'm not really a beach person in the sense that I spend hours perfecting my tan so that someday I can be the makings for a lovely purse, but the beach just seemed like the right place for us to get married.

I found this site that has some great pictures and historical information about Hampton Beach and the surrounding area.

http://www.hampton.lib.nh.us/hampton/history/vignettes/NHhistoricseacoast.htm

If you're wondering what the weather will be like in October. It looks like the average high is 61 and the low is a chilly 39.

Enjoy!

Six Things You Will NOT Find at Our Wedding

You've heard of "dos and don'ts". Here is a list of "please, for the love of God, don'ts", courtesy of one of our favorite websites, CRACKED.
(Warning! This article contains some strong language and also a lot of fighting.)

Six Ways to Ruin a Perfectly Good Wedding

My personal pick for most cringe-worthy is the deliriously drunk bridsesmaid hogging the spotlight during what starts out as a cute little dance number between her and the bride. Incredibly awkward and embarrassing moments like this are part of the reason Andy and I decided to keep our wedding as simple as humanly possible, which means no wedding party, no idiotic staged photographs of the groom trying to run away, no Chicken Dance, no Electric Slide, and definitely, DEFINITELY no shoving cake in each others' faces.

EDIT: Ok, actually 7 things. We will encourage everyone at our celebration to have as much fun as possible, but please try not to destroy the entire place and injure the other guests like the following drunken Russian:

Enjoy.