The Post You’ve Been Waiting For

Yep!  I got married!   Most of this year, I was mostly unavailable or MIA or out of town.  If I wasn’t on the East Coast, then my [now] wife was here in the Mid West.  And if I was home, I was probably on the phone or on Skype with her.  We got married on August 15th of this year (2009).  I’ve changed and grown up a lot in the past year.  For one, I lost 90lbs (no, my wife never asked me to), eliminated 95% of my beer intake, which helped tremendously with my weight loss and gout flare-ups, fell in love and didn’t want to be alone anymore.  I seized the moment and proposed in July.  We had about 6 weeks to plan our wedding.  We went back and forth on the type of wedding, and in the end, my incessant whining led to a “traditional wedding” of just over 100 guests.  Planning a wedding in 5-6 weeks is a lot of work!  Just running around to find a banquet hall which is affordable, has good food, and looks good (so you won’t be embarrassed when your guests show up) takes a very long time.  There’s Google, there’s word of mouth, there’s meeting with banquet hall managers and there’s food tastings.  Believe me, you’ll *want* to do a food tasting.  Don’t always trust what people tell you about the food.  Taste it for yourself.  If you’re not completely satisfied with the food and venue, neither will your guests be – oh yeah, and they’ll probably talk about how crappy the food was on Facebook for months after!   I must say we were very impressed with the food at the venue we’ve selected, and if you were one of our guests, then I can confidently say that you probably found something good to eat and drink at our wedding.

Then there are the details like D.J., Photographer, Flowers, Cake, Tuxedos, Dresses, Groomsmen, Bridesmaids.  Then there are extra details like the floral arrangements on the tables, what kind of tablecloths or seat covers you’re going to choose, the guestbook, the invitations – oh, and don’t get me started with the invitations.  I cannot believe how expensive they are to have a company do them for you!  We tried to be as thrifty as we could and went to Michael’s, found invitations to match our color scheme and I printed them out at home, stuffed the envelopes and sent them out.

We bought our own vases for the tables, and one of our friends offered to do our flowers as a wedding gift.  That saved us a lot of money.  Tip #2: get your flowers at Costco if you can.  You wouldn’t believe how cheap and nice the flowers are at Costco.  If you know someone that’s good with crafts and flowers, ask them to help out – it will save you a ton of money.

The D.J. … well there’s not that much you can do here, except if you know someone or have friend with equipment.  Otherwise, you’ll just have to pony-up.

Photographer.  These guys can be *really* expensive.  From the research I’ve done, a price tag of $3k-$5k isn’t unusual for the whole day.

Taste your wedding cake.  Go around to some bakeries, and ask them for samples of their wedding cake.  Many bakeries make the glazing too rich and buttery or too salty or too sweet and too salty.  If you’re not satisfied with the sample, don’t get the cake.  If you go to a more expensive place with a better quality cake, just get a simpler design and go with the better quality cake.  People won’t remember what you’re cake looked like, but they’ll remember if it sucked.

I could probably write a few pages on all the details and phone calls, and running around we did, but in the end we had a wonderful time, we were happy with all aspects of our reception and ceremony, and we’d like to thank all of you for your generous gifts and happy thoughts.

We’ve been kinda slow with pictures; I know some of you got a little preview of some of the photos, but we haven’t even collected the proofs from our photographer yet – we’ve been a little busy with this and that, but hopefully a wedding album will be up on my site soon and I will post about it.

I can’t believe how long it’s been since I wrote anything on my blog, but it turned out that this was probably one of the busiest years of my life

More to come!