moriath

Went to Saugatuck today to meet our officiant and discuss what Billy and I (mostly I, lol) want in our wedding ceremony.

I really like our officiant - she's very relaxed, lots of fun, and is definitely on the same wavelength as me regarding various sexist practices in "traditional" wedding ceremonies. Also, especially since we have only a little less than 6 months until the wedding, she's very flexible about everything. In a couple of weeks she's going to send us a rough draft of the ceremony, but in several places there will be multiple options for us to choose from/work with (things like the exact wording of the vows, or what to say when the rings are put on, etc). Things where I have a vague idea of what we'd like to say, but really don't know how to word it.

This is exactly why we're working with a professional rather than having a friend do the ceremony. I don't have to write anything (well, except my vows. Eventually); I just need to approve.

We also snuck something subversive into the end of the ceremony. At least in the draft, we're going to be pronounced as wife and husband, rather than husband and wife. We'll see if Billy catches it and requests it to be worded the traditional way ;-)

Will blog more later. Probably. In the mean time, I'm going to go pick up my birth control, go get my hair cut, and then work on some wedding and/or moving stuff for Mom.

Good news and bad news today:

Good news: BILLY AND I SIGNED THE LEASE ON A NEW YORK APARTMENT!!! We're living in Rego Park in Queens, which totally isn't glamorous...or big...but it's a little place not too far from NYC that will enable me to actually get a job out here. We're so excited!!! And yet, a little lost: we gave ourselves two full days out here...and we had our apartment by 2pm on the first day. What do we do tonight? And all day tomorrow?

Bad news: Michael's has discontinued the vase that I really wanted to use for our centerpieces. I know, it's on a totally different scale than our apartment, but it's still a little disappointing. They were purple!

For some reason, Google Reader keeps recommending Stargate slash blogs for me to subscribe to.

Not that I have anything against Stargate slash...except for the fact that I've never watched the show. And it's m/m slash. Women don't get enough love in fandom.

ANYWAY, went out to the bar tonight since it's our friend Richard's last night in Ypsi. Sad face. But he assured us he would definitely be coming back for the wedding! Which is good. I would be very very sad if Richard didn't come back up (he's moving to Alabama. That is possibly crazier than moving to New York).

Spent a good chunk of the evening talking wedding shop with Nina, who competed with Billy and I for a year before being a coach on the team for the rest of our time. She's getting married a few months after Billy and I and it was SO NICE to have someone to talk inane wedding details with. We compared wedding colors, talked about how AWESOME my (and possibly her!) photographer is, talked about moms and budgets...it was fun. I think that's one part of the whole wedding experience that I'm missing out on a little bit because my bridesmaids are spread out all over the place: I don't get to sit down and just blab about all of these things with anyone. This is probably why I have an unhealthy number of wedding blogs on my Google Reader, so that I can at least be privy to the inane details of someone else's wedding.

... And my brain just shut down. I didn't really have anything else specific in mind to blog about...but I can't even think of a coherent way to conclude this entry. Maybe the Kahlua affected me more than I thought?

You know how when you repeat a word often enough it begins to lose it's meaning and just seems like gibberish?

That's how I feel about the word "bustle" right now.

When a wedding idea pops into my head, I have the insatiable urge to research it RIGHT NOW. Hence the reason why I spent an entire workday last week (seriously, from about 9 in the morning until 5 in the evening) creating the first part of Billy's and my wedding registry (I'm not publishing it anywhere yet because right now it's not nearly complete. It only has kitchen things on it because I know I want/need those items, where as bed and bath items I'm less sure about what we need because we don't have our NYC apartment chosen yet).

So this morning I woke up and decided I wanted to re-investigate doing a train on my gown. Meaning I would need a bustle.

Now I know I don't want anything too huge and fancy, either train or bustle-wise. Originally Mom and I were going to concoct a detachable train...but the more I think about it, the less I like that idea. My dress is going to be a very slim, sheath-like gown with a subtle mermaid skirt (there's extra fabric at the bottom of the dress, but we're not putting in a crinoline or anything to make that part poof out. It's just there for extra swishy-ness). So I think having a whole extra length of fabric serving as my train would mess up the silhouette. So now I'm thinking maybe there's a way to do a really simple, flat under-bustle that will let me have a small train and still dance the night away.

I swear I saw a picture of a bustle like this once, but my Google-fu is escaping me. And no, it's not at the bustle bio or Leanna's.w

Or does a bowling afterparty (scroll to the bottom of the page) sound like an absolutely FABULOUS way to top off the wedding?

It's really too late to go all the way with this idea, but I'd really love to make my wedding more of a wedding weekend party than just a one evening affair. I'm already planning on starting the festivities Friday night, at least if I can get enough people to trek across the state on Friday vs. Saturday. I'd love to host a gathering at The New Holland Brewing Company after the rehearsal dinner. This way we can actually spend time with our friends before the wedding (I've been to enough weddings at this point to know that you don't actually get to talk to the bride and groom the entire evening). Then Saturday would be the wedding, naturally (potentially followed by the afore-mentioned bowling party) and then, depending on the honeymoon plans, have a brunch on Sunday.

I'm currently leaning towards delaying our honeymoon...I know, it sounds a little crazy, but here's the deal: we want to do Disney's Land/Sea Cruise package, where we split a week between going to Disney World and a Disney Cruise. It's totally perfect, but because cruises have strict departure schedules, we either do 3 nights on land and 4 at sea starting on a Thursday, or we do 4 nights on land and 3 at sea starting on Sunday. So in order to get any mileage out of that first day in Disney world with the latter package, we would pretty much have to leave immediately after the wedding. No bowling party. And no "wedding night."

Boo. Hiss. Et cetera.

Of course, delaying the honeymoon by very much means we start getting into Spring Break time...followed by hurricane season, when I DO NOT want to be in the Caribbean (true fact: last time Billy and I were considering taking a cruise, Hurricane Katrina ended up hitting. We ended up in Hawaii and as we were coming back we wondered why all of the TVs in the airport were showing New Orleans flooded).

Which means the dream honeymoon might actually become a one year anniversary deal. Which wouldn't be awful, but it wouldn't be ideal, either.

I thought planning the honeymoon was supposed to be the FUN part of a wedding!

If I'd known I could do something like this, Billy and I would totally be getting married in Vegas.

I mean, duh, of course you can do something more romantic than a drive through and/or Star Trek wedding (though the rehearsal dinner would have HAD to be at Quark's. Seriously; best food on the strip).

I don't want to think about how much that wedding cost, though. The Wynn isn't a cheap hotel/casino. Mom and I went there to see Avenue Q when I turned 21 and there's a bunch of signs at the front door saying anyone under 16 won't be allowed in the hotel. And even during the afternoon when we were there the table minimums were in the $25-50 range (during weekday afternoons, the minimums-at least at the casinos I hang out in-are usually $5. I wasn't a happy camper last time I was there during the week to see the minimums rise to $10 Friday afternoon! I'm a cheap gambler).

But damn. Getting married in a night club in Vegas? Soooooooo cool.

Because my photographer is awesome, I've been collecting pictures online that I want to recreate on my wedding day (or during my boudoir shoot next week!). I found one today that practically made me squeal.



I WILL BUY A BRAND NEW MIRROR IF I HAVE TO TO RECREATE THIS SHOT. OR FIGURE OUT HOW TO SHIP THE ONE I ALREADY OWN. I LOVE THIS SHOT THAT MUCH.

Speaking of my boudoir shoot, I need to go pick up some sexy underwear sets tomorrow. And maybe a new pair of sexy shoes (I really wish I was better at keeping track of days so I could have ordered a new pair of Frederick's shoes) since I'm going to be spending the rest of the week in Ohio for Origins

I've had three wedding-related dreams this week. Two last night! Although last night's two were almost the exact same thing both times...but I think I still get to count them individually. 'Cause really, who has repeat dreams like that?

Last night's dream I, once again, didn't have everything finished the day of the wedding. As in, while I was on my way to changing into my dress, I realized that I hadn't written my vows yet. WTF? And there was related craziness.

Then I woke up for a little bit when Billy came to bed, and when I fell back asleep...I STILL hadn't written my vows. But it was actually only the rehearsal dinner? So why the hell was I all done up in my dress? I mean, Billy's going to see me in my dress before the wedding, but not the night before!

My grandmother needs to send me the last batch of addresses so I can just MAIL these friggin' save the date cards. Maybe once they are gone I can relax again and stop going crazy?

Because I'm poor right now and thus can't afford either of these shirts (one for me, one for Billy):





(Roslin would kick Obama's ass. Just sayin'. Most likely because she'd rig the election...but you know you want a prophet for president!)

They would, however, make wonderful wedding presents. His and Her geek shirts! Totally better than monogrammed towels.

Apparently, you can now create google pages that don't rely on your gmail address. This would have been nice to know BEFORE I printed off all of my save the date cards with angela.craft.googlepages.com as the address. Now I look like such an ego-centric bride :-(

A couple of weeks ago my mom was wandering around downtown Holland and saw an awesome dress in the window of a bridal salon there. So now that I'm in Holland for a few days, and wanted to try on dresses to see different fabrics and make sure my mermaid style gown would in fact be a good fit for me.

UGH. I HATED the dresses at this store. Every single dress was a stiff taffeta style, and while the sales woman said they had "lots" of mermaid gowns, I only saw big poofy ball gowns. Yuck, yuck, yuck. So we walked out without trying anything on.

And then we went to the fabric store and got the charmeuse fabric I've been in love with. My gown isn't terribly structured (I'm not having a super dramatic mermaid style, just extra fabric at the bottom of the dress so it's really swishy) so the slinky fabric will be perfect. While it wasn't my original intent, my dress has definitely taken on a glamorous '30s style. AND I LOVE IT.

Oh, and I just need to brag a little bit about this: the fabric for my dress only cost $36. Mom figured my dress would cost $100 with half of that being fabric, the other half beads. I haven't totaled up yet what she's spent on beads, but I'm pretty sure even after we add in the price for the patterns (we're putting together multiple patterns to come up with the perfect gown) my dress won't be much more than $100!

Okay, now to wake Billy up and make our way back to my parents house. And make him harass his mom for their guest list and addresses!

If you click the eBay link in my last post, you may notice that bidding has ended on the item.

That is because my mother bought the shoes for me this morning. Eeeeeeeeee!

Being the shoe lover I am, especially when it comes to obnoxiously high heels, I've maintained since the beginning that I'm not going to be a two-shoe bride. Well, okay, I am, technically, because life is much easier when both feet have shoes! But I intend on sticking to one pair of shoes for the night, because after a lifetime in heels I know that it IS, in fact, possible to have comfortable high heel shoes.

Of course, finding said comfortable pair of shoes is easier said than done. I have had many pairs of shoes that are great for sitting around and looking pretty, but try to walk any distance or stand any length of time and you're hobbling pretty quickly.

My mother has had foot problems for most of her life (due to problems in her childhood, not wearing heels), so she's always instilled in me the importance of good shoes. Good shoes are about the only thing she'll drop over $100 on without batting an eye, simply because it's a medical necessity for her. When I started forensics, and part of the "uniform" was high heels, Mom immediately gave me the money to buy myself a good pair of heels. And they were good, but probably the best pair of shoes I have ever owned is this shoe



Why yes, that is a shoe from Frederick's of Hollywood. Yes it does have a 4" micro stiletto. And they are amazingly comfortable. Ask anyone who was on the forensics team with me: I wore those shoes almost every weekend for three years (I didn't get them until half way through my second year competing) and never brought a pair of flats with me. I still have the shoes and wear them regularly, though they're fairly scuffed up now and have had to be re-heeled multiple times.

So, anyway, since I know I love that shoe and it's totally comfortable, I figured I'd get them for the wedding in white. Kind of boring, but comfort is worth forgoing a little bit of style, right?

But the more I've thought about it, the more I've decided that I would really love to have some color poking out from under my dress. Not that the dress itself will be devoid of color (hello LOTS OF PURPLE BEADS), but the shoes would be a nice addition.

So I poked around a couple of places, looking for purple shoes without much success. Probably because what I want (a classic pump) isn't much in style right now considering the entire country is melting in the heat. Everything's about flirty sandals in lots of colors that aren't deep purple.

And then I remembered that, again for forensics a couple of years ago, Mom had bought me a bunch of designer shoes on eBay for cheap. So I searched tonight, and that's where I found these:



They are sooooooooo pretty! I'm seriously considering calling Mom tomorrow and asking her to buy them for me. They let you return them if you don't like them for whatever reason (though they do charge a restocking fee).

I think I need to sleep on it before making any decisions.

OMG, the wedding planner at the hotel responded to me within a reasonable amount of time! With a sincere sounding (looking? It was an e-mail) apology for the communication difficulties.

Now I need to pick a time to go back to Holland and meet with her. And a prospective officiant!

So I spent most of today's oppressively hot day putting together my wedding planning notebook. Sure, I could have gone to Borders and bought a pre-made book for $20-$50 , but spending that sort of money just didn't make sense for me. Most of what jacks up the price are all of the planning lists: what to ask your caterer, photographer, etc. But I've already bought books covering those questions.

So instead I went to Target and bought a heavy duty binder, a plastic envelope (for holding receipts), paper covers and folders/dividers and spent today setting up my planning book.

I've made inspiration boards for each section. First is my overall inspiration board, just giving the feel for the whole wedding overall. Very glamorous, if I say so myself. And wintery. Which was nice to think about when the humidity was offensively oppressive. That's where I have the receipt envelope, keeping careful track of the money Mom has spent so far.

Next is the attire section, with my beautiful dress inspiration board, then the floral section, photography section (where the inspiration board is just to keep track of shots I want for our wedding. Our photographer is awesome and said I should definitely send her any photos I find that I want to replicate) and the reception/misc section for things like the DJ contract and cake inspiration pictures.

I'll share the boards on here eventually, when I feel like scanning things. Oh yeah, I was old fashioned and printed out all of my pictures, cut them out, and then physically taped them to paper to create my board. Sitting at the computer is waaaaaaaaaaay too hot in my poorly-air-conditioned apartment.

The book ultimately is serving two purposes for me: first, it gives me a place to put everything so (hopefully!) I won't lose it. Second, now when someone asks me "What's your dress going to look like?!" I can whip out my binder and say "Well, these are the two patterns we're using, and then here's some inspiration for the beading..." Because trying to describe my dress (especially to people who don't know fashion/wedding gowns) is nearly impossible. In this case, the pictures really will speak a thousand words.

Also? Perhaps I can stop stressing out about my mom doing stuff on her own if I can leave her with a couple of inspiration boards. It will be much better for both of us, I think.

and I'm missing all of it.

No, this isn't some emo post about how I wish I'd done more with my life or something. It's because half of my favorite sites haven't updated/are updating infrequently this week with no explanation. Is there a holiday somewhere that I'm unaware of?

Okay, have to go do some novel writing now (need to get my couple through the next sex scene!), then I need to put together some wedding stuff. Maybe I'll even get some cleaning done before the air conditioning wears off (our air conditioner is OBNOXIOUSLY LOUD, thus making it impossible to think, let alone do anything productive while it's on. So we turn it on at night and any time we leave the apartment and it keeps us fairly cool. I think the cats are melting, however).

And then later this afternoon Billy and I are going to see either "The Strangers" or "Kung-Fu Panda." Yeah, we aren't eccentric in our movie tastes at all!

For those people who I'm sure just DON'T CARE, I'm now going to preface all of my wedding posts with a big note in the subject line. Please skip these posts if wedding details make you feel nauseous :-)

Anyway, the reason for the excitement? All of my bridesmaids have picked out their dresses!

( Pretty pretty pictures under here )

HUZZAH for that being out of the way! Now I just need to figure out where we'll order from, lol. It didn't look like the shop in Ohio was going to give us the greatest of deals (you only got a discount on bridesmaid dresses if you bought a wedding gown), but later in the month I'm visiting home to see what the shops around there might charge.

Next wedding projects: Picking out what engagement pictures we want prints of, an officiant, and sending out save the date cards!

So working at Borders pretty much sucked the life out of me. I was totally not meant to be an office drone. Doing the exact same brain-numbing thing every day was killing my desire to do anything but sleep. Oh, and killing my back. And my wrist. I've decided that eventually my entire generation is just going to have carpal tunnel, because all we ever do is sit in front of computers.

Yeah, anyway, so yesterday was my last day at Borders. It came about for a couple of reasons. Primarily the soul-sucking-ness of it all, but also because Billy and I were just BORED OUT OF OUR SKULLS and a little depressed that we weren't doing anything with our lives that involved our expensive degrees. I have to start paying back that money in June and $10.75 an hour just wasn't going to help with that.

So quitting Borders gave us the impetus to say that by July we're going to move out to New York. I've been frantically submitting my resume to all of the publishing houses I can think of since I want to go into publishing. At least for a little while. I'm going to do one more office job, and if I can't handle that again I'm going back to school to get my media studies degree. I have absolutely no problem parlaying my geekiness into a degree, lol.

In the meantime, I'm going to start writing porn. Lol. No, seriously, Billy has been pushing me forever to try my hand at writing "real" stuff (smutty fan fic doesn't count). I've always refused because I've just never felt the drive to write anything original. I could come up with characters galore but nothing to do with them. Then he suggested romance novels, which seemed even more preposterous. I'd never read a romance novel in my life, how the hell could I write one? Why would I want to?

Except that romance novels can now double as porn. I've been reading a few of Harlequin's Spice novels and...they're not half bad. Some of them are not as great as the others(this month's novel, What Happens in Vegas... has some ridiculous plots that are totally just tired old romance novels with explicit sex), but essentially they're not much different from some of the fic I've written. It's all about sex; I can write sex. Seems like a perfect match.

So I'm dedicated June to bashing out the first draft of the novel. I already have a couple of chapters finished written (I'm sure I'll go back at some point and read them and ask WTF I was thinking). It'll be my own personal NaNoWriMo. Then at a later point I can go back and see if the darn thing actually makes sense.

Wedding plans are coming along fairly smoothly. Getting ready to send out save the dates soon (mental note: need to get addresses from Billy's mom. And forensa-addresses from...whoever has those at the wedding today. Marisa? Anke?). Doing a final round of bridesmaid dress shopping at the end of June with Carling.

And speaking of weddings, I have another forensics-related one to go to later today. That makes 3 forensics-weddings in less than a year. RIDICULOUS. And then in August two of our former coaches are getting married. And then there's a break until February...which is mine. That is still so surreal to think about. Over Memorial Day weekend Billy's brother had a barbecue that a bunch of the family went to. At one point while I was chatting with some of our friends there the whole Coffing family was gathering for a big picture. I was completely oblivious (I think we were having a really interesting conversation) until Billy's dad started calling me over. I "said yes" so now I had to be included in the family portrait. SO WEIRD.

Anyway, need to go start getting ready for Lauren's wedding. I need to go rouse Billy from bed and then dye my hair. Yaaaaaaaaaaaay hair dye.

Okay, you would think that in the most heteronormative of online institutions, the wedding community, you would find lots posts on how lovely men are and, gee, aren't we just so lucky they put up with our crazy tendencies when we're planning these little shindigs. I get those, I put up with them, and then move on to the crafty DIY entries (ooooooooooh, make your own pocketfolds!)

But then you also get threads like this where every other post mentions how dumb men are and how they need shit spelled out for them.

And y'know what? In this case, it does sound like the bride-to-be is dealing with a couple of knuckleheads who don't quite get that being hung over on the wedding day might not be tons o' fun. But y'know what else? They aren't knuckleheads because they're men. There are lots of female knuckleheads out there as well (for example, and this is just my opinion since I know there are lots of people who will agree with this woman, the woman who seems to think "I guess that's just one of the perks of marriage" is an actual response to my question of why strippers are disrespectful to the bride AFTER the wedding but not BEFORE).

STUPIDITY IS NOT THE PROPERTY OF ONE GENDER. Please get this through your heads, people. Because if you honestly thought all men were stupid, why the hell would you marry one?

Are these just instances of hyperbole? Frustration? Okay, I get it. But I don't accept hyperbole and frustration as an excuse for misogynist comments, no matter how benign they may seem.

Okay. Thank you for letting me get that out. And now I'll conclude this by saying once again that eventually I will get to a real life post. No later than two weeks from now when I saw GOOD BYE FOREVER to Borders!

Woot woot!

But they confuse the hell out of Billy's and my family's. Both my grandmother and Billy's mom want to know why there is a picture of our feet (my shoes are WORKS OF ART. They should be worshipped thusly more often!). And my mom is convinced the one with the sun glare is "obviously a bad picture." Bah. She doesn't know Art.

More when the full gallery is online. I can't waaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit! Maybe I'll have the energy to put together a coherent entry by then (leaving my job in a few weeks. FINALLY.)

Also? Iron Man pwns.