Whew! The wedding venue in India is finally booked and reserved. We are getting married in a old bungalow. The bungalow is called La Belle and has a nice big lawn so that we can have an outdoor reception and ceremony. Since I haven’t seen the place in person, I only have some generic pics of the place , when they were decorated for other weddings.
Its weird hosting my mom in our apartment. Usually, I visit my parents and totally relax and laze in their house and just pretend I am a kid again. Last night , it felt weird ,being a host, making sure my mom had everything she needed, cooking dinner, insisting she have the bed etc. Wonder if this will add a formal dimension to our relationship. So far I give J and I a B for our hosting skills. Why B? because we have left my mom at home alone all day today, since we both have to work.
The title pretty much sums it up! When I’m in a bind and need photos printed right away! ( yes, I have photo emergencies, don’t you?) I go to the CVS one hour digital prints. The last two times, I had such a horrible experience with them: broken machine, bad employees, horrible prints, not ready in time that I swore that I would stick to my online service and never use them again. But, yesterday, since I bought some new frames and I really wanted to put a few photos in them before tonight that I thought I would give CVS another try, boy was that a mistake! They messed up my order, gave me prints from a previous order, told me I hadn’t ordered 1 hour service when I clearly had and on top of that the Store manager, yes the store manager got bitchy with me!!! On top of that i have to wait for my pics till wednesday. I have decided that I have had enough! I am boycotting CVS for good!
Whew! What a busy weekend!!! J and I have been cleaning, organizing and setting up house non stop since last friday and we still have a few mini projects we want to finish before tongiht when my mom gets here. We did have some fun scouting Thrift stores for a couch and some end tables and I am happy to report that we found both!
Projects we completed:
Bought a cute loveseat
Bought two really nice end tables and matching lamps
Reorganized bedroom
Reorganized study (both look damn good , in my opinion)
We also had some fun this weekend! We went to our weekly potluck at DS’s house and my friend ST fulfilled his lifelong dream of buying stilts. He found construction stilts on craigslist and after our yummy potluck we decided to give them a whirl. I wasn’t sure if I was going to do it because I was wearing high heels and the stilts couldn’t be brought down from a size 12 to fit my size 6 feet. But what the hell!!! We only live once right and I had full faith that the boys wouldn’t let me fall! Check out my stilt pics!
I have now officially hired a photographer. Although I’m not sure if hired is the right word to use when someone is doing it for free! But, I’m giddy and happy anyway because the contract is in the mail! My photographer maintains a blog that shows off some of her wonderful pictures. For an up and coming photographer I think she is really talented and likes color! I am really excited that she is doing this for us.
She also offered free bridals in her wedding package and although I was hesitant, I decided to go ahead and do them on Oct 3 anway. My reasoning behind this was that I will only wear my wedding dress once so why not have as many pics of it as possible. Plus she is agreeable to do something cool by graffiti walls and also of some around modern architecture. However, I think I’m going to let her call the shots on this one, because after all she is doing this for free and she should get stuff she wants for her portfolio too.
I guess more and more people are telling J and I that they are excited about the wedding in India! This is great news on one hand, but on the other it is sending my anxieties levels into space! Its hard coordinationg lodging and entertainment for a lot of people from halfway around the world. Also, I am nervous to go ahead and plan too much or book too many rooms because India is not a small endeavor and my guess is most people will back out at the last minute. Anyway, I am going to stress about it more this weekend I guess.
In other news, my parents are coming out for a visit next week which should be a lot of fun. Its going to suck that I can’t take time off work then, because my new position kicks in exactly that week 😦 but i’m sure we’ll survive. However, to prepare for that week of fun, J and I need to bust our ass this weekend. List of stuff to do :
1) Make sure our apartment is sparkling clean
2) Buy a sidetable to replace our crappy one
3) Buy a lamp to go on new side table
4) Do laundry and keep the bedroom spotless till the fam arrives
5) Make layla calm down
6) Plan menus for the 6 days they’ll be here
7) Plan activities
8) Get Car registered ….grrrrr
So, I’m not really looking forward to this weekend as much, but after last weekends incredibly eventful activities, it will be nice to be mellow and chill.
I have a new office/cubicle and a new job role! I am going to be a tech support coordinator for my company, which means ensuring that our customers are getting the required and timely responses from our tech support team. I am excited about the new job but I’m even more excited about my cubicle! I have never had my own cubicle before, I finally have my own three walls. I am super excited to put up pictures and a plant and all sorts of fun little toys that I have!
Right now life is good! I have the best fiance in the world, he spent all weekend taking care of me and another friend SVS when we got drunk at a party and he took me to a really yummy seafood dinner on tuesday to celebrate my promotion. We went to a restaurant called Fishmongers in downtown Durham and we ordered so much food! We got raw oysters and curry calamari as appetizers, I got a blackened Reddrum Fish as an entree and J got BBQ shrimp. We also got yummy sides of jalapeno corn and sugar snap peas. It was a great celebratory dinner.
Saturday, one of J’s coworkers and good friends B got married to his long time sweetheart. They had a small and simple ceremony by the side of a lake and fun reception in the clubhouse right after. The ceremony was beautiful but they were a little too prompt, and a lot of guests missed the ceremony. However, in their reception they had fun norwegian and scottish touches because the groom was half norwegian and half scottish. He wore a kilt to honor his scottish traditions and they had a norwegian cake and his dad wore a traditional Norwegian military outfit.
I had worn a black strapless dress to the wedding and I felt very sexy dancing with my friend ST, who is a really fun dancer because he does all the twirls and dips and turns. Anyway, he spun me out for this really great turn and my dress went flying up my waist. I flashed everyone at the reception, little kids, grandmas, J’s boss.
Thankfully nobody mentioned anything and the rest of the night went without incident. It was a very mellow night, with good friends, and food(smoked salmon….aaaha….) and drinks and dumb jokes about wedding nights.
Also going to a wedding at this stage of wedding planning was very calming for me! It actually helped me realize that it is all about how happy the bride and groom were that day! None of the guests cared that much about the details and we were all having fun just because our friends were having fun! This is an important lesson for me to remember!
JE, two other girls and I had a girls night. We drank alcohol and made junk food and sat around and just talked through the night. We were all supposed to spend the night, but the other two girls decided to leave last minute, so it was just me and JE who ended up sleeping over. We had a really fun girly morning too, trying on clothes and making breakfast.
On friday night, J was a very sweet boyfriend because even though he was not invited he came over and helped us out of a jam. He was the only boyfriend who volunteered to help! I was so proud of him. (I’m being cryptic on purpose). Its building up to something….
For my Save the Dates , I used Sendomatic.com an online announcement sender. I chose sendomatic over others especially evite.com is because sendomatic was not cheesy and my card looked more like an e-card rather than an invitation. At evite, I found that it was really hard to upload my picture and make it look nice. Also there was no way to get rid of the response boxes. Sendomatic gave me an option of uploading my pictures, getting rid of response boxes and sendomatic’s designs in general were very pretty. For 100 ecards it cost me 12.99 and there were absolutely no advertisements on either the site or the email sent to guests. Also the 12.99 covers any other correspondence I might have with my guests, like reminders etc. Sendomatic also lets you see all the people who have viewed your invitation and guests can also send comments to you through your e-card. The only thing I didn’t like about Sendomatic was that it didn’t have an option to turn off the sound. I really did not want sound on my e-card but there was no way to change. Overall I give Sendomatic an A- and I will definitely use their services in the future.
Orange You Grape 
