WorldWideWaterCooler

I made it back on Thursday from “Fabulous Las Vegas” and am so incredibly glad the crazy travel time is over. Now we can get on with crazy running time and crazy moving time and crazy wedding time - hopefully in that order.

Vegas was good, though was really all work. And while I love what I do, it doesn’t make for very interesting blogging, so suffice to say I rocked the casbah with my trade-show-fu, and didn’t do much else. Quick hotel review: THEHotel at Mandalay Bay is really nice. So is Mandalay Beach. But the two are a 1/4 mile hike through the casino/mall apart. You have been warned. Quick restaurant review: Alize at the Palms is really not worth the money. Sensi at Bellagio really is worth the money.

Running update: I haven’t run since the day before I left for New York. I feel like a whale out of water - all floppy and useless and struggling to breathe. Now that I have the time and inclination to do anything but work and sleep, I’m going back to Week 2 of the Couch to 5k program.

Moving update: We finally dealt with securing our mortgage. No I don’t wanna talk about the rate (which, like all rates at this time, is atrocious). I also don’t wanna talk about how the GST is going down another 1% 2 weeks after our current estimated closing date. It’s ok, I didn’t want those thousands of dollars anyhow. We are trying very hard (and mostly succeeding) to be Zen about it all, since we can’t do anything about it anyhow.

Wedding update: Our engagement announcement ran in the Province and Sun last weekend (November 3 & 4, 2007). Thanks again to everyone who called/emailed/sms’d to pass on well-wishes. I’m not entirely sure how long the online version runs (I think I remember my mom mentioning 3-months or so), but you can also see it online for the time being here. Other than that, planning keeps on keepin’ on keepin’ on.

My mom will be most pleased to hear that Neil and I finally got our engagement photos done, so she can snag one to send in with the newspaper announcement she’s been itching to create.

We had absolutely stunning weather as we made our way to Granville Island yesterday with our photographers - the phenomenally talented Miranda and Reilly Lievers of Blue Olive Photography - and spent the better part of an hour giggling and smooching and snapping.

I’ll be the first to admit that I spent the better part of today obsessively refreshing their blog to see when the promised teasers would be up. Partly out of excitement, and partly out of photo-phobia.

I don’t have much anxiety in front of a camera, but the results of the photos afterward generally send me screaming for the hills.

Well Miranda & Reilly were crazy post-heavy today (four blog posts in as many hours - seriously - I was going nuts over here!) and by the time our shots showed up, I didn’t even recognize myself at first glance.

Seriously.

I look…. good! This just does not happen in photographs. I am generally represented by a 6-chinned gigantic forehead. With eyes thrown in for good measure, if you look carefully.

And they made us both look absolutely incredible. Click through to their blog to see a few more of the teasers from the day.

Booking these guys (just in the nick of time, I might add) was definitely one of our better moves, and I can’t WAIT to see the rest of the photos, and what they manage to pull out for our wedding!

UPDATE: You can see a full slideshow of the images here!

Other than the semi-regular dreams of wedding disasters that I keep having, everything for wedding planning was going fairly well.

Until now.

The dress. Or should I say dresses. The damn dress decision is distressing me. I need a deputy decision maker. Or a distraction.

There are two dresses that I’ve found. Both nice. Both make me look incredible. Both are similar in price. I can not decide.

Dress One is definitely more “traditional bridal” in fabrics and structure, though it’s still fairly unique in styling and a bit more dramatic than the average gown I’ve seen (and I should know - I swear I’ve tried on every damn dress in existence) in terms of styling and embellishments. It’s going to be hot and heavy in terms of wearing it for hours, but thankfully won’t require any extravagant or involved undergarments (if I were so inclined, I could probably wear nothing under it at all and still look great).

Dress Two is what designers are calling a “destination-style” gown. Tropical weight fabrics and much more informal styling. My Grandmother thinks it makes me look like Grace Kelly. The more modern among us would say it makes me look like J’Lo from the back (in her very, very best days). In fact, while the front has a very flattering line, the back of this dress is really what it’s all about (and isn’t my backside what people will largely be staring at for the first part of the day?). This dress will definitely lead to something “hot and heavy,” but be comfortable to wear all day and well into the evening. The seductive styling and sheer fabrics though, will require a modern miracle in foundation garments and double-sided tape to keep all my bits at a tasteful level for everyone involved.

Also, complicating matters, they are at different stores about 45 minutes apart - making it very hard for me to try them on back-to-back and have a reasonable means for comparison. And of course bridal salons don’t let you take pictures, so any images I have were taken clandestinely with half-done-up dresses in changerooms. In dresses where the sample-sizes are either too-big or too-small (or both, in different places, thanks to the awesomeness of being pear-shaped).

I’m so torn, that (as ridiculous as it sounds) I’m actually considering the budget busting move of getting both, and changing halfway through the event. My justification is that after the wedding I could totally have the train removed from the second dress, get it dyed a colour other than white, then keep it an evening gown. Because I totally need an evening gown, I wear them all the time - there was my prom, and my high-school boyfriend’s prom… and… well… nothing since then, but a black-tie affair could really leap up at any moment, right?

Clearly this issue has driven me completely batshit crazy. Save me from myself internets, talk some sense into me and start dispensing some sane advice. Before this dress decision dilemma drives me to drink.

UPDATE: (Sept. 1/07) Yes, I have made a decision. No, you do not get to know what it is. You’ll have to wait a few months for the pictures!

Honey-Moon that is.

Both Neil and I are getting itchy feet again, and the uncertainty around my work situation has meant that we’ve had to keep our travel planning fairly limited in terms of destination and duration.

So what does one do when they can’t plan for a vacation in the immediate future? Plan for one in the not-so-immediate future instead. We booked the major airfare and a custom, private tour for the first part of our honeymoon over the weekend!

The plan is to fly out of Tofino either Sunday evening (March 30) or Monday Morning (March 31) back to Vancouver. The evening of the 31st, we hop on another plane to Morocco! We’ve got a 12-day itinerary with a private guide and A/C Land Rover at our disposal for the duration (I’ll post details after the jump). After that, we’ll make our way across the water to Spain, and hopefully spend the next 6 days recuperating while lounging in a villa near the Costa del Sol before flying from Malaga back to Vancouver on April 18th.

So, of course I have questions for the intrepid globetrotters out there:

Killing Time: Have any of you been in the British Airways executive lounge at Heathrow? Is it worth the price of admission? Both arrival and departure flights have 3 hour layovers there, and the Heathrow cattle-pen isn’t really all that awesome for just hanging out in.

Also under the killing time umbrella, we’ve arranged for extended leisure time in Fes and Marrakech - any suggestions for must-see and don’t-bother sites? Same question for Southern Spain - though nothing too taxing of course.

Planes, Trains, Automobiles: If you’ve travelled between Africa and Spain, how did you get from point A to point B? Our options seem to be Plane or Train/Ferry. Plane is slightly more expensive (by $75 each or so). Ferry ride is 6 to 9 hours.

Home, Sweet Home: Any advice for places to stay in southern Spain? Must be self-catering, so we can privately gorge on Serrano ham and Sangria. Neil definitely wants something beachy, but we both agree that we’d prefer to be a little off the beaten path so we’re hopefully not lumped in with the droves of packaged-tour pink Brits who flock to the area to soak up the sun.

Wardrobe Crisis: Again, in an effort to be as inoffensive as possible, I’m looking for suggestions on what to wear in Morocco. The country is primarily Muslim (with a few Berbers and even fewer Christians thrown in for good measure) so I must be mostly covered. Other than stocking up on long linen pants and skirts and a large hat for the sun, what would y’all suggest? Bonus query: recommendations for comfortable, non-sneaker footwear?

Watch your Language: Between us we probably have enough French (which is similar enough to Spanish) to get by in that department. However, we’d love to get some Arabic under our belt before we go. Is there anywhere in Vancouver we can take some conversational Arabic classes - or a good “book on tape” program anyone can recommend?

Shutterbugs: We’ll need a new digital camera before we go. Something with enough power and options to take effective night pictures (remote control, long shutter speed settings), but not fancy enough to be inconvenient to carry or attract unwanted attention from those who’d prefer to relieve us of it.

Thanks in advance for answers to those, or any questions I’ve not thought of yet! And of course, after the jump, our Moroccan itinerary:
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They have officially started.

They = wedding dreams.

No, not those dreams that little girls have about a big princess dress, gigantic cake, prince charming, etc. etc. I never was prone to those. I was far more focused on obtaining a pony than a prince. Incidentally, while I have the prince, I’m still 98.5% pony-free.

These are the kind of dreams overextended colleagues and classmates claimed they’d get in times of stress. The kind where you show up to work naked, or show up to class and realize you need to write an exam worth 75% of your grade that you were (up until that moment) completely unaware of.

I’d be the last to say that wedding planning is stressing me out, but I’m still having semi-regular dreams about showing up to my wedding, and realizing I’ve forgotten to organize about 80% of it. Subconsciously created catastrophes have included:

Of course, I show up thinking everything is hunky-dory, and it’s only when someone else in the dream draws my attention to the missing elements that I start to freak out.

And, for a special treat, in a strangely Hofstadtean twist, I managed to startle myself awake from a dream just the other night in which various family and friends were trying to calm me down because I was so freaked out about yet another wedding dream in which I’d managed to forget to plan any number of things.

In case that was confusing: I have progressed to dreaming about having these dreams.

And while I suppose it’s good that my subconscious is acknowledging the momentous nature of entering into a marriage (because goodness knows I’m acting laissez faire enough about the wedding to drive my mom crazy - sorry mom!), these wedding dreams can feel free to fuck right off any time now.

Because if this is what I’m in for over the next nine months… well let’s just say elopement is sounding better and better…

While there haven’t been any other exciting or noteworthy developments on the wedding planning front (not that I could share much anyway, or I’ll give away the whole evening to guests who may read this), I did have my first encounter with the “Wedding Machine” the other day.

Wedding Machine? It’s the phenomenon that dictates anything to do with weddings immediately inspires the vendor to pull out a folding chair, whack you in the shins with it, then bend you over the back of the chair and reach their fist as far up your hindquarters as they can in search of vital organs. Or at least that’s how you feel when they present you with a quote for their services.

In search of some music for the evening, we contacted one such vendor, mostly out of curiosity to see what his rates may be. You see, having a wedding in Tofino means that nine times out of ten, we’re going to be paying our vendors to travel from somewhere that isn’t our venue. The photographers are from Vancouver, the officiant is from Ucluelet, and some rentals are going to be coming from the Lower Mainland. Travel and shipping costs are built into our budget.

And while we have no qualms about providing for our vendors, there’s certainly a point where their requested compensation starts to look like one of those ridiculous diva-level backstage riders from the smoking gun.

This particular performer requested the following:

1. Minimum booking charge of $500 or 4 hours performance at $520
2. Mileage and ferry costs to/from the venue
3. A meal during the event
4. Overnight Accommodation

Those were pretty reasonable - what really got me was when he added:

5. Per-diem for all meals during travel to and from the venue
6. $25/h for 10 hours of travel to and from the venue (his “normal rate” for travel anywhere past West Van or Langley)

Seriously. Seriously? SERIOUSLY!

I respect that the guy’s gotta eat, and a drive to the far west coast probably isn’t his idea of a good time, considering the rate he wanted for doing it. But while I’m sure he’s talented, he’s not any sort of groundbreaking musician. He’s a wedding singer. That’s ALL he does. He does not do weddings in addition to gigging other venues and events, he doesn’t advertise any sort of individual composition or instruction ventures. He sings cover tunes at weddings and corporate events. And has a partnership with a DJ service to offer both live and canned music. And has clearly never entertained the notion of packing an effing sandwich!

The ONLY thing he’s being compensated for, at his $25/hour, is he’ll be driving instead of sleeping in until 3:00pm, then writing love songs for Drew Barrymore so he can sing to her on a plane while Billy Idol distracts her big beefy jerk of a fiance… wait, no… I don’t think he does that either.

In any case, when I called him out for his exorbitant demands, he simply said “fine, good luck finding someone else” and left it at that.

Dude, if you didn’t want to travel, just say so. Don’t assume I’m stupid enough to cop to your particular brand of crazy simply because I’m a bride to be.

And incidentally, we did find someone else, who happens to be an enthusiastic, recognized and well-trained musician/composer who happens to accept weddings in addition to other regular gigs, and like the rest of our vendors is as far from a Diva as one can get, and really just wants to offer any advice and expertise in his realm that he can in order to make our event the best it can be.

Also, because he’s making perfectly reasonable demands in terms of travel & logistics, we can afford to hire him, and a few of his bandmates as well - making our musical experience even better than we’d initially planned for!

Take that wedding singer. I hope you’re enjoying hitting the snooze button next March 29th.

I’m sure I’ll eat my words in another 9 or 10 months, but this wedding planning thing is dead easy. Boring even.

We’ve currently got the following things booked and ready to go:

Ceremony & Reception Venue: Long Beach Lodge Resort, Tofino BC
Photographers: Blue Olive Photography
Florist: Crabapple Floral

As well as an officiant, our cake, and some entertainment.

We do still need to tackle invitations (and figure out who exactly to send them to), but that doesn’t seem like a terribly major undertaking.

I suppose we do still need something to wear, as well as some other decorative details, non iPod music, and hair/makeup whatnot - but for all intents and purposes, this thing is ready to go.

It certainly helps that by having the wedding in Tofino, most of our decisions are made for us. The resort handles all aspects of the ceremony & reception (no separate caterers and flatware rental companies), there are only 4 marriage commissioners to choose from, and there is one florist. The photographers were a no-brainer.

But having all these things done doesn’t stop me from acting indecisive around vendors - watching them fall all over themselves trying to woo me with their wares is one of the best parts of being a bride-to-be!

After all, it was only by engaging in some wedding-related conversation while donating blood, that I received this priceless gem!

One of the nurse’s assistants at the clinic where I was donating blood also moonlights as a makeup artist. It’s heartbreaking, really, that I won’t be married in the city, so I can’t have my own hair feathers, heavy eyelashes and bright fuschia lips! The only word I can really think of to describe this particular look is “special” - perhaps you can do better?

I keep meaning to write, but I really have nothing exciting or interesting to say.

But I got sick of seeing the Fiber Bar entry, so here is a boring, uninteresting update.

Read on if you dare…

Because I have no kids, and don’t know too many people who do, I was completely oblivious to the fact that March 15, 2008 is the first weekend of Spring Break. So plans to have a wedding at a destination resort that day were firmly thwarted. The weekend following that is Easter. Of the remaining March Saturdays we’ve decided on the 29th. So a year from today we’ll be gettin’ hitched. Kookookachoo.

I’ve enlisted the services of a professional resumé writer, and used the past week as time to get my portfolio together and get a bunch of other long-overdue errands done. I still don’t like being at home all day, but I am getting used to it.

We’re hosting the 2nd annual Cinco de Mayo fiasco. Hopefully with slightly less hostess-experienced fiascos this year. That said, if you were invited last year, check your email inboxes (or the spam folders - it was sent through evite). If you somehow didn’t get an invite this year, this is the one occasion I open my house for all and sundry to partake in the debauchery and tequila. Comment or drop me a line if you’d like to join us.

Today I’m also playing Florence Nightengale. There’s some sort of flu-like thing going around and Neil has it. We also had his youngest sister over last night, and she sounds pretty sick too. So far I’m calling it the Watkiss Death Rattle, and popping ColdFX like there’s no tomorrow in an effort to ward it off. Then again, Gill has it too, so perhaps it’s some kind of Nerd Flu.

See. Told you life was boring ’round these parts. Anything exciting up with any of you?

Update (5:26pm): I am feeling snotty, and a wee bit achey. This does not bode well.

My biggest pet peeve about the wedding industry is that it’s just a gigantic mess of vendors all thrusting their wares at brides- and grooms-to-be using the ever-popular tactic of fear mongering.

What do you mean you haven’t thought about chair covers? But it just won’t be the same if you don’t have live butterflies glued to your bouquet! I can’t believe you’re not writing your own love song (thanks James) - is your relationship so indistinct that someone else’s words and melodies can adequately describe it?

For the most part, I’ve done well at generally shoving those things aside as frivolous and unnecessary and keeping my attention focused on things I feel are far more likely to make or break a great party (and how much of it’s remembered): Food, Liquor, Photography.

However, something else has just come up from nowhere and blindsided me with its apparent importance: Music.

The plan so far is to have a late afternoon wedding and evening reception, complete with dancing into the night. Of course music is necessary. We naievely figured we could simply create our own playlist, and plug either an iPod or laptop into the venue’s AV system (the planned location has one) and let ‘er rip.

But after doing some reading, I’m now not so sure.

Every Source I’ve Consulted has made mention of the fact that music is vital to any successful wedding reception. The list of adjectives to describe such is alarming: crucial, critical, necessary, complicated, and “best left to the professionals.”

Ok, colour me frightened.

So, gentle readers, it’s now your turn to smack me firmly into reality, either with a good shaking and the knowledge that there is no way in hell I should entrust my music to anyone but a professional, or ample reassurances that asking a friend to man the iTunes Party Shuffle feature is more than adequate. We plan on having a fairly swanky affair, the music will generally be jazz standards and the like, and now I’m concerned that the do-it-myself-DJ solution will detract from, rather than add to, the atmosphere.

In the meantime, I’ll be thinking up meaningful phrases for my own custom love song, to add to the mix.

In planning our wedding, Neil and I have had an ideal scenario in mind the entire time: personal and intimate.

We purposely picked a small, destination venue that could only accommodate our closest family and friends, and have established some personal criteria for how to deal with making the guest list work.

We also made another decision that seems to be exactly the opposite of what a lot of the rest of the world is doing right now: no wedding website. This entire thing will be conducted offline.

Not to say I won’t share details here about the clusterfuck that is planning a wedding these days (I really should have an “I Survived Wedding Fair” T-shirt) - but this is a personal blog, so I figure I’ll just keep my personal experiences archived in one place (a place which has been sorely lacking in content anyway) instead of starting up another site.

But the more I think about what’s involved in not dumping details online, the more I like the idea.

While I like to think I was raised to be polite, with good manners, and to conduct myself in a way that Miss Manners herself would approve of, I’ve really been getting off on all the pomp and circumstance and social mores that have evolved over the years when it comes to conducting a wedding.

Since it would be impossible to cram every single detail of the where, when and how into save-the-date and invitation mailings, I’m going to have to pick up the phone, or write some casual letters to friends and family clarifying the ins and outs of everything.

(It’s just occurred to me that this would be a LOVELY time to procure some engraved, monogrammed stationery, and I got some lovely new pens in my Christmas Stocking, and maybe I could get some personalized stamps, and who doesn’t love actual postal mail that isn’t bills?!… ok, I’ll admit it, I’m an office-supplies geek, though not as bad as my boss who just bought an Easy Button…)

I’m also hoping this will be a really special time in our lives to further solidify the relationships we have with our friends and family. If they need further information, they’ll need to actively contact us, instead of passively looking it up on a website. If we have something that needs sharing, we’ll have to make an effort to communicate with each guest personally.

Guests will have to make an effort to save and remember the wedding date, time and venue information they’re sent. No disregarding it and checking for details online later - the invitation is required reading. Anyone who loses theirs will be voted off the island will have to suck it up and either contact another guest, or someone in the wedding party to figure out the details. (Not that I would actually be completely offended if someone lost their invitation - it happens.)

Someone, at some point, will have to march their wee tush down to the mailbox and send back their response card. I know RSVPing online at 3:00am in one’s underwear is preferable to some people, but I’ll remind them that mailboxes don’t close for the night either. Though, depending on how dark it is, I’d recommend considering pants before going out.

For me it’s all a part of representing how seriously we’re taking our relationship (not that I’m implying that other people don’t take their relationships seriously, this is just what works for me, don’t hate.) and how engaged we want our guests to be with their participation in our wedding.

As fun as it would be, there isn’t going to be any sort of “skill-testing-question” for potential guests to garner an invitation or a scavenger hunt for a map to the venue.

But it does force Neil and I to ask ourselves some questions regarding anyone we’d consider inviting:
-> Do we have their postal address and/or the ability to get it easily?
-> Do we talk with them regularly, and feel comfortable calling them (requiring obviously, having their phone number) to chat? Would they call us for the same?
-> Do they know our families or attendants well enough to contact them to ask about things don’t belong in invitations like if and where we’ve registered, or exactly how formal a ceremony and reception we’re planning? (or things that were in the invitation they lost…)

If we don’t know people well enough to even answer those simple questions, then it begs the question, do we really have a strong enough relationship with that person to participate in the kind of wedding we want to have, and offer the support in our marriage that we’ll ask of them?