lazy blogger placates eager readers

This weekend went all too quickly and I don't have the brain power? energy? werewithall? something else? to write my bachelorette post just yet.  Instead I will placate you with more pretty wedding pictures.

I couldn't resist this one. My husband looks too hot. Also, I can't stop saying "my husband." Husband! Husband! Husband! Photo via Noah Devereaux.

the night before

Forgive me if this post turns to Ramble City, USA.  I'm not sure exactly what I want to say, but I feel like I want to say something.  Or I should.  Or something.

I am getting married tomorrow.  Well, it's 1:12am, so technically I am getting married today.  It's the most surreal feeling.  I told my dad tonight that I'm as ready as I'll ever be, that I think you can only be 95% ready until you've already done the thing.

Ari called me his wife today.  I turned into a little gooey mess of girly loveitude.  Really, honestly, I love the "stuff" that goes with my wedding, but I am ready for my marriage already.  It's not about my beautiful dress or lovely flowers (that my mom, friend Ros and I have slaved over for the last 2 days) or the dancing or the cake.  It's about this wonderful, incredible, perfectly imperfect person who has chosen to love me and let me love him back.  Ari, Baby, I can't wait to stand in front of all the people I love and tell them why I'm yours.

I have this song stuck in my head.


It's going to be a good day.  I can't wait.  Married.

my photographer is the best!

Yes.  My photographer.  He's so awesome, I have laid claim.  Though I did pass kindergarten, so I am willing to share (just not this Sunday!  eep!).  Take a look at these awesome engagement shots he took of Ari and I in Central Park last weekend.

This is just a teaser, Noah was so nice and sent along a few photos sooner rather than later so I'd have something to buzz over to the NY Times (which I may have been too late to have published anyhow, but it's worth a try, I suppose).  I'll post the rest when they come around, but it'll probably be after the wedding and our honeymoon.

Seriously though, Noah has been really great, totally relaxed and unobtrusive.  I can't wait to sing his praises even more after the wedding!  Check him out on his site: Noah Devereaux Wedding Photojournalism.

All images taken by and courtesy of Noah Devereaux.

The Final Countdown: One Week

Sorry for that little bit of down time earlier this week.  My parents took me on a last hurrah mini-vacation to Block Island.  Suffice (for now) to say that it was divine (minus my sunburn).  I'll have a real post for you once I get a chance to look at the photos I took.

---

It's pretty astounding (to me at least).  One week.  Seven days from today I'll be getting my hair and make up done, chatting with my family and best friend and generally getting prettified and trying to stay relaxed.  Something will go wrong and I'll try not to fuss.  I'll get in the car and walk around with my face all done up and veil in my hair... and a tshirt and shorts.  I'll hide away in a restaurant manager's office and my mom will zip up my wedding dress.  Right now it seems so surreal...

Fact is, my to do list is still two full pages long.  Heck, my to do list for today has 9 things on it, at least four of which are starting or completing some big projects.  When I have so much tangible work in front of me, it's hard to think about the really huge emotional thing that's happening so soon.  I mean, in a week I'll be a wife!  Now if that's not trippy, I don't know what is.

I'm trying to think what to write next and realizing that this post has no structure at all.  Guess I'm a little rusty... the beach melted my brain in the most pleasant way.  I think maybe I'll throw in a random list of things about... here:

• I'm excited. 

• I'm worried about the wedding (and all the stuff I have to do for it!) but not the marriage.

• I am so excited about the honeymoon, I'd have a pretty hard time explaining it.  Whenever I get stressed, I add a day to the wedding countdown and say to myself "in 8 days I'll be on my honeymoon! honeymoon! honeymoon!"  

• There's a song that goes with the honeymoon chant.

• I got a letter from the White House yesterday in response to our wedding invitation.  I'm being a good girl and waiting for Mr. McGee to show on Wednesday.  He said I could open it without him, but it's not every day you get mail from the White House...

• I still have to get my ceremony readers and chuppah holders together.

• I'm pretty excited to not know every nook and cranny of my ceremony text.  I know Carie is going to say lovely things, and I loves me some surprises! 

• I am seriously marrying the best person ever.  (And we're getting married!)

• Plus, bonus points because he's so hot (we're going to make pretty babies some day)!

• Bachelor/ette party plans are in full swing and I absolutely cannot wait for mine!  I know any time my sister and best friend put their heads together to plan a party it's going to be beyond insane.

• On a related note, any tips for dressing up like "a sexy pin up girl?"

• Holy crap, I'm getting married in a week.

words

After our meeting with the rabbi on Sunday, Ari and I have sussed out what our ceremony is going to look like.  Well, so far as we want to know.  We know all the parts, but some things that the rabbi will say, and our vows to each other are still saved for surprises. 

Initially I had been reading all of these ceremonies (I moderate an online forum of knitter and crocheter brides and we have a dedicated thread for that) and thinking we'd use one or another as readings in our own.  I saved only my very favorites, and read them to Ari on the porch one night, but he just wasn't sold.  I was a little bummed at first (the words, they are so beautiful!), but I understood his reluctance and we decided not to have readings.

And this one wouldn't have worked anyway, not for our wedding at least.  But for a spring wedding, all sunshine and peonies and joy, this would be perfect.

Today by Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.
-------------------------------------------------------
source

And, in case you were wondering, my favorites were Our Union Could Be Like This by Hafiz, a children's book called I Like You by Sandol Stoddard Warburg and I'll Be There For You by Louise Cuddon.

I found Billy Collins through the ever-awesome East Side Bride, who posted my now favorite video of a three year old kid reciting from memory Collins' beautiful poem Litany.

on the docket

So with 45 days to go, things are coming fast and furious.  Some of the bigger things have gotten left later than they should have (thank you blog overload and massive indecision!) but it means they all start happening pretty rapid fire.  On the agenda for today is ordering our ketubah, booking our honeymoon and ordering my veil!  That means I'll actually have a complete outfit, the ability to have a ceremony and a week of total bliss full of booze, beach, flying trapeze (we're going to club med - so excited!) and my new husband (husband!).  This thing is really happening!

confession

I have a confession to make.  This will not surprise anyone who knows me personally, but it's a little wacky, and it's made wedding planning more stressful if not harder.

I am afraid of the telephone.

There.  I said it.  It's true.  And it's not like I'm afraid of the actual object, or won't use it, or won't pick up the phone, or won't call people at all, I just really hate it.  I get really anxious when calling anyone, to the point that I have to spend serious time psyching myself up to call people (have you guessed that I am writing this to avoid calling someone yet?) that aren't my parents, sister or Mr. McGee, and I'm pretty sure they're all that way because I speak to them so often.  I don't know what it is, or why I do it, but it makes life pretty complicated sometimes.

Once, in college, I at dinner 3 and 1/2 hours later than I'd planned to because I wanted take out but Ari wouldn't call for me because he thought I was just being silly.  Well, he still thinks I'm just being silly (or crazy) but I can't help it and he eventually did order me food.

---

OK, so I made the call.  (Yay!  Go me!)  But like I was fervently hoping as it rang, the call went to voicemail.  The downside being that I have to have another phone call.  This is not so good.

THUNK!

That noise has been the only thing keeping my going for the last week.  Kinda odd, right?  Well, thunk is the noise that a buttload of nice, thick envelopes make when you drop them in the mailbox.  That's right kiddies, invitations went out yesterday (except for a handful of people that have yet to get back to me with their addresses)!

I had been waiting quite impatiently for them to arrive since I ordered them about three weeks ago.  They finally showed up on Friday and Ari and I worked pretty much non-stop on them for four days.  Well, I worked on them a lot Wednesday and Thursday, but 95% of what I did those days got scrapped.*  In the end, our invitations ended up being 7 pieces, with a grand total of 2 pieces that we didn't doctor at all or make from scratch (though I wonder if adding a stamp counts as doctoring, the amount of time I spent researching and selecting stamps and then schlepping all over town on multiple occasions to buy them and then affixing them, I'm saying yes).  We needed $0.61/invitation, but I decided that the cake was ugly and the dolphin wasn't quite the look we were going for.  I decided to suck it up for the extra 3 cents to get the $.064 monarch butterfly which went a bit better with the colors and aesthetic I was going for.  The international envelopes got the butterfly plus an ecclectic mix of other $0.44 stamps I had in the apartment.**

There were the outer envelopes and the coordinating inner envelopes.  The outer envelopes had the return address embossed, which I don't have a good photo of but looks hella fly:

The actual invitation card and coordinating response card.  We didn't change any of this beyond tweaking the sample in the book (first names all caps rather than all lowercase, using our own wording, some cute responses rather than the tired accepts/regrets, putting "name" before the line on the reply card rather than the "M" which seems to perpetually confuse young single men):

We used the Liberty Bell Forever stamps pretty much because that's what they had (that and flags... eugh) at the only post office open on a Sunday... the grocery store.  I liked that they worked with our metallic color scheme.  Ari, apparently the sentimentalist, liked that they said "forever."  This comment may or may not have made me melt a little.  I definitely picked a good one.  Anyhow!  The reply card and envelopes:

Originally, we weren't going to do info cards.  Then my mother said that the restaurant was going to give us directions cards we could just throw in.  Then what they had was on a full sheet of regular paper.  Then we were just going to print our own version of the directions they had on their website.  Turns out it was just an embedded map from MapQuest.  At this point we were committed.  So we drove to three (four?) office supply stores around town before finding an acceptable paper to print on (the invitations and the color scheme are metallic, so we of course needed metallic paper.  Unfortunately we couldn't find anything precut to the right size, or with much heft, but we got a nice champagne pearl 32 lb. paper and we used the paper cutter the quarter.  Ari typed up directions from three starting points and I edited and added subway directions, the venue address and phone, and our wedding website.  The photos don't really do the info card justice,*** they turned out really nicely.

And lastly, my favorite touch: the belly bands.  The belly bands are the product of six assorted visits to Jo-Ann's and Hobby Lobby.  I made them using four different scrapbooking papers, two different paper cutters, glue dots and a whole lot of time.  I could only find papers I liked in 12" squares, which initially created a problem because usually belly bands wrap horizontally around invitations.  It was Ari's idea to turn them vertically, and it both worked perfectly and looked beautiful.  They did put us over weight for the $0.44 stamp, but I think they really made the set special:

So here for your perusal, is the entire suite:

In the end, I decided I'd rather put them in the inside box rather than the regular one outside.  This particular Post Office has a hopper-thing where you put your letters.  Consequently, the invitations made more of a loud "ssshhh, plop" noise, rather than a "thunk," but it was still satisfying.  I was so excited to be done, I might have made this face:

And oh yeah, Ari helped too, even though I don't have a picture of him with his eyes open to prove it.

*For future reference, buying lots of crafting supplies and punching 300 cardstock tags and bruising your palms in the process before you have the actual invitations they are going to adorn is probably a bad idea.  Save your receipts.

**Yes, some people got a wedding invitation with a cat making a weird face on it.  It's ok, I thought it was funny, and really, no one else cares.

***There was a giant smooshy (yes, that's the technical term) and a fiber in the frame on my good camera.  I couldn't tell if it was on my lens or the sensor.  I hope the former!  And I somehow lost my lens cleaning cloth.  Then my memory card magically wasn't in my little digital camera.  So I used Ari's camera which is really nice, but full auto, and as I write this, I still haven't gotten a chance to look at the images because I can't find the upload cable.

They Say it's Your Birthday!

Today the world's best guy turns 24.  I love you so much sweetie, I hope your day is a great one!

Me and Mr. McGee!

I am procrastinating. I should be leaving right now. I am meeting Mr. McGee in 3 short hours. This is a big time yay! because I haven't seen him in almost a month and a half. We have a date! Crashing on!

I thought it might be time for something a little more playful than my previous, seriously New York-y boards. This one is happy, like late summer near the beach in New England with sunshine and whimsy. I would love for someone to one day surprise me with a room totally full of balloons, Patch Adams style. Until then, enjoy.

Credits: Linda Chaja, Lisa Franchot