The Blonde Diaries

So yesterday I posted this photo for my weekly Wordless Wednesday meme. So now I’m going to tell you about it since it is…

Sorry so late today. I keep having mini-disaster after mini-disaster here at work. Sigh. Luckily it is lunchtime so I’m taking a break.

This week, I went with a photo from Mike and I’s wedding. We were married on July 11th so it will be 2 months next week. It has been such a huge relief to have the wedding over with. No more worries about booking things, budget stress, or constant phone calls asking if I have done this or that. I finally feel as if I can have my life back and boy am I trying to catch up – scrapbooking, cooking, cleaning, you name it, I’m working on it. LOL.

This photo is from the vow exchange portion of the wedding ceremony. We were married with the traditional Catholic Mass but at a church who likes to stick with a strict schedule. We were out of there within 50 minutes and had 20 minutes for photos before being thrown out. I rather appreciated their strictness. Our priest at the mass is the pastor of the church. He likes to do his cermonies a tad differently. Rather than standing on the alter with you, he joins the crowd of friends and family as he is a “witness” as well rather than someone marrying us. So we had to stand at the top of the alter and turn around to face everyone. Talk about being really scared! I am not one who likes to be the center of attention so I was nervous the most about this part. I was calm all day till we got to the church and I remembered this part. Then the nerves came out! I was glad at that point that we kept the guest list small and that we had a little less than 100 people come because had the church been full I would have never made it! It was a great photo opp though so I am happy we did it this way and we have great pictures to remember our wedding by.

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It has been almost two months since I tied the knot with Mike.  I have to say I’m just as happy now as I was that day.  I am starting to see some of the photographs trickle in from our friends and family and I can’t wait to see our professional photographs.  It looked like we had a great time that night though it all went by in a blur.

Looking back, there isn’t anything I would really want to change and start over with.  Sure there are a few things I wouldn’t mind doing differently such as changing the time of the wedding so the reception could be longer.  As well as cutting back on some expenses.  One thing that I wish I would have done before the wedding was to shop around more.  While we stayed within our budget, it would have been nice to save a few dollars here and there.  One such area was wedding invitations.  I liked my invitations but they were so plain and boring.  Traditional white.  I only comparison shopped at two websites before deciding on these invitations and I just realized I could have found some with a much better design, including colors, over at 123print.com.

123print.com allows you to make custom wedding invitations using their templates starting at just 50 cents per invitation. The more invitations you order, the less you pay per invite. I just realized while browsing the site for a friend today that my 100 invitations would have cost just $36 through this website. Talk about a budgeter’s dream right there. That price was unheard of when I was looking – more like $2 per invitation! If only I would have known before. Lesson learned. Next time I need any type of invitations – shower invitations, birthday invitations, etc. I am going to start here and then work my way around but I have a feeling that I won’t have to look long before placing my order here.

Three weeks ago now, Mike and I finally tied the knot.  We had an excellent wedding and a fantastic honeymoon.  It was so great I almost forgot about all of the stress leading up to this event.  It is a vague memory that should be gone fairly soon.  One of the first things we did when we got home was laundry.  Weird I know but we had 3 weeks worth piled up and needed to get on it really soon.

While doing laundry, I saw the pile of wedding presents from our guests and decided we should probably open them so that we could start putting them away and writing the thank you notes.  Unfortunately, about mid-way through the unwrapping festivities, I noticed ANTS!  Yes not just one or two but a whole mound of them crawling all over a present.  I thought for sure they came from the zoo until I saw the sheer number of them.  Nope I think they came with the present and recruited more members once they moved into my home.

The gift happened to be a really nice set of Onida springform cake pans – just perfect for cheesecake.  But why are there ants you ask on these new pans?  Well, because during the course of the discovery of the bugs, Mike threw the present into the bathtub and started running water to kill the ants.  He opened the pan box to find more and more ants.  Hoping to clear the ants he went through and found that the pans were USED!  Yes used.  The gift giver was not giving us new pans.  In fact, they have no clue this happened to us.  We discovered when it was all said and done that someone had used the pans and did not fully clean them as there was cake residue all over attracting the ants and pieces were missing.  So back to Bed Bath and Beyond the pans went.  The people were really nice and didn’t question the exchange one bit but I will be contacting corporate and the store they came from to complain about reselling used items.

As for the ants, it has been 1.5 weeks since we discovered them and approximately 3.5 weeks since they moved in to our apartment.  They have infested every room and we just cannot get rid of them.  We have ant traps and spray poison that we are using but they keep appearing.  We plan on bombing the apartment next weekend when we head to visit my family. I am hoping this works as they are impeeding on my life and last night (I kid you not) I couldn’t sleep because I was afraid I would wake up with ants all over me!  I did wake up Tuesday morning with 3 ant bites so I’m not too far out there.    They have got to go though.

With my wedding quickly approaching, I am working on wrapping up the final details and making the final payments.  It has been such a huge relief to write those checks or punch in that credit card number this week and cross things off my to-do list.   Looking back, I have to say I think I was most excited about the wedding in the inital stages of planning and I was much more creative with my wedding ideas.  I wish I would have kept that spirit up a little more towards the end.

There was one idea that I had from going to a wedding for one of Mike’s close friends.  The couple decided to rent a photobooth for their wedding guests to take photos in.  Once you took your photos you were to pick the best one and glue it to a scrapbook and leave your message to the couple near it.  It was such a great idea and one that you wouldn’t think about unless someone else did it at an event you attended.  I liked it because it made the guest book more personal and you could actually see your guests.  I totally forgot about it until after I was at my budget and tired of planning.  If you are in the early stages of planning I totally recommend thinking about it.

If you have never heard of renting a photobooth for your event a quick google search will provide all the information you need.  I found Portland photo booth rentals to be a pretty good source in describing how you might want to use the rental service for your event, the length of time you might want to have it for, as well as what type of photos you will receive – digital or print.  Our friend’s did the normal photo printing, 4 photo strips at their wedding and provided scissors to cut the photo out to include in their scrapbook and then Mike and I kept the other 3 photos.   Most companies come out and do the set up and clean up of the booth for you so that you don’t have to worry about toting the entire machine around with you that day and figuring out how to set it up and then put it back in your vehicle.  For more information I’d also recommend checking out the about Portland photobooth services page even if you are not from Portland or near Portland because it will give you a good idea on questions to ask when you call your local rental service as well as why having a photobooth might be a good and fun idea at your next event.