Though I was incredibly tired from my long drive and still grumpy from the night’s events, my mood had been elevated by the issuance of our marriage license. But let’s face it, I was still in “fake it until you make it” mode.

Mr. DG and I made it to the wedding site, and I was ready to stop faking it and start working. When we arrived on site, we looked for the owner so that we could settle in and get to work. He wasn’t there. There was however, a distressed man also looking for the site owner. Apparently, this man’s child was having an allergic reaction to something… Well, at least I could help with that!

We called the owner’s numbers and waited for a while, and I could have gotten really steamed again… but instead, I decided to get to work. We unloaded all of our craft boxes right in the middle of all the cabins (with no access to anything indoors) and just got down to work. So much for unpacking, organizing or collecting our thoughts!

I started working on chalkboards—a job that was going to take the better part of my next two days. And I erased. And it was scary. And there was paint… and sharpie on them! It was a mess. I whipped out the krylon and resurfaced the seating chart board. I had bought all of the supplies that the hive suggested, including the miracle pens suggested by August15bride. Thank goodness!

An hour or so later, Mr. DG’s family started trickling on site. I just knew that they knew about my meltdown and I couldn’t bear to look them in the eye. Luckily, Mr. DG’s sister in law (who I had never met before) figured me out in 2 seconds flat. She asked me when was the last time I ate. All of a sudden I realized I hadn’t eaten since the day before. In the afternoon! No wonder I was so crabby! Sheesh… So she fed me, and now ranks as one of my favorite people in the world!

We were all hard at work, and finally about 3 hours later the owner showed up and said, “Oh sorry if you were waiting. A man’s gotta eat lunch you know.” Grr… but I’ll get to a vendor review on the site way later!

Anyway, the day ended up being a colliegial collaboration between us and Mr. DG’s family. My family showed up and some friends showed up and it was a great day after all!

I worked on chalkboards. Mr. DG’s family cooked food. Friends and family played catch… and I got to catch up with some of our favorite friends from Seattle. I was stinking tired!

By the time the sun went down, I had one chalkboard completed (the menu board) and the other was at least drawn (but not inked). I knew with all the things planned for Friday, I’d be cutting it really, really close to get everything done :o!

Taste of the honeymoon

Today I wish I was back in Glacier National Park!

Jen photos

My friend Jen took some great photos with our camera. I thought I'd share a couple since they don't feature on Annie's blog. Nice second shooting, Jen!

recap part 3

The kindly housemate took my note saying do not disturb me very seriously. Apparently she fended off several calls wondering where I was. She even made sure that Fiance didn’t wake me up when he dropped by! I woke up at about 9:30 and felt like I never wanted to get out of bed and face the world. I was still totally in a funk and knew I’d need to get out of it.

I called fiance and we discussed the marriage license that we would need to get that day. I had done all the research about cost, what to bring and where to obtain it. The only hitch? Do to the economy, the local office had shut down. It seemed that the nearest office was an hour and a half away and only available by appointment! There were no appointments available for that day.

Fiance came over and we tried to brainstorm. I looked him in the eye and asked, “Is somebody trying to tell us not to get married?” Seriously, so far it had been roadblock after roadblock. Thinking outside the box, we started looking at municipalities outside the Tahoe area to obtain a license. Finally, here came our first ray of sunshine. There was a no-appointment necessary place at the Nevada County office, which was actually closer than the other one. Score one for the DGs!

It was already hotter than blazes at about 10 am, and I was thinking “Uh oh, is it going to be this hot on wedding day? I might not do so well in this kind of heat!”

We got to the office, handed in our paperwork and felt a little triumphant for a minute. I should never feel triumphant…

The county clerk informed me that my driver’s license had just expired. (I had not received a notice, nor was I aware that this was the case prior to leaving Seattle). Not only was I not sure that she would issue our license, but we were far from home and planning to drive to our honeymoon. This was not good!

Luckily, I had my passport with me and my old California Driver’s license. The kind official decided not to make a big deal about the expired license. I could have just hugged her!

Then, the county clerk told us about the Name Equality Act in California. To avoid having to file a court order to change names, we were going to have to decide right then and there what we wanted to do with our names. Now, we had talked about this extensively (because I wanted to keep my last name), but we also decided that we wouldn’t need to officially decide until after we were married. All of a sudden we went from having all the time in the world to having about 3 minutes to decide what we wanted to do. Yipes!

Due to professional issues, I was pretty committed to keeping my last name. But, both of us felt that we wanted to do something to acknowledge our new partnership. We had discussed taking his adorable last name as a middle name… but that didn’t really solve the problem, since it didn’t reflect any change in his status. We asked the clerk, “Can we do anything we want?” She affirmed this and our eyes lit up. I could take his name as a middle name and he could take my name as a second middle name! It felt egalitarian and transformational at the same time. It was an option we could both live with ☺

License in hand, we headed to the wedding site for the first time. At last, I felt like the fates couldn’t stop this marriage from happening. Now, about those chalkboards…

We're back!

We've traveled over 3,500 miles, suffered a flat tire, chalkboard fail, dress hi-jinx, gotten married, gotten honeymooned, and have generally been head over heels for each other.

Chalkboard FAIL!

We paid a chalkboard artist to do our seating arrangement and our menu. What we got was a major FAIL. Now I'm going to have to spend time figuring out how to salvage the whole mess.

This is time that would be far better spent on other things at this point!

Welcome to wedding month!

Wedding is fast approaching! We're still working on favors, seating arrangements, music, schedules, decorations and many many other little things.

I'm ok... but it was really adorable when Chris had wedding anxiety dreams last night. I felt like he was sharing some of the stress! Thanks baby!

Our weekend

Well, I enjoyed my last free day until we head down to California. We spent it

1) making a chalkboard
2) fixing my french net birdcage veil
3) going to the dog park
4) making the seating arrangement. My hope with this one is that everyone will be happy :)
5) making a delicious dinner
6) working on thank you notes
7) working on a photo shot list

I'll still have some short workdays and some free daytime hours, but every weekend from here on out, I'm working 11 am to 8 pm. Sad.

Accessory festival!

I went to try on my dress today with all of my accessories... More on that later. But, when I got home, I put all the accessories together with the veil I made today to take a picture.

I may try and make another veil with french netting. I'm not fully convinced that this one is quite right... but since I made it today, I thought I'd try it on. Veil making is another post as well!

Beautiful bouquet

I guess I'm on a flower kick, because this bouquet caught my eye today.

Found at http://sarahkchen.net/

Flag it!

I just wanted to share my latest DIY. Total cost: less than $4 (cost of glitter and tempra paint). Everything else was free! Please excuse the messy front porch. The picture wasn't going to get taken if I didn't do it right then!

You can find instructions for this project here. It was actually incredibly easy. All you need is a ruler, newspaper (we just saved all the spam we get in our mailbox), some water soluble paint, glue and some glitter or letter stencils.

One little tip, don't plan to go around an MRI machine the day after working with glitter! Whoops!

Perfect peonies!

I have a whole hedge of peonies in my backyard. I love them so! When I was planning for wedding flowers, I knew that I wanted peonies. Every florist told me that peonies bloom in May, and so by July there will definitely be none left. Well, last year was a very cool June in Seattle, and my peonies did bloom in July, so I was hoping that mine would be blooming for the wedding this year and I could bring flowers of my own to round out our florals.

Well... wouldn't you know it... It hit 90 degrees in May and June here, and we haven't had a drop of rain in weeks. My peonies are in full bloom right now. It's sad because we won't have any for the wedding, but I'm trying to see the glass as half full-- after all, they are gorgeous.

I made a bouquet yesterday in honor of the wedding, and the beautiful flowers are now sitting on my dining room table!

Milk Expiration Date

Chris bought milk today that expires on July 18th. Yep, by the time our new milk expires we'll be getting married! :)

Spectacular Shrug

My friend Jen (hi Jen!) found this amazing designer who makes custom shrugs. Jen and I worked with Holly to make the perfect wedding shrug to go with my dress. Holly (and Jen) were so great to work with! This is what Holly made for us :)



Lots of love to Jen because she is in the midst of moving into her new home this weekend!

Walking songs

Right now I'm having a bit of a conundrum. There is so much good music out there that I'm having a hard time figuring out which song to walk down the aisle to.

At first I was pretty convinced that I wanted Bittersweet Symphony, but as I was running yesterday (a whole other post in it's own right!) I was inspired by another song by Bloc Party which maybe feels slightly more current for me. But then again, I'm assured that Bittersweet Symphony is a classic. Funnily enough, both videos feature people walking!

Bittersweet Symphony

So Here We Are

Preferences? Any other fabulous suggestions for the perfect song for me?

Chalkboard

Did I mention we had a busy weekend? Well, one of the things we did was to go yard sale-ing in the neighborhood. We saw an old classroom chalkboard for $40 and thought, "Hey that's cool" and then went on our merry way.

Well, after a trip to Michael's and some google searching, we realized that the giant door-like chalkboard was a pretty good deal. The next day, we went back to the house where the sale was and saw that the chalkboard was still there. We offered them $20, and voila the chalkboard was ours!

Now we have to decide how to best use it for the wedding. It's about 6 ft by 3.5 ft. We were thinking about using it to direct people to their tables, but we also wanted to write the menu on a chalkboard. Could we do both with this? Any other ideas?

This photo was taken right after we washed the board, so it isn't all shiny splotchy like in the picture. I should say that the random snowboard binding in the foreground was purchased at the GI Joe's going out of business sale for $16! New Burton Freestyles, and they were practically free!

Busy weekend!

We got so much stuff done this weekend. It was great! We did some important wedding stuff...

One thing we did was our table numbers. We decided that we wanted to continue on with a national park theme, so we ordered some postcards from Ranger Doug.

Then we went to Michael's and found a great deal on unfinished wood frames ($1/piece). I then varnished the frames with a polyurethane seal. We trimmed the postcards to fit inside and voila... Table names!

We are going to have one person or couple at each table fill in their address on the postcard, and then next time we go to that National Park, we'll send them the postcard with a memory from our trip.

Results

What a fun weekend (more on the various details later)... but I had my hair and makeup trial with the fabulous Laura from Salon Bella Vita in Tahoe City and with Jen from Kiss and Make-up (also in Tahoe City).

They did a great job and I'm happy, but if you have suggestions for tweaks, please let me know. The makeup was inspired by Claire Forlani in the second photo in the blog post just below this one and the hair was inspired by Katherine Heigel shown here.


Here's how it turned out:

Hair and makeup trial

This weekend I'm going for a hair trial and trying to organize a make up trial as well... It'll be fun because I have a wedding to go to Saturday night. Knowing nothing about make-up means that I'm kind of shooting in the dark here.

I've found a couple of pictures of make-up that I like (on some of the most beautiful women I can think of-- so it's really not a fair comparison!)

Claire Forlani


Jennifer Connelly looks great here, but I'd definitely lighten the lips!


Input?