Other weddings

Inevitably during a long engagement, other people will get married. Vader and I have attended the weddings of my sister (technically while only dating, though at this point the distinction is laughable), my cousin, his college friends, and next weekend will attend the wedding of my college roommate and good friend. Of course there is the sharing a special moment with close friends and family aspect of weddings, but while planning my own the experience is like the ultimate wedding magazine. I see lots of pretty pictures in the making, check out planning details, and think about how I could steal the decoration ideas. Then I head to the bar area and dance 'til my feet hurt.

During this short time, we've seen the gamut of wedding styles. We've seen classy brunch weddings, evening rustic chic tented affairs, backyard family fun styles, and (soon) a wedding on the beach with German influences. After I poke around to notice all the details and Vader locates the bar, we traditionally sit down to eat and think about what we like from each wedding and how we can incorporate it into our style. Most of our wedding plans are big picture right now (read: my "inspirations" document is so full of ideas we'll be crafting and shopping until 2020 if things stay as they are) so our biggest takeaways from other weddings have been the experience at each and what aspects we'd like to replicate.

For example, after we eat we just want to dance. So at our wedding, we'll do a couple of traditional dances (ours first, with parents) and then move right on to group dancing. We're aiming for a fun party atmosphere, not a "watch me have fun while you imagine what the cake flavor is out of boredom" atmosphere.

Also, cocktail hour is more fun with cocktails. So instead of a throng of people attacking the bartender, we'll have servers passing some popular drinks to the waiting crowd.

Finally, as the older folks head home the young people often want to keep the party going. In an effort to do so in a room not built for 200, we'll be headed out for an Old Port pub crawl after the wedding for anybody who wants to join in.

I'm off for a week to cause trouble help my college friends  prepare for their wedding, so here's a sneak peek at what's next when I return!

Nerds

   Vader and I went to high school together and were in a small group of friends who shared most of the same (tracked) classes. During the spring of our freshman year, Vader was describing an upcoming trip with all of us to a friend of his. Knowing the group and our penchant for academics, this friend referred to us as "the Nerd Herd." Being fifteen and wearing our math team memberships proudly (no joke, those memberships earned us varsity letters three years later!), we took ownership of the term.

Shockingly, as high school went on the term seemed less cool. Not shockingly, Vader's and my nerdiness did not fade away. We love puzzles, Jeopardy, and geeky web comics. He loves the Lord of the Rings, I love punny math paraphernalia. We *may* have spent a few months playing World of Warcraft together. Nothing says romance like two dwarfs riding dragons to defeat the evil trolls. Were it not for each other we would surely have turned to online dating by now!

We decided two nerds can't get married without some ode to their geeky past. Without further ado, here's how we'll be honoring our true selves at the wedding:

1.) The date. Prime numbers make me happy, so when 7/13/13 turned out to be a Saturday we jumped at the chance! Through some strange mystery of the world, another former Nerd Herd member chose the same date.

2.) Flower accessories. Originally a method of placating Vader's Star Wars desires for his groomsmen, my bridesmaids turned out to be just as interested and now their boutonnieres/bouquets will be adorned with these puppies:

3.) Table numbers. What's a wedding without a pop quiz?

Don't worry - we realize how embarrassing it would be if you sat at the wrong table because you can't subtract. We'll have the answers discreetly written on the back. And we'll only judge you slightly if we catch you peeking at those answers. 

Where?

"Real" decision number one = choose a venue! We're now booked to wed and party at The Portland Club in Portland, Maine. This place is REALLY cool. It's an old historic mansion, so we'll have lots of rooms at our disposal to mix things up a bit. Vader's favorite room is this:

I've made him swear up and down that he will not run off during the wedding to play cards and shoot pool with his friends, leaving me to dance dejectedly alone at our wedding. I'm personally jazzed for the photo opportunities!

Conveniently for us, a catering company (called the Black Tie Company, who owns the photo at right) runs the Portland Club event space, so we don't have to select a separate food/beverage vendor. They'll even make our cupcakes! And coordinate decorating! We're pretty excited.

Since the wedding STILL isn't for almost a year, we haven't done any tastings yet. Instead, we just sit around and drool over the menu options. Eager to (pretend to) do something productive, I made a list of all the appetizers I would eat. That narrowed the list to 18. Hopefully Vader turns out to be pickier than I am. Otherwise, hope the guests come hungry!

A slight food conundrum: we don't like seafood. Yep -- we're Mainer's who don't like lobster. Some of our family does, but two in my family are deathly allergic. All of this (and the price, let's not forget that...) deters us from offering seafood appetizer options, but in the back of my head is a voice saying "you're in MAINE."

If you were going to a wedding in Maine, and there was no seafood present, would you be sad?

The Interim

Fifteen months after the proposal, we finally made a real wedding decision. Note that "real" here means "of actual consequence involving money." Of course I made plenty of wedding decisions in the interim. A brief smattering of those decisions were: 

1.) No matter how badly my fiance wanted to get married as Darth Vader, it WAS NOT HAPPENING. He sweet talked a bit of Star Wars into the wedding, but you'll have to wait and find out what it is. Because I'm too lazy to find an accent aigu to properly write fiance, he'll henceforth be known as Vader. 

2.) My initial thought about colors (blue and pink), though I assured Vader they "worked in my head," would not make the final cut. The fact that I could shop for decorations in the baby shower aisle at Michael's was a tad overwhelming, and so blue got replaced with the old standby of black and white.

3.) We'll be getting married in the wonderful state of Maine. Okay, maybe that one was a "real" decision.

More wedding magazines than I'd care to admit, two bridal shows, and several exploratory e-mails sent out to potential vendors later, I learned (not for the first or last time) that weddings cost some serious cash. I promptly decided to make every effort to save money in my wedding planning. And then I buried my head in the proverbial sand for more than a year. 

The beginning

One weekend in November 2010, while visiting our families in Maine, my boyfriend called me and explained that he would be spending a bit of money on our joint account. When pressed why, he told me he was buying a keggerator. I rolled my eyes copiously, hoped to God he was lying, and kept helping distracting my father who was fixing my car.

While heavily anticipating Chinese food delivery after our drive back to Boston the following night, said boyfriend appeared in the living room of our apartment nervously giggling with his hand clenched tight around something. He pulled out a sparkling diamond, said some words now forgotten to both of us, and asked me to marry him. I said YES! We celebrated, ate dinner, and called our families. Their first question (logically) was, "When's the wedding?" To which we eloquently replied, "Uhhhh...."

Later that evening we sat down to figure out when a wedding could happen. We would be paying for most of the wedding ourselves, so the bank account foretold a wedding in the distant future. There were possible plans of a return to school for the now-fiance and wedding plans in the works for the following summer for my best friends from college, so not for awhile. For the time being, "Somewhere down the road" was a good enough response. We're young, so who cares if it happens soon?

We now have a date. Twelve months and two days from now. As of today we have been engaged for twenty months. Go ahead, do the math. Our engagement will be a grand total of 32ish months!

Long engagements mean many things: the opportunity to thoroughly research venue and vendor options, time to craft some stuff myself, the opportunity to save some money through early booking, etc.

They also mean: SO MUCH TIME to drive myself crazy looking for ideas. Namely, through watching obscene amounts of TLC wedding shows (much to my fiance's chagrin), reading magazines, and reading wedding blogs. 

At a year out, I'm trying to wean myself off of thinking up new ideas. We've already infused our nerdy, fun-loving selves into our plans that are starting to come together and I'm looking forward to sharing them with you as they develop!