I'm over at Happy Sighs today!

Hey you guys, you're getting a whole four sentences from me even though I just posted yesterday. Wow, right?

I'm super excited to have a post up over at Happy Sighs today. It's part of a series called Why We Wed, Rachelle's awesome idea that's now being hosted by the equally awesome Liz at Happy Sighs. Go check it out (and keep reading while you're there, trust me).

Oh look, that was five sentences -- bonus!

Yes, there was more than flowers and food.

I had kind of a "challenging" day at work today, and I cheered myself up a bit just now by scrolling through some of the photos from our wedding. I also realized that I never blogged about anything post-wedding except for the flowers and the food -- which, yes, are the important points, dontcha know, but not the only things I'd intended to write about.

So. If you're having a challenging day as well, I hope you might be cheered a smidge by


...the fact that The Awesome Husband's phone apparently saved the day:


...a bit of patent leather in two colors:


...an amazingly blue sky (and to think I'd been hoping for cumulus clouds):


...and a whole slew of my favorite people all in one place:



I know they're not necessarily your favorite people, but don't they look happy? Hopefully the cheering effect works of you too.


All photos are the work of the lovely Clare Norton.

The cake. Oh, the cake! (and other wedding food...)

My mother outdid herself. The six test cakes she slaved over (of which at least two were multi-tiered) were worth the effort. The frosting was perfectly executed, and the cake topper took about as much money, time, and effort as I think any cake topper should take (which is to say, very little), but still managed to be a perfect visual addition.

More importantly, the cake was delicious. Like, the venue staff was amazed how little was left at the end of the night, it was so delicious. I know for a fact that one bridesmaid had three slices (if that's not validation of yummy cake, I don't know what is). Said bridesmaid's husband also apparently had a hilarious conversation with my mother wherein he caused her to be thoroughly flustered -- and likely red as a boiled lobster -- because of 1) well-deserved compliments on the cake, and 2) profanity for emphasis as to just how very impressed he was. Mom's a little faint of heart with the language...



During the reception, The Amazing Husband and I each had about as much cake as one can eat in the time it takes a group of family and friends to snap a few photos. Not surprisingly, we didn't really consume much of the non-cake food while mingling and dancing and taking in the evening, either. I suppose we could have set up a table for us to make sure we got some sustenance, but then we would have missed out on a lot of really fun conversations and interactions with our nearest and dearest. (Plus, everyone would have been watching us eat. No thanks.) The Amazing Husband, it should be noted, needs vast quantities of nutrition to appease his overachieving metabolism, so just "not eating" wasn't really a good way to go.

What's a freshly married couple to do?

You book your wedding at a venue where the staff is so awesome, they'll pack up leftovers for you (and surprise you with two complete, unrequested meals, in case the leftovers aren't sufficient) and let you hang out with your spouse in the industrial kitchen after the festivities have ended, eating phyllo-wrapped asparagus, priscutto-wrapped grilled peaches, and pieces of mangled wedding cake with your fingers. And you talk and you laugh and you rehash the previous ten hours, and you enjoy the most memorable meal of your entire life.

That's what you do.

So the flowers worked out ok after all.

Hey, guess what I realized? If I wait until I can post organized, logically mapped out thoughts about the wedding, it'll nearly be our first anniversary before I get to share any part of that fantastic day. Haphazard and lighthearted and interspersed with other posts it is!

I mentioned a few times that our hope was to grow our own flowers. It went about half according to plan, but the result ended up being just what we needed and (didn't know we) wanted. It wasn't the best year ever for flower growing: a lot of dry, sunny days went a long way towards a fun summer for people, but a less pleasant time for thirsty plants. Thankfully zinnias, cosmos, anemones, and sedum are drought tolerant, so we had a sizeable crop of those to decorate the reception tables.







The bottles, incidentally, came with the house I bought in 2005. They were on a bookshelf in the basement, and they were covered in dirt (some of their more stubbornly filthy friends weren't included in the decor). I'm very glad that my internal packrat insisted on salvaging them when I sold that house about a year prior to the wedding, although the idea to use them this way didn't come up until months later. The table runners have been used in two friends' weddings already, and I was excited to continue their tradition, too.

We didn't end up growing quite enough flowers to create five respectable (whatever that means) bouquets, so a friend and I spent part of the morning touring grocery store floral departments hunting for things in pale pink and white. We were prepared for a grand adventure, but we only needed to visit two stores, where we grabbed a few armfuls of pink carnations, pink roses, baby's breath, white spider mums, white daisies, white roses, and these gorgeous, delicate (and maddeningly unlabeled) white flowers with mauve speckles.

One of the few regrets I have about the wedding in general is that I don't have any photos of the bouquet assembly process. A bridesmaid and I weilded some fierce floral tape and wrapped, wrapped, wrapped our way to what I think were some pretty awesome bouquets, and a friend of The Awesome Husband used her skills as a former floral shop employee to cover the stems in brown ribbon. Here they are hanging out on the cake table while everyone danced and mingled. (Note: the cake topper is made of grocery store flowers, too; my mom stuck a bunch of rose buds in a half-circle of floral foam.)



While I didn't jump on the two-dress bandwagon, I *did* have three bouquets. Sort of. I created my bouquet as three small, separate bouquets that I carried together as one. I figured the best way to hand off my flowers during the reception (bouquet toss? no thanks. given to the winner of a dance-off for all the married couples? awkward, given the crowd. languishing, ignored, on a table? passable, but anticlimactic.) would be to give them to the demographic that would most appreciate them: there were three little girls in attendance between the ages of 4 and 6. And so, I made three mini-bouquets that looked like one bouquet.

The monolith being carried back down the aisle.

My cousin's daughters enjoying their respective third each.

And that's how we ended up with semi-home-grown flowers for the wedding. Blooms, floral tape, ribbon, and seeds for planting couldn't have totalled more than $100, and the result was perfectly suited to the day.

I promise this won't be a (psuedo) wedding blog for much longer.

Almost all the wedding related prep work is done, y'all. The only big things left to do are finalizing the music and actually setting everything up at the venue (which we can't do yet anyway).

This means that my day tomorrow will probably consist of:
- running
- cooking a batch of tomato sauce to use up all the tomatoes that keep ripening (seriously, stop it, you guys)
- trying to find people on whom to pawn off some of our string bean crop
- laundry
- figuring out how to write a blog post in advance and have it publish later
- making little paper flags for affixing to wedding favors*
- making more lists of little things that have to be done before the wedding
- cleaning the house
- standing outside and staring at the japanese anemone plant -- with its 20something buds and two fully bloomed flowers -- and willing the rest to open

Should be a good day.


*Ok, confession time: we will in fact be doing the individual notes for the favors, despite my earlier rhetoric to the contrary. I'd like to point out, however, in my defense, that this doesn't constitute a "big" thing left to do.

Crusading in the Name of Logic: Wedding Edition

My idea for a whole series of posts pointing out that which is infuriatingly illogical hasn't really materialized yet. One post does not a series make. Well, there will be more on illogic from the world around me in the future, but for today the focus is the wedding-related illogic in my very own head. And yes, I am crusading against it.

I've been trying to keep the wedding craziness at bay, but it's been creeping in lately. Yesterday I had to remind myself that it does not matter whether we serve lemonade in a punch bowl or one of those cute glass decanters with a spigot. The SuperFiance helped me realize that we do not, in fact, need to put a personalized note to our guests on each and every favor, when a general thank you sign will serve the same purpose with much less risk to our sanity. There was also an alarming 15 second window during which I actually contemplated acquiring false eyelashes. (It has passed. I am me again.)

I think I might be battling genetics here. My (generous, talented, wonderful) mother is making our wedding cake, and she's taking worrying to new levels. Like, 6-test-cakes-in-the-past-two-weeks kind of levels. Requiring-our-taste-test-approval kind of levels. Um, it's cake -- pretty much always yummy.

So. We've tested the cake, and it was delicious, as I suspected. For good measure, we threw in a reminder (that I'd never have imagined would be necessary) that she should wear what she's comfortable with, colors be damned.* For our parts, The SuperFiance and I continue to remind each other what our priorities really are and what we should focus our energy on.

That, plus some running speedwork to boost the mood and clear the mind, and we should be good. I hope.



*Ok, I might not have worded it quite like that. But you get the idea.

Decisiveness (thank goodness)

It's rare around here, but sometimes the decisiveness arrives at just the right time. In the last week or so we've:

- written our wedding ceremony. together. this invovles collaborative editing, which I hate, and the result, which I love.
- mapped out the timeline of the reception.
- designed the programs (front for ceremony, reverse for reception).
- painstakingly gone through our music collection, looking for the 80-or-so best tracks to use at various points throughout the day.
- scouted out flowers for purchase and come up with a (vague) plan of action in case the home-grown plan doesn't pan out. ok, maybe there are four possible plans of action, and we have no idea which one we'd employ.
- taken breaks to go running, or cook dinner, or catch a free concert, or just. sit. on. the. couch. Deciding to do this is important, too, I think.

Second-string gratitude!

A completely hectic week calls for a second-string gratitude list, I think.

- a steal of a wedding dress that needs no alterations in the bodice (just some minor work to make it appropriate for my height)
- a rain barrel that, by our calculations, is paying for itself in one summer
- having a supervisor at work who acknowledges my efforts and abilities
- string bean plants that refuse to stop churning out string beans
- Stevie Wonder

It's like I'm Goldilocks. Sort of.

Remember a couple posts ago when I said I was, to put it diplomatically, not the best at calling wedding vendors? No? That's ok, you can take my word for it.

What really triggered that statement was my inability to just set. up. an. alterations. appointment. already. I had called a few people and had actually gone to meet with one woman in person, with dress in hand. None of them felt quite right, and I was having a lot of difficulty committing to any of them. I'd even talked to my mother about whether she would feel comfortable tackling the project (she didn't), and if you know us, you know how easily that could have turned into World War III. I was clearly running out of options.

I still don't know entirely why this process stumped me for so long, but I'm chalking it up to instincts. I called one last seamstress this morning, and I couldn't feel more at ease with the idea of doing business with her. She was friendly and professional, and she didn't hem (heh) and haw about whether she can handle the alterations I need done. I hung up the phone nearly giddy with excitement to work with her. It felt like the right decision, and it was a very refreshing change.

It's pretty tempting to extrapolate from this that I should make all my decisions by waiting until one option makes me feel as though the clouds have parted and perfection has descended upon me. Tempting, but probably unwise.

Our Stamps

The Awesome Fiance and I are dividing and conquering this wedding planning stuff (thank goodness). I dealt with the printing folks to order our invitations; he called hotels to ask about reserving blocks of rooms. That sort of stuff.

We'd decided that yesterday, I would pick up an ink pad from the craft store near my office, and he would pick up stamps for our RSVP return envelopes because he works near a post office. At the end of the day, we'd convene and start assembling and addressing invitations, all to be adorned with the stamp we had made (hence the ink pad) that arrived a few weeks ago and that we're still disproportionately excited about.

Ok. Back to the topic. My wonderful, helpful, adorable fiance bought stamps and brought them home. It was one of the most amusing moments of wedding planning we've had so far (though I'm not sure if anything will top this). I looked at the three sheets of stamps in his hand and inquired if there were no other choices, and he said he didn't state a preference when asked. I've never advocated having us invest in personalized wedding postage, but I'd sort of assumed we'd go with, you know, flowers or something. But these will get the envelopes where they need to go just fine.

At least they support a cause we both agree with: adopt pets that need homes, folks!



This concludes our unintentional wedding-related public service announcement.

Oh don't you worry, we'll rock out.

Apparently I'm going to have to remind myself a couple more times in the next few months to just trust my/our instincts with all this wedding-type stuff, already. Seriously.

This time it isn't elegant flowers and sleek vases distracting me, it's music. Specifically, a dj. Specifically, this dj (scroll down, he's in the last photo). Not some guy with a computer and a bunch of mp3s and a microphone, but an artist who uses vinyl and turntables to create something that's greater than the sum of its individual-song parts. Click around through some of the dj mixes over there and just try not to bust out with some dance moves.

I'm not genuinely, deep-down-in-my-heart-of-hearts disappointed that we won't be hiring him (although I *am* disappointed not to have an opportunity to rock out to his tunes at some other event). We're compiling our own music, and -- as with the bottles and jars as vases -- I'm excited about it because it's very us. The Awesome Fiance and I are music people, and while Mr. Flashdance there clearly has excellent taste, I think it's safer if we keep complete control of the set list (mostly so we make sure to include all the must-haves, of which there are many).

I have no idea what Mr. Flashdance charges for a fee, but that's probably another good reason to stick with the plan. We surely shouldn't be able to afford him if his rates are in any way linked to his level of talent. Plus, there's the pesky matter of him being located in California. And the fact that if he played our wedding, I'd spend half the night at the table asking about the songs. I mean, honestly, how cool is it to watch him at work? I find live artistry and musicianship (this guy, a really good band, whatever) so fascinating, but for this particular event I intend to be fully immersed in dancing with the wonderful man I will have just married (and lots of other loved ones), so recorded music will do just fine.

Plus, we found that most elusive and important of items this afternoon: a suitably danceable Rage Against the Machine track, free of profanity. So, clearly, it's going to be ok.

Well, that settles that!

Remember when I wrote about our indecision with respect to reception decorations? How we weren't sure whether to go with mismatched bottles and jars to hold flowers, or to acquire plain, matching cylindrical vases for a more elegant and dramatic effect?

I never did get around to posting pictures of what the latter would look like. Sweetpeas and snapdragons submerged in water with tea lights is kind of hard to envision, I know. Trust me, it's stunning. And we're not using it.

We've opted to stick with the approach we initially thought of: cleaning up a slew of vintage bottles and jars that came with the house I bought years before I met Senor Stupendous. We should have trusted our instincts rather than continuing to seek out -- and get distracted by -- other, sleeker ideas that are aesthetically beautiful but not really in line with our personalities.

You know what matches our personalities really well? Using what we've already got. Incorporating a nod to my life before we met and his love of all things historical. Not stressing about whether everything matches, and having faith that it'll look great if we follow our instincts.

It didn't hurt that a couple of test cases cleaned up remarkably well, with nary a hint of their cloudy, dirt-encrusted former selves. Baking soda, it seems, can do anything.






Ideal, indeed. Thanks for the confirmation, jar!

Go, team!

So let's talk about how major life events can be happy and exciting in their own right, but also as opportunities for self improvement. Specifically (yes, I'm going somewhere here) I think wedding planning will be a good exercise in learning how to collaborate.

I always hated group assignments in school. Being at the mercy of randomly selected classmates and their level of effort to determine my level of academic success? Yeah, I wasn't a fan. I've mellowed a bit, but my tendency is still to prefer to maintain responsibility (er, "control") for projects myself. That's all well and good, but there are times when it's nice to work with others as a team. Especially when you can choose to work with people you like and respect, and when your eighth grade GPA isn't at stake. (Stop laughing. It felt important at the time.)

Enter: wedding planning. The Awesome Fiance and I want to make the day about more than just the two of us getting married. The way we see it, the day is also a celebration of all the people who love and support him, and all the people who love and support me, and the fact that those groups are converging to become a great big bunch of people who love and support us.

So, with that in mind, I'm fighting the urge to do everything ourselves, and we're asking people for help (*gasp*). One of the things we're doing in this regard that I'm most excited about is assembling a team of gardeners to grow wedding flowers. My mom, his mom, and a few other friends and family members who like to garden (and don't have other Big Life Stuff filling up their proverbial plates) will be allocating space in their yards for seeds and plants I'll be handing out, then we'll all cross our fingers for things to bloom when they should. And if they don't, well, that's what the farmers market is for.

Like I said, I'm super excited to work with these folks and be able to point to the resulting floral loveliness as a successful team effort. I'm hoping they're excited to be involved, too. Bring on the planting!

I, for one, would be a smidge more excited if I hadn't had to scrape frost off my car this morning. Maybe this whole wedding planning thing will teach me about patience, too...

Birthday Deliciousness

I'm a lucky girl. I turned 31 over the weekend, and I was overwhelmed with good wishes from family and friends. Mr. Wonderful, of course, was a big part of that. He gave me some lovely gifts, but what's really impressed folks so far (if my coworkers are a representative sample of "folks") is that he baked my requested birthday dessert item: Mexican Caramel Cheesecake. Not attrociously unhealthy (I know, can you believe it?), and so, so, so yummy.

On Sunday, my mother took a stab at a celebratory birthday dessert. I say "took a stab at" in jest, because she's an extremely talented cake decorator. So much so, in fact, that she'll be making our wedding cake. She used this year's birthday cake as a trial run for doing a tiered cake in swiss meringue buttercream frosting, with dowels (well, drinking straws, cut to size) holding up the top tier.



Not bad, eh? The wedding cake will be white, and sans chocolate chips, but you get the idea. And, I should add, the frosting was applied to the cake in about 15 minutes, by my estimate. Impressive indeed.

Ask and ye shall receive...

... three weeks later.

I'd mentioned -- wow, yep, three weeks ago -- that we're not sure yet what approach we're going to take for wedding reception decor. There was a request for photos of the space so as to allow the collective interwebs to better weigh in with suggestions, and I'm just now getting around to taking you all up on that.

Here's the room where we'll be dancing... so, hopefully, where most people will be spending most of the evening. The table on the right won't be there, nor will the table with the coffee thermoses.



I like the french doors. I like the columns. The light fixtures on the ceiling, though, aren't my favorite. Let's take a closer look:



Hmm. Not sure what to do about those. Deeming them not a big deal and declaring that my dislike for them won't ruin the look of the whole room is still a distinct possibility.

The room with the dance floor is connected to the room with the bar (fitting, no?):



There'll be fewer tables in here, as we're not doing a seated, plated dinner. It's valuable real estate for mingling and chatting and enjoying hors d'oeuvres.

The last room, which sort of wraps around the room with the bar, is this one:



All those windows there? They overlook the ocean. Islands and sailboats and sparkling waves and all that good stuff. It's gorgeous, but it's a little separated from the rest of the interior space, and far(ther) away from the dance floor. I think we'll have a few tables set up in here for folks who want to take a break from all the rocking out. (Not everyone finds that as energizing as I do, I've been told.)

At this point, we've pretty much narrowed it down to two not-very-overlapping potential approaches:

(1) whimsical! cute! breezy! sprigs of flowers or single blooms in mismatched antique bottles (we already have these, oddly enough) and jars and stuff, clustered together. possibly with ribbons.

or

(2) elegant! dramatic! lots of votives clustered around a taller visual element, possibly consisting of plain cylindrical vases filled with blooms submerged in water. more candles. lots of little white lights.

Oh heck, lots of little white lights either way.

We'll be starting the festivities while it's light outside, and transitioning into nighttime, so I'm not sure how option 2 would look while there's still sunlight streaming through the windows, or how option 1 would look at night without tons of candles. (Clearly I'm really looking for a way to avoid using the lighting that comes with the place.) I've loved every photo I've seen with rows of little white lights stretched across a ceiling, but I don't know if that would put off enough light... and the ceilings in question aren't exactly vaulted, so there's that.

So. What do you all think? Which option (or neither) would you go with, and what would you add that we haven't already thought of?

zen and the art of wedding planning

All the wedding-y decisions we've made so far have been surprisingly, blissfully, almost oddly easy. We look at our options, we let ourselves ruminate for a bit (if we have to at all), and without fail one option presents itself very clearly as the one that feels right for us. Our venue? We walked in and promptly forgot all about the list of seven other places we'd considered. We went back and forth on whether we should do favors and ended up getting really psyched about what we've decided to give to everyone, once we thought of it. And don't even get me started on how I found my dress (which I should totally tell you if I haven't already -- 97% off retail, bay-bee!)

The big decision that was making me nervous, though (and of course that means "the decison I was trying to postpone as long as possible"), was the invitations. SuperFiance kept suggesting that we start thinking about them, and while I agree with him that deciding these things now will make our lives easier in a few months, my tendency toward indecision put me in flight, rather than fight mode. There are a LOT of different types of invitations out there. Elegant, whimsical, vintage, modern, professionally printed, DIY. Gah!

I bit the bullet and agreed to sit down and look at some possibilities last night. By the time I reached my thoroughly-overwhelmed threshold, we had a few possibilities flagged for future inspiration at the very least, and one design that we liked more than the others.

About an hour later, the solution became apparent, and in this case the answer wasn't a vendor or a location but a frame of mind. I looked at SuperFiance and said "hey, if we look at those invitations again on Saturday and still like the same ones, you wanna just buy them?" No rethinking, no hassling with fonts and graphics and paper cutters and dimensions in a quest to make every last element of the day as "us" as it can possibly be.* They'll be "us" enough because we like them. And we'll be much, much happier making a decision and moving on.

I wonder how long we can put off deciding what to use for reception decorations before the it'll-all-fall-into-place approach works for that, too?



*We're picking our battles and playing to our strengths when it comes to projects (hello, home-grown flowers). We're ok as garderners, but graphic designers, not so much.

I AM A COOL GIRL

Meg over at A Practical Wedding says so.

(Or said so, back in November, if you want to be particular about it. I've been holding off on sharing this so as not to be all-wedding-all-the-time. You're welcome.)

Anyway, even though it's presented in the context of weddings, everyone should go and read Meg's awesome diatribe on confidence and authenticity. It's a great reminder around here as we get into the real planning stage of the process (stumbling across the perfect dress and saying that we'll compile our own music at some point between now and September are not necessarily what I'd call "real planning") that whatever decisions we make will be the right ones simply by virtue of the fact that we made them.

And, to take it a step further, it's a great reminder to take pride in all aspects of your life that have been arrived at with joy and purpose. I'm not making any Resolutions-with-a-capital-R for this new year, but if you are and you'd like to use that one, go right ahead.

But yeah, Meg's more articulate than I am on the subject, so click on over there and read and get all fired up and empowered. (She's also a little more, shall we say, edgy with the language, so if you've got shy and retiring sensibilities -- or literate kiddos near the computer -- be careful.)

It can be done!

I promise not to turn this into a full-fledged wedding blog... or anything close to it. But I saw something recently that inspired me.* And I don't mean "inspired" like "inspired to now require [xyz] element at our wedding" or "struck with the sudden desire to create an inspiration board" (they're great if you like them, but no, inspiration boards are not on the list of things I do).

What I'm talkin' about here is inspiration in a different sense. Like, "wow, that's inspirational!" "I didn't think a certain thing could be done, or I wasn't sure I could accomplish said thing, but now I believe it to be within my reach" kind of inspiration.

The Budget Savvy Bride (I may not create inspiration boards, but I do read some wedding blogs) featured a gorgeous wedding this week, with a stated budget of $7,500. (For those of you not planning or financing a wedding these days, that's, shall we say, near miraculous. Particularly given the results, as briefly evidenced below.) The budget isn't itemized, but that's fine, it still gives me a calm, happy feeling of hope that our budget friendly (partially out of necessity and partially on principle: we just don't think any one day should cost an exorbitant amount of money) nuptials could potentially be this lovely and enchanting.

To be fair, no, the ceiling at our reception won't look like that.

By all means, if you're so inclined, go check out the other beautiful photos from this beautiful wedding that cost $7,500. It's impressively affordable and just plain impressive!


*Err, two things. Stay tuned for the second one, and lots of other non-wedding-y things!

Priceless and Adorable

As you may have guessed, The Awesome Fiance and I are planning a wedding that will, in many ways, depart from some of what we see as somewhat antiquated marital traditions. We've been joking about how quick the ceremony will be, what with the lack of the pomp and circumstance associated with organized religion. Don't blink, you might miss it! Folks paying attention might hear the words "cherish" or "honor," but certainly won't hear either of us saying "obey," for instance.

That said, we're not veering overly far from the traditional format -- minus the churchy stuff -- of a marriage ceremony. Which is what makes the following exchange that transpired in our house yesterday so very entertaining. To me, anyway.

Me: ... so I was talking to [friend] about wedding stuff and how we're going to have such a short ceremony, and she asked whether we were going to have anyone do a reading...

The Awesome Fiance: You mean, like, with tarot cards?


I stopped laughing about ten minutes ago.

As I was saying...

Super-Fiance and I had a lovely dinner with lovely people last week, and a part of our conversation got me thinking. We were chatting about how our wedding planning process is going, and I sort of ungracefully fell all over myself in apologizing for what I felt was a blatant takeover of the conversation (in hindsight, I think it was really ok). I fear I've been a bit hyper-aware of talking about wedding stuff, not talking about wedding stuff *too much*, and making sure nobody gets annoyed that there's so much talk about wedding stuff. In case you didn't already know, I can worry with the best of 'em.

Anyway, in my zeal to shield those around me from All Things Wedding and to maintain my status as a well-rounded individual (not a whole lot would make me more sad than the prospect that someone thinks I, in my bridehood, want only to discuss my own nuptials), I've been saying a lot of "... right, so that's going well, but how are YOU?" and "oh, it'll just fall into place. how's things with your [job, kids, spouse, whatever]," and other phrases of deflection. In the conversation over last week's dinner, though, I didn't get away with it, and as it turns out, I'm so pleased.

I realized that, rather than shying away from the topic as a glaring mark of conceit, it can actually be embraced as a way of connecting with people. If we hadn't been talking about our wedding and how we're trying to create the day and celebration that's right for us, we wouldn't have heard about our companions' wedding, what made it special to them, and how they arrived at some of the elements they remember most vividly. I mean, really, in most ordinary conversations, it would be more than a little odd for someone to interject "so, hey, our wedding four years ago was so much fun. let me tell you about the best parts..." but in the context of a discussion of marriage that's already begun, it's a really nice sentiment of advice and commonality, and it's perfectly logical. Almost everyone has either had a wedding or been in a wedding or been *to* a wedding, and all of those experiences -- and resulting commentaries -- are fun to hear about.

This is a fun time that we're in, Super-Fiance and I. For several months now, we've been lamenting what feels like forever of a wait until we'll be married, but on the way home from dinner last week, we talked about how lucky we really are that various circumstances conspired to give us a 17-month engagement. Never again will people be so delighted to hear what kind of flowers we like to look at and what kind of music we like to dance to and what kind of cake we like to eat. Never again will people be compelled to share so much of themselves and their thoughts on their own relationships. Well, I suppose they will, but not in quite the same way. We've decided to listen and ask questions and learn and enjoy it all.