The Averys.

Last night’s timeline:

10pm- arrive home, see large box for me waiting in hallway

10:01pm- Announcement made to room mates “my wedding dress is here!” Followed by requests to try it on for them. Duly agreed to.
10:08pm- After gingerly stepping into the crinoline monster, I realize it does not fit. I put on a t-shirt underneath and emerge for review.

10:10- Room mates agree: too big, but “it will look very nice after getting altered.” I skulk back to my room and get out of it and realize I’ve gotten dust stains all over the bottom of it, so I can’t return it. Me and the room mates spend the rest of the night discussing farming in Bulgaria.
I went online and have hopefully found a good seamstress to help me manage the ivory beastie. I really hope it works out, and I won’t end up looking too much like the marshmallow man from the end of Ghostbusters. I feel a little disappointed but I guess this was to be expected.
DC friends: any tips on dress woes like this? (Where to go, what to expect to pay, etc.)

After reading through the highly recommended The Hard Questions: 100 Questions To Ask Before Saying I Do, Mele and I came up with a financial plan that seems to work for us. Basically, there are three accounts: hers, mine, and ours. The “Ours” account is used for rent, home repair, necessary travel, and whatever both partners agree it should be spent on. The Ours account is contributed to monthly, based on an equation applied to an individual’s salary. I know it sounds harsh, but money is rough stuff for any two people, and you can’t be romantic about it!

But here’s something I never found out from married friend or parents or…or anyone. How the heck DO married couples deal with personal expenses, major expenses, and routine expenses? Any tips?

One of the largest - and most overly-romanticized - aspects of married life is the married bed, a magical place where everyone arrives at the same time and sleeps soundly in eachothers’ arms. Not so, say many married couples afflicted with insomniac spouses, differing routines, and incompatible sleep patterns. It’s nice to see articles like this that take a more practical view: sleep is as sacred as marriage, dammit.

I worry about this recently while considering the difference between our sleepin’ stylez:
MELE: Goes to bed at 11, reads for an hour, sleeps fitfully until her alarm wakes her, and then snoozes repeatedly. Awakes instantly and permanently if interrupted.
DOUG: Crashes at 2 or 3, wakes up around 4 to mumble something about “Everything moving up into closets,” wakes up again at 6:30, tosses around in half-sleep until 8:30.

CONCERN.
Any murrieds/co-habitance out there with insight into conflicting sleep situations?

The offishul wedding wallpaper. Or something. This is basically an iStock template with new little icons on it that represent stuffs about us. There aren’t a lot of icons now, but I’ll add more as I think of them. This pattern will play an important role in the invites (WHICH I AM WORKING ON I SWEAR) and the site design and. I don’t know what else. So there.

When I announced that Mele and I were engaged, my mother offered to make a quilt for us. That was like 20 months ago, but I am happy to announce that I have finished my first draft of the design.

It’s got leaves and stuff. I hope she can do it. We shall see.

Things are moving along smoother than we expected.  At the current rate we should have most of the big things taken care of in 2 months.  I just ordered my dress this weekend and it should be ready in late March.  We have started looking into the hotel situation for our many out of town guests.  We’ll book a block of rooms for a group rate, and the hotel won’t be more than a mile from the Birkby House (don’t worry, there’ll be a shuttle!).   I guess we’re been very lucky in all the planning.  It kind of makes me wonder how crazy it would have to get before a couple resorted to hiring a wedding planner.  We’ve had the easiest time arranging everything ourselves, and thankfully all is going well so far.  To date I’ve only had one actual nightmare about the wedding day being a catastrophe.  Perhaps the month before I’ll suddenly realize we’ve forgotten something huge.  Somehow I doubt it.  Our current to-do list: finish up invites (and send…), meet with the pastor, settle up the hotel situation, hang with the maid of honor and find a dress for her, and plan the honeymoon.  Six months to go!

Cinque Terre Close

I really had to struggle not to begin this post with “omg.” Thanks to another great tip from the boards on indiebride.com (which also lead me to my amazing dress), we are now just drooling over the notion of seeing this village in person. Cinque Terra (”Five Lands”) is a set of 5 small villages on the coast of Italy, and 9 miles of hiking trails connect them all to each other. No car traffic within the cities and its relative isolation has helped preserve it from becoming a modern town. Twisty cobbled streets and nearly every rentable room with a view of the ocean. A little train even makes stops in all the villages, in case you get trail-weary. We will also be hitting the more beaten path in places like Venice and Siena (turns out the Venice Biennale will be on when we are there), but I am most excited to see this time capsule of a place and hopefully take some halfway decent photos. Now I just have to meditate on my dread of that trans-atlantic flight for the next few months! Sorry if this post is gloaty, but I am really just very excited about it.

This week, I’ve been investigating the idea of a wood-inlay wedding band for myself. Frustrating, though, because I’ve only been able to find three real examples: The overpriced, the moderate but inartful, and the gold/Hawaiian (warning: Last two sites are needlessly built in Flash). Hmm. Has anyone out there seen other examples of wood either as an inlay or a stone for a ring?

Thus begins the season of poorly thought-out purchases in the name of matrimonial stylings. These shoes can be returned, my dignity, however…. rhinestones? sigh…. Doug, you were so right about these.

…and made the following decree: housing for us has been found!  We found the perfect place for us and the cats, and we’re very excited.  For those of you in the area, it’s going to be in Annandale.  We won’t be moving in for months, but it’s good to have that all figured out ahead of time.  I will now become an official DC/Beltway commuter, which is very different indeed from 3 years ago, during my rural/rustic farm life experiment.  Oh, how I once scorned “those people,” the unenlightened throngs who had to, gasp, drive thus to work.   Now the universe is getting even with me, it seems.  To become what we once loathed; is that some kind of rite of adulthood?  Please pardon the strange tone of this post.  I guess I still have city-life growing pains to work on…. in any case, we can check this previously daunting task off our list, and we both could not be more pleased.