anoisette

Found an inspiring new blog today, a $10,000 wedding. Despite one’s best intentions it really is so easy to get wrapped up in the whole machine so it’ll be good for a change to get a different perspective! Keeping our wedding under 10K was the original goal, but I got really discouraged the more I ventured into the actual planning.

On the topic of keeping it real, the blog Stupid Wedding Crap rocks and reading it is a breath of fresh air! This about sums up exactly how I’ve been feeling:

Lately a lot of people have been asking me if I’m excited to get married when they actually mean ‘Are you excited to have a wedding?’ You see, I’m completely psyched about getting married. I’m looking forward to making a public commitment to the man that I’ve loved for the past 5 years and will love for the rest of my life. I am not excited about the following:

• Finding a location
• Picking a date that doesn’t interfere with everyone else’s lives
• Choosing flowers
• Finding a dress
• Asking my friend Lily to be my maid of honor
  Done! I totally cried. It was great.
• Other wedding stuff I can’t bear to imagine

From the post Tractor & Cow Wedding Cake Topper

Amen! In fact during my very painful venue search which I conducted while dragging my feet and accompanied with copious amounts of whining to any of my friends who would listen one of them actually said to me “You don’t actually want to have a wedding, do you?” A very insightful friend that one is. But thanks to the mom who took matters into her own hands by booking a flight out here to kick my butt in gear and get the deal sealed, a venue was secured for next summer. So now there is no turning back. And I need to re-focus and re-visit how to make this work on a modest budget.

I’m not much good at magazine clipping, namely because I just don’t buy the magazines. But I think Polyvore is going to make it very easy for me to save images I see online that I like. And then I can make inspirations boards like this one.

Right after I posted this, I realized that the colors kind of match my blog… Can you tell I like green much?

Vanvows said it perfectly, it IS hard to find a wedding photographer you like AND can afford when photography is your hobby. I’m having an extra hard time because neither my or the boy’s parentals feel that spending for a professional photographer is worth it. My dad likes to remind me what lovely lenses I could buy for the money we’d have to spend to get a decent photographer. And while that’s true, I still think having a professional photographer would be really nice but also it’s not really in the budget. And if I do go ‘cheap’ and compromise do I still want to be spending over 1K on very limited coverage and service? Tough decisions indeed.

I was looking through my site stats and thought I should post this: I actually never did get to see the hippopost postcard I had made because I had it sent to my inlaws thinking it would arrive before I went to visit and it didn’t come until much much later. So that was a bummer.

I only just noticed that Wedding bee conveniently lets you view blog posts by cities! I clicked on Vancouver and found the same day edit of idovancouver’s StillMotion video. Gorgeous! I love that it was set to a Death Cab song… but really it was just amazing to get to see the culmination of all the blog posts I’ve followed on her blog. I’ve just been so impressed by the thought and research she seems to have put into every aspect of her special day and being able to see a snippet of it artfully constructed by the talented folks at StillMotion was really really cool!

My mom emailed me some photos of centerpieces. She didn’t tell me what site she found them on so I got really excited thinking I could try out TinEye to do a search with them. But it didn’t really work so I had to resort to the old fashioned way (google) and found them pretty easily at The Centre Piece. I really like the ones wit the long grass things or whatever they are.

During the week I had some japanese food fiend friends visiting from out of town so naturally we had to hit up a sushi place. I picked Okada Sushi after reading some favourable reviews and checking out the menu which sported tempura shiitake rolls. Those basically had me sold. I ended up ordering them and some asparagus and avocado rolls which were also pretty good. My friends loved whatever it was they ordered (some tuna sashimi? amongst a lot of other things) and everyone was happy.

I’d love to go back there on a warm sunny evening and see if they have their patio set up. Being up on the second floor, it kind of has a secret corner feel to it which is fun.

So it was a few weeks ago that the new wordpress upgrade was released but I only got around to upgrading just now. It wasn’t as straightforward as I thought because I’d originally installed wordpress with Fantastico De Luxe but to my dismay when I logged in to my control panel to do the upgrade Fantastico was telling me I had the newest version and there was no option to upgrade. A quick search on the Bluehost forums led me to find out that Fantastico is apparently slow about wordpress upgrades and one user was changing over to SimpleScripts but there were a few things to watch out for (namely naming of db tables). One lovely person took the time to type out an explanation on how to migrate a blog to a SimpleScripts installation but just skimming over the post I was thinking “too. much. effort.” in the end I used SimpleScripts for a 1 click new installation (in a new folder) of the lastest version of wordpress and exported my posts (1 click) from my old Fantastico installation and then imported them into my new SimpleScripts installation (1 click) and it looks like nothing broke so hurray! Then I uploaded my theme to the new installation (1 click) and next I will delete the old Fantastico installation. Easy peasy.

I just found out the Gibsons Landing Fibre Arts Festival is happening this week-end and I’m wondering if I should go. I still have a big yarn stash to work through though. But it would be nice to ooh and aah over people’s lovely creations.

The other day I was introduced to Haute Note, they have some really lovely and modern designs. And the best part is they are designed and printed in Canada, on 100lb. textured stock, and packaged in Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper.

I really like this one: