All about weddings

Before I talk about other wedding details, which of course I will, I have to talk about what happened to us on Friday. Because it's possible that it's one of the best and simultaneously most horrifying things that has ever happened to me.

Okay. Torsten and I met up with a potential wedding officiant for lunch on Friday. The man was very old--I don't know exactly how old, but he told us he'd been married for 64 years, so probably somewhere around 90, give or take a few years. Over email, he'd seemed great, and we could tell from the conversation that we had similar values.

However, he was pretty much deaf, even with his hearing aid, which meant that we had to shout to get him to hear us. Already I was imagining our wedding ceremony: "Do you take this man to be your husband?" "I do." "What?" "I DO." "What?" "I DO, damn it!"

Anyway. So, there was the fact that he couldn't really hear. And generally we just both felt a little awkward around him, and the conversation felt forced, which isn't really how I want to feel around my wedding officiant. But still, like I said, we seemed to share values, and he seemed like a nice enough guy, so I was still kind of on the fence about him.

And then he asked what our hobbies were. I went first and told him a couple things, and then he turned to Torsten and said, "So, Torsten, what are your hobbies? Aside from making love to Jess."

I just sat there thinking, OH NO. This 90-year-old man did NOT just say that to us. Seriously, I thought that I must have heard him wrong. But then, after lunch was over, Torsten grabbed me and said, "DID YOU HEAR THAT?"

Yes, yes I did. And that is why our search for a wedding officiant has not yet come to an end.

Anyway, you all gave such great advice about the save the dates on Friday that you know what? I ended up deciding not to go with any of them. This is in part due to what you all said (changing my mind about that last one with your comments about the pie chart) and in part due to the fact that Torsten, as it turns out, does not like brown. Who knew?

Anyway, I went back to the site with all the stuff that you guys had talked about in mind, and found another STD that came in purple that I overlooked the first time (because the website trickily named the purple "amethyst"). It's great. It has dots, which I love. It has purple, which I love. It's simple, which we both love. It isn't brown, which Torsten loves. And it even has a line for the address of our wedding website. I created that website over the weekend, and put ten pictures of us on it, so that, for me, alleviates the need to have a photo of us on the STD itself.

Here it is:


Now, I'm sure about this one, and so is Torsten. But still--what do you think of it? The actual version will have our last names too, and also obviously the real address of the wedding website, which I so want to show you guys except that that's a little too un-anonymous, even for me. But suffice it to say that the website is purple, and very basic--it just has some photos of us (nearly all of which you've seen), some info about the venue, and then the info about hotels and directions and the registry and all that.

There were options to add all sorts of other cutesy sections, like our story and descriptions of the people in the wedding party and downloads, but we decided to keep it bare-bones and just plain informative. So it's pretty much done, except that I need Torsten to translate the whole thing into German.

But hey--did you notice that I said that it has info about the registry? Because we registered yesterday! We went to Macy's and registered in person, using one of those fun little scanners. Then we went home and read reviews of all the stuff we'd registered for and took off half of it and created a second registry on Amazon with better, less expensive versions of it. We aren't done with either registry, but the biggest hurdle, of getting them started and figuring out what basic stuff we want, is done. And it's such a relief, especially after my angst the first time I tried to register.

Okay! Sorry for all the wedding talk. I swear I won't post about wedding stuff again for awhile. Or at least a couple of days.