Housekeeping and wedding invitations

I've been meaning to create a page with some of our favorite recipes, since so many of you keep asking. And finally yesterday I got the motivation to do so, in the form of RA and Nic's fun new collaborative cooking project, Whip It Up. I love recipe-sharing, and I think this is a great plan. But I don't want to clog my personal blog with a lot of recipes that the majority of my readers don't care about, and I couldn't figure out how to create a new page on my blog. (Side note: Is that even possible on Blogger?)

So I decided to go the easy route and create a spin-off blog, Du Wax Loolu Recipes. You can find the link right over there in the sidebar, and if you scroll down, you'll see a mini-feed of the most recent entry. Right now there's only one recipe, but hopefully later today there will be two, and it will continue from there. I'll post about new recipes when we think they're worth sharing, and update with some of our staple favorites, and possibly share cooking disasters if any occur.

Speaking of over there in the sidebar, you may notice that I joined Twitter. For a long time I didn't want to, because I thought it was just like Facebook status updates, and I totally didn't get that. So I didn't do it. But I was really bored on Friday, and wanted to read other people's Twitters (tweets?), so I created myself an account, figured out how to customize my page to be purple, and now I'm hooked. If I'm not following you already, please tell me your Twitter name so that I can. And you can follow me!

Okay, now that the housekeeping is out of the way, let's discuss something that's almost as fascinating: wedding stamps! I've actually discussed this before, first when I bought the purple wedding stamp for the save-the-dates and RSVPs, and again when I discovered the next day that postage was going to go up before we sent out the invitations. So I've been patiently waiting for the introduction of the new wedding stamps at the correct rates, and recently they came out, and um, not only are they no longer a pretty purple and pink? But they are instead a less than charming orange and green.

Specifically, the 59-cent stamp I need for the actual invitations is pale orange. Behold:


The design is not nice, the color is even less so, and the idea of a pale orange stamp on the dark purple envelopes makes me want to puke. I was going to be very pissed about the whole thing, but then I discovered this beautiful stamp:


Yes, it's 72 cents, which is 13 cents of wasted postage per invitation, but we are only sending 50 invitations domestically, so that adds up to a total waste of $6.50. To me, it's worth that much to have pretty stamps on my envelopes. I realize that I am probably the only person that cares about or will even notice the stamps, but they still matter to me. And I think I've done a very good job of avoiding being a Bridezilla so far, so I will allow myself this particular little indulgence.

But oh, speaking of invitations: We worked on them for several hours this weekend, with the help of a charming and adorable friend of mine, and they are coming together so well. If we really sat down and applied ourselves, we could have everything done in the next couple of weeks. But this dual language thing is so COMPLICATED. First of all, we have to number the RSVP cards so that we can figure out who they're from when we receive the inevitable response cards without the names filled in. So once the RSVP has been numbered, we have to make sure that it winds up in the envelope addressed to the correct person.

But it doesn't end there. We also have to make sure that the RSVP card and information card are in the correct language (German or English). We have to make sure that only the domestic invitations have return postage on the RSVP envelopes, because RSVPs mailed from abroad can't have American stamps. And then we have to make sure that the external envelope has the correct postage for where it's going (and it will cost a whopping $1.74 to mail each international invitation). It's such a complicated, multi-step process that I want to do the whole thing myself to make sure that wires don't get crossed in the middle. I'm going to go ahead and declare right here that this doesn't make me a control freak.

What might make me a control freak, though, is the fact that I keep going over in my head all the different steps we have to go through to make sure that the correct invitation gets sent to each person. It's not that it's stressing me out, but since it is going to be complicated, it's something that I really want to get done. But we aren't there yet, because the invitations aren't fully assembled yet. So I am trying to practice my new zen attitude. So far, it's only working somewhat.

Lastly, please allow me one small Bridezilla moment: My wedding gown is supposed to arrive in June. June is more than halfway over. WHERE IS MY DRESS? I want it NOW.