More wedding chatter

Bizarrely, even though our wedding is only two months away, it doesn't feel like crunch time. Maybe this will come back to bite us in the ass, or maybe it's because we got a lot of stuff done ahead of time. Many little things still need to be taken care of, but things are progressing, neatly and on time. If we woke up tomorrow and it was our wedding day, we'd be fine even though some of the details wouldn't be in place. We would likely be the only ones not to notice. And that's a pretty nice way to feel.

Our RSVP deadline is in two weeks and we still have over 50% outstanding. Every day there are multiple purple envelopes waiting in the mail. Except Tuesday, when not only did we not get any RSVPs, but we actually got no mail at all. I was in such a state of disbelief about it that I trekked back to the mailboxes at nine p.m. to see if maybe the mail had just been delivered late. It hadn't.

My next dress fitting is next week, and I am so excited to try it on and have it fit properly. It fit pretty nicely the way it was, but it was too big in the chest. I'm thrilled to see how it will look when it's really set for me.

We decided at the last minute that we wanted a string quartet for the ceremony music if we could find something affordable. We followed the advice for savings on that and contacted all the local music schools. We had very little response but we did find one quartet that we were able to negotiate down to within our budget range. Everything seemed set until I asked if we could hear them play before we signed the contract. This didn't strike me as unreasonable--after all, for all we knew, they weren't really a quartet and didn't even own instruments. But the woman wrote back an offended email saying that it would be too much of a hardship to do a rehearsal, and explained why, then told me to tell her whether or not I wanted to proceed.

I wrote her back and said I totally understood her reasons for not wanting to do a rehearsal (which were legitimate) and asked if, instead, we could hear a recording of the quartet playing, or see a list of past performances, or get a couple of reviews, because we had absolutely nothing to go on to be sure that they weren't going to be terrible or not show up at all. I didn't phrase it like that--I was very polite, and stated clearly that we were very interested in working with them. She didn't write back. I sent two follow-up emails. She still hasn't written back. It's been a month. I've given up. And so we are back at square one.

The wedding is close enough now that when we've been making schedules at work for products I write or edit, they've pushed into November and I've had to remind people that I'll be out. I got engaged right before I started this job, so all my coworkers are thrilled for me and get really excited whenever I mention the wedding.

My engagement ring has gotten so big for me that it actually fell off the other day and really scared me. I looked into DC jewelers and I'm going to try to find time to get it resized this week. Then it will exactly match my wedding band, too, because I purchased that in a smaller size.

The wedding is soon. Maybe it's the weather--it feels like our wedding season has really arrived. I'm feeling nothing but excited about that right now.