I'll try not to rant too much...

I joined a group of friends at the annual Wonderful Wedding Show on the weekend and I have to say, it's more crazy, more intense, more crowded, and more surreal than you can even possibly imagine. I wish I could have taken a picture of the throngs of people surging through the Convention Centre, pushing and shoving to get brochures and enter draws for the free stuff. By the end of the three day show, over 10,000 people had gone through (at $14.50 per person) the main doors and into wedding craziness. It really was bedlam with laser shows, djs blasting music, PA announcements for prize winners (including me!!), girls running around in ball gowns and wedding dresses, getting accosted left-right-&-center by salespeople vying for your attention. At some points, I said to Kathy "I'm starting to feel anxious and claustrophobic". It really was overwhelming the number of people and the amount of noise!

I went Kathy and with another bride, her fiancee, her three other bridesmaids, our shared maid of honour, one of her flower girls, and I think a sister(?). Kathy and I had a plan. We mapped a route (counter clockwise). We synchronized our watches and took off, ditching the rest of them to manage on their own. Sorry, it's evil to ditch, but a necessary evil when you're in crowds that rival a Bejing marketplace.
I needed to find a dj and a florist. It occured to me about half way through that Brendon might want to wear a tuxedo, so I picked up brochures for him. I entered contests at many displays, hoping to win something else. We were done seeing everything in about three hours. Exhausted, sore, bruised, and hungry, we flopped into the chairs and tucked in for the fashion show. The fashion show was entertaining, and not in the "Oooooh ahhhh" good way. It might have been the low blood sugar and the blistered feet that brought out the snark in me, but I know I said "Oh sweet merciful crap, what the???" more than once. We had to keep the language PG because there were kids around in earshot. The highlight of the fashion show...ok, the two highlights for me, were 1) the extra long veils and skirts that kept getting stepped on or stuck onto the runway and watching the models trip and get yanked backwards while maintaining a fake smile. And 2) the overly tanned, silicon enhance, pouty model trying to "strike a pose" at the end of the runway which may work if she wasn't wearing 40lbs of crinolins and satin and lace. It's hard to jut out a hip and look all Tyra Banks ANTM when your dress walks into a room 5 minutes before you do!!

After getting home, I dumped out my goody bag of brochures, recycled 90% of them and kept the info on djs. There weren't very many florists there, but I did get a chance to see House of Silk's bouquets. What I want, a simple daisy/sunflower bouquet, is about $160 at one of the florists. House of Silk was $38. Our $200 budget for bouquets/corsages/boutonneires (sp?) is really tight so House of Silk might be a viable, but still gorgeous, option. Kevin and Jamie used their services and Jamie raves about how realistic and beautiful her bouquet was. Hmmmm, something to ponder.... We have to decorate the church and if we decide to go with flowers for the church, they have to be alive and stay at the church afterwards. I don't know what we're supposed to do. I'm planning on wearing my mother-in-law's veil during the ceremony, but remove it for the reception and replace it with flowers in my hair. Live flowers may not survive a night on the dance floor but silk ones will!

The upside to the show is threefold for me....
1) All the vendors you can possibly think of are under one roof. It's one stop shopping but it's easier if you have only a few things you want to look for. It's not the perfect place when you're indecisive or thinking you can plan for everything all at once.
2) I met a financial advisor and we're meeting her next week to discuss retirement planning strategies. It seems dumb to some people, but long-term financial well being is more important to me than $160 bouquet I'm supposed to (but not) throw away at the end of the night!
3) I won a door prize for a dinner for the two of us at Pineridge Hollow in Oakbank, which will be lovely in summer when their massive gardens are in full bloom. Very romantic!

We're going to premarital counselling next month. I'll post more on that later. Should be fun. We're the oldest couple going (ugh) but also, according to Fr Mark, the best matched. Can't wait to see the young, poorly matched couples!!

Happy New Year!

Hoping that everyone had a wonderful holiday and celebrated in their own way with the people they love! Cheers!

So unique that everyone's got it!

I made my final payment on my dress yesterday (yes, I braved the -40 windchills and ventured outside to pay it off!). I was so pleased when I picked the dress because, as the salesperson assured me that my dress was unique, original, the only one they have like this, "designer" (though I can't remember which designer is it, not that it matters), and is only carried by their store ;-) ;-)

Once I bought my dress, I immediately went online to find dresses similar to it so I could show people what it looks like. Well, I couldn't. Not that I didn't try, really I did. Brendon can attest to the fact that I spent more time online on wedding dress website after I bought it, than before. And he still catches me looking online! But I couldn't find ANYTHING like it at all anywhere. That made me feel great! The dress really was original and unique!

Yeah, I've got a great big "SUCKER" written across my face now. I've started seeing dresses like mine all over the place now. The feature of the dress that I liked the most, which is the asymmetrical drop waist and the halter top making my torso look 9' long, is everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE! I can't go past a single wedding dress store in the Downtown (in the eyeglass and wedding dress district, not to be confused with the hammock district...) without some type of copy of my dress in each display window. So much for unique and *only* being carried at their store! (If you're really dying to know what my dress looks like, the closest I can find online is Mori Lee style 4507. It's not exactly the same but it's pretty damn close.)

On the upside, I am glad that the "Baked Alaska" look is slowly disappearing from stores. Some people (like Rilla) can pull off this look, but not me.

My sister comes home today (assuming the blizzard in Toronto isn't too bad) so at some point in her vacation, we may go to the store and try on the dress again letting her, my mom and my nieces have a look since the only people that know what it looks like are Kathy, me, Liane and my saleswoman. And since I switched to a new cell phone last month, I don't even have a grainy blurry pic to show off.

Theme song?

We've booked our photographer, the beautiful and insanely talented Chelsey Goodman of XOX photography. She also happens to have a MSc in Medical Microbiology... some people are just too ambitious eh?

Our next step is to find a dj, so I was online looking at different dj's in the city, which lead to websites on the top wedding songs , which lead to websites on just how many songs we're supposed to dance to. There's the First Dance Song, the dance with our wedding party, my dance with my dad, his with his mom, one for cutting the cake, another for when he throws my garter (which we're not doing), yet another when I'm throwing my bouquet (which we're also not doing), and apparently, another song when my maid of honour (Jenny) and the best man (Derek) are supposed to go around collecting money from all our guests to help us pay for our honeymoon. Huh? The last one is where I just started laughing. That's a ridiculous number of songs for us to be on the dance floor before the party's supposed to start!

Now we're discussing what our "First Dance Song" should be. We don't have an "our song". It's not like we met at the bar and this was playing in the background. We had our first kiss at work in the loading docks so there wasn't any music there either! We have to find something we both like, and that's proving to be a bit difficult.

His favourite song of all time is Threat Signal's "When all is said and done". Go ahead, click the link...ummm yeah, you can see why that's not going to be a particularly good "First Dance Song". I like bands like BNL, GBS, and Blue Rodeo so my pick would be something like "Dark Angel". Course, I'm a sucker for love songs so Josh Radin's "Today" and Amanda Marshall's "Marry Me" are on my list too. He's veto'd all my songs so far (booo!) saying they all sound like soundtracks to a bad teen romance movie! :-(

So far, the only one we can agree on is Nickelback's newest song "Never Gonna be alone". I have a feeling that it's going to be a very popular song when it's *officially* released on the radio.

We still have 10 months to decide, but it may take that long to come up with something we can both live with! LOL

Plans are coming together!

We had our first meeting with Fr. Mark to introduce Brendon and do the preliminary paperwork (names, baptism, ceremony date etc). We have to go back next week to complete the PMI, the Pre-Marital Inventory. It's 181 questions about our expectations about being married, about money, us as individuals, our future plans, personal beliefs etc. It's really quite weird but I think the entire point is to make sure we're both taking this seriously and have a chance to talk about all the important topics. We read the questions and choose either "agree/disagree". If there are topics that we have different opinions on, then that's something to discuss. And if there's a few important topics that we both agree on, then that's also something to discuss. My personal favourite question is "I am afraid of my future husband." Honestly, if it takes getting engaged, doing all the planning, meeting with the priest, then having a multiple-choice questionnaire to get that information out of me?? then there's a bigger problem! The question that made me laugh was "I have hobbies that I don't enjoy sharing with my partner" which I have to agree with! Apparently, that's bad. But I mean really, can you see Brendon tying on a coin belt and bra, getting on stage at the Fringe Festival and performing?? NO! (Although... the mental picture does makes me giggle!) I don't think having different hobbies is such a bad thing. I am worried about explaining tribal belly dance to my priest without making him blush! LOL

And we just put our deposit on the hall!! It's so exciting!!! We're toured three venues: the U of M Faculty Lounge, Red River College Princess Campus and the Irish Club. The Faculty Lounge was incredible and I have to thank Jamie and Kevin for recommending it (sorta...) but it was just waaaaay out of our price range. RRC was neat, but noisy and too industrial for us. All the exposed piping and concrete and glass makes a beautiful location, but it just wasn't the environment we were looking for. Plus, sound just reverbs off the walls so when the dj starts, you won't be able to hear yourself think! So, our last location was the Irish Club which we fell in love with immediately! It's so cozy and the pub is STOCKED! Plus there's a smaller pub off to the side with the dart board and the pool table so when we open up the dance floor, anyone looking for a quieter room can hide in there! Tony, the chef, used to work at the Marlborough and other big hotels in the city, but has decided to retire from large catering jobs (1200 people usually) to small events like ours (1/10th that). We have our choice of "anything you want" for the menu. We both have our hearts set on cabbage rolls and perogies, and probably a vegetarian lasagna and a meat...either roast beef or ham. The weddings so soon after Thanksgiving that we immediately scratched turkey off the list. Oh, risotto is also an option, which I know is a favourite of Catie.

And I got a quote for the wedding cake but while she was giving me the details, the fire alarm went off and they had to evacuate the bakery so... *fingers crossed* they haven't burned down!! Is that supposed to be a bad omen? ;-)

Guess I should update this more often!

I haven't been updating this blog because, well, there's nothing much to update on the wedding planning front. We've just been really busy with other things to worry about the wedding that much. However, I'm happy to announce that we've starting working on the wedding plans again.

Things that we can now check off our list include:
1) The date.
October 24th, 2009. My niece has started school this year, which is crazy because she's only 3! But next year is Kindergarten for her and there's some rule about the amount of time she's allowed to miss school. So, I asked Holly when the four of them can come home for the wedding. She said the week of Oct 24th or the week of November 1st, so we went with October 24th. I urge everyone to start driving their cars more and using CFCs to speed up global warming so we won't get married in a blizzard. Hey, it could happen!!

2) My dress.
Funny story. The store that I bought my dress from, I nicknamed "The Ugly Dress" Store. It's in "The Wedding District" of Graham Ave, and I don't want to name it since I did buy my dress there! Kathy, Liane and I had planned a girls' night out and were going to meet up with another friend for dinner at 5:30. I'm off work at 3:30 so I suggested we kill the 2 hours in between and go dress shopping, more for fun than to actually *find* a dress. I suggested the "Ugly Dress Store" because the display dresses in the window were so hideous that Kathy insisted we go out to lunch the week before just so I'd have to walk in front of the window and see the monstrosity of red taffeta, gold sequence and cream tulle in a hoop-skirted, fake roses, glittery, mess. All that was missing was a curtain rod and it could have been something from Carol Burnett! I figured if we're going to have a good laugh at my expense, goto a store like that one! At any rate, I got there early and discussed with the saleswoman what I wanted. Or, more importantly, my list of what I don't want: no lace, no pouf, no train, no strapless, no ruffles, no bows, and most of all, not $$$!! She brought me about a dozen dresses that fell into most of the categories and $300 price range I specified. The second dress she brought me was exactly what I wanted and it fit with very minor alterations (halter strap a little too long, don't need extra padding in the front). I kept trying on dresses until Liane and Kathy arrived. I put on a dress I was hemming and hawing about, they agreed that it's not the best one. Then I put on the dress I really liked. Liane's reaction sold it. "It's Old Hollywood style". Bingo. That's what I was hoping to hear. It's really pretty and I've never seen another dress like it anywhere.

3) Attendants.
Kathy, Sasha and Jenny for me. Keith, Jarod and Derek for Brendon. Ash and Francis have graciously agreed to be the MCs for the reception, which I'm really looking forward to because they're two of the funniest and sweetest guys I know. Ash'll make me laugh so hard I'll probably bust a gut, and Francis will probably make me ruin my mascara!!

Location. Location. Location. We've started scouting out locations for the reception. We're meeting with the first co-ordinator next week. Of the 6 or so locations we tossed around, two have already been booked for that day, which kinda freaks me out!

Lists...

We were at Safeway today picking up stuff we forgot to pick up yesterday (are we the only ones that happens to?? Is it too soon for Alzheimer's?) when I spotted "Duly Noted, A wedding guide to Winnipeg Spring/Summer'08" edition. Brendon's been joking that anything that says "Wedding", I make a quick b-line towards. I ``read`` the two magazines that Elda gave me that she'd inherited from Trish that they used for their wedding plans. This one was free and small and had local content, all things that the other magazines weren't. Like most bridal magazines, it's 99% ads and took the 3 block ride home from Safeway to read all the useful stuff. What I did enjoy is The To Do List at the back of the magazine. Left side is the bride`s list, right side is the groom`s. It made me laugh.

12 months before the ceremony, the bride is to:
-select the wedding date
-determine the number of guests
-look for a gown
-plan the colour scheme
-choose bridesmaids and flower girls (note the use of plural in this one....)
-reserve the church
-reserve the reception site
-reserve the florist, photographer, musicians or dj, and videographer

12 months before the ceremony, the groom is to:
-choose his groomsmen
-*help* select the ceremony and reception site

That`s it. He get 2 things. She gets 7. And one of his two things is to help her with one of her seven! The final countdown to the wedding (in three month increments), her list is 2-3x longer than his. And his list mostly starts with `Help to....` or `Go with your financee to....`
I laughed so hard I nearly dropped the book. So much for sharing the arrangements!!!

On a funnier note, Kathy found a wedding dress so absolutely horrible and ugly, it stopped her in her tracks (on the other side of the street) and she invited me out to lunch just to witness the monstrosity of bad fashion. It`s like the designer took elements of everything horrible and put it in one dress. It was metallic maroon with gold sequence, corset and boning, white and gold roses, rouching, hoop skirt, tulle, and bows. Scarlet Ohara would be proud...Actually, Carol Burnett would be prouder. The dress was only missing the curtain rod!