come home soon!

So while I was in Victoria away at school for three weeks, my hubby got a tad lonely. Apparently his way of telling me to come home early was to get into a little fight at hockey...the goal post won!

School for me, in the meantime, was fabulous. It was my second of two face-to-face times...it's an online program, so you do a face to face, then a year online, then a face to face, then a year online. So, I'm pretty close to finishing my Masters! Wooohoo! I'll be done June 2007 - I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel!

So here's a picture of the hockey injury that brought me home a day early (wasn't that nice of me - to come home rather than spend a day shopping?!)

Networking

Well you always hear "it's not what you know, it's who you know" - so here it goes. This is a great networking tool:

More oak

Thought I would post this picture - it shows the deep purple/red colour in our family room, and also shows our oak fireplace. Goodnes gracious. I think we may just eventually put a gas insert into it, since we won't use wood (the glass doors do nothing to keep the sparks in the fireplace, and I don't want burn marks on the floor or area rug). Still thinking of something to do on the mantle...

This pic was taken at our gift opening. Holy smokes - had no idea how tired you get after a wedding!

What a pretty hutch

This is the beautiful hutch that my grandparents bought us as a wedding gift. We also bought a dining room table to match. Very pretty. The crystal in the hutch is just part of a collection that my grandma has been building for me for the past few years. I have changed the order of the shelves a bit - not pictured are our wedding toasting glasses, the picture of us toasting (other picture here!), and my tiara. Had no idea what I would do with the silly thing (tiara!) after the wedding, but it actually looks really pretty in the hutch. This is the only place in the house that anything wedding-y is displayed.

Photography Disaster

So while the photographer, Bruce Benson, at our wedding took some nice pictures, he gets the grade of F. Let me tell you why.

He lied. He ignored. He was just not easy to deal with.

Our wedding was in January - he told us since our wedding was in the off season we would have the cd's with our pictures on them in 2 weeks (this normally takes 8 weeks he told us). Well, 8 weeks after the wedding I hadn't heard from him. So I called - he set up an appointment for us to come pick up the cd's. He didn't bring the cd's. UGH. Brought us the cd's over three consecutive days the next week (why he couldn't bring them all at once escaped us).

Going through the pictures I took notice of a lot of pictures missing...

-pictures from before the ceremony of Trevor, of our friends, of the string quartet...all pictures that friends told us after the wedding had been taken
-our first kiss. Can you believe a wedding photographer missed this one?
-a huge family shot that I know the photographer was there for
-the bouquet toss

Sadly I could go on. Fortunately friends and family have pictures of most of these moments.

We asked for explanation over why the pictures were missing. Never got one. He just kept ignoring my emails and calls. Finally Trevor emailed him. Guess what? The guy wrote back to him right away apologizing for the terrible service. UGH. Finally last week (6 months after the wedding) we received the developed proofs. I will not use him to produce our wedding albums, I will not recommend him to friends.

Please don't use this photographer: http://www.brucebensonphoto.com/

Regardless, we had a great day. This is one of my favorite photos - are you surprised that it is yet ANOTHER photo that the "professional" photographer missed?? This photo was taken by Trev's aunt - I'm making a kissy face at her six-year-old.

Egad, no bedskirt?

Woohoo - the picture worked. So there you have it. The walls didn't turn out like I expected - apparently we picked a pretty light colour for all of the walls other than the feature wall. Oh well. I'm sure as soon as we do some decorating it won't seem so bland. You can also see the oak trim around the windows and as baseboards - that's ALL over the house. Sigh. I must admit, the oak doesn't bother me as much now that we have a fresh coat of paint...if this becomes our "forever" home, we will definitely change out all of the oak. For now though, we'll live with it!

Beyond the wedding

Yes, it's true, there is life beyond the wedding. Hard to believe but true!

So, one of the things we did during our first few months of marriage was build furniture - lots of it. When we bought stuff from IKEA we knew what we were in for, but when we bought our bedroom suite online from sears.ca we certainly weren't expecting to have to build the furniture - it took hours and hours and hours. It looks good now that it's put together, but we are both already looking forward to a new suite (that won't be for years, but it's fun to dream).

Here's a pic - you can see the boxes of the dresser, mirror, and chest of drawers in the corner. Man, that was a lot of work! (Hmm, picture won't load right now, guess I'll try again later...)

Hair, makeup and all that glitters

Spent the evening talking about weddings last night. One of the couples on Trevor's football team is getting married next June. So fun to talk about dresses and bridesmaids (although all of hers are married, none wish to be called matrons...I don't blame them!) and the carpet of their venue... Oh weddings.

I realized I should write about some of the fabulous businesses I used.

First - the dress. I went to ONE store: Denilore Bridal. They were fabulous. I went in, told them I did not want poofy and I did not want a train. I tried on four dresses that fit that description, and we bought the third one. That was it. The perfect thing about my dress: the colour. Suddenly, not only did I have my dress, but the colours for the wedding were also chosen - hooray! The store was fabulous - so friendly and helpful. There we found the tiara that I wore by accident. I was being my usual "oh I'm not wearing a veil or a tiara, but I'll try one on to shut you up". Turned the tiara upsidedown so it didn't stick up, and voila, it was decided I would have a tiara!

Next - the hair and makeup. Thank goodness I asked a friend for a referral on this one, for without asking I never would have found Sandy, owner of Radiance Pro Makeup and Hair. My maid of honor, Kelley, and I went in for a trial just before Christmas. Perfect timing really because Kelley had a Christmas party to go to that night, so she certainly wasn't "all dolled up with nowhere to go". Anyways - Sandy right away made sure that my hair and makeup would be the stunner...you see, Kelley has TONS of hair, I have very thin, fine hair ... so needless to say, Kelley's hair is elaborate no matter what! I'm so glad we went in for a trial; it gave us a chance to get to know Sandy, and Sandy a chance to know us.

The day of the wedding Sandy came to my mom's house and got right to work. First up was Grandma - she was thrilled to be having her makeup done!! Then Kelley, then me, then my mom. We were all pretty calm, laughing and joking all day long. Grandpa really felt left out though! He made sure every time he walked into the room that we all knew that "he was next".

I wanted to get to the hall before all of our guests arrived - I didn't want anyone seeing me walk into the hall, so Kelley, Grandma, Grandpa and I left for the hall at 4pm. The ceremony was set to start at 5:15pm - which really meant 5:30pm (yes, I said 5:15 on the invitation on purpose so that we could get started at 5:30...). Kelley and I practiced the Hawaiian Cowboy linedance while we waited in the basement of the hall. Mom's hair took longer than expected, but that was a blessing in disguise, for she came downstairs just as I was talking with the JP and my dad about our walk down the aisle... I told all of them that I wanted my mom to walk me down the aisle with my dad. Yeah, I was thankful that she was late - gave us the opportunity to do that!

But this was supposed to be about hair and makeup...I highly recommend Sandy!! It was so nice to not have to worry about leaving the house on the day of the wedding. Especially having a January wedding, we really had no idea what the weather would be like - but the weather was beautiful, around -10, no wind. Beautiful for the end of January anyways!

The DJ

Ok, where do I begin on this one?

We did not have good luck on this front.

Trevor called five DJ companies. Only one called him back: Starlight DJ Services. We met with the owner of the company, he showed us his superb references, we gave him the list of music that we wanted played, we signed on the dotted line.

Can you smell a problem?

First of all, we did not find this company through a word of mouth reference. I highly recommend finding a DJ by a reference.

I hope that our experience is unique, and I think you will too.

Our DJ arrived late (a man hired by the company, not the man we met with...little did I know to ask). No big deal, I was very calm that day. He started asking me all sorts of setup questions, I made sure to tell him that just because we had line dances on our "must play" list that we DID NOT want lots of country played, and then I pointed out our emcee to him and asked him to cover all of that with her. Ok, mini-crisis averted.

After dinner and speeches and cake cutting, the fun was about to begin: the dance. Trevor and I danced to "You and Me" by Lifehouse for our first dance, and then invited everyone there to join us on the dance floor for "Accidentally in Love" by the Counting Crows.

Then the DJ played four country songs in a row. One or two, fine. But four? After we specifically said not much country??

But then the issues began - the music would screech, skip, jump, be fuzzy. It was awful. And this did not happen just once. It happened every three-four songs. It didn't ruin our evening - I was prepared for the worst, for I wanted to have fun no matter what happened. It was funny - our guests booed. We laughed and kept dancing.

I didn't think to go talk to the DJ about it because I didn't want to get upset. It was that simple.

A few weeks later though, I could not get this awful service off my mind. I was worried that other brides would have the same experience, and I did not want that to happen.

I emailed the company, letting them know what happened, and letting them know that unfortunately I would not be able to recommend the company. The owner of the company called me, to tell me that my memory must be foggy because he talked to the DJ after our wedding and the DJ said everyone had fun and that only one song skipped.

Well, yes, everyone had fun. But WAY MORE than one song skipped. The owner refused to hear what I was telling him. Although bad news is hard to hear, I thought that the owner would be greatful to hear my experience - I naively expected an: "I'm sorry this happened, thank you for letting us know so that no one else will have to experience this". Instead I was argued with and told that I was wrong.

Starlight DJ Services would never give me as a reference - but I think everyone should know about my experience. Hopefully my experience was unique. Hopefully it won't happen again.

We did have a blast at our wedding. We did not let the imperfections ruin our party!

The cream of the crop

Engagement date: October 13, 2005. Wedding date: January 21, 2006. Yep, you read right, we had just over three months to officially plan the wedding. Everyone thought I was crazy or pregnant, or perhaps both (I was, and am, neither!).

I knew that a year engagement would not work - I was doubtful that I could go through a year's worth of planning without becoming a bridezilla. Trevor and I thought a winter wedding would be fun, so we set the date (to a few people's chagrin I must admit!).

Two days after getting engaged, I was off to Victoria for three weeks to begin my studies at Royal Roads University - I am completing a Master of Arts in Professional Communication - the program is delivered online with two three-week residency's. So, Trevor was responsible for getting some of the plans started. His jobs: finalize the invitations, book a DJ, give the photographer a deposit, and rent tuxedo's.

We were thoroughly impressed with our invitations - they were beautiful and created on time by Evergreen Stationers. Thank goodness Trev read the proof a few times though - for the three times that my name appeared on the invite, it was spelt wrong once. Big tip here - we saved a bit of money by assembling the invitations ourselves. They were easy to put together, just putting an embellishment on (one of those do-dads that goes through a punched hole and then clasps to the other side of the paper like a duotang does) and then gluing the top piece of the invite to the bottom piece. While this wasn't a big deal, in hindsight I would just pay the $50 to get the store to assemble the invites.

So, Evergreen Stationers gets my recommendation!