Weddings, ho!

Amanda and I attended our second wedding in a row this weekend.  This time around, it was friends getting married.  The ceremony and reception were great, and Amanda and I even had her sister volunteer to take a photo of us together!

Amanda looked amazing in her black dress, and I didn't look entirely bad either. :-)

Short-Lived...

So our living room is a mess again. We visited Amanda's sister and her family yesterday and picked up some of the stuff she took home for us the day after our wedding. So for now it is all in our living room...

On the plus side, it's consumable stuff (leftover pop, beer and wine), and we have some people who will take the beer off our hands. It'll make things a little simpler than us returning things to the liquor store.

July 27, 2013

July 27, 2013

On this day, Amanda Marlene Buchan and Jacob Llewellyn Fehr (aka. the Kissing Couple of Grande Prairie) were married. It was the best day of our lives.

Tomorrow, or... today

This is it. In thirteen hours, I'll be marrying Amanda. The last 10 months have been quite a ride. It's been wonderful to have Amanda as my fiancée, and tomorrow she'll finally be my wife.

I'm excited.

I'm not nervous right now though. I think all the stress of the wedding preparations over the past month in particular has inadvertently kept me from being nervous about marrying Amanda.

So before I watch Amanda walk down the aisle and say "I do", I want to thank everyone who supported unconditionally and helped us to prepare for the wedding.

THE Song

So... Amanda and I went looking for the perfect rendition of Here Comes the Bride tonight. I vetoed any version that was heavy on organs -- organ music feels like it is really out of place outside of church. I (jokingly) suggested all sorts of techno, rock, and dance versions, most of which resulted in Amanda making faces at me.

The version Amanda went with is very appropriate for an outdoor wedding (which we're still hoping to do), but it'll work just fine inside the hall if the weather forces us to have the ceremony indoors.

Last Minute Tasks

We're down to the wire, and only last minute stuff is left. I want to make up a simple itinerary to send to wedding attendees by e-mail, and we still have to buy pop, juice, and water on Thursday. Amanda and I started making the reception playlist, and we've got to finish that up still.

We'll make it. That said, July 29th and our five hour drive to Edmonton will seem incredibly relaxing!

Only a week

It's only a week away at this point.  One week from now, I'll be trying to sleep, completely excited and absolutely freaking out about the next day. One week from now, our wedding rehearsal and dinner afterward will have finished, and everyone will just be waiting for the next day.

Holy cow.

Two Weeks

We're down to just two weeks now. Two weeks from today, Amanda and I will be married. In fact, two weeks from now we'll be partying at our reception with friends and family, having just celebrated our six hour anniversary. That thought puts a real smile on my face. Amanda and I just passed the two year mark from our first date a few days ago. I moved to Grande Prairie just under a year ago, and we've been engaged for nearly ten months. I can't imagine being anywhere else, or wanting to be with anyone else.

That said, there are still some weird moments. There are days I lay in bed wondering how things ever ended up this I way, and how amazing it is that I'm nearly married. Sometimes when I'm with Amanda's family, our friends, or the members of the roundtable group, I sit there thinking "how did you people end up as part of my life?"

At any rate, there are only two weeks until I'm married.

Yay! :-D

Medium-Size Stuff, Done!

I took the afternoon off and finished up the last two medium size things we needed to finish prior to the wedding. I booked our catering, and it should be delicious. Booking that restaurant was painless, and I'm sure our guests will enjoy their food.

I also got our liquor license and bought most of the alcohol we'll need for the wedding, which was an odd experience. I never took my first drink until I was 30 years old, and so never went on beer runs while I was at university. As a result, it was very odd to load my car up with alcohol. I took a photo of it while my little hatchback was crammed full of beer, wine, and coolers, and it looked incredibly weird.

Anyway, we're basically down to small stuff for the wedding. The last three weeks of preparation should (knock wood) be fairly straightforward.

Zomg Wedding Preparations

Amanda and I sat down after supper to plan some of the final things out for the wedding. We were at it for over an hour. There are two or three medium things along with approximately 18.7 trillion small things left to do in the next 23 days.

Yeah -- we're barely over three weeks away from our wedding. To make things more interesting, I have to work all weekend, and due to my program schedule, cannot take off other adjacent days as I would normally. Instead, I'm taking Friday afternoon off and I'll be visiting a restaurant and liquor store to try to wrap up the last two medium things on the to do list.

We have time to get this stuff done. I know we do. I also know that if we magically had an extra month of time before the wedding, most of these things would be left alone for that month because we wouldn't want to have to store everything for seven plus weeks.

Still...  July 27th is going to arrive in a hurry. Buckle up Amanda. :-)

Ready to Party

Amanda and I picked up the most important part of the decorations for our wedding reception this afternoon: a disco ball. I don't think the reception would be much of a party without it! We've got the disco ball, its motor, and we just need some kind of light to shine on it. Not laser light though. Though it would look cool, I don't want to blind everyone in the hall.

Now, if only we had *multiple* disco balls! :-)

One Month...

When we were out having supper tonight, Amanda pointed something out. We're only a month away from our wedding. Exactly one month from right now, we'll have been married for around seven hours, and will hopefully be having an amazing time at our reception. It's kind of weird to think about. Two years ago, I hadn't even sent my first e-mail to Amanda. One year ago, I had just interviewed at the Grande Prairie Public Library and was packing up to move. And now here I am, just a month away from marrying an amazing woman who also happens to be my best friend.

I have an awesome life.

Just Seven Weeks

When Amanda and I were out for a walk tonight, it hit me. In just seven weeks, we'll be married. Seven weeks from right now, we'll probably be leaving our reception and heading home. Finally, seven weeks from now, we'll have been husband and wife for approximately 8 hours.

This is crazy.

I knew we were getting closer and closer, but to realize there's less than fifty days until our wedding kind of blew my mind. It blew Amanda's too. Fortunately, most of the heavy lifting for our wedding is done. We've still got a lot of smaller details to attend to, but at the very least, we will have a place to be married, someone to marry us, guests watch, and a photographer to immortalize the day.

T-minus seven weeks. The countdown has started.

Greenery and Wedding Preparation Update

Amanda and I made our second annual trip to the greenhouses together. Like last year, we took a photo together amidst the plants to commemorate the visit.

I don't remember all of the plants we picked up, but they did include a chocolate mint plant that Amanda is hoping to train to grow around the rail on our balcony. She had good luck doing it last year, so hopefully that'll carry on!

In other news, Amanda and I were really productive on the wedding front today! We picked up our marriage license, arranged for my tux rental, and picked up the jacket for Amanda's engagement ring that will make it into a full blown wedding ring. It changed the nature of her ring -- it became much bigger and blingier, but Amanda seemed to like it a lot.

We've got more work to do and not a lot of time to do it, but we were definitely heading in the right direction today. Hopefully tomorrow will be just as productive!

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered

The wedding invitations are in the mail, and a huge weight is off our shoulders.  Now we've got a place and time to get married, someone to marry us, someone to take photos, someone to cater everything, and shortly, some people to come as guests!

What would we do without the guests?  Without them, it would just be Amanda and me getting married.  We really wouldn't need the hall or caterer -- just the two of us the the woman marrying us.

On the other hand, it'd be very clinical.  It wouldn't be a celebration.  How much of a celebration could it be without us getting to watch our friends get a little rowdy over the course of the evening?  Not much of one.

We're in the home stretch.  There's less than three months until the big day, and only a few things left to figure out.  Wedding in T-Minus 8 days, and counting.

You are cordially invited...

Done.

All but one of our invitations (we're just waiting on a mailing address) are printed, packaged with RSVP cards and return envelopes, and have been sealed. I'll be sending out the mailing ones tomorrow, and we'll be giving Amanda's family their invitations in person on Wednesday.

It's a huge load off to have this task done, and our printer did an incredible job on all of it.

Wedding Invitations DONE!

Our wedding invitations are done! Amanda and I finished them up while re-watching Pitch Perfect. We're thrilled with the end result, and it was great being able to edit things on the fly. Amanda doesn't like the shape of the letter A in a particular font? *Wa-Chow* and it's changed. I'm not happy with the overall spacing and placement of the purple peacock in the corner? *Wa-Chow* and it's changed. Some capitalization errors need to be fixed? *Wa-Chow* and they're changed.

So tomorrow night's task will be to finish up the RSVP cards and envelopes. I think that'll go fairly quickly for the most part, and then we'll have finished one of the last remaining big picture items for the wedding!

Oh, and Pitch Perfect was hilarious again. I joked with Amanda that Fat Amy is her favourite movie character of all time, and she didn't argue too much against it :-)

Slipping away ...with math!

I can't believe how fast time is slipping away. As of Saturday, we'll only be sixteen weeks away from our wedding. It seems like just yesterday it was still at least six months away. Sixteen weeks is 112 days. That's 2688 hours, or 161280 minutes.

So as of 2pm this Saturday, there will be just 9676800 seconds until Amanda is my wife.

9676800, 9676799, 9676998.....

It's close. It has to be close.

Wedding Songs, Part... I don't know. 8 maybe?

Our wedding day is less than four months away, and there's still time to consider the music we'll be playing at our reception. I'd like to also include the following:

Hey Beautiful - The Solids
My brother has me hooked on How I Met Your Mother, and shortly after I started watching the show I purchased this song that the title theme is based on. It's catchy, I like it, and I think the title is appropriate for our wedding day!

Busy Day

Both Amanda and I had today off so we could go talk to our florist about wedding flowers and make it to other appointments, and the day was very busy.

Amanda left for her appointment, came back, and then it was time for me to leave for mine. Then we met up for lunch and the florist appointment before splitting up again -- Amanda going to another appointment and me going for a walk before meeting up again to go look at printers. We had supper and just a little bit of quiet time before going to the library so I could give my talk on my trip to Japan in 2007.

My talk went well, and we just arrived home a few minutes ago. Now we're continuing working our way through the first season of Game of Thrones. It's been a very good day, but it's definitely been a busy one!