First of all, just wanted to say I had to switch back to the old theme. Something about the Harry one was not satisfying me. I will be working on either making another one or finding a premade before long.

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I have been super worried about money lately. My savings seems to be rapidly dwindling, and I still haven’t started my tutoring job because the stupid school won’t ever call me back. I have to start by Wednesday or I lose my opportunity completely, which means I have to go looking for another job in the middle of the semester. There was one shining light yesterday, though! I’ve been accepted into BlogHer, and am putting their ads where the Google ones were. I know using your blog for money may be reprehensible for some people, but I’ve already made more from BlogHer in 16 hours than I usually do from Google in two weeks. As far as I’m concerned, you all are just helping me pay for my honeymoon and my house. And you don’t even have to do anything. But I’m still thanking you for it.

Speaking of honeymoon, this is something else Josh and I have already talked about, and even thoroughly planned. (Okay, well, I did the planning, but he nodded and said “Sounds good.”) Thing is, it’s going to cost almost as much as the wedding. Which I guess doesn’t really matter, since we’re paying for the honeymoon and my mom is paying for most of the wedding (and his parents will most likely help a bit). And before you think that’s still outrageous - we have a very low wedding budget. I honestly can’t fathom how people spend tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding. I would feel bad even ASKING my mom to dole out that much dough, you know? I felt bad when I said the budget was going over $3000!

So, at first, I thought that we should go out of the country for our honeymoon since we both have our passports now. I looked up a private oceanfront villa at a Hilton on a beach in Cancun. With our budget we could spend something like six nights and seven days in that villa - but we basically wouldn’t have money for any big activities. Just the occasional bar or lunch out. It still sounded lovely, though, and the pictures of the villas were gorgeous.

We had actually already agreed on this, when I had a random burst of inspiration. What if we went to California? True, it’s not out of the country, but it’s across the country, and certainly somewhere neither of us has ever been near. Then I started thinking about what we would do in California. I thought of Disneyland right away. Then I realized… California has TONS of theme parks. I started doing research. I talked to Josh about it. For the same price of the villa in Cancun, we could stay at a cheap-ass Days Inn for seven nights, rent a car for the week, go to FIVE different theme parks, have a few nice dinners out, and still have spending money for souvenirs and stuff.

I asked Josh which idea he preferred. First, he gave me the runaround, wanting to know what I THOUGHT first, as usual. It didn’t take much to pull his opinion out of his butt though - he was excited about the theme park hopping.

So that’s what we’re doing. A theme park honeymoon. Yeah, we’ll probably be staying in a shit-ass hotel with no mini-bar, but it’ll have a king-size bed… and that’s all we really need on our honeymoon, right? And during that week, we’ll go to Universal Hollywood, Disneyland, California Adventure, Magic Mountain, and Knott’s Berry Farm, AND maybe go to the insanely expensive Pirate Show dinner, eat at Hard Rock Hollywood, and still have around $300 for spending.

Now THAT sounds like a memorable honeymoon. We’ll save Cancun for our 10th anniversary.

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We’ve got a nice start one some of our wedding purchases so far. At our current predicted date, we’d still need to spend an average of $180 a month to afford the wedding, so it’s really not too early to start. I’ve got the kits for making our own invitations and thank-you cards, we’ve got tiny plastic toasting flutes for the guests, and yesterday we ordered my chosen flower girl basket:

It totally fits the fairy tale theme and is hopelessly adorable. It’ll be nice to set somewhere in our future house after the wedding.

Last night Jennifer and I also went to Wal-mart to get a few of the supplies for the centerpieces. We got 7 large fish bowls and 4 small ones. The plan is white table cloths, the bowls in the middle filled with water, with lavender petals floating on the water and surrounding the bowl, with two real black moor fish in each of the big bowls and one in each of the small ones (for the outside/smoking tables). The bowls will have black ribbon tied around the necks, and we’ll get little white or lavender tea lights to set on either side of each fish bowl. I think it’ll be cute and original. Everybody does flowers, you know? This is cheaper and cool to look at. I’m excited!

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Yesterday, Josh and I went to the Brown-Pusey House in Elizabethtown to see if we liked it for our wedding, since it’s the only thing local that’s not ugly at a decent price. My aunt got married there 15 years ago, but I didn’t remember what anything looked like. When we got there, I thought it looked a bit small - but it was absolutely gorgeous. I knew it would be great. The only downer? We’re going to have to have a dry wedding. The way the law in Hardin County is written, you have to have a caterer with a liquor license to serve alcohol at any event, AND caterers have to serve a certain amount of food to be able to serve alcohol. Well, we want to cater our own wedding to save money, so that was just going to get way too expensive. So, sparkling grape juice it is. The drunkards in our families will have to get over it.

There’s just one thing I haven’t been able to fit into our budget, and that’s a professional photographer. For the really good ones, you’re lucky if they have packages starting at $1500! That’s just obscene to me, especially for digital photos. There are cheap ones out there, but sadly, you get what you pay for, so it seems, as the pictures aren’t great. And some of the expensive guys are REALLY REALLY GOOD - but some of them aren’t! Seriously, if you’re going to charge that much, at least make sure you’re worth it.

I’m also not really into the ones that make you pay EXTRA for a full copyright release to the digital negatives. I mean, it’s your own fucking wedding. That’s just rude.

And see, I’m quite capable of editing and printing my own photos (hello, Photoshop, I think we’ve been friends about 10 years now?), so I don’t really need that service - which is where most of the cost really goes. So I can’t fathom why in the fucking world a woman would give me a custom quote of $1300 for shooting 4 hours and just handing the pictures over on a disc. You have GOT to be kidding. You’re basically just charging me for the actual time spent shooting, which is over $300 an HOUR. Get over yourself, bitch.

Thus far, I’ve found an okay guy that charges $595, including copyright release. The guy I want is Todd Nichols. His photos are absolutely amazing, perfect, everything I want. His prices aren’t listed on his website, so I requested a quote, but at that kind of quality, I’m sure it’s way out of my budget. And that would be totally understandable.

I requested about 10 other quotes last night, letting everyone know I’m working class and don’t need to be charged out the wazoo for their fabulous editing sk1llz or super awesome photo album prints. Crossing my fingers!

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In the neverending line of crazy things I do related to premature wedding planning, I started our registry yesterday. Hey, I mean, The Knot says it’s perfectly acceptable to start your registry from the day you get engaged. And we’ve been engaged over two months. Because according to The Knot, you never know when someone’s going to randomly seek out your hidden registries to send you a congratulatory pre-wedding engagement gift. Or something.

I worked on it ALL DAY yesterday, and I only found 44 things so far. The Knot says we should list at least 2 or 3 times as many gifts as there are guests at the wedding, so we need at least 150. I’m just so picky, it’s taking forever. Josh is not picky whatsoever, or this would take eternity.

I am a total online shopper. I’ll probably go into the store to look at some of the stuff I list to make sure I really like it, but I love online shopping. I don’t know why. I guess because I don’t have to deal with real humans. Fortunately, I found this fabulous website called My Registry where you can group ALL of your online registry items into one master registry - TOTALLY FREE. I mean, that is freaking amazing, right? So I’ve been perusing walmart.com, target.com, bedbathandbeyond.com, kohls.com, and amazon.com simultaneously for items to compare them all, then put my favorite on My Registry. Once I’ve gotten a decent list I’ll probably go to other websites to see if they have stuff I like better, but for the most part, our families are poor and I know they can afford most of the stuff from these sites that I like.

I’m actually having a hard time putting expensive things on the list. The frugal buyer in me keeps telling me to choose the cheapest thing that will do the job, but then the future wife and mother in me tells me that I’m going to be using this stuff for a LONG. TIME. and I should go for the gold. So I’ve been trying to strike compromises - getting only pretty stuff, and actually coordinating the household, but still going for the bargains.

By the way… in case you’re interested… my registry is *cough* here *cough*.

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Once again, even though I’m not getting married for nearly two years, I have already been through every wedding gown (under $600) on every major bridal boutique’s online store. Astonishingly enough, I’ve only kept 15 bookmarked. Unfortunately, this means I’m probably going to be quite picky when choosing my actual gown.

I WOULD have probably 20 more bookmarked, but for whatever reason, almost every dress I really really loved were part of the David’s Bridal Online Collection. Meaning you can’t try them on before you order them. Which is so not for me… I need to have total control and be fully aware of what I’m buying when it comes to something like this. So why do they have to make the Online Collection so damned awesome? Oh, so I’ll buy a dress, not like something about it, return it at my expense, and buy another one, and go through the same thing again and again until I go in the store and buy one.

I will spare you all 15 dresses I have bookmarked, but below are my top 5 faves. I know that these dresses may not be available in a year and a half. Plus, I plan on losing a solid 40-60 pounds before I get married, and my tastes may change as a result, depending on how the shape of my body changes. But anyways, this is an idea of the kinds of dresses I like: simple, princess-like, and flowy.

From Alfred Angelo

From Alfred Angelo

From David’s Bridal

From Mori Lee

And my absolute favorite, from David’s Bridal

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