Talls and Smalls

The Past Year: Grad School and a Feminist Job

2011-06-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else feel guilty about abandoning online spaces? This disused blog is one of two such digital creations that I ignore—including my erstwhile LiveJournal, which I’m scared to look for. Oh, the angst.

If it were a crime to ignore your digital creations, we’d all be serving time. I think it’s probably a good thing that real life gets in the way.

Even though it’s been more than a year, I do think it’s useful to stop by here to give a little update on the Moulton Belecs since, surprisingly, some distant friends do check in here. Again, I’m not sure what to do with this space now that we’re not documenting our contrarian wedding planning. I think if we have kids, I’ll probably do a lot of writing about how horrifying and gross pregnancy and childrearing is (or seems to be), since women are typically under a social gag rule—even among their closest friends and relatives—about the downsides of compulsory heterosexuality and reproduction.

But those blog topics are mere speculation at this point, because I’m not sure what the future holds for our careers, location or multiplication. But since it’s been a while, let me catch you up on our lives since I had that delicious, free salt bagel in May of 2010.

Two major life shifts began last year: I started grad school and a new job. In the same week.

After my three-year tenure at the enviro magazine Trout, I applied for an editing job at a women’s issues nonprofit on a whim. During the painful graduate school application process, I decided I wanted to move into a career that aligned more precisely with my interests: film criticism and feminism. Because I’m an inexplicably fortunate person, I was well on my way by late summer to do just that when I started an MA program in women’s studies and film and by somehow landed the editing and writing job at a major feminist organization.

Embarking on these new endeavors was scary. I had to give up an awesome workplace and boss at Trout Unlimited, and starting a new school journey was an intimidating prospect, especially since I knew I’d still be working. But luckily, I’m still in good touch with my old boss and TU friends, I made great friends at GW, I survived the insane reading and academic blowhards in my first two semesters, and my new job (well, not that new anymore) convinced me that I would enjoy sticking with a career in the publishing world. Before that, I was planning to leave editing behind for teaching or academia. But being busier and working with copy that’s more relevant to my political passions has made all the difference.

So from August to May, that’s basically all you need to know about the life of HB—work, school and tears. But life as I knew it couldn’t have worked without Eric’s help. Not a lot has changed for him since last year. He’s still a brilliant teacher, still jamming in a funky band, still a skinny runner, still bearded and still my total rock. The only thing that has changed is that he probably has a thicker skin for my stress-induced breakdowns near finals time and has definitely sharpened his cooking skills since he was kind enough to pick up my domestic slack.

And now you’re up to date on Talls and Smalls. We’re so happy to be enjoying summer (well, he will be in two days), and we’re looking forward to volcanic adventures in Hawaii in late July. Until then, look for us

on our futon watching Battlestar Galactica as research for my thesis,

harvesting the mighty bounty of my garden,

reading Entertainment Weekly cover to cover,

avoiding watching season five of The Wire because we don’t want it to end,

rocking out with Dimestore,

brunching or drinking with my favorite feminists

writing feminist film reviews and

maybe, just maybe, running a race or two.

Peppy Life Update: Courtesy of a Free Salt Bagel

2010-05-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

Happy bike to work day, DC!

What can I say? The weather is beautiful. I'm spending this weekend cheese-making with my best friend. My partner is a dreamy rock star. I saw the first fireflies of the season last night. I'm starting a Master's program at GW this fall. My bro Shade made a surprise DC visit this week. I have a trip booked to Tempe for this July.

And I was the proud recipient of a free salt bagel this morning.

Mopey Life Update

2010-03-10T07:48:00.000-08:00

Oh party people, how I have neglected updating you on the lives of the Belecs. I admit, the infrequency is exacerbated by my disdain for online journaling of the let's-document-my-every-move variety. You don't need to know every detail of our daily lives, and you don't want to know. This blog started as an issue-based medium to show off our thwarting of the wedding industry, and to justify to our traditional families why we eschewed certain sexist or just plain ridiculous wedding practices. But now that the wedding is over, we've stepped off the soap box and we're clearly unsure of what we want this space to be.

We'll figure it out. But until then, I guess we'll write occasional updates so you know generally where we're headed in life, career and love. On second thought, life and career are up in the air, but at least we've got love figured out, and I'm thankful for that.

Seeing that my last update was before I ran the Marine Corps Marathon, I'm happy to report that I successfully finished, and I'm tentatively planning on running MCM again this year. Check out my finisher's page or see some photos my adoring fans took.

After MCM, I had a jam-packed few months of studying for the GRE, taking the GRE, taking an honors women's studies class, completing grad school applications, going on a business trip, finishing up the winter issue of Trout, planning a surprise visit to Arizona and travelling after Christmas. After all that, I was happy to sit back and wait for news from grad schools to tell us what my academic future held.

But alas, my droogs, the rejections have been rolling in. It's hard not to be pessimistic about the four schools I haven't heard from, because two were big stretches anyway (New York University and the University of California-Los Angeles). The rejection from the local University of Maryland--what I considered my safety school--was an especially crushing blow. My only hopes now, however vague, are George Washington and the University of Texas-Austin. For now, I'm working under the assumption that those, too, will be rejections, and I'm marking my calendar for next year's round of applications. I've been in a sizable funk because of this unexpected academic setback, but like a professor reminded me last week, even Jean-Paul Sartre failed his philosophy exam the first time he took it.

I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm having trouble pulling myself out of mope-ville. This really sucks. But when I find myself here, again, in the doldrums, I just start to feel guilty about what yuppie problems I have. That's right, I'm healthy, employed and married to a wonderful partner, and I'm edging toward depression because I might not be able to break into academia. I admit it.

But there is some hope, my droogs. If I don't have any options but to stay in DC and work, that's what I'll do. Eric and I will move to an apartment that isn't so craptacular and we'll probably get a dog. I'll re-apply to grad programs next fall and keep taking classes at my local community college, where I received a small women's studies scholarship to do so. I'll take Spanish immersion classes to fulfill my longtime goal of learning another language. (No, mom, Latin doesn't count. Sorry.)

Aside from having to deal with my drama, Eric is doing very well. He's on a new fitness kick and plans to ride a full century this year (hopefully with me in tow). He biked a metric century with his dad last summer. He's also really digging his new band, Dimestore, and I have to say they could really go places. If we ended up leaving DC--like I said, a diminishing possibility at this point--I'd be sad that he had to leave the band. They play locally and often, and their sound is much more Eric's and my style than his previous bands were. They're worth checking out.

Don't Stop Me Now

2009-09-23T08:56:00.001-07:00

After 17 weeks of training for the Marine Corps Marathon, I'm so glad to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I have only one more absurdly long run left before race day (one more 20 miler) before we start tapering. I'm holding up pretty well, and I'll be proudly sporting my yellow DC Road Runners shirt (they call it a singlet), so keep an eye out for me.

I've gotten a lot faster, and my long runs have gone well despite a few nagging knee and hip pains. I don't know that I'll ever do another marathon--training has basically taken over my life since June--but I can't say for sure. I have an addictive personality and I tend to revel in doing things most people find painful and otherwise impossible. I'm addicted to being a badass. It was this tendency that led Elizabeth and me to train, in the weeks before senior prom, with countless vanity curls to hopefully be more muscular than our dates. Did we succeed? I'll have to post pictures and let you decide.

If I haven't seen you in a while, or if you doubt my reputation as a "badass mufu," then I not-so-humbly present you with this evidence, inspired by my scrappy ways and created by KB. Thanks, KB! I'd love to do a moon marathon someday.

And send me fast, uninjured vibes on October 25! If you're in DC, get in touch with me or one of my head cheerleaders (Elizabeth and Eric) to join in the hollering.

By Jove, We've Done It!

2009-08-07T12:35:00.000-07:00

The past few months have been nutso for Talls and Smalls, so much so that I've forgotten to write about a huge development. It came about so fast, we haven't had much time to celebrate the victory ourselves, to be honest.

WE, TALLS AND SMALLS OF THE D.C. SUBURBS, A MERE 10 MONTHS AFTER RESOLVING TO DO SO, HAVE PAID OFF OUR STUDENT LOANS.

I don't mean to get all dramatic on you, but this has been the subject of 80 percent of financial conversations since we decided to "do the damn thing" and pay off 12 years' worth of student loans early. We were never really sure how early we could make it work--although the amount varied, we dedicated hundreds a month to eat away at the balance. With a lot of tough budgeting and sacrificing gift money to the cause, I'm thrilled to say that we took care of the debt in less than a year, faster than either of us thought we could do it.

Now that the loan is taken care of, we can't wait for the first few paychecks where the money we put away is money we eventually keep--even if it's in savings or investments. At least it's not going down the black hole at Citibank. Now I'm thinking of getting rid of our only remaining debt--my training-wheeled $500 limit credit card. Let's get all old-school with this money-handling.

Always Coming Back Home to You

2009-06-18T09:03:00.000-07:00

The past few months have been a blur. Talls is now out of school and tenured as a Montgomery County teacher. He's spending his first day off in a blur of sleep, food and Pixar.

Meanwhile, I'm in quarter-life crisis mode, fighting off mad homesickness and boredom. What I need to do is write out my goals and stick to them. I've made it harder on myself by joining the DC Road Runners and beginning a marathon training program, which has basically taken over my non-work life, but I'm at least enjoying a chiseled exterior.

Hokay, so, back to the goals.

Study for GRE
Take GRE by August
Enroll for Montgomery College women's studies class
Practice Spanish
Run my marathon, simultaneously kicking ass
Get serious about my feminist blog
Apply for various grad programs at UMD, GW, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, ASU, U of A
Get serious grad school funding lined up
Pay off student loans by October
Start a house-savings plan
Start an investment plan

All doable, I just need to get my shit together, and read the signs until decision time comes. I have to admit that after five years in DC, I'm starting to feel the pull to spend some time closer to my family. It's a hard thing to explain, but I think that some people need to spend some time independent and have room to fuck up and prove themselves. I feel I've done that, come into my own and had the five best years of my life in the meantime. But maybe it's time to go home, back West. Atmosphere knows what I'm saying. Check out the secret track after "Always Coming Back Home to You" starting around the 4:30 mark. Check out the opening track, too, because it's also awesome.

Some excerpts:

Roam if you must, but come home once you've seen enough
If you know this is where you want to raise your kids
If you can drink tap water and drink the air (Well, not literally something you should do in Tempe)
If you're not gonna leave because that's where you're from

She Stole My Karma

2009-04-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

Seeing Kings of Leon last Friday was the kick-off for a frenzy of a weekend for Talls and Smalls. We were pumped to see the Kings after we missed their Constitution Hall show last November. My trout buddy Chris introduced me to the Kings this fall, and they're my favorite new obsession, but I'm not the only one. They blew up this fall thanks to their good looks and lusty singles like "Sex On Fire."

They played all of my favorites, including "Charmer."

Saturday, we spent the day as local celebrities at Run Amuck, a 5K mud run, which we and 13 friends ran in costume as members of the Mario Kart pack. Eric and I were Toad and Toadette, complete with spotted hats (our bike helmets with shower caps stretched over them). Eric had the good luck to run into one of his students and her parents in full costume. Luckily, she's a good kid whose mom wrote to Eric the first week of school about how much her daughter loves his class. What can I say, Talls has it goin' on.

We wore cardboard cars and made quite a splash, literally through the mud and figuratively by the awesome reaction everywhere we went. Kids and adults wanted to take pictures with us and of us. Talls and I concluded that we've never been cooler in our lives.

Sunday hosted great weather for a rooftop goodbye to my friend and colleague Kate, who is off to Guatemala this week for Peace Corps work. It's such a cool opportunity, but I left feeling really down about the heaviness of growing up, moving on and moving apart. It's just depressing to face the fact that all of the people I want to see can't be in the same place.

F*** Bitches, Get Money

2009-04-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

At a happy hour last night, Elizabeth admitted that in a recent run-in with an acquaintance , she responded to thusly to the question of what she'd been up to:

(shrug)

Fuck bitches, get money.

Although out of nowhere (and hilarious--I've resolved to give the same answer when the next unsuspecting person prompts me, unless it's my boss or my Nana) to my virgin ears, E took the response from a chart-topping hip-hop song. By the way, I love how the poster of this video--such as it is--censors "bitch" but not "fuck," the direct opposite of my headline instincts.

This incident is as good a segue as any to talk about money, honey. I've been increasingly interested in finance, inspired by several people: my dad, E, the woman behind Feminist Finance and a few authors.

Right around the time of our wedding, Eric and I started noticing how many houses were up for sale in our neighborhood. We started looking at houses once we were hitched, figuring that we should take advantage of the shitrendous market. We took a few months to look around, and ended up making offers on two different houses in Rockville, Md., before we decided to throw in the towel. It's funny, I remember our mortgage broker telling us in August of last year that we should buy a house quickly, because the market was going to turn around any day. Obviously, he wasn't the best fortune-teller.

So after two offers fell through, both because of shady sellers, Eric and I decided to do something that felt a little crazy. We put several thousand dollars of our savings toward student loans, and resolved to pay the rest of the debt off within a year.

But how did we become such debt Puritans?

Well, it started with years of indoctrination from my Dad, I'm sure, but I wasn't really paying attention until I was an adult. As he often does, my Dad asked for some bizarre favor as a gift for his birthday last year. He requested that all of his kids to listen to this quacky economy dude Dave Ramsey's audiobook. Eric and I listened, and although I disagreed with some disturbing points (God doesn't want you to have a Jaguar, dude), we did come away with some sound advice, some strategy and a plan to be completely without debt at 25-years-old.

You heard it here: I listened to my dad's advice. I have done that once or twice. Hi, Dad.

Basically, there are several steps you follow. The first few go something like this: Make a budget, start an emergency savings fund, pay off your debts one by one, starting with the smallest, including your house, and from there, invest a certain percentage of your income into retirement, college funds, Roth IRAs and the like.

We're obviously in the paying-off-debt phase, and the idea behind paying everything off would probably sound like a good idea to most people, but you'd be surprised what a radical step it feels like to put thousands of dollars against a debt that you usually pay off $60 at a time. The fact is, when you pay off your debt early (11 years ahead of schedule for us), you save lots of money in interest. It feels like we threw away all that money, because we didn't have anything tangible to show for its loss, but in reality, we had that much in debt to pay off eventually. It's a hard thing to wrap your head around at times.

If you can get past this dude's bizarre idea that God wants us to be rich, and the fact that he's a regular on Fox News, he has some reasonable advice and a pretty funny adjective that he uses for hard-core debt-payer-offers: gazelle-intense (as intense as a gazelle that's running from a cheetah).

So in addition to the big lump sum payment, we're basically paying as much as we can each month against the student loans, which were the biggest form of debt for us after minimal credit card bills and one side project. That means that we're paying three-quarters of a rent payment against the student loan every month, which is quite a chunk of change. As a result, we feel pretty cash poor for now, but we get really pumped up when we see the loan balance trickle. It gives me insane pleasure to do out the math to figure out when we'll have everything paid off (with some luck, maybe by the end of 2009).

Since we started this quest in September 2008, we have paid off over 65 percent of our debt. Every time we pass another incremental milestone, we get more inspired, and we've given ourselves at least one incentive to get to the end of the rainbow: We won't get a dog until we've seen this through.

So, no horribly spoiled devil-dogs like Ginger.

And no smelly-breath loving, either.

But when it's all over, we'll have a proper family band, like these peeps.

Viral Online Habits

2009-04-08T12:29:00.001-07:00

In the days when I first moved to Virginia in 2004, I would often sit on Cindy's couch (Lisa and I rented rooms from a very awesome woman, who is still a great friend) with my laptop, bullshitting with my friends, who were spread all over the country at college--from Middletown, Conn. to Los Angeles, Calif. to Spokane, Wash. This was the dawn of the viral video days, the days of Schfifty-Five and the hilariously dumb answers to high-school test questions. I still need to study up, but this list is a good starting point to viral video history.

Viral video has become so pervasive that Current TV has a segment called Viral Video Film School, which covers internet how-tos, vlogging (video blogging), sexy tax advice and anything else that people take video of and post online.

Much as we still enjoy viral videos and sound clips, ridiculous, self-aggrandizing "quizzes" have also sadly endured in the present-day internet experience. Ten multiple-choice questions aren't going to make you any more similar to Bella Swan (Which Twilight Character Are You?) than you were five minutes ago, and they sure as shit won't make Colin Firth your partner (Which Celebrity Is Your Ideal Boyfriend?). It might, however, make me Paul McCartney (Which Beatle Are You?) circa 1979. I don't want to be the post-2000 McCartney, selling shitty albums at Starbucks. That McCartney I refer to as Mr. Jowls.

But I digress. The inspiration of this entire post was, believe it or not The Most Useless Quiz Ever. This was one of my favorite viral internet quizzes from my internet-use infancy. The quiz is true to its name, and I really enjoy the results. My first quiz back in 2004 revealed that I was "the macaroni protest movement," which came along with an illustration of angry elbow noodles. I've clearly grown up a lot since then. As you can see, I'm now "the attack banana." Other known results: a heart-shaped armadillo and a ladybug languishing on a throw pillow. Good times.

Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish

2009-04-02T14:30:00.000-07:00

Hello my droogies,

It's been forever since I blogged atcha. I attribute the lack of enthusiasm (on my part) to a general "I'm sick of obsessing about my freakin' wedding, as awesome as it was" and also a months-long depression about our living situation, which happily ended March 1.

After a disappointing house hunt, Eric and I decided to just move from Takoma to a nicer apartment, and use the down payment money to pay down our student loan debt (more on that later). Thinking that it would be great to commute without cars, I had the bright idea that we should move to Rockville (known to us now as Suckville), which is the suburb in Maryland where Eric teaches. Long story short, we had a few financially irritating run ins with a moving company, a gym, and someone who I hope gets hit by a car while riding my bike. The lifestyle change from walkable, dense city (Silver Spring/Takoma) to soccer-mom, suburban wasteland was really, really depressing for both of us, but I was most vocal about it. The move added a half-hour to my commuting time, made it impossible to bike to work, and made me feel really isolated from our friends and anything we wanted to do in DC.

So after a lot of thought, we decided to break our lease with our Suckville apartment (which was a fine place, but rather small and we had to pay utilities separately) and move back to the Silver Spring area. Eric brilliantly found an apartment complex that was running a rent special that basically paid for the cost of breaking our lease, and we moved in March 1. Eric has to drive to work now, but his commute is pretty short, and I've suggested he try to carpool with his friend and fellow MoCo teacher, Grant.

We're so pumped with our new place, we already have it all set up. We never got all the boxes unpacked at Suckville.

Soon my new bike will join Eric's on our bike wall. It just came in the mail today!

Those lanterns are from the dairy farm where my mother-in-law grew up in New York. Try not to be too jealous, Mom.

We, happily, have a lot more room in our Silver Spring place. Enough room for a proper music corner, which makes it easier to jam on our keyboard and guitar (for me) and any number of instruments for Mr. B.

And our favorite new addition, our turntable chills under the fellas. The player was a wedding gift from my big sisters. Now Eric and I jam to Arlo Guthrie, Jackson Browne and The Beatles on vinyl, among others.

More on our debt later, because I'm really proud of what we've done in the past year. I just felt like I should draft a post, because I've been doing it a lot at work. Check out the blog I started for our magazine and leave your feedback, if you know what I'm talking about. Fisheries science can be pretty wonky.

Love,
HB

Vendors: The Music

2009-01-08T16:13:00.000-08:00

Husband here, blogging live from 2009!

Our first post of the year, and my first post in several months. As happened last year, once school started I fell right into an intractable school/band practice/recover routine that’s pretty hard to break out of for the time needed to write an interesting blog post. I recall that most of my more interesting posts last year were written between midnight and 1 a.m., but these days I spend that time dreading 6 a.m.

Things have been going well on my end. I’m having a really good year at school—whether sixth grade is that much easier than eighth, or whether one’s second year of teaching is that much better than the first, it’s certainly working for me. I’m tired a lot, but I’m much less worn out than last year and don’t feel as if I’m gasping for free time.

The wedding happened over six months ago, but it’s still fresh on our minds. We spent Christmas and New Year’s in sunny Arizona, not just for the holiday but for an awesome west- coast reception for Hannah’s friends and family who couldn’t make it out for the main event. It was a great time; I really feel like I’m part of the family now. My parents made it out, and everybody got along great.

So with all that in mind, it’s time to post my two cents on the two as-yet unexplored vendors from the wedding day: the music and the beer. First up: the music.

Wedding Music – St. Charles String Quartet

The music for the ceremony was always going to be a sticky wicket. Music is, of course, crucial to setting the mood at pretty much any occasion, but the thought of a giant pipe organ pumping the traditional wedding march as we walked down the aisle never really seemed appetizing. It’s not any big ballsy “anti-tradition” thing; the song and the sound of it never resonated with me. I mean it’s a MARCH. We might as well have used the Darth Vader march. That would have at least made shopping for my outfit easier.

The only acceptable use of a pipe organ in church:

Hannah and I were both after “pretty” music, but even that had its limitations. Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” is one of the mainstays that I actually really enjoy; however I can’t quite get past the fact that Pachelbel apparently stole the chord progression from “Hook” by Blues Traveler. Plagiarist hack.

We figured we could hire a pianist from UMD on the cheap. Their accompanists are so good that we could have tossed them some sheet music half an hour beforehand and no one would have known the difference.

However, the idea-that-was-so-cool-that-we-figured-it-was-unattainable was a string quartet. Hannah and I had discovered string music in a big way since we became a couple; neither of us had been into it before, but the music of Nickel Creek in particular shaped a lot of our tastes over the next few years and resulted in the surprisingly high concentration of country-esque music for the day.

I never really thought we'd get it to happen. I always envisioned string groups playing events where tuxedos were mandatory and guests used caviar as a condiment. We started looking, hoping to get lucky, but we were prepared to be told that we'd need to spend thousands of dollars to even think about having a string group play our ceremony.

A simple google search brought me to Gig Masters, which allowed me to read reviews and look over prices for several string groups at once. I was able to send a request for a price quote to a bunch of them with one click. And soon enough, I heard back from St. Charles String Quartet.

Even though I was expecting not to be able to afford it, Neil of St. Charles String Quartet immediately got in touch with me with a quote that was very very reasonable--a few hundred dollars for an hour and a half of setup, rehearsal, entrance music and playing. Both Hannah and I were impressed with the clips and song lists on their website, which were stocked not only with classical standards but with arrangements of dozens of pop and rock songs--including a huge Beatles selection (check out their site to hear samples like "Everlong" by the Foo Fighters, too).

Even more impressive was their willingness and ability to learn not one, not two, but THREE special requests specifically for our ceremony. Again, I was prepared to shell out extra dough to get them to accomodate us, but Neil and the gang had no problem arranging and learning the songs in time for our big day. They accomodated our every request--even allowing my bandmate Dave to record their music along with our ceremony.

I won't go too much into what songs we picked and why we picked them--that was covered in an earlier post. However, I do want to point out that, as much as I love Mark O'Connor's "Appalachia Waltz," I was worried that others wouldn't hear it the same way. However, when we were all scrambling in the minutes right before the ceremony and they began rehearsing, I watched my mother-in-law Tanya stop in her tracks and exclaim "wow, that sounds beautiful!" I knew we'd scored.

Being a gigging musician myself, I devoted a lot of mental energy to planning and envisioning the music for the ceremony. I was thrilled with how it turned out and how easy it was. I wish there had been more time to enjoy it; I would have loved to have been able to just sit there and hear them play, but maybe some day one of my other local friends will hire them and I'll have that pleasure. I certainly plan on recommending the St. Charles String Quartet whenever possible.

Reception Music – My iPod, among other components.

As I said in my song-requests post from a few months ago, the PA system was graciously provided by my bandmates in Lucky Day (we each bought the different components of the PA before a doing a short tour in 2007. I was a poor college student at the time; I believe that I purchased the cables).

Beyond that (admittedly very large) contribution, almost every other part of the "DJ station" was compiled from something in our apartment. I'm pretty sure that the only purchase I needed to make to get the thing up and running was a $5 cable.

I'm not sure how feasible it is just to rent the music equipment (speakers, stands, cables, and mixer), but if one could swing it, there's not a heck of a lot of reasons for paying for an actual DJ any more. For one thing, it's not really necessary, since music has gone digital. I was at my cousin Jessie's wedding in August, and their DJ was running more or less exactly what we used: an iTunes playlist. Granted, he was making up a lot of it on the fly, but in our case it wasn't too hard to acquire the music we wanted from various sources and throw it together into a pre-arranged playlist. Of course, it's impossible to predict exactly how the party will flow and when the various milestones (first dance, cake-cutting etc) are going to happen, but if you know anyone who can use a computer mouse, all you need to do is hit "pause" or drag the song you need to the position you want. It required almost no effort whatsoever. We even did DJ-like dedications ourselves, by using the simple Microsoft voice recorder. Then all we had to do was drag and drop the dedications in front of whatever song we wanted (like dedicating "Fake Plastic Trees" by Radiohead to Hannah's sister Rachel, to thank her for introducing Hannah to the band so long ago, or like dedicating "Play that Funky Music" by Wild Cherry to my dad, since his life partially inspired the song).

For the most part, Juan and I split up "DJ" duties for the reception--that's right, I DJed my own wedding. It added up to about 60 seconds--tops--of volume control, hitting pause, clicking and dragging, and telling Juan how to do those things. I put Grant in charge of hitting the "play" button while we were biking over, and that was that.

The end result was that Hannah and I had complete, 100 percent, total control over the music that was played at our wedding. We made a deliberate effort to make sure that there were plenty of recognizable hit songs that everyone would enjoy, but we were able to balance that with some songs that were personal favorites--for both us and some guests. iTunes even has a crossfading feature that, like a real DJ, is able to segue from song to song so that the music never stops. I recall that the transition from "Walk this Way" to "Stronger" was particularly awesome.

Of course, the best part wasn't just that we got to play music we picked--it's that people enjoyed it! We got lots of compliments on the music, and have burned a couple of CDs with the whole playlist after a few requests. If you feel like checking out what was played at the wedding, I exported the playlists to spreadsheets and uploaded them to Google documents, linked below:

Dinner Playlist
Dance Playlist

I think that the fact that our wedding was so homegrown and showed so much of our personalities didn't just make it more satisfying for us, but for everyone else as well. Whether your musical poison is classical/string music (St. Charles String Quartet), classic rock (Journey), hip hop (Kanye West, The Roots), country (Gillian Welch, Randy Travis, and Lucinda Williams), progressive rock (Dream Theater, Procupine Tree), indie (Weakerthans, Andrew Bird, the Format), or even schizophrenic Casio-keyboard rant-rap (Wesley Willis), our wedding had something for you.

All this, and on a budget!

Traditions: The Rehearsal Dinner

2008-11-12T12:54:00.000-08:00

Honestly, I can’t even remember the only rehearsal dinner that I’ve attended. Methinks I must have been at one for my Aunt Jana’s wedding way back in the day—also my only participation in a wedding, as flower girl—but I was about 4 years old, so I don’t recall if it was a fancy affair or not. What I do remember are my sister Rach's bangs, eegads.

I assume that, like all aspects of wedding madness, the rehearsal dinner is another potential stressball and money-suck for most people. Eric and I didn’t budget for a dinner, but when his parents offered to host a rehearsal dinner, we took them up on it, grateful to pass the buck to someone else. We agreed that the campground would be a great place for a casual dinner after the rehearsal. The campground didn’t really have any gazebos to rent, so Mel and Rick just rented an extra campsite and set up an event tent that they bought for the occasion, all while entertaining the evilest dogs west of the Mississippi.

The fellas set up the tent in the morning, whilst I picked flowers for all the peeps with E, my mom and Mel. After a short breakdown in Elizabeth’s apartment and a subsequent argument with Elizabeth about gun control (that’s how high tensions were), I started randomly honking at people in my truck to release some of the stress. Thank God for my peeps, who helped me forget my troubles by wholeheartedly contributing to the Bridezilla/Momra joke.

Arriving fashionably late to the rehearsal, I found Eric had gallantly already started organizing our peeps. After a really good run through (what a relief), we piled into the cars and caravanned the three miles to the campground. On the drive over, the sky opened up and torrential rain dumped down on us all the way to the campground. My peeps and I hung out in my truck until my brother ran up with some garbage bags for us to fashion into ponchos. They didn’t help that much. But once we were out of the truck, all hands were on deck to put up the sides of the big tent to provide some crowded shelter for the early arrivals.

Like most summer storms in DC, this one just had to scream and cry hard for a few minutes and before it gave way to a cool, purple evening—perfect grilling weather. Mel and Rick's longtime family friend Mr. Wright manned the grill.

The Wright family were there in full force for wedding festivities. My mom said it best: We'd be very lucky if we all had friends like the Wrights. Look at the bike setup they had to help with our Just Married Bike Parade.

With some food and beer in our bellies, we started to mingle and dry off. The spread was great—salads, chips, burgers, veggie burgers, chicken and lots of sweets. As evening fell, lights came on in the tent (thanks to Eric’s sister Ramie’s decorating) and all of a sudden our picnic-style rehearsal dinner started looking like a very classy affair.

Eric’s parents put on a slideshow of pictures they put together for us, and after a while people started filtering back to their hotels, apartments and campsites. The women in my family started assembling the flowers for the big day, and Eric and I and all of our peeps were off to do last-minute preparations before popping half a Tylenol PM. We had a big day ahead of us.

Vendors: Photography

2008-11-10T12:08:00.001-08:00

I’m tired of talking about my wedding. Are you tired of hearing about it? Although I’m sick of it, I feel like I need to give props to the people who helped us, and sing the praises of the vendors who went above and beyond. I hope my research, trial and error will help direct people planning similar events, especially in DC. Now, on to it. Let’s finally give my photographers their due. The only picture I have of all of them is from the disposable cameras.

I found Lara Swanson and her peeps at A Softer Image through an ad—where else—on the Offbeat Bride site. I halfheartedly looked through Craigslist ads for photographers, and found a lot of online portfolios filled with hokey-looking portraits. The most telling thing in ruling out these photographers was that the wedding pictures—as “journalistic” as they were in black and white, focusing on detail—looked nothing like the wedding I envisioned. I knew these nuptials looked like what I didn’t want (which, as we found out, can be its own theme-ish).

Thus, I count my blessings for seeing Lara’s ad on our underground site, touting photography in the DC area. Her contact info said she wasn’t above haggling, and she wasn’t kidding. Lara was always enthusiastic about the details that everyone else was giving us shit about—riding bikes in, that’s right, dresses—and I basically told her what I could afford, and she told me what she could do for that amount. We contracted for five hours, with an understanding that I could ask for more hours for a specific rate per hour. I did end up asking for two more hours, methinks to make sure Lara caught the cake-cutting. It was well worth the money.

Lara brought two other photographers and her husband, who is also a photographer. They caught so many classic shots, it’s impossible for me to name a favorite. But I have to say that some of the most memorable ones are the portraits, which were the pictures I was most scared about. People so often look awkward, cheesy or both in portraits—but I think the best photographers (like my good friend and peep Amanda) can make you look your best on film, and Lara and her team most definitely did that, as you can clearly see.

I knew after meeting Lara last November in Alexandria that she was the right one for the job. She was always in touch, always interested in our traditions and anti-traditions, and just good company in general. She studied marriage traditions in graduate school, and lauded our efforts to cut out the sexist traditions that we found offensive. I’ve never met someone who knew more about the meaning behind the traditions, and it was awesome to have that insight.

On the big day, Lara and her peeps didn’t just blend in to our festivities—they were a positive presence, interacting with our guests, strategizing about when the best photo ops would happen and complimenting our playlist. They told Eric and me that ours was one of their top five favorite weddings, which is a terrific thing to hear when you’ve spent months preparing for a hugely stressful event. We finally felt like we pulled it off, and the best compliment anyone can give us is that they had a great time.

As many of you know, the day after the wedding Lara already had a slideshow of pictures ready to view, set to a song that she had noticed was on our playlist (The Moldy Peaches “Anyone Else But You”), the quintessence of thoughtfulness.

After the insanity died down, I chose a few pictures for Lara to edit for us, including some antiquing (a certain number of edits was included in our package). I’ll let her work speak for itself here. We were thrilled with these.

And after reading Lara’s blog and seeing the amazing work she has done at births, I’m considering hiring her if Eric and I ever have little ones. I never thought that’s something that would appeal to me, but check out these incredible pictures. She also captured the same couple’s wedding.

We can’t say enough good things about our photography team, and we’re not the only ones. Everyone who comes into contact with Lara and her peeps fall in love with them. So if you have a life event that needs to be captured, give her a call. Or, just ask her to hang out with you.

Marathon Man and Woman

2008-11-10T09:38:00.000-08:00

Eric and I ran our first half-marathon last month at the Baltimore Running Festival. Inspired by my coworker Gibbs on one of our glorious springtime lunch-runs through Teddy Roosevelt Island, Eric and I started training pretty soon after the wedding.

We had a running partner in Alli, and all three of us ran the half and did really well. Eric and I qualified for the National Marathon by running the Baltimore Half in under 2:30—a feat I was very skeptical about accomplishing in the weeks leading up to the race. But we did it, and it felt awesome. Alli also qualified, so she and I have decided to train for the National Marathon, which is in March here in DC. Eric will probably do the half at the same race.

Alli’s parents, Elizabeth and Brynne were good enough to come cheer us on in Baltimore. We three definitely took the cake for the best signage. Check it out.

We took several weeks off after Baltimore, but we’re back in training mode—Wednesday will be a seven-miler. Wish us luck!

To all the haters

2008-09-17T20:02:00.001-07:00

Courtesy of Junebug and Callie.

Come, crush a cup of wine

2008-09-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

The wine and champagne at our wedding was extremely well-traveled, my droogs. Although you know me to be a liberal of the bleeding-heart variety, when my Nana mentioned that her friend from the Arizona Republicans owned a local vineyard with good wine, I was all about using the connection. After some research, I found that the Chandler, Ariz. vineyard, Kokopelli, offered good variety (such as I know it, but to me Trader Joe's has plenty of wine variety. I'm a beer person, myself) at a better price than the Shenandoah vineyards I had been researching. Sourcing from Kokopelli meant that we were still purchasing from a small, locally-owned (local to Arizona, that is) business, plus we were getting a little West-coast representation in the mix.

But the best part about the choice was that it wasn't something I had to worry about after I made the initial decision of how many bottles of which wine and champagne to get, because my mom made all the arrangements and then trucked the boxes of wine over on my parents' cross-country drive to the big event. Thanks mom and dad!

After consulting Alli the chef, we decided that we'd buy four bottles of wine, two red and two white, plus one bottle of champagne, for each table. I sent my mom and Nana on the chore of all chores - to go to a tasting to decide which whites and reds to choose. We ended up with the merlot, the pinot grigio and the raspberry champagne, Imperial Kir. The Kokopelli people threw in some extra bottles (any comm major knows that it's all about who you know), and a specially decorated bottle of champagne for Eric and I to crack open on our first wedding anniversary.

If you were in attendance, you may have noticed this little one, Alison, whom I babysat all through college in Arlington, coming around to your table to collect corkscrews.

Just last night, Ali and her mom Sheree gave us this awesome trivet, which Ali and Sheree made using the Kokopelli corkscrews from our wedding day. Isn't that the coolest thing? So don't toss those special-event wine tops. Reuse them for a trivet or corkscrew bulletin board.

Even the wine snobs, who shall remain nameless, complimented us on the wine. Although I was afraid we'd run out of drinks, we had probably 10 or 12 bottles of wine left over, and Eric can tell you about what happened with all the leftover beer.

But one word of advice, my droogies, if you're planning a big ol' stressful party: put someone in charge of cutlery, plates and corkscrews. That's what we had the most trouble with at our party. The devil's in the details, and I think we handled the snags like pros, but it would have been nice to have a functioning corkscrew or five. Elizabeth heroically bought a few at the campsite's store, but they broke after a while. I have no idea where my mom found another one.

I'll let Eric elaborate on the beer, since he's the expert. But I have to give a little ink to the non-alcoholic drinks, including the Keystone and Coors that mysteriously appeared on the drink tables. I'm not naming names (Ramie). Hey, at least it wasn't diet soda. I swore to Eric that no diet Coke would pass that threshold, and to my knowledge none did. If you know otherwise, don't tell me. I'd like to keep that fantasy alive. I really hate NutraSweet and aspartame. That's all my mom's fault. Plus, I was hypnotized not to drink soda. Seriously. By this guy.

Anyway, we did have some drinks for the kids and non-drinkers in the crowd. Obviously, we had water. But we didn't want to buy a bunch of bottled-water, because of the litter and expense. We thought about getting a Water N Ice-style cooler (they have water stores at every corner in Tempe, but the only one in practically the whole DC area is in Bethesda). But we came up with a really good idea, if I do say so myself. We bought a Brita faucet filter, and just affixed it to the kitchen sink at the reception hall. That worked marvelously, because we were able to fill the water coolers, and use purified water to make other drinks.

Mom and Mel were in charge of the other drinks, and they looked awesome. My mom brought this awesome Western-style (at least I always associate it with backyard family pool parties in Tempe) drink dispenser for the lemonade. The mamas bought lemon juice concentrate - with some sugar already in it - at Costco, added water and ice and some sliced lemons. It looked very awesome, and tasted good on a hot June day. The mamas also made iced tea - with plain black tea bags - and put some ice water out in these really cute drink dispensers. I got to keep the yellow one.

Mel and Rick donated some leftover drinks from the rehearsal dinner, and I think it's safe to say that everyone's thirst was well-quenched. Some more than others, if you know what I mean.

Yesterday

2008-09-02T18:08:00.000-07:00

Happy four-year kissaversary.

Vendors: The Food

2008-08-20T16:51:00.000-07:00

Having started a slow journey onto the local-foods train last summer (thank you Barbara Kingsolver), I was determined to source everything for the wedding as locally as possible. In general, it's always better to support local businesses and buy things that haven' t had to travel across the globe or country to get to you, whether it's a sweater, an apple or a cup of milk.

But the cards are stacked against us, my droogies, and there were times I was willing to throw in the towel and just order food from Boston Market. Not that that wouldn't have been delicious (mmmm macaroni and sorta-cheese). But with a little research and a lot of help from friends and family, we ended up with the perfect mix of delicious, elegant and home-made food.

First things first. Upon arrival to the reception, guests found a beautiful cornucocpia of fruit, vegetables, nuts, crackers and dips courtesy of Gail's Vegetarian. I found Gail's by googling "vegetarian catering D.C." on a whim, after realizing that free-range meat was going to be far too expensive to manage. When I filled out an inquiry form through their web site, I received a prompt call from Gail herself, who talked me through their options. I credit Gail with talking some sense into me about structuring the reception. She was all about my laid-back approach to the day, but she helped me realize that people were going to have expectations no matter what, and that I needed to let them know what to expect, and give them some benchmarks.

After a lot of thought, Eric and I decided that since we wanted to source our own entrees, salads and bread but that we still wanted to book Gail's for the cornucopia. Gail was very cool and helpful with that, let us know what she needed from us the day of (a table and linens) and that was that.

The first seated course was bread. Baked goods are probably the easist foods to source locally, because all you have to do is find a...bakery, duh. We've enjoyed bread from Takoma Kitchens at our year-round Takoma Park farmer's market since we moved there, so that was an easy call. Eric dropped by their shop on Riggs & East-West Highway in Hyattsville to order and pay in advance (cash only), and Grant picked up the goods the day before the wedding. We decided to have three types of bread at every table: asiago, sun-dried tomato and sourdough for my dad (a.k.a. Tim "taste buds are my enemy" Moulton).

Our bread dip was inspired by the free bread that Mama Lucia's (more on them in a few) serves at their restaurants. I picked up a megaton of olive oil from Costco, and Eric picked up some garlic, red pepper and local parmesean cheese for the dip-making. Elizabeth and my droogs made the dip the day before, and let the chopped garlic infuse. The cheese went in right before it was served - in shallow pie-tins from the 99 cent store all the way up Georgia Avenue.

Mine and Eric's peeps were in rare form during the bread and salad prep. They heated the bread in the oven and served it up like pros. Elizabeth was our sous chef for the day, managing the kitchen goings-on.

E's skills were never more apparent than in the salad-prep department. As previously blogged about, I sourced the salad greens and vegetables from our CSA farmer, Allan Balleitt. Using 4 ounces as the standard serving size for salads, E and I multiplied it out to get rough poundage of greens versus veggies. Allan gave me 12 pounds of salad greens, and 2 pounds each of cucumbers, pea shoots, radishes and peas - all grown, in Allan's words "biodynamically, without chemicals, GMOs, etc." Not to mention local. The salad stuff travelled only a hundred or so miles to get to your bellies, all for under $2 per serving.

So we have some produce. That's all well and good, but there's still work to do. Eric and his peeps picked up the schtuff from the farm on Friday, and delivered it in CSA-borrowed coolers from Farmer Allan to E's and Alli's place. While I picked up my dress from the vintage-cleaners (yes, the day before the wedding - hey, that's just how I roll), my peeps got started on making the dip and making a red-wine vinegrette from red-wine vinegar, olive oil, cheese, garlic and some spices. We had to jet to the rehearsal festivities, but my peeps and I were right back at E's apartment later that night to wash all 20 pounds of salad stuff, which was harrowing and messy, let me tell you.

I should also mention that during this wet nightmare of greens-washing, E heroically coordinated with a co-worker of ours, who delivered a voucher for a serious discount at the UMD Marriott, where Eric and I were going to stay the night of the wedding. Thanks to E and fellow TUer Big Dave, that effort was victorious and would have surely fallen through the gaping holes in my brain, so focused was I on getting through this damn thing rather than planning what I was going to do after it was over.

Suffice it to say, after a half-hourish of making seemingly no dent in the huge fucking cooler of salad greens, we got a lot less meticulous about picking only the best leaves. We called it a night at around 11:45 p.m.

Flash forward to the morning of the wedding. KB and E set to work in the kitchen, chopping and assembling the 20 pounds of salad while Amanda helped me out in the ballroom. It looked beautiful, especially the pea shoots and the mandoline-sliced radishes. Mel and my mom bought some ranch dressing for the non-adventurous types (ahem, again, old "no tastebuds" Moulton) and Mel donated some leftover dressings from the rehearsal dinner. Bravo to my peeps who worked tirelessly in the kitchen, and who served all of our guests, and to Grant, who served while being "so damn cute," according to Mel.

The salads were served on the buffet, along with the entrees, which were various types of pasta, delivered from Mama Lucia's . Eric and I have spent many a special occasion at this place. So after we dismissed a few ethnic food options (Eric's never had a taco in his whole life, if you can believe that), we decided to go with the catering menu at our favorite Italian place.

I emailed the catering director Sandra, and chose five entrees and split servings down evenly among those. We chose their ravioli rose (a huge hit, there was nothing left for leftovers, much to my chagrin), spaghetti with meatballs on the side, fettucine alfredo, eggplant parmigiana and lasagna (with meat). I set up everything with Sandra well in advance, including one special order of gluten-free pasta, which the owner made himself. It tasted awesome (I tried a bite) and he made double the amount I requested, just in case we needed more.

People seemed to enjoy the pasta, and it made for some really awesome leftovers. For any event you're planning, I highly recommend going for the catering menu at one of your favorite restaurants. It's usually way cheaper than going through a catering company, and you'll get food you know you'll enjoy. For our low-key affair, this was a great option, especially because we preferred buffet-style serving to the more formal (and more expensive) hiring of a wait staff. In general, we didn't want any strangers at the wedding and we wanted to keep things as personal as possible. Mission accomplished.

And now, the part my nephew Ollie couldn't wait for: the cake. Alli the chef got us in touch with her friend Sam, a pastry chef who worked with Alli at Hook. Sam makes cakes for weddings and parties in addition to teaching at L'Academie de Cuisine. Eric coordinated with Sam via email to set up a tasting. I was blown away by how awesome her cake was, because I'm generally not a cake person at all. In fact, I suggested having brownies or cheesecake instead of a traditional cake, but Eric really wanted one and, as it turned out, we had a vintage, family cake-topper at our disposal, so why not use it?

At the tasting, we decided that to serve about 85 people we needed three tiers. Eric made the final call - the bottom and top layers would be chocolate cake with strawberry and vanilla filling, and the middle layer would be vanilla cake with strawberry and chocolate filling. Sam includes set-up in her overall fee, so she came sometime in the morning to set up the cake, which was a buttercream-frosted, lisanthus and snapdragon sugar-flower clad dream topped with my Nana's cake-topper, used at her wedding, my parents' and both my aunts' weddings.

Looking back at the pictures, Ollie is surreptitiously, but patiently, ever-present and waiting in every single cake photo. I don't blame him one bit.

Vendors: The Flowers

2008-08-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

One of the easiest aspects of the wedding to keep local and handmade was flower-purchasing and assembly.

For fresh flowers, I worked on a tip from Elizabeth. She had introduced me to a DC farmer's market, Fresh Farm Market. Looking through the list of vendors, I found a flower vendor which, as I saw on their website, hosts parties by appointment to go pick flowers for events. I emailed with Dave at Farmhouse Flowers & Plants to set up an appointment all the way back in February. He sent me a list of flowers that would be in season in June (lots and lots - spring and summer are great times for local flowers) and costs per stem.

June arrived, and in the midst of wedding chaos I schlepped Elizabeth, Mel and my mom out to Brookeville, Md. to pick some flowers the day before the wedding. You all should know me well enough to know that I had no color scheme in mind. I just wanted cool flowers for me, for my peeps (preferably some yellow for KB), and some that we could make into boutonnieres for Eric, his peeps and Shade.

The farm was about a 40 minute drive from Takoma, all the way up Georgia Avenue. Nestled in a hilly, open area, we found the farm - fields of awesome flowers, and a handful of greenhouses. One of the workers showed us around the greenhouses and pointed out what would hold up best, considering the flowers would have to be perky for about 36 hours after they'd been cut.

We walked over to the fields and talked with the ladies harvesting flowers there. We decided on dahlias for my bouquet. We bought some yellow lilies and white hydrangeas for the pillars at the church. I'm forgetting the type of flower I got for my peeps - maybe E or my mom can help remind me. We got the guys some dark red flowers for boutonnieres that matched my dahlias and blood-red snapdragons pretty well.

I came knowing that we needed specific bouquets: two for decoration at the chapel on pillars, three for my peeps, one for me and little buds for the lapels of Eric's peeps and Shade. We ended up with beautiful flowers, as you can see.

My mom, aunts and Nana put together all of the bouquets and boutonnieres with some scissors, ribbon, straight pins and a lot of love.

According to the Bridal Association of America (why there would be such a thing, I have no idea), the average couple spends about $700 on flowers, plus about $150 for the bride's bouquet alone. We spent $105 for all of our flower needs.

Now on to the fakes. We had some flowery decorations at every table. Thanks to the able hands of KB, Amanda, Eric and yours truly, we were able to make our own colorful faux flowers with floral wire and tissue paper. Rick gathered some sticks, and the morning of the wedding Amanda and I hurriedly fashioned the poofs onto the sticks and, voila - easy, cheap, colorful, vaguely southwestern paper flowers.

My sisters Callie and Rachel made the vases - empty Izze bottles with vintage-looking stickers pasted on. It all came together and looked awesome.

The last flowery touch was in your humble narrator's own hair. My peeps and I bought fake calililies and something blue at Michael's, and Amanda put it altogether in a perfect HB-style anti-updo.

All told, the flowers could have been a lot harder without a little help from my friends, and a lot of research on how to be as contrary as possible. But isn't that just like me?

Did we videotape it?

2008-08-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

Short answer: no.

Long answer: we did now!! (sort of)

Check it out! (You'll need to turn up your speakers).

Part I
(Procession through Hannah's Dad)

Part II
("The Luckiest" through Recession/Reception Montage)

If you want a copy of this video/slideshow, let us know! We'd be glad to put it on a DVD (playable in most standard DVD players) or to send you a digital copy.

Keep reading for making-of details.

Someone--I'm pretty sure it was my grandparents--asked me right before the ceremony if anyone was videotaping it. I'm pretty sure I mumbled something about assuming that somebody probably would, and if they did, hopefully they'd let us have a copy. The truth is that the term "videographer" never once crossed our minds in the course of planning this whole adventure. It's something I'd seen kicked around reading about weddings, but it wasn't something we ever thought about bringing in. I had thought about it so little that I was honestly unprepared for the question, so I didn't have an answer ready.

Our reasons were simple. We were on a tight budget. Bringing in a videographer would have been risky--I wouldn't have wanted to spend hundreds of dollars on some single-handheld-camera pan-and-scan operation. Bringing in someone with a more elaborate setup would have, of course, destroyed our budget. And of course, there's always the risk that we would have ended up with someone both expensive and incapable of making a good movie. None of this was ever openly discussed between Hannah and I--it didn't need to be. It was obvious.

I'm not sure when the idea of doing a full-length slideshow like this actually occured to me, but when you have a complete audio recording of an event and almost 1000 high-quality pictures of that event, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to come up with the idea. In fact, Lara Swanson's amazing pictures made it damn near impossible to mess up.

It was pretty painstaking. When I asked Dave to lend his recording skills to our wedding, my main goal was to get the music; I didn't specifically ask for him to record the whole ceremony because I didn't want to make it too big of an operation. Fortunately, just recording the whole thing made more sense than him having to press "stop" and "record" every 5 minutes, but since it wasn't recorded with ceremony itself in mind I needed to use my limited audio engineering skills to make a few enhancements.

A much less romantic view of our wedding.

Apparently, it was hard enough to hear Shade at the actual ceremony--it was even harder to make him louder on the recording without it sounding like he was in a wind tunnel. Overall, I think it turned out pretty well, and I added a couple of items to my recording bag of tricks in the process. It's still a bit on the quiet side and some sections are much louder than others, but it's definitely listenable. Setting the pictures to music was easier, but much more time consuming, because of the sheer numbers involved.

This is me trying to use special effects to show Hannah's and my parents all merging together to create one Superparent, a la the Megazord.

For example: I know it's hard to see, but that one screen shot above encompasses the first five and a half minutes of the slideshow, and almost 70 pictures (the preview window is transitioning between numbers 19 and 20). I never did count up the total number of pictures used in the whole thing, and I'm a little afraid to.

The point of this isn't just that I worked really really hard on this with a piece of software that was included with Windows and is so inflexible that whenever I went back and changed a picture in the beginning of the slideshow I would have to spend 15 minutes compensating for the resulting changes in timing through to the end, butterfly-effect style.

It's that, in my opinion, the work that went into this thing, and the fact that it ISN'T a video makes it tremendously more satisfying and entertaining to watch. When I was putting it together, I loved the flexibility that the photographs gave me. I loved that I could zip from right in front of Hannah, Shade, and me to a wide shot of the whole chapel. I loved the ability to hone in on a single gesture or moment--being able to zoom in on Hannah's admiring gaze during her dad's reading, or on the eye contact between me and my mom during hers. In a true video, these moments would have zipped by without anyone even noticing. With pictures, I was able to milk them. And of course, I was also able to do more interperetive, abstract things--particularly during "The Luckiest."

Don't get me wrong; it's pretty much the video of a wedding, so it's not Star Wars. There's lots of talking, no explosions, and only one picture of me pushing Hannah in a shopping cart. I think I got to touch upon a lot of the emotions that day, though. It took a lot more work, but I think the finished product is much more artistic and emotional than it would have been if it had been just one dude's camera's view of the ceremony.

But that's just, like, my opinion, man. Let us know what you think, and again, let us know if you want a copy!

Highlight Reel

2008-07-24T21:11:00.000-07:00

Can't believe that it's already been almost a month since this whole thing went down. Married life is good... the transition has been easy since there wasn't much to transition between as a couple. Everything is as good as it always has been, except now I have this ring on my finger that I accidentally try to eat sometimes when I'm eating Cheez-its. We're definitely settling back into a life-as-usual routine, with Hannah back to work and me back to spending most of my waking hours in my special summer vacation underwear.

But even a month later, we're still sorting through a lot. Thank-you cards went out earlier this week. The next big project for me has been assembling a wedding photo album (more details on that in a bit). We've also begun finding our favorite pictures, printing some of them off, and framing them. It's funny, I'm as wired, digital, and multimedia as they come (just check out our new computer!), so I found clicking through the pictures to be pretty satisfying. However, nothing has compared to actually printing the things off and looking at them. Seeing a physical representation of the wedding seems to confirm that it actually happened.

We're still pretty high on it. I bet that about a third of our conversations are still at least somewhat wedding-oriented.

Another thing we've been doing a lot is just swapping memories--some of which are shared, many of which aren't. With such a big production, both of us couldn't be there for everything awesome that happened throughout the weekend. Personally, I would have loved to have seen Ollie playing as a rather notorious character on the Wii, as well as one of my best friends showing up another one of my best friends on the dance floor with what was apparently the most awesome dance move ever. Also, as it's inevitable that we'll forget them over time, we've started committing these "remember whens" to paper, for the ages. So in 15 years, when our young son Boba Fett Belec asks what "Juan's confession" was, things are going to be nice and remembered.

Fortunately, though, many of our favorite moments were captured on camera, and this post is (ultimately) about one of them. Talk about your-collision-of-worlds moments. This one featured Matt, whom I have known since high school, doing an awesometastic disco dance with my new sister-in-law, Rachel, to the tune of "Canned Heat," by Jamiroquai (one of the most underrated bands in the bast 15 years)--the song featured in the dance scene in the movie "Napoleon Dynamite." Surreal, hilarious, and too awesome for words. I was really happy to be there for this one, and was even happier to find out that longtime friend/musical cohort Phil caught the moment on video. Thus it shall be preserved for the ages... or at least until this computer's hard drive does what my old one did.

Soooo ladies and gentleman, without any further delay... Rachel and Matt!!!!

Video courtesy of Phil.

East meets West

2008-07-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

This is a post all about our party favors: maple syrup and hot sauce. We wanted to pick gifts that represented both of our backgrounds. So we needed something southwestern and something northeastern.

Mine was a more last-minute decision - on a tip from my Mom, I got in touch with a Mesa, Ariz. based company for locally-made hot sauce and salsas. We ordered several cases from the site. They gave us free shipping since it was a big order, and the customer service was great.

But Eric's favors were the big hit of the day. His cousin Lyles taps trees and makes maple syrup himself on their family's dairy farm in West Chazy, N.Y. Especially considering our newfound locavore tendencies, I was really excited by the prospect of nabbing some homemade syrup. Mel got in touch with Lyles and figured everything out. In the spring, we heard from Mel and Rick that Lyles had put aside the best of the best for us. As of breakfast this morning, I can vouch that the syrup is de-licious. Especially on chocolate chip pancakes.

But typical of my peeps, the fun doesn't stop at good-tasting syrup. Here's a small sampling of the fun everyone had with syrup at the wedding. Photos courtesy of Lara Swanson, KB and Sally.

Amanda hoarded about 20 bottles.

My college roommates Kelly and Leah getting a crazy sugar high.

Kelly surreptitiously bags an extra bottle.

Ali, who I've babysat since she was four, marvels at the viscosity.

Even Eric and I couldn't help but get in on the fun. We took one bottle with us to share in our North Carolina adventures.

Hanging out at Jockey Ridge State Park.

Biking without a helmet, very dangerous.

Chillin at the beach.

Uh oh. Looks like he fell in with the wrong crowd.

Back at home, this bottle met its end on my chocolate chip pancakes.

So good. I highly recommend you all break out your West Chazy syrup and enjoy it on some pancakes or waffles as soon as possible. Many thanks go out to Lyles Trombly, who made the awesome syrup for us, and Mel, who helped coordinate.

Merci Beaucoup

2008-07-14T08:50:00.001-07:00

We owe a whole lot of "thank yous" to a whole lot of people. To start, I'll announce the roll-up donations of our guests to DC's Levine School of Music: $225

To kiva.org, our friends and family donated $200 in our names. Our first loans have already started to be paid back. Right now we're focusing on women in Central America. Check out our lender page and read some stories about our chosen entrepreneurs here.

Lots of pictures to come. Love to all.

The Luckiest

2008-07-06T21:08:00.000-07:00

boomp3.com

Click the little blue play button above to listen back to the "The Luckiest," from our wedding ceremony. The performance featured Hannah's sister McKay and the St. Charles String Quartet, and was recorded courtesy of Lucky Day drummer Dave Ray. It might take a second for the play button to appear, especially if you're on a slow-ish connection.

Also, click here and press the "Download mp3 file" button to download the song to your hard drive. This will let you put the song on your iPod, burn it to a CD, convert it to an 8-track tape, or whatever your preference may be.

There's lots Hannah and I could say about the music for both the ceremony and the reception, but the simplest way to put it is that it was something that we both put a lot of thought and effort into. Every song you heard that day was either hand-picked by us or requested. "The Luckiest" was such an obvious choice for the ceremony that we put off making a final decisions about the reception playlist for months. Sometimes it seemed like too much of a time-eater; I spent about 2 hours searching for a good techno remix of Led Zepplin's "Immigrant Song" that could have been spent, oh, I don't know, doing something important.

However, we have gotten a lot of compliments about the music (even from the photographers!), and since music is such a big part of both of our identities, it wouldn't have been right to have our wedding without our friends Ben Folds, Radiohead, Nickel Creek, the Weakerthans, the Beatles, Umphrey's McGee, Mark O'Connor, Andrew Bird, Porcupine Tree, Wesley Willis, Rufus Wainwright, Kanye West, Social D, Johnny Cash, Jamiroquai, etc etc etc there as well. We could have had the most unique, off the wall, utterly insane wedding ceremony imaginable, but the second that obnoxious Lonestar song started playing, it wouldn't have been us anymore. The fact that we were true to ourselves but everyone still enjoyed it is another example of how awesome and supportive everyone has been through this whole experience.

I'm hoping to have a recording of the rest of the music (and hopefully the ceremony itself) soon, and will hopefully be cooking up many delicious audiogoodies with them. Stay tuned.

E-rock

How high is 1200 feet??

2008-07-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

This high.

Since the honeymoon seemed like an ideal time to do a bunch of cool things that we don't normally do, I jumped on parasailing the second I saw that it was an option. I'm one of those people that's really really good on rollercoasters, so of the three options--600, 900, and 1200 feet--I went ahead and booked the highest-altitude option. It was kind of a no-brainer. Especially after the less-than-complete success I experienced as a very large hang glider, I was excited to do some legitimate flying. Better yet, Hannah and I could go together, on a side-by-side duo flight.

We made our appointment, waited for a few minutes at the dock in Manteo, NC, and got on the boat. The first "oh boy" moment was when I saw what would be supporting us as we dangled hundreds of feet above the ocean: two straps around each leg, held in place by one plastic buckle. Hannah captured this moment of realization on camera:

"Ohhhhh boy...."

However, we did not get very long to dwell on this idea. In the next minute, the chute was out...

"Y'arr!"

and we were airborne.

"Oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap oh cra..."

Immediately after our knees left the boat deck, Hannah and I knew that this would be our last time doing this. The winds tipped us to and fro as we rose into the air, ever so conscious of the fact that the full weight of each our lives rested one plastic buckle and two caribiner clips. Hannah and I have since determined that, throughout both of our lives, there is only one moment in which one of us was more scared than we were right then. Needless to say, we lived to tell the tale, and after a few minutes of... let's call it "settling," we did manage to relax and enjoy it.

This is what "enjoying it" looks like.

We got to snap some cool pictures and do something we'd never done before. In retrospect, I'm actually very glad we did it... personally, it's the kind of thing where if I hadn't done it, I'd still be wanting to right now. Instead, we've been there, done that, and won't need to ever do it again. But since it was something really different and since being scared absolutely shitless makes a good story, I'm glad we did it and rather enjoyed the experience--just in a different way than I thought I would.

Anyway, in other news, we got home late last night. We ended up cutting our trip a couple of days short, as a result of several factors: anticipating bad traffic for the weekend because of July 4th, feeling sunburned and dirty after spending the whole week in the sun, lacking a sufficient place to clean/cool off because of our relocation to a remote and remarkably Jeff Foxworthy-inspired campground, and just general exhaustion after such a busy and awesome week.

Ultimately, objective #1-A-prime for our honeymoon was to recover and relax following the stress and insanity of putting the wedding together, and when it appeared that we were getting more stressed, we figured it was time to just come back home, where we can relax and decompress further. As I recall, the amount of time from "Maybe we should just go home" to being in the car and on the road was about 40 minutes.

It was an awesome time and we're hoping to make it back this fall. For now, we're spending our time cleaning a little bit, sorting through pictures, relaxing, and reminiscing about how utterly incredible these past couple of weeks have been.

We'll keep you posted. Talk soon!

"There's something about flying a kite at night that's so unwholesome..."

2008-07-01T18:47:00.001-07:00

-- Marge Simpson

These were taken yesterday, following a day at the Wright Brothers Memorial, followed by swimming. Today began with some hiking, followed by even MORE swimming. Tomorrow is a doozy: "Lost Colony" tour followed by parasailing followed by dolphin watching. Oy gevalt!!

Tomorrow is also our first night at Hatteras Sands Resort, and since we're not really sure what their story is as far as internet access, this might be the last post until we get back. If so, talk to you all soon!

Science Experiment

2008-07-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

Question: Can 250+ pound male Homo Sapiens fly?

Answer:

Question #2: Can much smaller female Homo Sapiens also fly?

Answer:

Honeymoon is going AWESOME so far, we both love this place. More updates on all fronts as things progress and we get time to write about them.

Better than perfect (or, finally, a serious post)

2008-06-29T08:40:00.001-07:00

Thanks to everyone who made yesterday and all of this past week more incredible than we could have ever hoped for or imagined. Things are still a bit crazy right now, as we pack for the first stop on our honeymoon, so we'll get more specific with the thank-yous later. Keep checking back here for updates as we sort through all of the pictures, anecdotes, and music from this whole adventure and post them up here.

For now, please check out this awesome preview slideshow from our photographer, Lara Swanson at A Softer Image.

There's so much more where this came from, so we'll keep you posted. Thanks again, and we love you all!

How do I get there?

2008-06-23T22:30:00.000-07:00

One of those basic basic questions that gets overlooked. Now that the holy-shit-this-is-really-about-to-happen feeling has finally blossomed, I thought it would be a good time to put up a general travel guide. College Park is easy to get to, but kind of a tricky area once you get there. Therefore, I'm going to break it down into three phases: getting to College Park MD, getting to the Chapel for the ceremony, and getting to the reception.

PART I - College Park
DRIVING FROM POINTS NORTH -- A few tips.

--The Saw Mill River Parkway is a death trap. Steer clear of it unless you're the type who likes riding roller coasters, sitting on hot coals, and practicing acupuncture simultaneously. Take I-287 West towards the Garden State Parkway Instead.

--Unless you have EZ-Pass, bring $30 for tolls. It won't actually be that much, but it'll be closer than you want to know.

--When you pass into Maryland, don't get too excited. You've still got a good hour and a half left.

--Try to refrain from blinking during the trip, or you'll pass through Delaware without even realizing it.

--I like to take Garden State Parkway down about halfway through Jersey, pick up the Jersey Turnpike, and follow I-95 all the way to College Park (exit 25). It's a little heavy in the toll department, and traffic can be bad if you time it wrong, but the route is pretty simple and it can go by pretty quick if you hit the traffic right. Click here for a map from the Best Man's street to College Park, and alter to suit your tastes and/or location.

DRIVING FROM POINTS SOUTH, WEST
Ask Hannah, or just follow the North Star :-) Seriously, I'm not really qualified to answer this. It's taken me a good 6 years of driving around here to come up with the above tips, and after dozens of times driving up and down, trying different routes, and getting lost in Baltimore for an hour at 3 AM, this is all I have to show for it. Just find 95 North and you'll be fine. Or buy a GPS. Those are cool. Find one with Pierce Brosnan as a voice option. That'd be so cool. But I digress...

DRIVING FROM POINTS EAST
Hope your car is waterproof!

FROM THE AIR
The two major Airports - BWI and Regan/National both offer public transportation means of getting to College Park.
Regan/National has its own metro stop and it's such a pain in the to drive from Northern Virginia to Maryland that the metro is really the only practical option. More on the metro in a bit.

BWI has an automobile-rental facility; take 195 to 95 south and, depending on traffic, you'll be in College Park in between 25 minutes and 2 hours. However, if you follow signs to the busses you can catch a B-30 Metrobus, which will take you to the Greenbelt metro station--only one stop away from scenic College Park. Or just call Hannah and me, like many already have.

PART II - Memorial Chapel
FROM THE METRO
Them wedding bells is ringin at that red splotch on that map up there. If you find yourself in another town in the MD/VA area, coming from Regan/National airport, or metrobussing in from BWI, you'll want to make your way to the College Park - U of MD stop on the green line. Obnoxious and persistent delays aside (they say "Please allow and extra 30-45 minute to your travel time" like they're doing you a favor), the system is pretty clear, compared to other subway systems such as New York's. Just keep an eye on the map--they're posted like every 10 feet on the trains and in the stations. When you get to the College Park stop, call for help and someone will come get you.

HINT! Calling when you're at the Fort Totten metro stop will give the person retrieving you just enough time to meet you right when you get there. Not that Hannah and I used this tactic a million times in college or anything.

FROM THE ROAD
Because it's 2:15 in the morning, I'm going to copy and paste from the Memorial Chapel web site.

From the Capital Beltway (I-95/I-495):

Exit 25, (or Exit 27 if coming from Baltimore)
Go 2.5 miles south on US 1, past Campus Drive, toward downtown College Park
Turn right onto campus at Regents Drive, just before the downtown business district
Memorial Chapel will be on the corner of Regents and Chapel Drive
Turn left on Chapel Drive
Turn left at the dead end and enter Lot Y (Do not park in Lot W)

If Lot Y is filled:

Exit the lot at the barrier (which rises automatically as you approach it)
Turn right onto Chapel Drive
Turn left at Regents Drive
Take the first right into Lot L or continue in Lot L to the first right giving you access to Lot C2 or Lot C1 to your left

PART III - The Reception
If you are not joining us on our bike ride procession, the drive from the chapel to Cherry Hill Park is very easy. Just get back on Route 1 North, and drive on that for a little under 2 miles. When you see an IHOP on your left, hang an immediate left onto Cherry Hill Rd. If you go past the intersection with 495, or pass IKEA, you've gone too far.

Go down about a mile, and take a left into Cherry Hill Park campground. Tell the people at the gate that you're headed to the conference center. Go straight for as long as you can, and take a right at the fork (onto Yosemite Lane) and you'll be rolling into the Conference Center in no time.

If you've made it as far as some of you will have traveled to make it out, up, or down here, this'll be the easy part. We do have a couple of safeguards in place just in case. First, a nice big map of the campground. Second, injured groomspeep Grant will be leading a caravan from point A to point B.

I mean, this looks like a guy who knows where he's going, right?

So writing for an hour late late on a Monday night seemed like a really good idea at the time. We have another busy day tomorrow--they all are at this point. My family is coming into town, but I probably won't be able to put them to work until Wednesday. So since it's all Hannah and me again tomorrow I'd best be heading to bed at last.

And I just remembered that I forgot to do the dishes. God. Damn. It. Nothing like a warm bath of residual soy sauce spray before bed.

See you all in a couple of days!

If you really want to see me, check the papers and the T.V.

2008-06-23T13:14:00.001-07:00

Check it, droogs. In this scan from the Hill paper Roll Call, you can see two TU interns and yours truly reporting on endangered Pacific salmon issues at a press conference in front of the Capitol. Work has been hectic the past few weeks. We needed to get all copy done and off for design before I left. Honestly, I was glad to have something to think about besides wedding details.

We're gearing up for the last few days, party people. I hope you're excited. Eric and I had a stressful weekend, during which we just kind of wallowed and caved under the weight of the things we have left to do. I was really irritable and then spread the gloom to Eric, who became mopey. Eric noted last night that while I deal with stress by being explosive (while Eric calms me down), he deals with stress by drawing it all in (by then I just call a spade a spade while adding a little "we can do it!" pep). It works out quite well.

So methinks we're back on keel. Eric is dutifully doing my bidding during his first weeks of summer vacation, so he's making calls and running errands all over town. Our first peeps arrive tomorrow when Eric's folks and Ramie drive down from Connecticut. My parents drive in on Wednesday (they've been on the road since Friday) with my dad's mom, Grandma Mary. I'll pick up KB and Amanda on Wednesday night from BWI. My siblings come in starting late Wednesday night, and by Friday everyone should be in town to rehearse and throw down on Friday and Saturday. Eeegads it's almost here.

We'll be busy shuttling people around, picking flowers, picking up produce from the farm, and making poofs! Oh man. I can't wait to see you. Party on.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

2008-06-22T19:04:00.000-07:00

Hey peeps,

If you need a ride to or from the airport or the metro this week, call Eric or me. I have at least one friend metroing out to the ceremony the day of. Eric and I will probably be too frazzled to pick you up ourselves, but we're glad to delegate a shuttle service.

We definitely encourage as many people to metro as possible. You'll go to the College Park/University of Maryland stop on the green line. We'll get you to the chapel, reception and back to the train when you're ready to go.

True Love Waits (or "T-minus one week")

2008-06-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

One week to go and the stress-o-meter is about to burst. I remember Hannah and I joking that it was our "negative first" anniversary on 6/28/07 like it was yesterday. The fact that it's already been a year since then is too much. Time flies when you're... er... procrastinating.

Anyway, I've been ordering and arranging mp3's for the "DJ" for the past 2 hours. When tweaking the order of the dinner "set," I came across this song and remembered how much I love it. I can't say I know that much about what it actually means, but since the word "love" is in the title I'm just going to assume it's a good fit to commemorate the milestone. If it's not, then it's a damn good song anyway.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Thom Yorke...

Your Own Personal Waterloo

2008-06-18T08:01:00.001-07:00

My Achilles' heel is primping, my droogs.

Even though I well remember my junior high days when I would never, ever consider leaving the house without my Cover Girl compact (lest my forehead be oily), I somehow un-learned the arts of makeup and hair when I started rowing. To my jock friends, spandex and race shirts were the standard uniform, and I was lucky to have my contacts in and my teeth brushed in the 10 minutes between 4:15 a.m. and leaving for practice. Add that to a Catholic school uniform and a generally contrarian attitude and you get HB - to this day a looks minimalist. Observe, KB and me in the rowing glory days.

Ask my Nana and mom, who have tried to take me shopping a few times over the last few years for special occasions - college graduation outfit, job interviewing ensembles - it's no small feat to find clothes that I like and am willing to spend money on. Thus, shopping for some $5,000 strapless dress that looks like everyone else's was not in the cards for me or my budget.

Luckily for me, the women in my family kept their dresses. Un-luckily for me, my mom got married in the 80s when they apparently didn't eat. Even when McKay and me tried on my mom's dress at ages 12 and 15 respectively, we weren't close to fitting. My mom credits her long golf career with her super-human waist, but I wonder if she's just repressing memories from some sort of waist torture chamber akin to that scene in The Princess Bride.

When I tried on my Nana's dress last summer, it was similarly depressing. My mid-section, despite my oft' practiced 8 Minute Abs, was several inches too big for the dress.

So I gave up on my Nana's dress for a few hours, but after a pep talk from Mom decided to ask my Grandma Mary to use her sewing skills to help. Nana agreed to let us do anything we needed to do to the dress to make it fit my apparently gigantic body. Grandma Mary and my aunt B.J. did a lot of work on the dress between my visits to Arizona, creatively re-imagining the style to show a little skin in the small of my back to fix the rather large problem of the dress still being too small for me.

Then out of nowhere, June 2008 came along and we needed to fish or cut bait, as they say. So last week Mom and Dad rushed the dress to a seamstress, who picked up where B.J. and Grandma left off. The seamstress magically found some more material to let the dress out to my waist measurements, and in record time.

Even though the seamstress had my measurements I was really, really stressed that the dress still wouldn't fit. I was doing the twist and a million crunches a day. Dad ever-so-sensitively asked via Skype if I was "not gonna eat" until the wedding to fit into it. That is the grand tradition of modern brides, but I live off of food. Specifically, iced skim chai and potatoes.

Mom overnighted the dress to my office to arrive Tuesday. I asked E to come with me to the bathroom for moral support while I tried it on. I had to just get it over with immediately or else I'd drive myself crazy all day. E agreed she'd root me on if I had to stuff myself in. In fact, we had been recently inspired by an actual show that encourages brides to fit into their dresses rather than having dresses altered to fit them. Ever wonder what feminists think about that and other wedding shows?

But luckily for me, Mom and Dad's seamstress came through and the dress is now slightly too big! Victory is mine! I hustled to make an appointment at a local vintage-specialist cleaner in Chevy Chase, and they are going to do the final alterations and hand-clean the dress. The woman who helped me is getting married the same day in Kensington. I chatted her up and she rushed my order through so it'll be done on Thursday. What luck!

My next mission - an elusive full slip, which I'll surely sell on ebay June 29.

And with the help of my PM Amanda, my costume, hair and makeup Achilles' heel doesn't stand a chance. We're all gonna look awesome.

The Question: What Do I Wear?

2008-06-15T17:00:00.000-07:00

The answers:

Buuut seriously, here's what we're thinking.

The wedding and the reception will both be "casual." Not still-in-your-Stewie-Griffin- pajamas-attending-that- COMM-class-you-hate-that- time-when-you-were-a-sophomore casual, but wedding casual. I'll be in a new suit, picked out from Men's Wearhouse with the help of groomspeep Grant. Hannah will be in her Nana's wedding dress for the ceremony, and a sun dress for the bike ride and reception. Wedding parties and parents will all be similarly attired.

However, with high temperatures these days consistently in the 80s and 90s and the humidity somewhere between 70 percent and the inside of a goldfish bowl, we still want everybody to be comfortable. The suggestions below will be best suited to keeping everybody looking sharp and feeling good.

Womens
Sun dresses
Shorts
Skirts
Anything linen
Nice sandals

Mans
Slacks
Nice shorts
Polos
Nice sandals

Obviously, there are other accessories and aspects of the wardrobe to consider (such as hats), but think along these lines and you'll be fine. In the end, if you show up too far on either extreme of the fashion spectrum, we'll just be happy to see you.

Cruisin for some Boozin'

2008-06-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

Finally, the wheels are in motion--a dangerous, weaving motion that endangers all of the other wheels on the proverbial road. That's right, the beer is on the way!

Hannah and I decided (generally) what beer we wanted at the reception back in March. What ensued was a three-month odyssey in which we discovered that one of our favorite local breweries has been bought out, another requires a catering service that won't call you back, and just how hard it is to find a beer/liquor store employee who can speak English.

However, an unexpected day off as a result of mass power outages in the county gave me some time for decisive action. Working on a tip from an old bud, Andrew, I contacted Corridor Wine & Spirits , a veritable beer warehouse in Laurel, MD.
Many of the specifics are still falling into place - I received a call from them not 15 seconds ago, as I wrote this - so this may change, but as it stands right now, here's what we're going to have available:

Flying Dog Classic Pale Ale - Meet the alpha of the pack... Flying Dog Classic Pale Ale is brilliant amber in color and dry hopped with buckets full of Cascades for an unrivaled hop flavor and aroma. This is a true representation of an American-style pale ale, using the finest ingredients. Flying Dog Classic Pale Ale is a multi-award winning product and is consisently ranked as one of the best pale ales in the US. This is what craft beer is all about.

Flying Dog "Old Scratch" Amber - This dog enjoys his days in the sun... Old Scratch Amber Lager, is a malty, mellow beer that is fermented at medium temperatures to develop both ale and lager characteristics. "Old Scratch" raises the standard in the amber lager category.

Rogue Hazelnut Brown Nectar - Hazelnut Brown Nectar is a nutty twist to a traditional European Brown Ale. Dark brown in color with a hazelnut aroma, a rich nutty flavor and a smooth malty finish. Dedicated to the homebrewer in each of us, Hazelnut Brown Nectar Ale is a blend of Great Western 2-row Pale, Munich, Hugh Baird Brown, Crystal 80 and Crystal 135, Carastan, and Beeston Pale Chocolate malts; hazelnut extract; Perle and Saaz hops. HazelNut Brown Nectar is available in a 22-ounce bottle, a special commemorative 3-litre bottle with ceramic swing-top, and on draft.

Flying Dog is a VERY local microbrewery out of Frederick, Md. Rogue is most definitely NOT local, coming to us all the way from Oregon. The Rogue in particular might not be able to make it to the reception, so we're going to have extra Flying Dog just in case. Whatever the combination, it will all be damn delicious, so drink up!

Disclaimer: for the underaged or anyone not wishing to consume anything with alcohol, we will have plenty of Rolling Rock (below) available as well.

T-minus 23 Days

2008-06-04T18:59:00.000-07:00

Well my droogies, I'd be lying if I said the whole less-than-a-month-away thing didn't sneak up on me. So welcome to freak-out time.

There's nothing specific to flip shit over, just an impending sense of doom. The nightmares started a few weeks ago, but I quickly started re-reading Offbeat Bride, which is so awesome in so many ways. I reviewed the chapters on family drama, dealing with stress (although the author's methods are different than mine) and food tips.

Eric and I seem to have meetings or other plans every freakin' weeknight, so we've been wigging out over other things. Today I nearly cried over what should have been simple editing, and I ran out of words trying to explain to a colleague that "actually, I'm not bringing anything to the breakfast buffet tomorrow" because I'll be pulling out my hair trying to get a reasonable amount of sleep, so I can't take the time to bake or buy something. Today we had a late meeting in Rockville, so I took the train to meet Eric up there because it's close to his school. After eating, we went to hang out in his classroom, where he took a nap on the floor while I watched the admittedly cathartic Clean House.

All right, enough venting. For news, we have a few things. The first is that I'll need anyone's help putting together these pom-pom centerpieces, as well as huge pom-poms for pew decorations. There won't be a tremendous amount of work here: some stick and jar gathering mostly. And since it's a small wedding (about eight tables and 10 or 12 pews' worth of people) there won't be too many poofs. Methinks my poofs should be yellow instead of orange because yellow makes me think of Bode. My mom is a master big-ass bow maker, so I'm sure she can improvise a cool poof/bow system for attaching them to pews.

Although Belec is still sorting out the beer, my mom and Nana have graciously tended to the wine and champagne, both of which my parents are carting out from Arizona's Kokopelli vineyard.

I've been talking with Mama Lucia's, and I found out they have gluten-free pasta options, so let me know if you're interested in/require a gluten-free meal.

I know all of this is frenzied and unconnected, but you try learning to waltz from YouTube while juggling evening appointments and hard magazine deadlines fast approaching. Go ahead, give it a try.

That's all for now, my droogies. It's bedways for me.

A White Trash Wedding

2008-05-20T19:37:00.001-07:00

I'm going video-embedding crazy over here, but I had to share this one that I found a few weeks ago.

Why we're not serving hard liquor at our party, Exhibit A.

Videoblogging test run

2008-05-20T19:15:00.000-07:00

Aaaand with the latest news on Hannah and Eric's wedding, we go to our correspondent in the field... Rusty, the narcoleptic dachshund.

Rusty??? Rusty? Oh... damn...

Our Anti-Registry

2008-05-19T18:47:00.001-07:00

Many of you party people have been asking the age-old wedding question:

Where are you registered?

Eric and I decided that rather than registering for a bunch of expensive, useless shit from the most boring store ever we're going to suggest that you make a donation in our names at one of two worthy organizations.

My pick is kiva.org, a micro-lending non-profit that allows people to donate in small increments to entreprenuers in poverty-stricken nations. Oh, man. I'm on hyphen overload from that first sentence. Anywho, the payback rate is incredibly high, and when you get your loan money paid back, you can re-invest it in another small business. Through Kiva, you can help a woman in Azerbaijan buy four calves for her dairy farm, a family in the Dominican Republic expand their general store and a woman in Kenya start a dressmaking business.

If you so choose to donate to Kiva on our behalf, you can easily do so online here. You'll see that you can fill in either Eric's or my name and email, so we'll get an acknowledgment of your gift.

Eric's pick is the Washington, D.C. based Levine School of Music, which provides free music instruction to hundreds of kids. It makes music accessible especially to kids who couldn't otherwise afford it. You can learn about the organization at levineschool.org, and you can donate through the website and put our names in the reference box or by mailing a donation c/o Stan Spracker to:

Sallie Mae Hall
2801 Upton Street
NW Washington, DC 20008.

We feel pretty strongly that this is the biggest opportunity we'll have to make good-sized donations to worthy causes, and we don't feel like we need new plates or toasters. We've been living out of the nest long enough to have all the necessities and more. Between us, we have plenty of crap to fill up the house we'll be saving for once this whole shebang is over.

So unless it's handmade or a family heirloom (in the case of our relatives), we'd like you to consider the aforementioned organizations.

Thanks everyone.

Song Requests

2008-05-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

We want them!!

In an effort to cut costs and make the reception itself more personal, Hannah and I decided very early in the planning process that we would forego a band OR a DJ, and handle the music ourselves. Naturally, this has the significant downside of one of us spending the night manning the stereo, loading CDs and songs all night long, but we came up with another idea that was both affordable and low-maintenance. We'll borrow my band's PA system, plug in an iPod (or laptop) with a prearranged playlist, hit "play," and call it a night! We'll still be pausing and restarting as the night progresses and we need to move from one thing to the next, but it'll be low maintenance and allow us much more control over the music than we would have had in almost any other case.

Except for putting the playlist itself together, which is where you come in. While playing through my collection of Umphrey's McGee (pictured above) albums was briefly considered, Hannah and I both decided that at least a little variety would be ideal. We've been combing through our respective collections for songs that are meaningful for the occasion ("Anyone Else" by the Moldy Peaches), straight funky/dancey ("Billie Jean is NOT my luv-ah..."), and oddly amusing ("Contact" by Phish).

However, in order to fill in those 6-something hours, we really need your ideas. We're kind of envisioning the music in two "sets:" one entry-and-dinner set of mellower stuff, and the get-out-of-your-seat-and-shake-your-moneymaker set in which people will get out of their seats and kindly shake their moneymakers (also pictured above). While we could use suggestions for both, we need ideas for songs that will get people up and dancing and/or rocking out.

Hannah's and my tastes touch on most genres and time periods (north of the 60's anyway), so we're down for almost anything. However, that doesn't REALLY matter... we want as many people dancing as possible, so request whatever will get you out of your seat and excited*.

Email us or leave a comment with any requests you have, and we'll see what we can do!

*To a point. Any requests for GWAR, C.W. McCall, or Nickelback will result in immediate removal from the guest list and the immediate dispatch of twelve Jehovah's Witnesses and/or Cylon Centurions to your doorstep.

Ever wonder why the wedding is in June?

2008-05-03T19:54:00.000-07:00

If you're wondering about the inspiration for this blog's url, or why we chose a June date to get married, you must not be a Moulton.

To see a song and dance explanation of the good luck properties of the month of June, watch this video from one of the best musicals ever. In the first half, you'll see six women in underwear singing about how they can't wait to get married and have babies...in June.

Now I know what you're thinking: "Bad feminist!" I won't even get into the greater plot of "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers." It happens to be one of the best movies of all time.

Bike Route

2008-05-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, Eric and our brides and groomspeeps plan to bike the three-ish miles from the chapel to the reception site, via the University of Maryland Campus and the Paint Branch trail.

We finally got the chance to do a test-run in beautiful springtime weather when Mel and Rick came down to visit last weekend. We improvised an awesome route through campus, past the main malls and the big flowery "M" on a downhill coast to connect with the Paint Branch biking and running trail on the other side of campus. We meandered on the trail for about two and a half miles to get to Cherry Hill road.

As Rick says, 95 percent of the ride is easy and beautiful. Until you get to the last half-mile, the route is a breeze. I have to admit, though, that the home stretch neccessitates on-street riding on the two-lane Cherry Hill road, and a semi-wicked hill.

I figure if I warn you in advance, guarantee safety in numbers, and offer that we can walk up the hill if it seems too daunting, then I can still in good conscience encourage you to participate.

It took us about 28 minutes from chapel to reception site, and I'm guessing it will take a bit longer on the day of. Definitely get in touch if you want to be part of our bike parade. If I can't scrounge up a bike for you among my friends, then we'll rent bikes overnight from E's Bike the Sites.

Hurry, Hurry

2008-04-27T09:45:00.001-07:00

Granted, we didn't put a "please RSVP by..." date on the invitations, but as we work on booking the catering and cake and all that good stuff, we need to have the numbers of peeps as close as possible. If you're reading this and know whether or not you're coming, but haven't emailed Hannah or me yet, go on and let us know. If you'd prefer to call or let us know in person, that's good too.

We're going to start sending the posse after people around mid-May. You don't want to frak with these guys.

Food Detail

2008-04-24T08:22:00.000-07:00

As has been documented on this blog and in countless frantic conversations with family and friends, I've been pulling my hair out over affordable, good food that comes from relatively local sources. As prevalent as the "green" message is nowadays, I've found that very few articles, books or web sites have anything new to offer. It's the same messaging over and over: bring your own bags to the grocery store, set the timer on your thermostat. Thus, even though local-food awareness is on the upswing, I had a terrible time getting responses from caterers or even farms about buying local food for the wedding.

At one point, I thought I'd have to get in touch with several farms and source vegetables from some, dairy and meat from some others. Then E and me would pretty much handle all the food ourselves, with a lot of advice from E's girlfriend Alli, a culinary student and chef at The Inn at Little Washington. Due to crazy, unpredicatble chef hours, it's unclear even now if Alli can attend the big day, so E and I were looking at lots of prepping and freezing ahead of time, with some frantic work the morning of.

A few weeks ago, it dawned on me that I'd have enough stress without worrying about chopping and tossing in the hours before the wedding. Plus, E is my best friend and numera una bridesperson. I don't want her shuffling around when she could be having a ball.

And as much as I'd like to be a bad-ass Marylander and catch enough crabs to feed us all, somehow our last excursion to the Chesapeake Bay leaves me lacking confidence (notice the banana-peel bait).

My big wake-up call came when I googled vegetarian catering on a whim, and spoke with Gail at Gail's Vegetarian Catering in DC. I explained that although neither Eric nor I are vegetarians, we want to avoid a big meatfest (sorry, Dad) for health, ethics and sustainability reasons. Her website mentioned local-sources and seasonal menus, so I thought it would be cool to see what she could offer, since free-range meat (what we try to eat when there's not some half-priced happy hour burger special tempting me) is kind of hard to get in bulk, and more expensive than our budget allows.

Although I didn't end up having Gail fully cater, I can't tell you how much she helped me put things in perspective. I'm so abrasive about what I expect my relationship and the wedding (which I think should reflect the relationship) to be. I wanted the reception to be so non-formal, but I realized that having a free-for all and setting no expectations for my guests would be a disaster. On her advice, Eric and I set a schedule (which you can see in the previous post) and a lot of things have fallen into place since then.

For one thing, we decided to go with our favorite local Italian place, Mama Lucia, for pasta entrees. We're getting equal amounts of the following, served buffet style for you to choose:
Cheese ravioli
Fettucini alfredo
Eggplant parmigian
Spaghetti and meatballs (meat)
Lasagna (meat)

I know some of you have dietary restrictions, which we can deal with on an individual basis.

For the salads, I contacted a farmer who I know through Community Sustained Agriculture, which is a program where you can buy a "share" of a farm and then receive weekly deliveries of vegetables for the entire growing season. It ends up being really cheap, and you get lots of different kinds of vegetables to work with. Plus, you're supporting your local farm and your food isn't travelling half-way around the world to get to you.

Since a share is for a famiy of four, Eric and I teamed up with E and Alli to buy a full share of vegetables for 2008, and our deliveries start in June. I emailed the farm, Fresh and Local CSA in Shepherdstown, and Farmer Allan (yep, seriously) was very enthusiastic about selling me greens and vegetables for salads. I'll probably pick them up the week of at our normal CSA delivery site in Silver Spring. As far as what the salads will have in them, that depends on what's available that week. That's the fun of seasonal living.

We plan to order baguettes or some other sort of dipping-in-olive-oil bread to be served with the salads. For that, we're going to Takoma Kitchens, a bakery down the street from us on East-West Highway.

But I still wanted something special to greet everyone as they arrived at Cherry Hill. I thought of something Gail told me that her catering company offers: a fruit, nut and vegetable cornucopia display. It's the most pricey course so far, but Eric and I agreed that we've cut enough corners to have a mini-splurge for a beautiful fruit display.

Eric can fill you in on the cake details once we have our tasting with Sam next week, but I for sure recommend getting in touch with any chef or culinary school you know to see if they can recommend a private pastry chef to do your cake. Sam is giving us a major deal (including delivery and set up), and I think it'll turn out awesome.

After the cake, we plan to put out appetizers that our family members have agreed to help us with. The idea is that all the major wedding events are over, now everyone can either hang out, dance, swim, play video games or even leave if they're getting tired. But for those who want to stay, there will be something to munch on if you're hungry.

Eric is handling the beer. We plan to get kegs of our favorite local brews, probably from Wild Goose. We'll get at least one light and one dark beer, and the ratio will be something like 3:1 light to dark. I'm researching Virginia wines, and hope to have two bottles of red and two bottles of white per table, one bottle of champagne per table, and one bottle of Martinelli's for the kids. We also plan on having lots of cold water, iced tea and home-made lemonade.

Schedule

2008-04-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

We finally made some decisions about food, and I'm happy with where we ended up with local sourcing. Here's the schedule for the big day.

10:00 a.m. Bridespeople, groomspeople and family photos
11:00 a.m. Ceremony
12:00 p.m. Bike parade takes off for Cherry Hill reception site (a 2.5 mile ride)
12:15 p.m. Non-bikers arrive at Cherry Hill/fruit cornucopia out
12:30 p.m. Bike party arrives at Cherry Hill
1:00 p.m. Eric and Hannah's dance, then Hannah and Dad's dance
1:30 p.m. Salad and bread out
2:30 p.m. Pasta entrees out
4:00 p.m. Cake, ice cream, desserts
5:00 p.m. Upbeat dance music starts/appetizers and any remaining food out for grazing

You're invited!

2008-04-14T19:42:00.001-07:00

Details on food, schedule and entertainment to come, as soon as I figure it all out.

Cake Post

2008-04-09T20:11:00.000-07:00

Hey hey, it's time to hear from some Groomage.

As resident cake, sweets, junk food, and all-things-bad-for-you expert, I have taken on the duty of arranging for the cake. (And beer. More on that later.)

Although Hannah's opinions on cake are fastidious enough that my request for peanut butter filling was denied (I didn't even bother to suggest a cake-sized peanut butter cup ) local pastry chef Sam Burdman and I have discussed several possibilities that will please the eye and belly alike.

I'm a chocolate lover myself, but considering the oodles of white people that will be in attendance, I thought it a good idea to have the cake made up of both chocolate and vanilla layers. There's going to be a filling; one option is to have alternating flavors, with chocolate filling in the vanilla layer(s) and vice versa. This would be fitting as it would symbolize the racial unity as Hannah's and my peoples (German Catholic and Irish Protestant) come together at last.

I also like berries though. Personally, I'm feeling a raspberry jam filling.

I'm also hoping to sneak in one surprise slice filled with toothpaste.

Means of transport!

2008-02-05T06:45:00.000-08:00

So how do you guys think Hannah and Eric should get from ceremony to reception? I've included some options.

They're the only two people I trust to make that last one way less barf-inducing.

But really the mode of transport will probably be some home-brew combination built on their tiny deck out of reclaimed construction materials and a free bike from Craigslist.

Recruiting volunteers for safety tests!

HALP! The Prime Minister has gone mad with power!

2008-01-31T02:17:00.000-08:00

This is totally serious.

Look what I found in her secret prime ministrial files under the code name Pretty Girls:

AAAAGHHHH! There were others but I was too scared to look in the file that was horrifyingly titled Big Fuchsia Ruffles.

Awesome, Local Photography and Music

2008-01-26T12:40:00.000-08:00

Well my droogies, I've been sick with some sort of uber-cold since I last wrote to you. But after four sick days, two bottles of NyQuil and a serious prescription, Eric and I have managed to get quite a lot done. We've signed contracts and paid our very first vendors.

I found local photographer Lara Swanson through an advertisement on offbeatbride.com. She is very cool and appreciates unique weddings, and is really excited to shoot our bike ride to the reception. It's really great to work with someone who isn't scoffing at your choices - you'd be surprised how much flack comes along with the simplest of diversions from the norm. There will be two photographers on the big day - Lara and Jen Smoose, who shoots for the Washingtonian. Eric and I are pumped to have such awesome coverage within our budget.

In other news, Eric tracked down a hip, young string quartet. Once Eric showed me their website, we couldn't help but daydream about starting a quartet of our own - I'll take fiddle and Eric will shred the cello ("...and I'm jello, baby.") Not only do they look and sound fantastic, but they're very affordable and can learn our choices for processional and recessionals. They also have a great mix of songs, including lots of the Beatles, in their existing repertoire.

There have been several new developments on the food front, since our last talk with Alli and E. Stay tuned for talk of local produce, vintage cake-toppers and a startling amount of country music.

Invitations Photo Shoot Outtakes

2008-01-13T10:14:00.001-08:00

The photoshoot this weekend with Erin went swimmingly. It was about two hours of shooting with cut-out letters, posters and even some climbing rope. Here are a few outtakes...on the final product, keep an eye out for a fifth hand in some frames!

"I'm on a roll this time."

2008-01-09T10:26:00.000-08:00

My trip to Arizona for Christmas proved inspiring for the wedding in several ways. A few significant highlights:

Grandma Mary (dad’s mom) worked her magic on my Nana’s (mom’s mom) dress, letting out the seams a bit to fit my non-girdled waist. As you may know, I’ve declared Amanda Ellexson the prime minister of costume, hair and makeup. She asked for pictures of the dress, so she could see how it fit. But I forgot to take pictures, so this drawing is the best I can do, what with the dress in Arizona and me in DC. I can’t decide whether I should be ashamed or proud.

I have more to say about costuming, but I’ll save that until I consult with the parliament.

On the food front: although we can fall back on a number of cheaper (but no less delicious…mmmm Boston Market) options, I’ve been talking with the Festive Foods peeps in Bethesda, Md. as a catering option. For months I looked high and low for caterers who work with locally produced food but didn't find anything, not even on Local Harvest. Festive Foods does work with local purveyors, according to an article in the Washingtonian. I’m looking forward to hearing what they have to say.

Just this week we've progressed a lot on the invitations front. Inspired by these save the date cards, Eric and I decided to do something similar for our invitations. I’ve enlisted the help of our incredible Trout designer, Jim Gray, to take care of the photoshop and design elements, and our friend Erin Dooling has agreed to take the pictures for us. The wording will be different, since we're skipping save the date cards. I figure everyone who's coming already knows the date - so get a pencil and write it down, for goodness sake. We might shoot as early as this weekend. I’m thrilled that a whim on Monday has become reality by Saturday. These will look wicked.

Elizabeth and I talked over a few options for the invitation design, and I think I’ve settled on the tall-skinny folding card, with the photo-booth awesomeness pasted onto the cover. My smiley Eric-and-Hannahs might not completely capture the tone, but you get the point. I’m enlisting the help of my crafty elder sisters for paper choices and a cross-country invitation sweatshop.

Well, I’m off to return a call from the Festive Foods peeps. More on that and my possible costume changes later.

"What a Man, What a Man, What a Man, What a Mighty Good Man"

2007-12-09T17:45:00.000-08:00

Here's how I know Eric is the one - such an awesome display of manliness.

We had a few memos last week about annual exterminations in the building. A few days later a new, more troubling memo said something about mice and "the problem getting worse for about two weeks before it gets better."

So my droogies, this filled my head with horrible thoughts of mice-rats and roaches dramatically death-marching around my apartment but I tried not to think about it. Until...the smell.
Eric and I came home on Friday and promptly declared, "It smells wierd in here." We independently came to a really gross conclusion-slash-guess: dead mouse in the radiator.
Eric slipped a note in the landlord's office. We figured we could hold out until Monday. About an hour later, the smell got exponentially worse, and I wondered aloud if we could open the radiator ourselves.
Eric retrieved his screwdriver and a ziploc bag, and I was being very helpful by reminding him to be careful while perched atop a chair halfway across the room. He opened the radiator, he coughed.

E: Step outside, I'll take care of this.
H: Oh my God! It really is a mouse?
(H steps outside, a minute passes, E pokes his head out of the door and shows me some tongs).
E: You weren't especially attached to these tongs, were you?

I wasn't. Eric told me to look away when he passed me in the hall to take the tongs and the dead-mouse-in-a-ziploc to the dumpster.
Eric told me the thing was "brown and squishy" and was definitely decomposing in our radiator.
Isn't that the manliest thing ever? I don't think I could ever do that. My hero.

99 Problems [Edited for Explicit Information]

2007-12-06T13:57:00.000-08:00

We're back on track, sort of. I'll be going back to Arizona at Christmas, at which point I hope to meet with my Grandma Mary and Aunt BJ to alter my Nana's dress. I need to have my mom get it cleaned beforehand. Here are a few pictures from my Nana's wedding - 50 years ago!

I thought this would be especially interesting to my bridespeoples - hereafter referred to as "bridespeeps" - whom I have given no direction whatsoever as far as wardrobe. I figured they'd like it better that way, because there's no way I'm picking out ugly, expensive dresses for them to buy. I'll have Amanda look at the dress when I'm in Arizona at Christmas, and I'll let her direct Bode and Elizabeth since she has an eye for these things. Poor Amanda - she asked for some direction for their dresses or accessories and all I could come up with is "my favorite colors are blue and green."

Amanda is thankfully handling my hair and makeup, which she always does gorgeously. I told her I wish I had a clone of her to also take photos, because she makes everyone look so good on film. Alas, I'll have to hire one. She's given me some advice on that, and I need to get on the ball. I'm budgeting about $1,500 for that, including engagement photos. My biggest issue with a photographer is going to be posed shots, because I usually loathe them. Especially since my intended is a ham/cornball, we don't do well posing. Smile totally unnaturally, slouch...cheese!

I have indeed started budgeting, which is horrifying. I have more of an idea what food and catering will cost, thanks to Alli. We're planning on Alli directing the menu, and friends of hers doing the actual cooking, running food to the buffet and cleaning. I was surprised at how cheap foodpeeps are to hire - $12 an hour. I'll have to ask Alli how much they're generally tipped. I'm guessing 20 percent. It's good to have someone around with insight into that world, otherwise I wouldn't have ever considered hiring cooks. I thought they'd be way more expensive.

I've decided not to send save the date cards, because of expense and trees and time. So look for invitations around February. Now, if only I could finalize the list. I'm sure I'll be updating a lot more from here on out.

Reception in a trailer park?

2007-08-08T19:50:00.000-07:00

That's right, party people. We have a reception site pinned down, the Cherry Hill Conference Center right down the street from the University of Maryland. Eric and I had met a pagan couple who recommended the place, since they are having their reception at Chery Hill in October. Being blue-eyed and naive as we were in the evil, expensive ways of weddings, we thought the rental fee was outrageous - especially given that the place is in the middle of a campground and across the street from Shoppers.
But we learned quickly how expensive everything is in warped wedding world, and having nothing to show from months of research, we revisited the idea of Cherry Hill when Eric's parents were in town last weekend. They visited the place and loved it, so we went to check it out for ourselves. Wandering around the building, it was just one of those moments when things fall into place. It was perfect. It wasn't some trashy trailer park as I had feared. It was a campground (replete with RVs, but a campground nonetheless) with a building perfect for the huge party after my wedding. The building has an oak-floor ballroom, a catering kitchen, a balcony and three separate rooms for our use. Having a kitchen on-site means that Alli can probably still cater, and having extra rooms will be wicked for karaoke or guitar hero or whatever else occurs to us!
You haven't heard the best part yet, my droogies! Because of Cherry Hill's prime location, I will realize my dream of biking from the ceremony to the reception! I invite the bridal party and whoever else is interested to decorate your bikes (I also know where we can rent them for you out-of-towners) and ride with us down the Paint Branch Trail from the university to Cherry Hill. It's an easy ride of about two miles.
I'm checking into discounted camping rates for my guests - if I can wrestle some sort of arrangement, I'll encourage people to camp.
Eric and I are so relieved to have this albatross off our necks. A reception site had alluded us for months, but now we feel like we can focus on the details since the big decisions are behind us.
Remember, a wedding reception is essentially a huge party. So meet me in College Park for a damn good time.

Running on empty.

2007-07-25T18:39:00.000-07:00

The most-asked question recently:

"So, how's the wedding planning going?"

Sigh. It's going nowhere, to be perfectly honest. I've made a half-hearted attempt at gathering addresses for save the date cards. I saw a dress in the Express (for those of you not in the DC area, the Express is a small newspaper published by The Washington Post designed to be readable on your metro ride to work) that was cute. I saved the clip - that counts for something, right? I searched craigslist a few times for vintage dresses.

Honestly, I don't think things will pick up at all planning-wise until I:
a) move into my new apartment, which will be later this week.
b) have a serious talk with my parents about what they're willing to do moneywise.
c) have the same such talk with Eric's parents.
d) figure out what's left.
e) stop having, "why didn't we just elope?" thoughts.

The next step has been the same for months: find a reception site. I'm no longer sure that Alli the Curious Cook can cater. Food licenses and whatnot. I'm thinking about advice my mom and a coworker gave, which is to think about having the reception at a restaurant. That might be a good option, since that skips most of a rental fee. I'm sure there's some fee involved, but I'd bet it's not in the thousands. Sheesh.

Ok, I need some goals for God's sake. How about this: secure a reception site by October. Start making save the date cards and invitations in November and finish by January. Inquire about family wedding dresses when I'm home in September.

I think that's a good start. Now keep me to it.

You can only "Save the Date" after you've set a date.

2007-05-09T16:57:00.000-07:00

After months of procrastination, I finally took the plunge - I put money down and reserved the UMD Chapel for June 28, 2006 at 11:00 am.
After the DC Offbeat Brides meeting this winter, I started reading the book and had lots of ideas. Feathers in my bouquet, a string quartet playing Radiohead (Eric's brainchild), make my own dress, bubbles, ride fancy bikes from the chapel to the reception area et cetera. We had the date hand-picked, but my unemployment prevented me from putting money down for the date.
Here we are, months later and I've finally gotten around to it. Since then I've largely set aside any ideas or concerns about the whole thing. Now that the date is set in stone, it's flip-out time!
Eric has talked me down from frenzies about cost and time, and I'm trying to keep the anxiety at bay. At least until about this time next year.
Some good news - Eric is, as of this fall, also gainfully employed. Both sets of parents have offered to help us pay for a wedding which we hope to keep cheap, cheap, cheap with manual labor (this means you!) and creativity. We streamlined The Guest List to about 60 people, expecting it to bloat a little between now and then.
My parents are throwing us a reception in Arizona, which helps tremendously because it gives the option of involving a lot of people even though I have to be really picky with The List.
Eric and I are thinking about renting a hanger at the historical College Park airport for the reception. We haven't inquired yet, but it might be a cool option. The idea was inspired by Eric's high school graduation ceremony, which was at a Southbury, Conn. airport.
There is one aspect of the day which I'm glad to hand over to someone else - the food. Alli Sosna, Elizabeth's girlfriend and a real-life fancy chef, is doing the food (check out her blog on sustainable seafood and other food curiosities).That's all I know. I gave her the date today. I'll have a headcount later. She knows how I feel about potatoes. I'm confident that that's all I need to do about the food. What an incredible resource!
I feel strange about having the date set. It's not just something we're talking about doing anymore. The wheels are in motion.
Next step: Save the Date cards and find a reception location.

What we know so far.

2007-03-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Hannah Belle and Eric's wedding blog! We are planning a June 2008 date at Memorial Chapel at the University of Maryland in College Park. If you are a Moulton, you can hardly be at a loss for why I prefer June (think Seven Brides for Seven Brothers).
Eric and I have been serious about each other since we first started dating, so we knew the location of a wedding would be problematic, given that he's a damn Yankee and I'm a desert rat. I tried to convince him to elope and then have a reception on each coast, but he is more romantic than me and insisted on the ceremony.
Once we decided on a full-fledged wedding, there wasn't really a question as to where it would take place. We often played frisbee or flew kites on the grassy malls of UMD, especially in front of the chapel. We want to get married in the part of the country where we met and first planned a future together.
We're not sure about places for a reception yet. Outside from the university, College Park is kind of sketchy. Ideally, we want to impress our out-of-towners with a reception somewhere on the Potomac, but we'll see.
The wedding party is predictable. Our parents will be involved somehow. Elizabeth will be maid of honor (duh) and Eric's best friend Juan will be the best man. I want my sisters Rachel and Callie to be bridespeeps along with my brother Andrew and my brother-in-law Mike, Katie Bode and Amanda. Eric's groomspeeps will probably include his sister Ramie and his friend Adam. We've been exploring what to do about bridesboys and groomsgirls instead of sequestering the sexes on either side of the altar. We'll have to talk more about what we want to do. Eric thinks it is a good gesture for the men in my family to stand with him and vice versa. But part of me thinks it's a strange declaration of sexes to have my brothers stand with Eric simply because I'm not a dude.
My brother-in-law Shade will preside over the ceremony. He is ordained in the Universal Life Church (like all four Beatles!) and is very dear to me. We never considered having anyone else oversee the ceremony.
Well that is about all we know so far. I hope to keep everyone in the loop with preparations and answer any questions along the way. I've found great comfort in the resources I've found online, especially anything associated with the Offbeat Bride web site.
There probably won't be any other news until I get a job and reserve the chapel. Then there's no turning back...baby, are you sure you don't want to elope?