The Full UK Wedding Recaps

Hello lovelies!!

We're married!! On April 17, we tied the legal knot and just over a month later now, we are just getting back to the real world again (blogosphere included) and I'm now officially allowed to stay in the UK. Double awesome.

What's awesome again is that I've finished recapping the UK wedding for So You're EnGAYged, the awesome gay community wedding blog daily publishes that love is all around us. Since it would be a bit silly to post it all again here, I encourage you to go check out the latest over at SYE and get a feel for how our UK wedding came together (Hint: It rocked my world to the very core).

UK Wedding Overview

Getting Ready

First Look

The Ceremony

Afternoon Spent

The Procession

Portraits

The Rest of the Evening...

And guess what....? The wedding planning is SO not over. A rainy day in England meant that Alex and I have started to revamp our wedding website with a new California look! Bring it on, wedding website re-launch, new Save the Dates, and a whole new wonderful wedding to the love of my life...

Another Version of Our Story

For our website, Alex and I wrote another version of 'our story'. I might read it occassionally read it when I want to feel snuggly so I thought I'd share:

Lovefest: The Origins: or, How We Finally Fell in Love

Well, we'll start at the beginning...

We met in our second year of college at UC Santa Cruz in the classic way that couple's meet: through our friends. At the time, Erica was working for Kresge College and Alex was friends with everyone who was working for Kresge College. Erica's first memory is of Alex in her red pleather tail coat at a Kresge event, where Alex didn't pay attention to her. Alex's first memory is queueing up with Erica for the Giant Dipper at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, where Erica didn't pay attention to her.

Alex was at once fascinated and intimated by Erica's awesomeness...and the crush began. Of this crush, Erica was unaware: second year was BUSY, and then she left for Ireland.

Third year went by in Ireland (e) and the Brommer House (A). Summer came and went. Alex and Erica re-met at a bonfire on the beach in September--although Alex was more taken by Erica's Irish boots than anything else. They became proper friends this time through bonfires, nights out on Pacific Avenue, and times with the 'Kresge Crew/Kids'.

Then we graduated. Erica needed a place to live in the fall for her last quarter at UCSC and Alex decided to stay in Santa Cruz until Christmas. So Erica moved in to the Ocean St. House in September with Alex, Christy and Mallory (taking Corinne's old room). Well, thank goodness.

So, when did we FINALLY fall in love, you might ask?

For Alex, it was snuggled up on a couch reading short stories to one another; doing the New York Times Monday crossword puzzle; and the cincher was dancing in the kitchen to Nina Simone.

For Erica, she knew it best when one fall morning she woke up and couldn't think of anything else but "She's the one."

Now how we managed to stay together across an ocean, living in a trailer, working in a pub, getting into post-graduate programmes and moving countries is a whole OTHER story you can just ask us for at the wedding...

In Praise of Google Docs

While the work on the wedding website continues this week (I hope y'all are impressed with it--I spent an hour and a 1/2 yesterday on the Accommodation page for Fowey alone), this week it is all about the praise for Google Docs, in (short) list form.

Reasons Why A&E love Google Docs (thus far):

1. Our time, effort, and new skills in Excel have not gone to waste in the guest list/contact list compiling exercises.
2. We can share the UK Guest List, CA Guest List and HUGE Contact List with anyone really, primarily our folks (and we don't have to print them out! Yay trees!).
3. Anyone we share the 'documents' (files) with doesn't have to have a Google account.
4. Multiple people can be viewing, editing and saving those documents at any given time and those changes happen instantly.
5. Alex and I can sit at our own computers in separate rooms and chat and giggle online like old times across the ocean while we edit the lists together.
   

Betcha can't tell which one is my favorite reason...

Two more notes:

• Yes, I did totally co-opt the title of Cheryl Dumesnil's new book of poetry, In Praise of Falling--how did you know!? And yes, you should check it out.
  
• And blog posts are more fun with pictures, so here's an old school one of Alex at her desk at the Ocean House. :D

Save the Date -- Done!

For all of you following this who are actually coming to one or two of the ceremonies, this may be a bit of a spoiler, but I'm just so pleased with how the Save the Date and photo collage came out I couldn't resist sharing.

As for our to-do list, the photo collage is now checked off, the website coming along nicely, and some more basic details to be covered this weekend (like getting a Certificate of Approval from the UK Home Office--immigration stuff scares me! The bonus part though is that I just spoke to a very nice man at our council office who we'll go see to Give Notice of Intention for our UK ceremony. There's no Vegas-Let's-Get-Hitched! around these parts!).

Now onto the good stuff, what people will be receiving in their email boxes next month (yeah saving trees, postage, and fossil fuel!), with the exception of our grandmas--some of them are computer saavy, some of them prefer good ol' post.

Click on either for a larger view.
Images, respectively by savethedate and Wyatt Olson Photography.

The Save the Date design is called Jenny by savethedate's etsy shop. She was super easy to work with and Alex and I just love her design. Plus her slogan is 'Save the Date * Save the Trees' --pretty rockin. Then we picked out our favorite photos and threw them together in the collage! (Ok, ok, it took a bit more time than that...) In all seriousness though, we loved working with Wyatt and can't wait for him to photograph our wedding in California!

Week's To-Do List

I have to say that after being back in London for over two weeks now, I finally feel like I am sort-of back in the routine again. The realization was signaled by finally moving all of my IDs, cards, etc. from my US wallet to my UK wallet. (Yes, I have two different wallets. And if you've ever traveled abroad, you know the difference coins can make!)

With the settling came the time to start looking at the 'to-do's before the 'I do's--and let me tell you, we've only got 6 months left now before April 17th rolls along. Loads of time really, what with a dissertation to write, hospital placements to attend, jobs to find, shifts to work. Ok, ok, I'm not really complaining. Here's what we're up to this week:

Wedding Website

MyWedding.com is a free wedding website site up for couples to post their wedding info of where to go, where to stay and what to do along with their story, photos and select music. Let me tell you, Alex was stoked on that last one.

I heard about them as a dear dear friend used the website for her wedding and I really liked the set up. I have no idea who owns them (Anyone? Anyone?) but I've found their site easy to use and gay friendly--i.e. I didn't have to pretend to be a 'groom,' instead I could be the 'partner' that I am. (Although, best thing would have been to let their be two 'brides,' but hey, it's a US site and partner has a heck of lot more politic weight there than in England.)

This week I'm in charge of filling it out with the goal of having it done by the end of the week, ready to send out with our email Save the Dates going out at the end of the month.

A little preview:

The header we picked out of about a hundred,
it was a long process...

One of our favorite listed attractions!

We heart Pinky Murphy's

Another awesome reason for doing a wedding website: saves on paper, printing, and postage. Unlike some wedding invitations that come with different cards of where to be, where to stay and what to do, we hope our guests will use the power of the internets to garner all that information for themeselves and save some trees while they're at it!

Photo Collage

Alex's job for the week, among other glorious, but not so exciting feats in Excel and Google Docs, is to create a photo collage from our engagement photos (a few here) to send out with the Save the Date. Conveniently, the photo collage will also have the url for our wedding website. So far, it looks like it will be a run-off between these two photos for the 'big' photo in the collage. Votes?

Sort of traditional in pose and a nice shot of our faces.

More stylized and great colors!

Photos by Wyatt Olson Photography.