3 Days!

Cyrus: I'll be in MD in three days!
Me: OMGGG!!

O Tannenbaum!

The next most exciting day of the upcoming year (after our wedding of course) is... CHRISTMAS! I'm not sure if this is right, but I think this is the first year that I bought, brought, set up and decorated the tree all by myself! And considering Cyrus's non-enthusiasm for the holiday goodness, I think I might have to get used to decorating the tree solo. :( 

Here she is looking all shy and demure...

Here she is all straightjacketed up! :( Poor thing!

And here she is! It doesn't look as good on camera, but she's beautiful! (I dunno why blogger thinks that this is an upright picture... I got cut off!)

And the everlasting Christmas tradition: Mr. Lee, lone protector of the Christmas tree! I salute you!

Kickboxy

Tonight, I went to the gym for the first time in maybe months! My goal is to have excellent posture and toned arms and back--and of course...good health, right?? Eh. :)

My formula: kickboxing on Tuesday nights and pilates on Friday afternoons (once summer comes around). I considered taking Oreos out of my diet, but why would I ever do that?!?

Oreos, I love you. (I can't make this picture any smaller...)

Project 10": December Edition

I'm starting Project 10": I am determined to grow my hair out to 10" below my earlobe by wedding time next year! If I had known that I would be getting married the following year, I wouldn't have chopped off half a foot of my hair last July:

Look how happy I look. So proud of my low-maintenance cut. I wish I could appear before myself five months ago in front of the salon, Hiro-style, and say "Don't do it! I can't tell you why, but you will regret it!" I didn't measure it then, but I'm guessing that the longest locks were about 3.5 inches from my earlobes. 

And five months later, the ruler tells me that my hair is now about six inches from the lobes:

 

Ugh, is it math time? 5 months, and 2.5 inches of growth. Cross-multiply, divide...That means my hair is growing half an inch every month! Which means that in eight months, it will have grown four more inches, add the six inches I've got now, and I'll reach 10 inches by August 22!!

I think I did that right.

Not that I can actually do anything to make my hair grow longer faster, but I can make sure that I'm careful about the trims I get. Wow, I didn't think it was gonna be possible! 

But we'll see. Stay tuned for another hair measurement at the beginning of January.

Hat

My mom made me a hat!

I wonder if she could make me a veil, too? :)

Miles

Pandora.com led me to this song, and I love it! I wonder how it would work as a first dance song? The lack of lyrics could work for or against us...What do you think? :)


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Room Blocks!

Introducing... The Hampton Inn & Suites at the National Harbor!

Our out-of-town guests will have the option to stay at the brand-new Hampton Inn during their stay in the DC area for our wedding at a very discounted rate! After about a month of back-and-forth with the hotel, we finally signed our contract and we are ready to go!

I think we might be doing things a little out of order, but I was really excited to book our room blocks!

The wedding website will be updated with this information soon! :D Exciting!!

22 months!

I don't know why, but I still can't let our monthiversaries go! This is the first picture Cyrus and I took as a couple during our first real date. 

After an incredibly romantic Valentine's Day dinner at Taberna Del Alabardero, we went to a teahouse in Georgetown to finish off the night 22 months ago. We took this picture of ourselves at Ching Ching Cha. Look at all of that hair! =:D

Happy 22 months! :P

Twice a day?

How often is too often to polish the engagement ring??

I can't help it! The polish makes it so shinyyy...!

I am afraid...

It's only three months into planning, and it's hard for anything to go horribly wrong this early in the game. Yet I fear that I may go too far to get what I want the way I want it, when I want it.

I've been trying to work out hotel blocks with a brand new hotel in the brand new National Harbor area. When I first stopped by, I talked to a woman named Sharon and she told me that I could get a fantastic deal at their hotel. "Yes!" I told her. She wasn't able to show me the rooms at that moment, but I could call and make an appointment.

Too bad that after about five attempts, I have yet to see her face for a second time. She doesn't return my calls, rescheduled a meeting at the last minute, she actually stood me up, and she was supposed to send me a contract last week but didn't.

I'm ready to call the hotel manager and tell him exactly how incompetent some of his staff are...

But wait - I've heard of brides who lose control when things don't go their way. And knowing how I get when other plans like movies and dinner outings don't go my way (prime example), I know that I'm a prime candidate for bridezillitis.

So where do I draw the line with this? If they didn't have the best deal in town, I'd pick up my bags and sign with a different hotel. To be that girl or not...?

I wonder how different my life would be if I could rant like this guy...

Fisher

This is a song that Cyrus burned for me (along with the entire album) even before we started dating! I love it and want to incorporate it into our wedding somehow, but it's rather slooowww...and a little sad, no?

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Flu

"What does the flu have anything to do with the wedding?" you ask? Apparently a lot. Three wedding-related meetings have been canceled because of sickness, so I thought I'd dedicate this entry to the beloved flu virus. 

Personally, I think the flu vaccine is just a big hoax. They claim that it'll make you immune to ONE strand of the virus, so you still might get the flu. So how will you ever know that it worked? Well...apparently I don't hold that strongly to this suspicion because I got the flu vaccine last month. :P I don't wanna take my chances!

Here's an interesting website: Google Flu Trends. Google mapped out flu activity by state based on flu-related searches on Google! Isn't that interesting? According to them, there is"low" flu activity in every state except for nine, which are labeled as "moderate." Lucky us--we live in a moderate state. Yay, Maryland.

At least this is one thing that we won't have to worry about for our wedding in August, although it is making it really difficult to book our hotel block...Frustration!!

Down Unda!

Now that The Dress has been boughten, I know more about what kind of bridesmaid dress I'm looking for. Probably something a little whimsical, light and airy. And then I came across this website: Rose & Ruby...and saw these pictures:



Where is this company? How can I get these dresses? I looked more closely at the wedding blog where I found these dresses and saw that Rose & Ruby is based in Australia.

How is it that Australia is the home of so many beautiful things...?

The One

Disregard the last post. No need to fight over wedding dresses because...

I found it.

I found The One.

To go or not to go?

There's a designer bridal gown sale - 75% off!! - a few Sundays from now at the Ritz-Carlton in Tyson's Corner.

It's hard to know exactly where I fall on the urgency scale. Our wedding is in August, and it's mid-November and I have no clue where I'm going to find The Dress and if I can get it for The Right Price.

Some descriptions of the event that scare me:

- "Sale is first come, first serve
- Line starts directly outside of the Plaza Room at Ritz
- No appointments taken
- No merchandise hold policy
- All brides are recommended to wear bras, lingerie, shorts, and underwear to try on gowns as entire ballroom will become a dressing room"

YIKES! It's from 10am to 7pm on a Sunday, and I need to be at church from 11:15 - around 2:30. Is it worth it to go later when a lot of the best stuff will be taken? How crazy will people be here? Do people really get in fights over dresses at these things?

What if I encounter something like this...?

An Endless Summer Night?

As the kids complain about having indoor recess (What, would you rather be outside in the rain? Really?), I can't help but think about what fate the weather will bring us on our special day, especially since the majority of our wedding will be outside.

The Old Farmer's Almanac tells me that in the past two decades, it's rained on Aug. 22 four times ('07, '99, '94, '90). So looking purely at the odds, chances are higher that it won't rain. But the inconvenient truth is that the weather has just been nuts these days - and hurricane season has not been friendly!

Other potential threats are, of course, extreme heat, humidity and just general grossness. But seeing as though most of our ceremony and reception are going to happen as the sun's going down, it could end up being a Richard Marx kind of endless summer night.

Gay. Lord.

To celebrate my day off for election day, I went to meet our wedding planner at our wedding site just to check it out and talk about layout and other details. I had a little time to kill, so I also wanted to check out the hotel situation. There were two areas I'd never seen before: the newly-built National Harbor complex and Old Town Alexandria.

The National Harbor was first on my list (it's like 5 minutes from Oxon Hill Manor), and WOW. This area opened this past April with shops, restaurants, hotels and attractions to suit every taste and need! It's so new that my GPS left breadcrumbs so I could find my way back to the highway. I talked to a few friends and even our wedding planner, and no one I know has ever been to this area, or heard of it!

The crowning jewel of this place is the Gaylord National Hotel. Yes, Gaylord. With rooms for around $500/night, this place is jaw-droppingly jaw-dropping. They've got restaurants, coffeeshops, sports bars, conference rooms, TREES, and what looks like a mini-village in the main lobby. It's nuts. In any case, it's great to know that a place with such a variety of attractions for our guests if they want to hang out nearby during our wedding weekend!

Maybe it's because it was raining, but Old Town Alexandria (about 10 minutes away) wasn't quite as charming to me--It looked more like a dirtier, older Georgetown. But with such great, established restaurants like Hank's Oyster Bar and Restaurant Eve, it's tough to compare to the trendy newbies in the National Harbor.

In any case, it's really exciting that there are tons of things to do near our wedding site, especially when we thought that it was in kind of a dead-end area (ask any Maryland native about PG County...). More details are on their way as we really get the ball rolling. Next on the to-do list: hotel room blocks, finding a caterer!

Past entries

9/16/08 Not much is going on in the wedding planning world of Cyrus and Ina these days... Right now is kind of like a pondering, brainstorming, vision-setting time for us. Also, I have to mention that the future sis-in-law is being a huge help with ideas and recommendations. We’re pretty much reaping the benefits of all of her legwork! I'm also thinking about shutting down this site and making a new one with a prettier design. The more I look at other websites, the uglier this one seems to be... =\

8/29/08

We set a date!! We saw a bunch of great places, and thanks to Adam & Eve Wedding Consultants (aka Seh-Hee and YeHee), we heard about Oxon Hill Manor which we got to see just two days ago. We fell in love with it, which was a pleasant surprise, considering how starkly different our visions of our ’dream’ wedding are! Another couple had a hold on our desired date, which expired yesterday at 5pm. We’ve been crossing our fingers that they would pass, and lo and behold -- THE DATE IS OURS! It’s all happening! :D

8/20/08 

Welcome to our website! We’re just getting started with our planning, so there isn’t much we can say about our wedding just yet. But Ina’s working hard on the website, so feel free to browse around! As far as planning goes, we’re discussing our ideas and looking into venues for the ceremony and reception. As for the date, we’re aiming for summer of 2009. Can you believe this is really happening? AHHH!

Just one day?

"It's just one day" v. "You only get one chance to make it awesome."

These two opposing views have been the theme of our past 134820 conversations about our wedding: "It's just one day," so don't waste your money on something that will only last an evening; "You only get one chance to make it awesome," so make it as awesome as possible - money is no object! What do you think? I'm an avid Martha Stewart Weddings magazine reader, and the more I learned about weddings and the huge range of types of weddings there can be, I fell in the first camp - Why spend so much money on just one day? There are plenty of inexpensive things you can do to make your wedding beautiful and special. But as we're thinking and rethinking the look and feel of our wedding, my frugal side is slowly losing the war, battle by battle.

Cyrus and I have been learning a lot about compromise these days. At first it seemed impossible to fuse our opposite visions into one, but after over two months, it's finally coming together! I don't want to give too much away because we want to run a lot of our ideas by our families and wedding planner before we move forward, but expect something different! And fun!