Erica and Fuzzy

OK, here's the Wedding books we have so far. I know Dan and Vicky have already promised us their stash of wedding books when they recover from their immenient Date With Destiny. And I'm not reviewing these yet. I just have a few seconds that I wasn't typing anything else...

Christmas present from the Reids:

Your Stress-Free Wedding Planner by Judy Allen. "Experts best secrets to creating the wedding of your dreams." Spiral-bound with section tabs and lots of check-lists and fill-in-the-blanks.

Borrowed from my friend Kerianne:

The Bride's Book of Lists by Amy Nebens. "Things to Do & Questions to Ask." Little spiral-bound with section tabs and lots of check-lists and fill-in-the-blanks, and an elastic strap that wraps around and holds it closed.

The Knot Book of Wedding Flowers by Carley Roney. Everyone keeps saying that The Knot is a great wedding web site. Noted.

Anti-Bride Guide by Carolyn Gerin and Stephanie Rosenbaum. "Tying the Knot Outside the Box." Spiral-bound with section-tabs (I'm sensing a pattern here) and lots of hip illustrations and pockets on each section divider to hold your little lists and stuff.

The Desiderata of Love by Max Ehrmann. "A collection of poems for the beloved." Erica had an early bad experience with the audio version of the Deteriorata, a parody of the Desiderata, and just seeing the title of this book gave her the jeebies.

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of Erica's presents at Christmas was a "No-Stress Wedding Planner" -- which, from my quick glance, was a binder full of pastel checklists. Well, we can put a big check on one of those pages: we have our Wedding Party picked, asked, and confirmed.

On Erica's side will be her brother as her Honor Attendant and her two Rebeccas: Rebecca Hanson and Rebecca Rine-Stone. On mine will be Shaun Himmerick as Best Male Person, Kate O'Leary as Best Female Person, and my brother Disco Gerdes. I really haven't decided which of Kate and Shaun will stand where -- I may have all three of them do a shuffle during the ceremony.

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:58 PM | Permalink

I'm trying to get better about documenting our family gatherings -- I mean, I take a lot of pictures, but they're of whatever I think is interesting. My whole family gets together so rarely that now I'm trying to make sure that I take at least one "everybody get on the couch and for pete's sake look like a family" picture. I did it at Thanksgiving at my folks'. At Erica's parents' for Christmas we got the extended family on Christmas day, and then on Boxing Day we set up a camera and got a variety of shots -- the whole fam, mom & dad, Christopher and Katie, and Erica and I. We had been planning on getting engagement photos, but these came out so well, maybe we don't need to.

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:11 PM | Permalink

While we were in Vicksburg for the Reid family Christmas, Erica caught up with her friend Barbara who had also just gotten engaged. Her fiancee proposed to her in a deer stand while they were watching an alligator named "Stumpy" that had taken up residence on her father's property. Ah, Mississippi.

While we're on the topic, congrats to our friends Dana and Bilal and Brian and Megan who have gotten engaged (respectively, not all to each other) in the last month, too.

Posted by Fuzzy at 3:24 PM | Permalink

First of all, I have to say that Fuzzy is the most amazing person in the planet and I am more in love with him every single day and I now I know what all the fuss about love and romance is about and I want to spend every day with him for the rest of my life. And he is perfect. And so so handsome. And cute. And funny. And sweet. And generous. And caring. And loving. And wonderful. And I love him. And I think that marrying him is the best decision that I have ever made.

SIGH.......

There is nothing like getting engaged to make you feel totally girly. Like really girly. I'm not normally one to squeal over rainbows and pink shiny things and kittens (ok, kittens), but I feel like that is all I have been doing since we made our engagement public. And while we are going to have a fairly laidback and un-fancy wedding, you better believe that I am going to make a fuss. The dress I found is to-die-for gorgeous, and once I saw it, I knew that it was the one for me. I don't want to say too much about it, since the dress is supposed to be a mystery or something, but lets just say that I am waiting for the approval of that store's credit card so I can do some shopping. And it is only $325. SCORE!

And can I just talk about this ring? I know Fuzzy has talked about it, but I must echo him and say that it is the Most Beautiful Thing In The World. I just stare at it all day. And the fact that it is a family heirloom that the Gerdes-es (Gerdes's? Gerdeses?) wanted me to have makes me feel all the more welcome into the family. It was so unexpected and it makes me so happy.

The real challenge in planning this wedding will be that Fuzzy and I would probably both much prefer to sit on the couch and watch tv or play video games than do any real work...but I'm sure that because it is work this exciting, we'll be just fine.

Thanks to all for your excitement, happiness, and well-wishes!

Posted by Erica at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I just said (I guess I'm in a bunch-of-short-posts mood today) we're a little breathless, between the holidays and Erica's rehearsals for upcoming shows and the side work I've been doing, but we've started to make some of the earliest glimmers of some you could call planning a wedding.

We've started saying "September" instead of "Fall", for one. And Erica has a dress picked out already (I'll let her talk about that one). And we're trying to get down to the South Side to look at this Chicago Parks facility that was recommended to us (though we're way open to suggestions on this one -- we're just looking for a reasonably priced venue where we can have a wedding and then serve our own food and drink for, oh, a couple hundred guests -- preferably with access to the outdoors so that if it's nice we can be outside, too).

Posted by Fuzzy at 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

If, for some reason, you got here but don't know us, I'll let you know that we're Fuzzy Gerdes and Erica Reid, Chicago performers with day jobs, and we each have our own websites with information about our performances and goings-on. When we have a chance to breathe, post-holiday I imagine, we'll each put up our stories. (And yes, I mean our soap-operas that we watch.)

Posted by Fuzzy at 6:02 PM | Permalink

Erica's improv group KOKO had their gift exchange this weekend and Andrea Swanson gave Erica, among other things, these home-made and hand-decorated cookies. I'm guessing we can look forward to a year of wedding stuff.

Posted by Fuzzy at 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's a picture of the shined-up ring. You can click on the picture to go see it at larger sizes at the Flickr photo-sharing service.

Posted by Fuzzy at 5:50 PM | Permalink

I really need to take a picture of Erica's shiny, shiny ring. When my dad gave me the ring, it was a little big for Erica and (in retrospect) was a little dirty. At the advice of a coworker, we took the ring to Holtzmann's on Clark. Patrick Holtzmann measured Erica's finger and took the ring. I've never had a ring resized before, and the place is rather fancy, so I asked with a little trepidation how much it was going to be. $25. Whew!

Erica got the ring back in just a few days and not only is it the perfect size now, but it's shiiiii-ny. They even offered that just before she heads to Mississippi to show it off to her family for the first time that she should stop back in and they'd polish it up again.

Posted by Fuzzy at 3:12 PM | Permalink

I already posted this story on my website, but I wanted to have it over here, too.

So I like to say "we've announced our engagement" rather than "we're engaged now" because we had decided a few months ago that getting married would be a grand idea. But we thought it would be good to wait until after the move and we got things more settled around the house and our lives before we announced anything. And we wanted to go get a ring, but there just hasn't been time...

So we were going to visit my family in Texas for Thanksgiving and we decided that it would be good to tell them while we were down there. Saturday night at dinner we did just that and everyone was very happy and Mom had a great time introducing Erica as my fiancee at church the next morning. Monday morning my dad took me aside and asked if we were having an artist friend design a ring or some other big plan like that. No, we just really haven't had time. "Well," he offered, "would you like your grandmother's ring? She never had an engagement ring, but it's her 40th anniversary ring. It'd need to be resized..." Would I? And how!

I carried the ring around with me all afternoon in my pocket. I thought about keeping it a secret until we got back to Chicago and making a big production of it, but I knew I couldn't wait that long to share it with Erica. So when we got back to my parents' house from lunch, I asked Erica to come sit with me on the backporch. It was just a little chilly (for Texas, that is -- it was probably 65° or so) and we cuddled up together on a lawnchair and my mom brought us out some blankets. We just held each other and talked about things for a while and then I asked her to reach into my pocket (I wasn't trying to be cute, we were all crammed together in that lawn chair and I couldn't reach into the pocket myself). She reached in, but all she was finding were receipts. "What am I looking for?" she asked. A little box, I said. Well, she knew right away what it was and she was, I'll say, delighted. And I was, too. And then we took a nap :-)

I think we got the best of both worlds -- we had mutually decided on getting married (I really think the whole "waiting for him to pop the question" thing is ridic.) but I also got to surprise Erica, if not with a proposal, with a ring.

Delightful... that's what it is. Erica makes me happier than I ever knew I could be, and so I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, but this gives me a chance to announce that to everyone, and that fills me with delight. Yay! And then we get to get married! (Well, next we get to plan a wedding...)

Posted by Fuzzy at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On Thanksgiving, at my parents' house, Erica and I announced that we're going to get married in September(ish) 2006 (exact dates TBD). What else to do, but start a blog about it. All the cool kids are doing it.

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:07 PM | Permalink