Erica and Fuzzy

Erica's friend and co-Camenae-member Tory Crowe got married this last weekend to her fiancee Steve Geary. I barely made it back from Phoenix for the wedding, but I was there to video the ceremony.

Of course the wedding was important to Tory and Steve, but it was important to us, too -- it was Sara's first time officiating a wedding, and so a chance for us to find out if she was a total spaz at it or what. Fortunately, she was a delightful officiant and I'm looking forward to having her guide our wedding ceremony.

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Andy Ihnatko recently was asked by two of his friends to perform their wedding ceremony and he's documented the experience of writing and performing someone's wedding:

As a matter of form the state insisted that I possess the proper legal standing required to perform a wedding service and formally execute the marriage license. Sheer bureaucracy. At this very moment, little girls are marrying Barbies to Kens...and they aren't even mammals, let alone a couple who've had a blood test, bought a marriage license, and sat through a sex talk with a priest. Does the State step in to do anything about it? Of course not; they're too busy making honest, pious men like me fill out paperwork while thousands of dolls all across America are living in sin.

The Marryin' Man (Part 1)
The Marrying Man (Part 2)
The Marryin' Man Part 3: "I Feel Pretty"
The Marryin' Man, Part 4 - The Service

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:19 PM | Permalink

Selections from the complete list at DrinkAtWork:

"Don't throw out the gift ribbons! We need them to make the hat!"

"Okay, so that's three votes to watch porn and 12 votes to open up the Necrononicon…"

"Wait, we all brought Crystal Light?!?"

"So we all do a shot whenever a player goes down a chute or up a ladder."

"17, Dan! A haiku has 17 syllables! Do it again."

"Listen, the sooner we all stop crying the sooner we can be done with this ritual."

"We all have such pretty, pretty dresses…"

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:17 PM | Permalink

Last night, we went over to Sara McGuire and Erik Schnitger's house for fish sticks and wedding planning. I am honored to have Sara perform our ceremony (sidenote: how blessed are we that we can have our best friends involved with so many aspects of the wedding? Answer--VERY blessed), and I wouldn't want it any other way. It was so fun, crazy, and nervewracking all at the same time deciding what perfectly suits Fuzzy and I best with our personalities, beliefs, and humor. I got so nervous! But it was a great productive meeting and I am so thrilled with what we have come up with. The wedding is truly going to be amazing.

And Sara and Erik made their own tartar sauce! It was delicious!

Posted by Erica at 12:10 PM | Permalink

As something of a shy person, registering, that is, telling people what you want to get as presents for your wedding, makes me vaguely uneasy. I don't want to seem greedy. And I wasn't really sure how much stuff we needed. I mean, Erica and I have each lived on our own for many years. And if you've been over to the house you know we have plenty of stuff. But family and friends have been asking where we were registered, sometimes repeatedly.

So last night we made a mature decision to cancel our reservations for Chicago Underground Comedy and went over to Bed Bath and Beyond and got some by-gum registering done.

Somehow in my head I was thinking of registering like it was "shopping". I mean, I can get in and out of a store pretty efficiently, so I was figuring on being there maybe an hour. We were there 3 hours and part of that was just because I was getting worn out and hungry, so I think we zoomed through towels perhaps faster than we might have otherwise.

It's exhausting making all those choices. And the endless possibilities. We registered for a couple of things (a Dyson vacuum cleaner!) that no one's going to get us. Unless they do...

So we're registered for a bunch of stuff at BB&B (registry # 2309651). When we finally got home, I got online and deleted a bunch of stuff from that registry, and then made registries at Target (search for Bride, Erica Reid, Illinois) and Amazon. There isn't really anything in those yet, but maybe we'll fill those out during ANTM tonight.

Posted by Fuzzy at 1:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We are registered at:

Amazon
Bed Bath and Beyond: Registry# 2309651
Belk: Registry ID 101458647
Target Club Wedd: Search for Erica Reid, Illinois

Posted by Fuzzy at 1:20 PM | Permalink

Erica and I have been going out for two years. Whee!

Someone asked me if we were still going to celebrate our dating anniversary after we had a wedding anniversary. Why wouldn't we? If the notion of marking two days a year to celebrate our relationship seemed like a huge burden, then maybe we'd want to rethink the whole spending-the-rest-of-our-lives-together thing. Just saying.

Posted by Fuzzy at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We were filling out our engagement announcement for the Vicksburg Evening Post and realized that we hadn't actually finalized the time for the wedding. Easy enough to just decide, and so we did. 2:00 PM.

Posted by Fuzzy at 10:06 PM | Permalink

Erica and I had a dinner meeting tonight, before going to see a play, to get down on paper some of our wedding to-do list items, because it is, after all, April, and we've been telling everyone we'd have wedding answers for them in April. Heck, we've been telling ourselves we'd have wedding answers in April.

We ended up with a couple of notebook pages with the start of to-do lists on them, and I thought I'd throw them into a Word document tonight. But we've also got a couple of Excel charts of people's addresss and such that we've been trading back and forth over email. Those have been problematic, because we keep losing track of who has the latest version of the files. So I went looking for a simple document-management system that I could install on my website, to let us share and manage these few documents. Well, in the course of looking for that I came across Basecamp and I ended up setting up a Basecamp project for our wedding. Basecamp is a web-based, hosted project management and collaboration tool and it's got Milestones and To-Do Lists and File-Storage -- everything needed for a simple wedding planner. And 37signals is Chicago-based.

Half-way through setting up the project, Erica remembered that The Knot has similar checklists and such, and they are of course already wedding-centric. But Basecamp is so easy to use that I think anyone could take one of those wedding-books-that's-really-just-a-bunch-of-checklists and turn it into a Basecamp project in a half an hour or so.

Posted by Fuzzy at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We picked up our wedding rings last night!

(And because I promised that we wouldn't leave them out of the story, Dayna LaRosa and John Mulhern happened to be walking by just as we got to Holtzmann's and they came in and congratulated/made fun of us (respectively). Then they went to have pizza at Cafe Luigi which they claim is the best (NY-style) pizza in Chicago. Noted.)

NOW we can get married at any moment. I mean, we're going to wait until July 29, but if we wanted to we could run downtown today to city hall, slip on those puppies and boom ... married-town.

They're both red gold. Erica's has an engraved pattern and little diamond chips. Mine is a "fibreglass" finish, which was a mistake (it was supposed to be matte) but I decided I liked it. You keep a fibreglass finish fresh by attacking your ring with a Scotch-Brite(tm) scour pad (or as we call it -- a "green scrubby") and they even gave me a little square of one. Which is just... manly. No fancy chemicals or micro-fibre cloths for me -- I clean my ring with an industrial scrubbing product. Boom.

Posted by Fuzzy at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

It's actually not that far from the wedding location, but we will NOT be suggesting you stay at the Chateau Hotel (3838 N Broadway). Please read these online reviews to see why (or, you know, walk past it and realize it's sketch-ville).

(Via Adam Witt)

Posted by Fuzzy at 9:05 AM | Permalink

Carrie and Mugsy (excuse me... Matt)'s wedding website is up. All the cool kids are doing it.

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:10 PM | Permalink

We also checked off a wedding planning item tonight when we made a reservation for ourselves for the wedding night. I'm not going to tell you where the hotel is, because I've heard that sometimes friends of the couple get up to Shenanigans. I don't think our friends are very Shenanigan-prone, but better safe than sorry. I'll plug the dickens out the hotel after the wedding, because gosh it's cute, and we got a "luxury" room for less than the standard room-price everywhere else we had been looking.

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:43 AM | Permalink

We're still looking at some other options, but we know time is (relatively*) short and so we've gone ahead and made a block reservation at the Days Inn at 644 W Diversey. This is about a mile from the wedding location (3036 N Lincoln Ave, Chicago, if you want to look for your own hotel). The deets are:

Days Inn - Lincoln Park
644 W Diversey
773-525-7010
20 rooms reserved under "Reid-Gerdes wedding"
1 Double bed per room**, 15 non-smoking, 5 smoking
$121 + tax, 2 night minimum stay
The rooms will be released from this reservation on June 29 (a month before the wedding).

* no one panic!
** part of why we're still looking.

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:25 AM | Permalink