Recently in Wedding Category

My parents were nice enough to put out a wedding announcement for Kelly and I.  It was in the Post Gazette in Pittsburgh, PA.  You can see the announcement here.

While visiting her family in Tacoma last week Kelly went wedding dress shopping.  Those dresses she didn't buy but merely tried on are pictured.  The grand finale is a secret until March 14, 2009.  The pictures are available here.

About a week ago we ordered save the date cards from Shutterfly.  They came with envelopes thankfully (even if they are an odd shape).  Today we finalized and collected all the addresses for people to be invited.  We printed the envelopes on our printer so we could add fonts and some clip art.  I got them off the printer and unsealed them (the laser semi-sealed them) and then Kelly stuffed them.  We have 73 save the date cards ready to be mailed on Monday.  Some people may be surprised by getting a card from us, but hopefully not too confused.

To enable us to disseminate information and give people a place to look up details I have setup a new page for our wedding.  We will be adding more as it becomes known.  For now you can see the site at here.

Since we are attempting to have the wedding relatively quickly we almost immediately started looking for places to have the wedding and reception.  Kelly looked at several online sites and magazines to find places.  One of the most important parts of course is how many people are coming.  Kelly and I started a list ourselves and cam up with a little over 100.  Then we sent the list to our respective families to fill in any gaps.  After the families were done we got closer to 150.  This controlled our choices a bit, but not much.  We are guessing only about 80% will show up but have to account for 150 just in case.

We first looked at Chase Court on Thursday evening.  We really liked the place and it is in a great location.  Also the guy that owns / runs the place was really nice and answered all our questions.  Our only concern was that it might be a bit on the small side for the number of guests.  It was definitely a close second in our final list.

On Sunday morning we went to see Gramercy Mansion.  We later found out that we showed up at 9 AM for an 11 AM appointment, but they took it in stride quite well.  This place has the added benefit of being a bed and breakfast as well as a location for the festivities.  Also it is just a little bigger so we don’t have a concern over fitting everyone in.  It has 11 rooms for people to stay in from out of town too.  It is quite well decorated already so we won’t need to do as much which is a plus.  This is the place we picked and Kelly will be putting down a deposit on Wednesday.

The third and final place we went was Liriodendron Mansion.  They have open houses every Sunday 1 – 4 PM.  We showed up a few minutes before 1 PM and walked around the grounds.  We then waited by the door that listed the times and appeared to be the entrance.  Someone else came up and knocked on door and someone inside let us in and told us we were at the back door, which wasn’t at all obvious.  We then walked around inside by ourselves.  We never really figured out who if anyone was there to show us around or answer questions.  Also it seemed the inside spaces were much too small, the venue seemed much more setup for outdoor events.  We decided the place wasn’t for us.

As I said above we will going with Gramercy Mansion.  Now we just have to worry about all the other things.  More updates to come.

Since I figure there will be quite a few entries regarding it in the next year I thought I would add a category for it.  The first entry about the engagement has been added already.  There will be more to come I promise.

For the last few months Kelly had been dropping subtle hints about getting engaged.  Some choice quotes of these hints included statements like "Did you get my ring today?" "Where is the ring?" "Will you be giving me the ring now?"  I did actually follow through with acquiring a ring recently.  I ordered it from Whiteflash after a recommendation from Jerry (use one of us as references if you order from them.)  You can see the ring in the below pictures provided by Whiteflash.

I was actually going to wait until August 6th just to mess with Kelly.  That day was her going away party for her current job.  However another opportunity presented itself this weekend.  I will warn you this will seem a little odd.

I really wanted to see the Dark Knight in IMAX since it was filmed with IMAX cameras for certain scenes.  As I twittered there was no where in the state of Maryland that was showing it.  The original plan was to see it in Harrisburg on Saturday the 26th, then the 27th but it was sold out.  Kelly found that there were still tickets available at the Franklin Institute at 9 AM on the 27th and she bought tickets.  We later decided to spend the night in Philadelphia.  We booked a room at the Sofitel.  We had stayed at the Sofitel on the first weekend trip we took together.

On Sunday morning we ordered room service to provide for Kelly's oft requested breakfast in bed.  During that breakfast I presented her with the above ring.  You can see some more pictures of the ring in action here.  We then went to see Dark Knight.  More on Dark Knight later.  There aren't really any further details at this point.