Moving Across The Country Before The Wedding: An Illustrated Adventure

Last I updated about wedding planning, I'd just found the dress! Considerably more has happened since then. Things took a turn. The great news is that we found our photographer! He took a photo of us at a friend's wedding where we were making stupid faces at each other when we think no one's looking. We both knew as soon as we saw the photo that he was it.


This really seriously looks a lot like the picture.

That excitement was a little overshadowed by the fact that my fiancé and I were laid off the day before we met with him. That was terrifying, BTW. The sudden loss of stability and income, not meeting the photographer. He's quite nice and not at all terrifying.



My fiance found a job that offered to partially compensate for a cross country move, so we moved to San Francisco. I'd never actually been to SF, but everyone told me I'd love it. I'm nothing if not optimistic. This is obviously not my real understanding of the US, I just ran out of room for Maine.



The biggest thing is that the moving company we used decided my wedding dress was packing material. Here is a pic.



No wait, that's my ALL CONSUMING RAGE FACE.

This isn't an illustrated example, this is a very real photo of what my dress looked like after I unpacked it.

98% of me is obviously upset and traumatized, but about 2% of me is amazed at their ability to compress such a large dress into such a tiny box shape. I'm still in the process of getting that resolved, so that's to be continued.

There are a wealth of random pitfalls that we encountered and then the company that hired my fiance laid him off 5 months after we moved. And thus, the wedding was postponed. Fortunately our venue and photographer are SUPER wonderful and we got a new date that I think is even better! Next up, we're going to start working on the more DIY parts of the wedding, like my bouquet and invitations and such.

Thai Iced Tea

I think of asthma as my throat being confused about being a throat.

I think of allergies as my throat getting tricked into being misshapen dinosaurs that attack each other.

Today I drank a Thai Iced Tea that was apparently made with lies instead of the ingredients I was told about. That combined with a steep hill meant that my throat was both confused and dinosaurs. I look fine if not slightly cranky when this happens, so I drew a helpful diagram so that others can understand.

My Wedding Dress: An Illustrated Adventure

I tried on dresses! I bought a dress! I took notes! I mean, I scribbled out drawings on my iPhone.



I went to Kleinfeld's Blowout Sample Sale in NYC. I didn't really research where to buy wedding dresses in NYC, but a) I work kinda near it, b) I heard it had a show on the TV, and c) Kleinfelds is the fancy princess dress store and I very much wanted a fancy princess dress. Unfortunately I do not have the same budget as a fancy princess, so I bought a VIP pass to the Kleinfeld's Blowout Sample Sale.

At first I wasn't going to go, because when I hear about bridal sample sales, I think of roaming, semi-feral packs of friends all wearing matching tshirts and clubbing each other to death over the first spotting of what might be a Vera Wang.



The VIP pass was on a sample sale website, and it gave me access to the sale before they opened the doors to the public with my own consultant and my own dressing room. Fancy! Instead of rabid bride madness, everyone was so lovely and nice to each other. There was peace across the land of dresses. There was still that vague sense of urgency that all sample sales have, but even then no one seemed to be going for any of the same dresses I liked, so it was okay.



I even got to play dress up with sparkly hair things!



I think the only people there who didn't seem to be having fun was a surly looking mother-like woman in the hallway that seemed to disapprove of All Dresses*.


*Not my mother, obviously, because my mom is super awesome. She loves the pictures I sent her of my dress.

My consultant, Elena, was so great! I brought in a picture and was all "THIS ONE" and she pulled everything that was remotely within my budget and description. She actually found a dress that was so like the picture, I thought it was the same one until I realized a shiny thing was on the other side! That was the one I tried on first, and it was definitely the dress. Still, we tried on allll the other dresses just to make sure. But the first one was it. I pranced around in it for a while in the store and people smiled at me in spite of me quietly singing "I'm a priiiinceeeeess" in high pitched voice. Here it is!



I promise, it's really pretty.

The cameras were around and I saw bits and bobs of television happening, but never came into direct contact with it. I've watched the show a handful of times and recognized a few people, and they were all very nice. Two behind-the-scenes tech guys held the door open for me when I was leaving with my dress, so that was useful.

Everyone was very cheerful and happy for me when I was carrying the dress out. The girls in line, instead of descending upon me with deafening screams of "WHY IS SHE IN THE STORE BEFORE THE SALE STARTED?" started cheering and clapping for me. It was disturbingly sweet and I thank them for accepting me as one of their own.

Tasting/tour of potential wedding venue.

The most excellent fiancé and I had a tasting at reBar last night, and it was so much better than I imagined. We kept asking them if it was a trap.

We were happily sampling wine and our first appetizer until we realized that the couple next to us was taking meticulous notes on everything. We had been operating on a grading system of Awesome or What? Even More Awesome so we felt the need to step up our game. Here are my meticulous notes about our tasting.


We vowed not to eat everything they gave us so that we could actually eat the entrees when they arrived but that was before we encountered the macaroni and cheese. Cheese madness ensued, rendering the previous logic unsound.



The couple next to us were really serious about note taking. There was a large wedding binder and a tote bag filled with papers and notes that were presumably typed from the yellow notepad the future-groom was scribbling everything down in. I feel like they are those people that when you go into the Container Store, they are the people that buy those things and take them home and can utilize pretty boxes on modern shelves to create a lovely and organized space. Whereas I go to the Container Store and think "I'm gonna do it! I'm gonna be organized and productive!!!" and then I buy a bunch of boxes but in reality now I just have pink boxes sitting underneath of all of my other unorganized stuff.



After eating all the appetizers there ever were and an entree, we got a tour of the place. I had suspected earlier that we weren't really in this place and that we'd both been Incepted. After seeing this one room that I'm fairly sure was built by the dream-addled corners of my imagination I was about 90% someone was going to need to kick a chair or something to wake us up out of it.


I didn't forget how to draw, my notes were all done via rough finger painting on my iPhone. The fiancé couldn't help because he was still in the thrall of cheese madness.


The best part was at the end when they brought out a plate filled with little glasses, and those glasses were filled with various dessert things. One was rice pudding, one was strawberry/rhubarb something or other and the last thing was a cake, but it tasted exactly like a Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookie. It was amazing.

In conclusion, I didn't really need to take any notes, 'cause the place is pretty much everything we wanted. Wedding venue is go!