highlights

January 3, 2012

a few things I really liked from the last week or so:

  • these snakeskin print velvet flats from daniblack. which are as comfortable as they are rad.
  • buying tickets for my next trip – Chicago in February! (because apparently I’m a masochist – it’s very possible that I hate cold weather more than anyone in the world.)
  • the big 60th birthday party I planned for my dad the night before NYE, complete with made-to-order street tacos, gallons of sangria, and a plethora of papel picado (above.)
  • spending New Year’s Eve with some close friends, risotto, & champagne.
  • oh hey! I worked with the amazing APW ladies to make some downloadable wedding-related spreadsheets. They’re pretty awesome, if I do say so, and you should totally use them if you have a wedding coming up.
  • this piece from the Times on “The Joy of Quiet.” yes.
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goals and keywords

January 2, 2012

I, like many people, used to make long lists of New Year’s resolutions that, like many people, I would let fall by the wayside in approximately February. So I started doing things a little differently a few years ago – setting one easily achievable goal for the year, and then picking a keyword for myself to drive the coming year (I also make birthday resolutions, see here for this years.)

My keyword for 2011 was “purposeful” and my goal was to start flossing every night – something I’d never done with any regularity. I’m calling success on both counts, even though there was a break in the flossing habit this fall (I’ve since gotten back on track.)

My goal for 2012 is to learn to apply fake eyelashes quickly and flawlessly (hey, I never said the goal had to be… virtuous, just easily achievable.) And my keyword for 2012 is Yes.

I know from experience that my life is both fuller and happier when I say yes more often. (This, after all, is one of my favorite quotes.) Yes to adventure, yes to new experiences. Yes to dinners out with friends, yes to spontaneous trips, yes to helping people out when they need it, yes to inclinations to spend a warm afternoon reading outside. Yes to spur of the moment coffee dates with friends, even if it means working a little later that night. Yes to going to that show, even if it’s going to mean an extra cup of coffee in the morning. Yes to doing things that scare me, because they’re usually the things that make me grow. Yes to joy, even when joy seems like it might be a little inconvenient or tiring or expensive. I have realized that I only very rarely regret doing things, but regret not doing things much more often. So here’s to doing things in 2012. Here’s to yes.

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happy new years!

December 30, 2011

Oh my has this been a year or what?

Looking forward to all of the things that next year will bring. Here’s to hoping for lots of wonderfulness for everyone in 2012!

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new office

December 15, 2011

I moved my office into it’s own space about a month ago, and things are slowly coming together. I hope to have final before and after photos in a few weeks, but for now here’s a peek:

Best thing about having a dedicated office? I don’t cuddle with my laptop & client files anymore. Because while I love my job, I think we can all agree that sleeping with a stack of files on the other half of the bed is probably not the healthiest thing in the world.

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A Practical Wedding: the book!

December 7, 2011

SO, my friend Meg, author and editor of the brilliant website A Practical Wedding, wrote a wedding planning book. And, you guys? It’s awesome.

When I first started planning weddings five years ago (for friends, I had no idea at the time that I’d one day be doing this professionally) I read pretty much every wedding planning book I could get my hands on that didn’t seem totally insane, because that’s what I do when I want to learn about something – I read. And while I picked up some helpful pieces here and there, there was not a single book that I loved overall.* I wish that this book had been around then.

Now, I didn’t learn anything from this book, but that’s because, well, I now do this professionally (as Meg said when I told her this, “Well, I would be really concerned if you had learned anything from it, and have to start re-thinking whether or not I could recommend you.”) However, if you’re not a professional wedding planner? You will learn things. Good things. Things like how to find an affordable venue, and that it’s OK to sometimes cry during the planning process, and why you should focus on your ceremony, and when and why you need to ask for help.

Also – this book made me cry. And if you know me, I never cry (I do tear up – at weddings, at sappy movies, and at commercials that involve tender parent/child moments and/or deployed loved ones.) I cried because I am just so proud of Meg for writing this book. It’s a wedding planning book that manages to deal with both logistics (important! weddings are full of logistics, and they are often overwhelming) and, probably even more importantly, also deals with the often intense emotional logistics around weddings and marriages. It reminds you that your wedding is not just a big party, it is the start of your marriage.

So go buy it, and buy a copy for your mother, and copies for all of your friends who are getting married. This book is definitely my new go-to engagement party gift. If you are a regular APW reader, rest assured that it’s different than the website. The book walks you through wedding planning from engagement to post-honeymoon, all in a concise, smart, practical way. It pulls from many of the wisest posts on the site, but is in fact an entirely new piece of work that is valuable in an entirely different way to anyone who’s planning a wedding. (Fun fact: while I didn’t actually meet Meg until this year, I was one of APWs earliest readers, and so have read every post ever published on the site. Which, if you’ve just started reading recently, would take you a whole hell of a lot of time to do. Buy the book
instead, and then continue to read the website on a regular basis.)

The wedding industry in America gets a bad rap for a reason – it’s generally full of people and organizations who are trying to get you to buy more, do more, stress more. Couples who are getting married need all the help they can get in getting away from this – it’s insidious, and can trap even the most sane, laid back people into thinking that they have to do things a certain way, because it’s a wedding and it has to be perfect. My favorite line in the book is tied between “There is a whole wedding marketing machine set up to sell you the perfect wedding, but the reality is, things are going to go wrong on your wedding day. That’s fine. It’s great, even.  It’s the imperfections that make the day yours.” and (a quote from a real-life former bride) “I honestly just gave it up to Jesus. I mean, WWJD anyway? He wouldn’t stress about anyone handing out some program fans, I’ll bet you that much.”

Truth.

*well, I did, and continue to, love One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, but it’s not a planning book.

note: Meg personally gave me an advance copy of this book to review. Please see here for my policy on accepting things for review.

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books I’ve read lately – October & November, 2011

December 1, 2011

Yeah, this is a cop-out combination of months – the last two months have been a little crazy, and so the reading lists were on the lighter side. Here we go:

  • How to Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran. This was the APW book club book, and is well worth ordering from the UK (it won’t be available in the States until May.) While I don’t agree with Moran on everything (high heels and weddings being two notable exceptions) it’s high time that a contemporary woman came out in favor of “strident feminism.” Hilarious and deeply thought provoking at the same time.
  • Little Bee by Chris Cleeve. Woah, this was engaging. A successful switch between two narrators telling the same story, which is not an easy thing to do. A beautiful novel that’s the cover for a fictionalized and personalized take on immigration policies that may just change the way you think about the issue.
  • What Is This Thing Called Love by Kim Addonizio. Raw and powerful, the way that the best poems (or, at least, my favorite poems,) are. The first section was my favorite.
  • Great House by Nicole Krauss. It took me a while to get into this one, but I ended up liking it a lot. Moments of brilliance – Krauss certainly has a way with words. If you don’t like slow books this one may not be for you.
  • Miss Manners’ Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding by Judith Martin and Jacobina Martin. How is it possible that I just got around to reading this book? It’s *hilarious,* as in, one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. I think people who don’t read her don’t realize that Miss Manners is actually a total bitch (in a good way,) just a super, super correct and polite one. I have to say, I don’t agree with her on everything surrounding weddings, but I do agree with a whole lot of it. Worth reading if you’re planning a wedding, or even if you’re just going to a lot of weddings.
  • Oak: One Tree, Three Years, Fifty Paintings by Stephen Taylor**. Stephen Taylor painted the same tree for three years, and this book is part art book, part painting process book, and part reflection on nature and the way that we interact with it. A quiet, lovely book.
  • Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling. OK, I loved this. It’s light, and funny, but actually very well written. And, I’m not really sure why it’s getting compared to Tina Fey’s book so much, because frankly, it’s head and shoulders above. Great holiday gift for your girlfriends/sisters.

**this book was sent to me by the publisher. please see here for my policy on accepting things for review.

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homemade crackers

November 30, 2011

I started making homemade crackers a few years ago, and let me tell you – if you want something to bring to a potluck that will both impress people and take very little time or effort*? This is your dish.

I started with this recipe from Mark Bittman, and it’s pretty delicious as is, but the best part is that it is SO easy to modify. My favorite (and almost always the biggest hit) flavor of crackers to make is lemon-pepper – simply halve the amount of parmesan cheese, add lemon zest from either 2-3 large lemons or 4-5 small ones, and a really generous amount of rough ground black pepper. Other great additions: sage, rosemary (add the fresh herbs to the food processor before the liquid,) sesame and/or poppy seed (add a handful to the dough and then press more into the top before baking.) I’ve also replaced half the cheese with slivered almonds before, and while it doesn’t make much of a flavor different, it makes the texture a little more crumbly, which is actually somehow great.

*note: you need a food processor for these. also: food processors rock.

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it’s time

November 27, 2011

If there is one thing I’ve learned by working in the wedding industry, and by attending the vast number of weddings that I attend, it’s that there is nothing political about love. And there is nothing political when two people decide that they want to stand in front of their community and declare their love to each other. This video does one of the best jobs of illustrating that fact than anything else I’ve ever seen:

In general, I don’t really think that this blog is a very appropriate place for me to talk about politics. However, I don’t actually think that the legalization of same-sex marriage should be a political issue*, because it’s a human & civil rights issue. Which, I guess is a political issue, if you live in a country whose laws differentiate between and oppress certain groups of citizens.

I have to believe that Americans won’t continue to let the United States be that kind of country for very much longer. It is, indeed, time.

*I also don’t think that it should be a religious issue, (um, and let’s pretend to ignore the complet lack of Church-State separation in American marriage laws for a moment) except that as a practicing Christian, I actually find it impossible to find a valid Christianity-based argument against civil rights, including a valid Christianity-based argument against same-sex marriage. Religious arguments for same-sex marriage, however, are much easier for me to understand.

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thank yous

November 27, 2011

I like to make birthday resolutions every year*, and I generally like to keep them simple. This year my resolution is to send more thank you notes – it’s something I’ve been intermittently good at throughout my life, and it’s time to be consistently good at it. Because the only thing better than getting something handwritten in the mail is sending something handwritten in the mail.

Over the summer I had my friend Noah Breuer of 2×2 Press design and screenprint the cards above for my business – aren’t they great? (Noah is also an incredible fine artist, click on those links to see some of his work.) I need a good personal thank you card next – I have a variety of generic ones (mainly from Crane, who I will always heart,) but I think that streamlining my (at times ridiculously large) stationary collection would be a very good thing.

Anyone else make birthday resolutions? Any tips on how to make yourself stick to them?

*at New Year’s I usually assign myself a keyword, but more on that in January.

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On Birthdays and New York

November 27, 2011

Two weeks ago I took a super quick trip to New York, in celebration of my birthday and for my first non-working-vacation in several years (I actually travel fairly frequently, I just always work at least part time while I’m doing it.)

This birthday was feeling kind of angsty* for me, so I decided to do the obvious thing and blow it up with bi-coastal parties. I always joke** that one of my ultimate goals is to live a bi-coastal life, and so what better way to start moving towards that goal? And then, because I am amazingly lucky, I got to celebrate it not only with my large group of New York based friends, but also with four different friends who decided to fly to New York for the occasion – from California, Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. My people, they are awesome.

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