I Think I'm Learning Japanese, I Really Think So: A Guide to Reading Our Wedding Invitations

Katelyn and I will be mailing out our wedding invitations in the upcoming week, so we wanted to get a head-start on putting some necessary information online.

As part of the theme for our wedding invitations, Katelyn and I decided to incorporate apples and apple trees—which all of you will be able to see in person at Clark’s Cove Farm, which is a working apple orchard—as well as Japanese characters, since I’ve been to Japan on three occasions and hope to share the experience of visiting overseas with Katelyn once we are married.

Because our "wedding webpage" on http://www.theknot.com/ would not allow me to post Japanese writing for readability, I have put this information here on the blog.

Of course, the Japanese language in written form is not something that is easy to understand; I took two years of Japanese classes in college and still have trouble reading the language sometimes. With this in mind, we’ve put together this guide to reading the Japanese on our invitations so that you can understand them.

Designing Our Own Wedding Bands Part 1

One of the single most annoying advertising campaigns I have ever been subjected to in my life has to be the horrifically stupid "He went to Jared's!" engagement ring commercials that have swamped television sets across America over the past few years.  The phrase itself is grating to the point of frustration.

As the months have passed and Katelyn and I find ourselves getting closer and closer to the big day, we've begun to think about exactly what we're going to do for our wedding bands.  The diamond engagement ring was "easy" enough, since I presented Katelyn with the Jabel heirloom ring passed down from my late paternal grandmother, but both Katelyn and myself knew that we wanted our wedding bands to be something personal from our own experience together.  After a quick perusal of the typical wedding stores at the mall--even going to Jared's in Portland, Maine for kicks--we decided that the wedding bands would have much more meaning to both of us if we had something designed ourselves.

After some online searching, Katelyn turned up a ring style known as "Mobius rings," which feature a twisted ring pattern.  She even went so far as to order a cheap sterling silver version of the ring to see how it would look when paired with her engagement ring:

Places to Stay if You're Coming from Away #1: Cod Cove Inn in Edgecomb, Maine

As was documented early in our wedding planning, the decision of where to host the Cooper-Parker wedding extravaganza of October 2010 was a difficult one to make, chiefly because Katelyn is from Michigan and her family is spread out across a good swath of the country while my family is almost entirely located in Maine.  Because of our decision to get married in Maine, we've had to consider--at each step of our planning--how we can best accomodate our guests who will be coming from a distance to celebrate our wedding.

To that end, we have been researching various lodging options in the general Boothbay/Damariscotta region to provide our guests with options for where to stay while in the area for our wedding.  The proprietors of the Cod Cove Inn in Edgecomb, Maine where kind enough to invite Katelyn and I down to see their inn back in January (back when there was still snow on the ground, even).

Our Wedding Caterer

Before touching on the topic of this blog posting, I'm aware that it has been far too long since my last entry about this wedding and this has been the result of a number of things, but I can't really make any excuses for it.  With the holidays, getting back to teaching, and finally having nice weather again, I just haven't been able to bring myself to sit down and write anything wedding-related until now.  I hope to make up for it, beginning today.

So when I last left you, faithful reader, Katelyn and I had settled on a photographer for our wedding and were getting ready to start looking at catering services.  I am happy to announce that we have settled on a catering service; though in reality the decision was made nearly a month ago.

The Time Crunch

The holidays are always difficult in terms of things that need to be finished and the amount of time that we actually have to finish those tasks.  This fact--along with my devotion to NaNoWriMo and recent travels that Katelyn and I have undertaken--has contributed in a major way to the drop-off in posting activity here at "The Groom's Take".

Even though Katelyn and I work in two very different fields--she as an architectural intern at a local residential firm, me as an adjunct instructor at a private university--our jobs both come "to a head" around the holidays.  She's trying to finish drawings and details so that they can be sent out to a work site before the office closes down until after the New Year.  In the past few weeks, I was preparing my students for the submission of their end-of-semester work and then evaluating their overall semester performance to turn in their final grades.  In the midst of all that, I had to travel to Bangor to read end-of-semester portfolios from other teacher's students as well.

These "holiday circumstances" aside, however, the fact that Katelyn and I work in entirely-unrelated fields creates some difficulty in terms of time management for the relationship.

Our Wedding Photographer

T'was the night before Christmas Eve,
And through the apartment...

Who am I kidding?  I'm no poet.  I write prose.

Katelyn and I recently checked off another item from our wedding to-do list!  Hurrah!

We have our wedding photographer!

A Long Overdue Update

Wow; so the last update I posted to this blog was over a month ago, on November 8th.  Needless to say, it has been a busy time in my life, and not just with wedding planning--indeed, wedding planning has taken somewhat of a back seat lately.

Oh, by the way: