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.

Do-It-Ourselves Engagement Photos

Even with finally being able to lock in our wedding venue for next year, Katelyn and I have somehow managed to continue leading busy lives.  One of my friends had offered to shoot professional-quality photographs of us as a couple for our engagement photos, and we've yet to have a Saturday free to be able to meet up and get that taken care of.

Feeling the season slipping away and not wanting to stay inside on a beautiful October Sunday, Katelyn and I went back out to our "engagement rock" in Blue Hill Bay to see if we could set up her camera to take a picture of the two of us where I proposed to her just over two months ago.  The results, when you consider the difficulty of trying to take self-photos, weren't too shabby.

The Proposal Story

Now that introductions have been made, I can move on to the event that has turned me into a Groom-to-Be.

On a few occasions during the summer of 2009, Katelyn and I had discussed the potential possibility of eventually getting married to one another.  On two separate occasions, we actually asked each other to marry (me first, her second), but without a ring or a sense of reality to these proposals, we just carried on as always.

As the month of August began approaching and our impending trip together to South Carolina got closer and closer, I began to think seriously about proposing with a real ring: my grandmother's engagement ring from my dad's side of the family.  I didn't want to propose while we were in South Carolina because we were down there for a wedding already: the marriage between Katelyn's cousin Ryan and his wife Cheryl.  I thought it would be tacky and vain to propose while we were on vacation for that purpose, so I waited.