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:

National Novel Writing Month Word Count Widget [Update: 50,000 words!]

As many of you visitors know, I have entered this year's National Novel Writing Month at the suggestion of my lovely fiancée.  This challenge asks entrants to write a 50,000 word or more novel between November 1st and November 30th.  This challenge is also why I have not made any recent updates to this blog posting, even as Katelyn is beginning to send out contact information to potential photographers and caterers.

I know that some of you are trying to follow along with my progress, so I have included a word count widget that you all can check up on to see how my progress is going towards 50,000 words in a month's time.

Once that percentage hits 100% and I have successfully completed my goal of writing 50,000 words, I will return to updating this blog more regularly as I finish whatever remains of the novel to write.

Thanks for the understanding as the blog suffers somewhat in favor of my creative writing endeavor.  I look forward to meeting my goal and being able to write more wedding-related material in the near-future.

Update: As of November 14th, 2009, I have reached my goal of 50,000 words written for NaNoWriMo.  There's still more story to write, and much work to do in revision, addition, and subtraction, but I'm happy to have met my word count goal.

Happy Halloween 2009!

Since Halloween is one of my favorite holidays and since Katelyn and I decided to get pumpkins to carve from a local farm, we sat down on Thursday night to carve our own designs for the holiday season.  I had suggested to Katelyn that she might want to do an engagement-related design, and since I'm a Mainer and had the taller pumpkin, I decided to do a lighthouse to fit the geographic theme.

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.

Wedding-Related Information: MaineFoliage.com

Now that Katelyn and I have put our venue and date in place for this wedding, I'm going to be providing a lot of informational posts for our guests to get a sense of what they're in for when they get to Walpole, Maine for our wedding.

One of the reasons that Katelyn and I decided to have our wedding in October 2010 (aside from the primary one of wanting to have a year to plan the thing) is because the both of us love the autumn season and Maine gets very pretty (though it also starts getting very cold) in the fall.

Thankfully, for our purposes, the state of Maine understands the tourist appeal of fall foliage and runs MaineFoliage.com to give a weekly run-down of the change in leaf color and the % of leaf drop in seven different zones of the state.  They have been providing this service since 2003, and Katelyn and I both researched the trends of leaf coloration for our proposed wedding weekend heading back through the years.  The data for Zone 1, which is where Clark's Cove Farm in Walpole, Maine is located, can be found by clicking the link below.

Our Wedding Venue

Time passed since the start of the Cooper-Parker wedding venue search: 38 days.
Mileage to nearest venue from Blue Hill (Alamoosook Lakeside Inn in Orland, ME): 16.4 miles.
Mileage to furthest venue from Blue Hill (Dockside Guest Quartes in York, ME): 180 miles.
Busiest venue search day: Saturday, September 26th -- visited 5 venues.
Most frequent iPod artists in car: Jason Mraz, Tom Petty, Lonely Island, Black Eyed Peas, and Lady Gaga.
Number of energy drinks consumed: Too many to remember.
Number of refueling stops: See above.
Number of headaches: See above.

Finally deciding where to celebrate our love and marriage on Saturday, October 9th, 2010: Priceless.

Note: This post features many images, so please allow some time to load when you click the link below.

(Final) Venue Search #14: The 1812 Farm of Seacoast Maine in Bristol, ME

A venue search that began with our visit to Greystone Manor in Cape Neddick, Maine over Labor Day weekend 2009 finally came to a close yesterday, October 11th, 2009.  Katelyn and I woke up bright and early, braving the morning chill of a mid-October day, and struck out on the road to meet up with my parents at the final venue we intended to visit in our wedding venue search.

The venue search finally concludes with our visit to The 1812 Farm of Seacoast Maine in Bristol, Maine.  Join us for the last venue search write-up!

Venue Search #13: Point Sebago Resort in Casco, ME

For the last stop on our Sunday venue tour, Katelyn and I drove an extra hour beyond Cliffside Lodge to go visit Point Sebago Resort in Casco, Maine.  Katelyn had called and left a message a few days before we planned to go out on our visits, and we hadn't heard back from them.  We assumed, much with other locations, that we would be able to see the venue anyway, regardless of whether or not we had a planned visit set up.

We stopped on the side of the road because of this particularly beautiful sight between Cliffside Lodge and Point Sebago Resort.  It's a good thing we did, because it's the only good that came out of our drive.

Venue Search #12: Cliffside Lodge in Poland Spring, ME

Our second stop on last Sunday's venue search brought us to Poland Spring, Maine; yes, the home of the famous bottled water company.  After navigating a couple of rural back roads, the signs for Camp North Star led us to the Cliffside Lodge, which is part of the camp grounds but is also used to host wedding parties.

Join us in looking at one of the more interesting venues we've found in the state, the Cliffside Lodge in Poland Spring, Maine.

Venue Search #11: Maple Hill Farm Bed & Breakfast in Hallowell, ME

After a long delay, it is time for me to do some reporting on the venue we visited last Sunday (October 4th, 2009).  This time around we decided to make some calls in advance to the three places we wanted to visit (Maple Hill Farm Bed & Breakfast, Cliffside Lodge, and Point Sebage Resort).  We were able to get in touch with Maple Hill Farm, and we actually set a time to meet with them as our first stop on the venue search.

Check out our pictures and reaction to Maple Hill Farm Bed & Breakfast in Hallowell, Maine.

My New Family

Judging from the title, I'm sure many of you would expect this post to be about the Cooper Family, who I will be grateful to have as in-laws once Katelyn and I are married next October.  However, many of the members of Katelyn's family live far from Maine, and while I will see them on holidays and other important dates, there is a more readily-apparent addition to my family unit now that I have been living with Katelyn in Blue Hill for the past month and a half: her cats, Teagan and Gabriel.

From Our Kitchen to Yours: Moreau Family Crèpes

Now, I may not be as famous as Julia Child and I'm certainly not as popular as Julie Powell and her blog about working through Child's cookbook, and there's no real chance that I'll be able to parlay this blog into a feature-length movie where I'm portrayed by Amy Adams (that'd be somethin'), but I do have a family recipe to share.  Growing up in a Franco-American family (my mom's side), my grandmother (or Mèmère, as we called her) Normande Moreau used to make home-made crèpes for me almost every day of the week.  It certainly didn't help me keep a slim figure growing up, but I will always remember those days in her kitchen/dining room, waiting for a plate of crèpes and syrup.

Since I moved in with Katelyn shortly after getting engaged, I have been trying to be an equal contributor since she has the "bread-winning" job and I'm doing a job that, while it helps me build my résumé, does not provide the kind of income I would like.  One of my contributions has come in the form of introducing Katelyn to these crèpes, which have now replaced pancakes on her list of favorite breakfast-y foods.  Join us in our kitchen for the evening as we make "Moreau Family Crèpes" together.

Venue Voting Results

When I decided to post a poll to this blog asking people which venues they liked the most from our venue search and reporting so far, I was putting myself out there.  What I mean was, I was taking the chance that nobody would vote and I would feel as though I'm writing this blog only for myself.  Although this wouldn't be the worst thing (at least the blog gives me an opportunity to write on a regular basis), it does make me feel better now that I know people are actively reading what I write and are interested enough to weigh in on the decisions Katelyn and I face for our October 2010 wedding.

Here are the final poll results:

More Venues to (Possibly) Consider

As Katelyn and I continue to try and narrow down where we're going to stage this whole wedding deal, we're still left with a few more places on our list to consider as we enter the home stretch and face the reality of needing to lock in a venue before all of the good weekends in October 2010 are locked up.

Some of these venues have already been discussed here while some simply fell off our radar when we went searching and weren't ever mentioned.  Also, unlike my prior lists, we actually do have pricing information for most of these venue locations.  In any case, here are some venues still on the table that we might need to go visit in person to consider on our overall list.