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:

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.

Wedding-Related Information: Damariscotta Pumpkinfest & Regatta

Since so many people (even our Maine guests) are not located in the general area of Walpole, Maine, a lot of people will be making a bit of a drive (or, more often, flight) to the area for our wedding.  Thankfully, if you decide to get to the area ahead of the wedding, you can rest assured that you won't be lacking entertainment.  Unbeknownst to Katelyn and me, the nearby town of Damariscotta, Maine holds an annual Pumpkinfest & Regatta, with events typically beginning the weekend before Columbus Day weekend and wrapping up on Columbus Day itself.  Since our wedding is taking place on Columbus Day weekend in 2010, the Damariscotta Pumpkinfest & Regatta will be in full swing, so check out this post for a better idea of what you can expect if you come to the area looking for something to do.

Note: The images in the post were not taken by me; they come from the photo gallery at http://www.damariscottapumpkinfest.com/pumpkinfestGallery.html.  If the photo owners object to my use of these images, please contact me and I will remove them.  Thanks!

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.

"Groom" (or its rough equivalent) Across Languages

While my college major may have been English with a concentration in Creative Writing, and while I may be a teacher of English (though more specifically, a teacher of argumentative writing), one of my interests has always been picking up other languages.  Growing up, my grandparents on my mother's side spoke French around the house (though usually only to complain about my brother's behavior and my own behavior, or about the condition of our house in terms of cleanliness) and I actually attended a bilingual preschool where the instructor was fluent in both English and French and taught students in both.

Of course, once I got into public school at Farwell Elementary in Lewiston, the opportunity to be bilingual was pretty much gone.  True, my third grade class had a visiting Japanese teacher (Mamiko-sensei, though how I remember that name is a mystery to me) who came in to teach us some fragments of Japanese language and culture sporadically over the year, but there was no foreign language to go with the standards of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Before I get any further, I must warn you that this is going to be a very nerdy and linguistically-focused posting.  If you've no interest in the nuances of language or my propensity to gush about language in general, you might not want to click the link below.  There are some pretty funny and interesting bits to this post though, so those brave enough to proceed will be rewarded.

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.

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 Search #7: Spring Hill in South Berwick, ME

After "crashing" weddings at the Dockside Guest Quarters and Clay Hill Farm, we moved much further inland from coastal Maine to the town of South Berwick.  My mom, Joan Parker, had found and suggested this venue to Katelyn and me and she had actually gone through the trouble of contacting the owner in advance to let him know that we were coming.  While we weren't aware of the venue's hours (not opening until 5:30PM; we showed up at noon), we were able to meet up with my mom's contact and get a quick tour of the venue.

This is a venue in our price range, so read on for more thoughts on Spring Hill in South Berwick, Maine.

Venue Search #3: Lucerne Inn in Dedham, ME

After our adventure going to Clark's Cove Farm last Saturday, Katelyn and I headed in to Bangor to finally pick up her car from getting various repairs done and finally earning its Maine license plates.  It seemed particularly important to get her car, given my car's new feature of leaking radiator coolant.  Never ones to miss an opportunity to visit a potential wedding venue, we turned off Route 1A on our way to the big city to check out our third venue in person.

On Sunday, September 13th, 2009, Katelyn and I visited the majestic Lucerne Inn in the town of Dedham, Maine.

Venue Search #2: Clark's Cove Farm in Walpole, ME

It's been a couple days since my last contribution to "The Groom's Take", and part of this has been dealing with my job as an adjunct instructor and working with my students on their first drafts of the semester. Always a time of the year where stress and tensions are high and I need to be able to keep a level head to help them through it. Since it's the weekend now and I have some free time with my poor fiancée putting in extra hours at work (I'm cooking family recipe crèpes for supper tonight to make that up to her), I'm going to catch up with documenting the venues we visited last weekend. Now that Greystone Manor is no longer an option (see the update on that post for more information), these venues take on even greater importance.

On Saturday, September 12th, 2009, Katelyn and I drove my car (leaking radiator coolant all the way) to Clark's Cove Farm in Walpole, Maine.

Unintentional Title Reading

This is something that is probably only immediately apparent for a word-nerd like myself, but I did feel like a little bit of commentary could be useful on it, if only to appease my grammatically-focused brain.  Long story short: the origins of this blog post have little to do with planning weddings or my wedding in particular, and a lot more with my English-major-mind getting caught up on an unintentional reading of this blog's title.

When I was originally setting up this blog, I had decided on the title Groom's-Eye-View.  It had a good ring to it, it had good internal rhyme, it was musical.  I had everything all set up and was poised to post my introductory blog posting and advertise on my Facebook page when I did a Google search to find that another Blogger user had already titled their blog A Groom's Eye View.  Crushed (not really, but it sounds more dramatic that way), I set about brainstorming a new title for the blog.  I knew that I wanted to include the word "groom" in the title, as this is one way I'm beginning to identify myself with all the wedding planning in the air, but I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to come up with for a title.  The first title had been perfect; I'd fallen in love with it.

Venue Search #1: Greystone Manor in Cape Neddick, ME

One of the "fun" things about getting engaged is that you then need to figure out where the hell you're going to have the wedding.  A number of considerations need to be made, ranging from how many people will be able to make it to the venue (particularly when you have a groom from Maine and a bride from Michigan) to how much money you can afford to put down.  Oh yeah, you need to make sure that it's the kind of place that will be memorable for years after the ceremony and suitable for the tastes of the couple too.

On Saturday, September 5th, 2009, Katelyn and I visited our first potential venue: Greystone Manor in Cape Neddick, ME.

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.

An Opening Statement

As with anything that has a beginning, introductions are necessary.  Your author for the beginning of this journey (and the rest of it, hopefully) is me, 25-year-old groom-to-be Brian Parker.   I am a native of Lewiston, Maine and twice a graduate of the University of Maine located in Orono, Maine (Bachelor of Arts in English 2006, Master of Arts in English 2008).  I am currently living in the small coastal town of Blue Hill, Maine and beginning my fourth year as an instructor of college English and my second year at Husson University in Bangor, Maine.

Since I am a groom-to-be, there is also a bride-to-be and a particular story behind that.  Defying my expectations of the online dating world, I met Katelyn Cooper (the future Mrs. Parker) through the services of Match.com, which I joined in December 2008.  Ms. Cooper is also a Masters Degree holder, though her field is architecture and she works for a firm here in Blue Hill.  Our first date required us both to drive over half-an-hour on back roads in a snowstorm to make it to the "midpoint town" of Ellsworth (halfway between my residence at the time in Old Town and her place in Blue Hill) for a Sunday brunch together.  Neither of us knew what to expect upon departure that cold and snowy January day, and I'm sure neither of us would've predicted that I would propose to her with my grandmother's heirloom engagement ring after she got out of work on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009.  The proposal story will be visited upon in a future posting, though most people acquainted with us have already heard it.  We are tentatively planning to get married sometime in October of 2010, though there really aren't any details in place beyond that at this time.

Growing up, I never really had a particular vision of what my dream wedding would entail.  As children, boys aren't really encouraged to consider those sorts of things anyway; after all, we all know that it is the bride's special day and we just kind of stand up there with her and say "I do" before getting a ring, right?  Not as far as Katelyn and I are concerned.  And that's part of what this blog is being born out of; a desire for a wedding where both bride and groom have equal input and where the day is recognized as something equally important for both parties.  This may be a radical idea, for certain, but as long as us grooms-to-be have websites like The Plunge to counter traditional bride-focused sites like The Knot, there is hope for the future.

Whether or not Katelyn decides to blog on her own or simply interjects with the occasional posting on this blog, the hope is to offer The Groom's Take on what it means to plan a wedding today.

Welcome to The Groom's Take; I look forward to hearing feedback as this project continues along.