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.

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.

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.