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.

Meet My Wedding Party Part 3: Thomas (Tommy) Keschl, Best Man

And now, for my last member of my side of the wedding party, we turn to my best friend from college, and my best man at this crazy wedding business, Thomas Keschl.