Tallit

I am either going to make JewishGuy's tallit or I am going to buy one for him when I am in Israel. I'm leaving a ton of space in my bag to carry all the things I bring home - I am literally packing economically (only bringing about 5-6 days' worth of clothing, a compact towel, using hippie toiletries to maximize multiple use soaps, etc) so that I can shop shop shop for things for the wedding, among other things.

I really like the idea of making his tallit, but I am not an amazing seamstress so I would rather buy him something awesome that would last a long time than spend a long time making something that would start to fall apart at the seams after a few years. Also, I bet I could find some amazing tallitot in Tsfat, hand made by someone in the artist's colony, for not very much money!

The reason I am buying him a tallit is because he follows the tradition of not wearing one until he is married, so I want it to be a present from me. :)

Traveling to Israel!

I will be going to Israel soon, so I made a new blog (of course) to document my travels. But the cool thing about this blog is I'll be posting mostly audio posts from my cell phone since I don't anticipate having much access to the internet.

Check it out!

jewishgaltravel.blogspot.com

Funny Wedding Expectation

Until a few years ago, I'd only been to two weddings in my whole life.  Therefore, most of my wedding experience came from the movies, and you know how weddings are in the movies.  Something terrible always happens - someone objects, someone crashes into something, the bride doesn't show, or something else.  Every single wedding in the movie has some kind of catastrophe (unless it's at the end of the movie, in which case it's really pretty and perfect).

So when I started going to weddings of cousins, friends, friends-of-friends, the first few were interesting for me.  I sat there waiting for something to happen.  I wasn't consciously waiting but I remember when they ended I would think to myself, "wow that was easy!"

I think most weddings happen without much difficulty, though.

Plus One

We were having a little drama about the issue of "plus one"s. I think the drama is over now, though, so I'm glad that was short lived. I think the invitations might become a bigger issue if we start getting into really high numbers, because I'm not sure I want 300 people at the wedding (and also the venue only holds 250). I'd really like to keep it 150 or less but I'm not sure that's happening. It's not terrible to have it so big, it's just... so big.

ANYWAY...

This is what the story is right now: Anyone single over 30ish gets a +1. Meaning, they get a "Jane Doe and guest" invitation. This is because so many people in that demographic will be paired up so it might feel awkward for some people to go stag. Under 30 (other than my single cousins) don't get a +1, because there is a pretty big crowd of single 20-somethings that will be there and a lot of them know each other. Everyone in a serious relationship gets an invitation that includes his/her significant other. The problem with this is the definition of a "serious relationship" - how long do they have to be together, how serious is serious, whatever. I think this will have to be a case-by-case basis. Many wedding sites say to use the "one year" guideline, so we might do that in the case that we don't know much about the relationship of the couple, but it's not a hard and fast rule I think.

There are a couple of reasons why I don't want to give every person without a significant other a +1. The first one being that I don't really want a bunch of strangers at the wedding, people who don't know us and probably won't ever see us again. JewishGuy and I agreed about this, we don't want people to have to "find a date." But also I think it will bring the guest list up too much, potentially 20 more people, and when we're already watching our numbers to keep it at 150 it just doesn't make sense.

I hope everyone can be happy with that!

China Patterns

I would love to have plates that look like this

Or maybe some other things from Laura Zindel.  I have always loved pretty much everything on this website and I keep forgetting to bookmark it.  Not this time!  I want this whole collection.  JewishGuy says his sister would never eat at our place with bugs on the dishes but I think they are neat.

We are having some difficulty finding dishes we like.  There are some things that are all right on the websites, but nothing too exciting.  I think we've come to the decision that we won't register for dishes, at least for now, since there's no point in registering for dishes we aren't enthusiastic about.  The dishes we have right now are fine, so I don't really want someone to spend money on new dishes that are "eh" just because.  I think we will still register for the fancypants dishes, though.

Registering!

Yesterday JewishGuy and I went to register for presents.  For some reason we thought Macy's and B3 (Bed Bath & Beyond) would be a good combo for registries - I don't know why we thought that.  Listen up, anyone who is reading this who is thinking of doing this combo...

We spent 3 exhausting hours at Macy's going through everything on the floor and painstakingly picking everything up, putting it down, not feeling 100% about it, registered for it anyway (we can edit the registry online), etc.  It took forever.  They didn't give us a catalogue or anything to look through, we just had to look through the store, so it really took forever and we didn't even get halfway through before we were exhausted and needed to go get a snack.  We turned in the ray gun and left to get a snack and continue on.

Then we went to B3 hoping to look at some extra kitchen things we couldn't find at Macy's.  WELL.  Apparently they had everything - they had these huge catalogues with the same dishes and everything else we saw at Macy's and more, plus we weren't limited by only getting things from the Martha Stewart collection.

The person we worked with at B3 said that it often happens that people will come in after already registering somewhere else and then think, why didn't I just come here first?  Well, that's what we were saying, and we were somewhat frustrated that we spent 3 hours at Macy's!  And we just can't figure out why we really wanted to register at Macy's anyway.  I guess we just assumed you couldn't get fine china through B3, but you can, it's through their catalogue - not only can you get fine china through B3, it's the same exact china that we saw at Macy's, probably the same china you see in many stores.  That's what happens when you assume!

Anyway, the registry is a perfect project for JewishGuy.  I think he is more excited about it than I am.  I mean, I love presents and registering for fun kitchen gadgets (go go gadget stand mixer!), but he is really going nuts with the kitchen stuff.   Today I came home and he told me about all the things he added to our registry while I was away and how he had organized everything and whatnot.

So here are the fun parts about the registering process:

We got to use a ray gun!  Very fun.  It's not actually shaped like a gun - they really should have made it look more like a gun like in Star Wars.  You just aim and fire and it shows up on your registry online.  JewishGuy did the shooting (it seems like it's usually the groom's job).

JewishGuy and I have very similar tastes, we basically know exactly what we want when we see it, so there wasn't really any conflict on anything.  That wasn't really surprising but it was really nice, especially since both the woman at Macy's and the man at B3 joked about the fights that break out!

All in all, I'm disappointed that we lost 3 hours of our very busy week, but it was a learning experience and now we are kind of reorganizing the way we're doing this registry.  It's easier if you think about it first, apparently...

Engagement Party Delays

We have decided to delay our local engagement party until June for the following reasons:

1. We got lazy on sending out invitations and now it's a week before our original date and nobody has been officially invited. (This is a big reason)  Although we could send out an email, I really want to send out invitations, I just think that's nicer.  Plus, I made the invitations already!  I just have to scratch out the date somehow haha.


2. Right now I am feeling ridiculously crazy and not ready for most of the traveling I will be doing this summer, plus I'm still kind of finishing classes and taking care of grad school things, like financial aid & loans, eek.


3. I unfortunately had to race up to NY last week for 4 days, which cut out a significant amount of time to get things done that I needed to get done before I leave for Israel in a couple of weeks.


4. We haven't registered for gifts yet...  At first we weren't planning on registering before the engagement party since we weren't expecting our friends to give us gifts at the engagement party, but a number of our friends have asked us to register.  Who are we to disappoint them? ;)

Also, while I was in NY, many of my family members asked when we were going to have an engagement party.  And when I told them we were having one down here, they looked surprised and somewhat upset that we weren't having a family engagement party.  So now I am wondering, should we have another one in NY?  Maybe this summer or maybe closer to Thanksgiving when everyone is around anyway?

So now we are thinking late June, like June 22, for our local engagement party.  Some people won't be able to make it because it's so late, like people who are moving in May and people who are going on summer trips or internships, but I don't know how we could pull it all off in a week and still be sane.  I mean, we could, it's possible, but I think we might just delay it for sanity's sake.

Fun with Lists

Wow it is hard making a guest list.  We came up with a first draft of the guest list of just JewishGuy's and my friends today - mostly because we were concerned with the weekend events involving food.  Some of our guests are religious and coming from out of town, so we will be providing meals for them and services at the hotel throughout Shabbat.  That means we have to know how many people to expect to feed for those meals and how much space to rent at the hotel.  While we were at it, we made a list of our friends who will be eating on Sunday (well, we separated it into "maybe," "probably," and "unlikely.")

It's a pretty long list!  Right now it looks like around 20-25 of our friends will be there for the weekend and around 35 for the wedding!  I think we are looking to invite about 55 friends to the wedding, total.  Our friends list doesn't include our parents' friends and their (our-age) children, or family.

What sparked this new progress was developments in the catering and hotel arranging department.  I have only heard through JewishGuy (after talks with his mom on the phone), but it sounds like we are going to go with this caterer, which has been highly recommended by pretty much everyone we know in the area, even though we haven't tasted the food yet.  It also sounds like the hotel is going to be really flexible with us about blocking off rooms since we are renting conference rooms for meals and services - as in, instead of charging us a percentage of the costs of the rooms we can't use once we've blocked them off, we'll be able to cancel them 3 weeks in advance with no (?) charge.  That's fantastic news and a big sigh of relief, considering we are blocking off rooms in DC during the cherry blossom festival!

Things are falling into place, at least some of the major things.  Although, because I don't want to jinx it, AHH EVERYTHING IS FALLING APART AND NOTHING IS GOING RIGHT RAH RAH RAH :( :( :(