Last week in DC Before the Wedding

The next week, I was finishing up my last few days at work. Jeff and I got our typhoid medicine (an oral vaccine), which we need because we go to Thailand on our honeymoon.

We went through all the RSVP cards to double-check our spreadsheet, and we got our final guest count – 168 people.

Overall, we got ‘yes’ replies from a little over half of the people we invited – the response rate was higher (about 75%) for people in Minnesota, and lower for the friends, of whom almost 90% live outside Minnesota (and many outside the U.S.).

In the end, more than half of our guests – 88 of them – flew in from outside Minnesota, and at least five of those were coming from outside the United States.

We sent info emails out to the wedding party with the near-final schedule.

We worked on getting numbers for the BBQ, and ended up with an unexpectedly high 83 RSVPs. We decided to rent vans, since almost 30 people would need rides from the hotel.

We ordered the cover sheet of our program from 123 print. We also finalized the wording for inside the program – sending it to family, friends, and our pastor, Gwin.

I made a “Mariel & Jeff” photobook that tracks Jeff and I side-by side each year from 1983 to 2011. I think it turned out great, but it took forever!

We went to dinner with Kris and Emma and finalized the plan for the after-party in the hotel. We ordered the drinks from the hotel and Kris and Emma planned to get the keys, open up the suite, and set-up.

We got the speeches and photos from the wedding party, solicited final inputs for the wedding guest book, and then put that together. I also loved how this turned out, though, like the other photobook, it took way longer to put together than I’d expected.

My final photo-related task was to find a photo for every person/couple attending the wedding for their table card. This also took a while, though picasa’s face recognition softward allowed me to search for specific people, and that made it way easier.

We made tons of adjustments to the wedding schedule and tasks. We called Patrick and asked him to MC (and he said yes – yay!). We called Capture Studios and set up an appointment to chat when we got to Minnesota.

We wrote up an info packet for the subletter and got the keys to Stephanie to give to him.

We printed out the labels for the cookies that would be the table gifts.

Somehow, in the midst of all that, we managed to get away to enjoy one last happy hour with our friends before leaving town for more than a month.