This Entry is Rated 'R'...for Ridiculous

The battlecry for our wedding should be "If you're not crazy yet, then you're not busy enough!" I was just reflecting the other day on the various quirks of the moms involved in planning this wedding, and realized that weddings tend to magnify the bizarre qualities of everyone involved. Given that everyone involved in this wedding is becoming tediously obsessive compulsive, I'm at least hoping that these qualities already existed and weren't developed exclusively for the wedding. So far, these little OCD things have happened:
1) Kenny's mom requested that we mail all of the invitations that are going to their friends and family to New York so that she can send them from there. Why? Kenny and I are still trying to figure it out. It's likely that scientists will discover the edge of the universe, or perhaps explain how President Bush was re-elected before we figure out why these invitations were sent to New York.
2) My mom has requested that I reorganize our guest list so that guests from various different areas of my life are grouped together on the guest list. I asked her why, and she couldn't really tell me. She did, however, admit that it was an obsessive-compulsive request. Way to admit to the insanity, Mom! So far she's the only one willing to admit that she's acting slightly nuts, while the rest of us are still denying it.
3) Kenny and the stamps. Enough said. He refuses to admit that this was totally OCD.
4) I hunted down a post office that would hand stamp my envelopes. I was prepared to bribe a federal employee to do so. I also was overly excited when I found out that the post office in Dripping Springs, Texas still hand cancels stamps. That was before I found out that my neighborhood post office does as well, but I had no qualms about driving out to Dripping Springs. Yes, Dripping Springs is as country as it sounds. And it is far away.

Who is missing from this list? The dads. Where are the dads and why are they not crazy yet? Actually, I think their crazy will happen when they get the bill for the wedding. By then the rest of us should be feeling the effects of our Xanax, Prozac and other prescriptions and will at least be coherent enough to round up our dads for the looney bin.

Ask yourself, "Do I feel crazy?" If you don't, you're not pulling your weight. Get to it!

Do not bribe postal workers

After Jacque and Carol's hand-canceling strike out at the main post office in downtown Austin, I figured I'd try my luck with something a little more "small town," such as our little neighborhood Hyde Park post office. Before I went, I called Kenny's mom to see if she had any good advice for how to handle the post office. After researching this with her 5 Towns Wedding Mafia crew, she suggested bribing them. It was actually our caterer's suggestion. So I left my office today, invitations in hand, and a $20 in my pocket. I even had it neatly folded up so I could discretely slip it into the federal employee's hand. Yeah, that didn't sound quite right, did it? No. It didn't. As Kenny said, that's probably a federal offense. I got to the post office, and as I was standing in line, I weighed my options. I could just walk away, mail the boxes of envelopes up to New York, and let the Wedding Mafia pros handle this. Or, I could go through with it. Or, I could try a third option, which involved altering my place in line so I could get the male postal worker, batting my eyelashes, and turning up the southern accent just a bit. Worked like a charm. You should all be receiving hand-canceled invitations soon. What's better, I didn't get arrested and charged with a federal crime. I can't believe I was going to commit a federal crime in order to get my stamps hand-canceled. The wedding has obviously sucked out every ounce of sanity I might have had left after choosing wedding music with my mom.

Teamwork

I just have to give a quick shout-out to the fabulous ladies of Cantey Hanger, Carol and Jacque. Friday, after a trying week at work thanks to yet another time-consuming lecture on the margin tax, complete with technical difficulties (my projector cut out in the middle of my talk) and no ride back to the office (my car battery chose that moment to die), preceded by a not-so-nice encounter with one of the partners in my office, I was about to give up on being able to get anything done outside of work, including getting wedding invitations sealed, stamped and in the mail. Jacque and Carol came to my rescue by sealing the envelopes (all 109 of them) and taking them to the post office for me. Unfortunately for them, the post office is manned by a bunch of...federal employees!! (sorry, Allen). They were told to look elsewhere for hand-cancellation. Either way, they certainly saved me lots of time and a trip to the post office. Thanks, Ladies! I owe you lunch :)

Stuffing Wedding Invitations: Dante's Inferno with 2 extra levels of Hell

Sometimes I think Kenny does stuff just so I'll write about him on this blog. Wednesday night, we decided to tackle stuffing wedding envlopes. This is an AMAZINGLY TEDIOUS PROCESS!!! Considering the insanity of our wedding invitations, I knew this wouldn't be an easy task. We had 7, that's right- 7, components to our invitations: (1) invitation, (2) tissue to go over invitation, (3) reply card, (4) tissue to go over reply card, (5) reply card envelope, (6) direction card, (7) inner envelope for invitation, (8) outer envelope. Ok, that's 8. I tend to lose track after 2 items, which is the normal number of different pieces of paper involved in a typical letter. To add to this 8-fold nightmare, we had to number each RSVP envelope with a number that corresponded to each guest on the guest list in case they forgot to actually write their name on the reply card. (I thought, "Who forgets to write their name on the reply card? Who's such an idiot?" That would be me. Responding to a friend's wedding invite, I wrote this great little "well wish" for them, and am pretty sure I forgot to actually tell them I was coming, much less sign my name. These numbering rules are apparently created for people like me.) So this little numbering scheme adds the 9th component of our wedding invitations. This corresponds nicely with Dante's Nine Levels of Hell.

Kenny and I shared the responsibilites of Levels 1, 2 and 7, which involved folding the invite, laying the tissue paper over it, and stuffing it in the inner envelope. Piece of cake. Then I decided I would tackle assigning numbers to the RSVP cards (Level 9) , assembling Levels 3, 5 and 7 (the reply card and the tissue that goes over it, and the reply envelope), and neatly enclosing the direction card (Level 6 under the flap of the reply card envelope and stuffing these in the inner envelope as well (back to Level 7) then matching the inner envelope with its corresponding outer envelope (Level 8). It was during the process of stuffing the RSVP envelope in the inner envelope that I discovered a 10th level of Hell: trying to match the numbered reply envelope et al. with the right inner and outer envelopes. Remember, these little envelopes are numbered for each guest. Since I descended through the various levels of Hell in an assembly-line fashion, the reply cards and their respective envelopes were in a separate stack, and not exactly in the same order, as the inner and outer invitations. Let me just say that this sucked big time.

Once I finally got through this and matched up all of the invitations with their reply cards, I was introduced to Stamp Hell. Part of Stamp Hell involved my own creation- forgetting to put stamps on the RSVP cards. I would go through a few envelopes, then realize I forgot to stamp one before I stuffed it in the big envelope, and would then have to go back and check the five envelopes before that. This involved lots of unstuffing. Again, not fun.

Kenny created the second part of Stamp Hell. He is the most anal-retentive person when it comes to stamps, apparently. As I finished my trip through Hells 1-10, I looked over to see that Kenny, who did not participate in levels 4-10 or the first part of Stamp Hell, had a huge stack of envelopes before him that did not have stamps. This could only mean one thing: I stuffed, matched, and assembled the invitations faster than he could put stamps on the outer envelopes. I was truly baffled as to how this could be, so I watched him for a moment as he applied stamps to an envelope. He would take a stamp from the right-edge of a page of stamps so that it would have a straight right-side edge to match the straight right-side edge of the envelope. The next stamps were then lined up according to their little scalloped edges. The far-left stamp was taken from the far-left edge of the stamp page so that it would have a straight edge on the left side. Unbelievable. Meanwhile, I was haphazardly choosing stamps from anywhere on the stamp page for the RSVP envelope stamps. Kenny would occasionally yell at me for using one of the stamps from "his row." Again, unbelievable. So this is what took him 50 seconds per envelope. We still have 10 or so envelopes without stamps, but that will be done this weekend hopefully. And then we have the issue of hand cancellation of stamps, which will be a whole other adventure, and possibly an added level of Stamp Hell, or maybe a new level of Hell all on its own. That will be addressed in a later post that will undoubtedly involve one or more disgruntled postal workers and a $20 bill.