Shoes part 2

So last time I talked about shoes I was considering a splash of vivid color. Fast forward to the day I picked up the dress in Campbell with my future mother-in-law. I put it on and oohed and aahed and turned and twirled in it.

Then it hit me: I can't wear bright shoes with this dress. The dress is ivory. It's such a soft color and everything else I'll be wearing is soft, muted and understated colors. Hot pink or teal shoes would look out of place.

So I considered a soft, neutral gold color, like these:


Can you tell I like a little bling on my shoes?

I thought I'd look into dyeables, that way I could dye them whatever color I wanted. The internet had the biggest selection of dyeables, which is good and bad. Good since there's lots to choose from. Bad because about 70% of the shoes I try on in my size don't fit right. I seem to have narrow heels, which means that although they fit the rest of my foot, the shoe will fall off, or worse, rub my heels raw. So I figured a sandal with an adjustable buckle was the best way to go.

Here's some I liked:I particularly like the last pair, from David's Bridal. I love peep toes. Can't you just see some pretty painted toe nails peeping out?

And then I saw them: dyeable, with bling, an adjustable ankle strap and not too tall. They're 2.5 inches. I would have gone to 2.75 if I could have found them, but don't think I could handle three inches:
Yep, these puppies are now mine. Zappos sent them in a matter of days and they fit great. My dress is hemmed to fit their height. Now I need to get them dyed. I'm deliberately being vague on the color because Mr. Fried Rice reads this blog and I want it to be a surprise. More on that later.

The bling is in!

Remember the lonely engagement ring, sitting in an envelope at the jewelers without even a finger to love? It's not lonely anymore. It has a mate now.

After four long weeks the jeweler called to say the wedding band was in. I gasped when he opened the box -- it was so pretty and clean and sparkly under those jewelry store lights. I love it. The diamonds on the wedding band were smaller than we both expected, but I don't mind. Nobody on the planet has a ring like mine. I like to think it's kinda like me: classic, but with a twist.

This time we had our heads on straight enough to order Mr. Fried Rice's ring: A somewhat slender tungsten carbide band. It was fun watching him try on the bands for size and worry about getting used to wearing a ring for the first time in his life. I tell ya, seeing that ring on his finger was one sexy sight.

There it is in the photos, in the box and on my finger. Mr. Fried Rice said I had to put it away after we took the photo of it on my finger. But in 39 days it will be united with its mate, just like me!

Shoes!

Picking shoes was probably one of the most fun parts of this planning process. During the five long months I waited for my dress to come in, I scoured Zappos.com, Endless.com, Nordstrom, JCPenney, Piperlime.com, J.Crew, Anthropologie and more.

I love the idea of the pretty traditional white dress with a snap of color hiding underneath in the shoes, like these brides did:

Photo credit: Knottie Cathleya

Knottie Bella wore these red shoes for the reception and pictures, but not the ceremony. I think I may need to buy a pair like them for every day life:

Knottie Mrs. Foxy plans to go pink with her white dress:

And I love love LOVE how Knottie Ace wore shoes matching her bridesmaids "pool" colored dresses. If you have colored shoes, this is a must-take photo:



As for me, I was thinking hot pink or a turquoise/teal like the above photos. Some that I liked include:

Next time: What I chose.

The ring is in!

The jeweler called today to say my wedding band is in. Which means I can get my engagement ring back. I gasped when I heard the message and my co-worker asked me if I was OK. The only sucky thing is that the place is across town and I won't have a chance to get there during business hours until Saturday.

Invites are in the mail!

What a wonderful feeling of relief and satisfaction I have right now. The invitations are safely in the mail (well, except for poor Steve's, still waiting on an rsvp card for his. Sorry, Steve).

The invitations went out two weeks later than I had planned (six weeks out instead of eight), still with an RSVP date of Sept. 1 (oops) but at this point, I just don't care.

With 20 guests, some of them couples, we ended up with 13 invites. Is that bad luck? I love how the little stack of them looks, all addressed and stamped. Of course, this is after my list of people didn't match my list of addresses. I was short one. I forgot to invite the groom's parents. Whoops! Good thing I had an extra invite.

Which brings me to Zazzle.com, the website I bought the stamps from. This site is so cool and I highly recommend it. They sell stamps that are custom designed and uploaded by customers. I chose a fancy black and white stamp with RSVP on it for the RSVP envelopes that matches the black and white and touch of blue invites perfectly. And I found a stamp that said A&B (our initials) for the outside envelope in a pretty font and also black and white.

That stamp actually said M&M originally but Zazzle allows you to customize stamps. It was super easy. Click customize. Change the Ms to A and B. Click save and tada! They cost a little more than stamps from the post office, but I'm so pleased with how they look.

Hit a bump with the RSVP stamps, however. They were much bigger than I expected, even though I ordered the smallest size. The addresses on four of our RSVP envelopes were printed a tad high, so the stamp would have covered part of the address. All the post office had was red and green heart stamps, which don't match the black and white and touch of blue scheme at all, but at this point I really can't care about such things.

After dropping them off at the post office, I got a massage and tonight Mr. Fried Rice is taking me out on a date to a new restaurant. No wedding talk allowed!

Calligraphy pen: 1, Bride: 0

So my dream of starting a calligraphy business on the side is dead. I have failed to master the calligraphy pen. I had hoped for something like this:

or this:

photo credit: Calligraphy by Melissa

So I bought myself a beginner's kit and a book and set to work practicing. Pages upon pages of my friends' and families' names -- capital As with swirly swashes, beautiful Ks and complicated Ws.

They looked OK, but I had trouble mastering some of the fonts, so I decided to use large fancy first letters and do the rest in my own cursive. I measured out lines on a separate piece of paper that was slipped inside the envelope so when I wrote on the outside it would be straight.

But the pen got the best of me. I used a fountain pen with a calligraphy nib, which started off fine, but I ran into problems getting the ink to flow smoothly. I'd be in the middle of a word and the ink would just stop. Maybe I need better training on how to care for the pens. Maybe it was because I was using upward strokes (with calligraphy and fountain pens, you are only supposed to make strokes that go in a downward direction).

This led to some comical moments. I shook the pen rapidly, not realizing ink was flying out until I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and saw three splotches of ink on my face and neck. Mr. Fried Rice, in a valiant effort, tried to suck the ink out to get it to flow smoother. Ten minutes later I said, "why are your two front teeth gray?" Yep, he had ink on his teeth.

So I charged off to Michael's in a huff and bought a pack of calligraphy markers. The writing was much thicker than the delicate lettering I had pictured, which meant the address had to be written large. They looked a bit too much like my regular handwriting, so I gave myself a B- and went to bed. When I looked at them after putting them away for a few days while I waited for stamps, I was pleasantly surprised: They looked better than I remembered. Here they are:

Bridal Biceps

I love the names of exercise programs geared toward brides: Wedding workout, Buff Brides, The Healthy Bride's Bootcamp. I'm thinking of starting my own: Bridal Biceps.

While dress shopping, I tried on one backless, too-big dress that made my back look scrawny. Then, the following photo inspired me. I already work out some, but not on a regular basis. I was goofing around at the bridal salon and asked Tracy to take my picture while I flexed my muscles. She shot a detail of the dress, not my arms, but I did get a good look at what my back looks like while flexing. Holy cow, I like it!

(Well, actually the first thought I had was, man, that mole is big and promptly had my doctor remove it.)

Since Mr. Fried Rice is obsessive about his working out, I thought I'd join him. While he was lifting his more than 200 pounds of weights, I brought my little 7- and 10-pounders down to the garage to join him. Mr. Fried Rice never passes up an opportunity to play photographer, so here's some "before" pics taken in January, 2008. (I don't know why I'm working out in my engagement ring or the diamond necklace in these photos, that is not normal.)


Not a whole heck of a lot of muscle going on there. I had a vision of me standing there at the ceremony, all gussied up in my dress, holding Mr. Fried Rice's hands during the ceremony -- and my arms looking like a coupla puffy corn dogs and my back looking like a Pilsbury biscuit. I need some definition!

So we got another bar for me and started bench pressing with 40 pounds. Then 45 pounds, all the while doing my little 10-pound curls.

Fast forward eight months of two or three workouts a week and it was time for Mr. Fried Rice to play photographer again. I was surprised the camera doesn't capture the muscle I see in person, but I'm still pleased with the results:

(Why blogger insists I be upside down in this picture, I will never know)

The last one is my favorite. Look at those back muscles. Now of course, I'm not going to be carrying around 10-pound weights during the ceremony, so the results might be a bit subdued. I might have to have the photographer get a few shots of me showing off those arms.

Oh, and of course, Mr. Fried Rice went crazy with the camera. I had to post this last photo, probably the best stick-your-arm-out-with-the-camera-in-it-and-hope photo I've ever seen.

The Chairdrobe

If you haven't browsed UrbanDictionary.com, you should. I could spend hours entertaining myself on that site.

Today, they sent me their word of the day:

Chairdrobe:

The art of piling clothes on a chair to be used in place of a closet or dresser. If a chair is not available one can always defer to a floordrobe. "I searched through my chairdrobe to find my outfit for work."

It rang so true. With so much wedding planning, and so much time spent on theknot.com, I'm finding that some things are going by the wayside. Like laundry. I don't have a chairdrobe, but I have a bedpostrobe, as evidenced below.


So what do you find is going by the wayside as you spend time working on wedding stuff?

My ring finger is lonely

It's been naked for nearly three weeks. It's at the jeweler's, having a wedding band made to match it. That's only 4.8% of my engagement, but it feels like such a long time.

See, Mr. Fried Rice picked the ring out of a catalog. It has some lovely swooping curves that mean a plain wedding band can't be just crammed up against it. For some reason, the ring in the catalog does not come with corresponding wedding band, so one needs to be custom made.

When I first got the engagement ring it seemed so huge and unnatural. Driving was dangerous. You'd turn a corner and there it was at the top of the steering wheel, a big old distracting diamond, sparkling in the sunshine. I'd look down during a meeting at work and there it was, sparkling away in the conference room light. Punching in my PIN while getting gas and wow, look how good it looks in gas station light.

I wasn't used to sleeping with jewelry on, and always took my other rings off. One of the first few nights at Mr. Fried Rice's after getting engaged, I took off the ring and put it in a safe spot on the dresser next to his bed.

"Oh," he said, in a disappointed tone. "Aren't you going to sleep with it on?"

Well, I guess I could try, I thought, seriously thinking I'd make an effort, he'd see it wouldn't work and I'd go back to putting the ring on the dresser.

Fast forward a year and I'm sleeping with the ring on. The only time it leaves my finger is when I'm in the shower and even then my finger feels naked. The ring is so comfortable on now sometimes I can't tell the ring is there, and I have to grab the diamond between thumb and forefinger just to make sure.

You can imagine how hard it was to hand it over to the sympathetic jeweler. We chatted a while after he put it in the little brown envelope. He suddenly said, "hey," and pointed at my hand. "You just reached for your ring finger, and you didn't even notice."

I did reach. And I didn't notice. But now my finger is lonely and I notice it a lot. I called the jeweler today and he said it should be ready by Wednesday of next week. 6% of my engagement.

The Rules

One of the things I did not expect about wedding planning was all the rules. Etiquette rules or just tradition. I've never been big on silly rules. This is the girl who fought college officials tooth and nail after they took those dangerous halogen lamps out of our college-owned apartment senior year. (That's stealing. I wanted my property back and I got it.) So, Emily Post may be sorely disappointed in me (that's her at left) but here's my list of annoying rules:

Thou must get your guests drunk on your dime
Not a rule, but a "must have" according to this story on the Today show.

"Going to a wedding reception that does not have an open bar is like going to California and only seeing Fresno."

Not only have you insulted my home, but now you've insulted me. The average wedding costs $27,000. I'm not only supposed to feed all these people, but I'm supposed to blow my house fund and go into debt so they can have a free mojito? Screw that. You're getting beer and wine. That's how we do it in Fresno.

Guests must base self worth on labels
From Allexperts.com:

While clear, printed labels are fine for impersonal mail, when it comes to an invitation to an important event like a wedding, they really are inappropriate.

That's not to say that people don't use clear lables. They do. However, the label, in my opinion, cheapens the look of something that should stand out as a very special, personal piece of mail.

First, if we're going to be perfectionists, I'll point out that the expert spelled labels wrong in the second sentence.

But back to the invitations: How tacky. If I ever get an invite to a wedding with a label - even a pretty clear one with gold script - I am not going to the wedding. How could the bride think so little of me? Why doesn't she spend anywhere from $1 to $2.50 an invite and hire a professional calligrapher? Why can't she put up with a little carpal tunnel from addressing hundreds of invites? The thousands of dollars she's already spending to have me at her wedding is just not enough.

Thou must disrespect women
According to Martha Stewart:

"A formal envelope incorporates social titles and the husband's first name on the outer envelope."

This one just burns me up. We have the right to own property. We have the right to vote. We have the right to control our bodies. Yet we women do not have a first name when it comes to "proper" wedding etiquette. Mr. and Mrs. John Doe is proper.

I was raised by a feminist and I'm proud of it. She's paying for half this wedding and she is half of the couple who raised me and I refuse to disrespect her or any other woman by not even mentioning her name. My invite will proudly be addressed to both my parents, just as both their names are on the wedding invite.

Thou must be beseiged with children.
You are not supposed to say "adult reception" or "adult-only reception" on the invites, according to many of the people on theknot.com. Instead, you are supposed to "2 seats have been reserved for you" on the invitation.

You then watch as people add child after child after child to the rsvp card. This hasn't happened to me yet but I've chatted with several brides online who were shocked that people would tack on the extra guests like it was a barbecue and expect you fork over the extra bucks to feed them. Not to mention risk a wailing child in the middle of one of the most important moments in your life. Or having to say, as I read somewhere recently, "Bobby, get off the wedding cake."

I could go on about inviting strangers, oops I mean dates; Martha Stewart saying it's inappropriate to ask choice of dinner on the invite; secret gift registries that require guests to hunt for them; the taboo against organizing your own shower or bachelorette party, etc. But I'm tired. Not just of rules but just tired. Goodnight for now.