he said, she said

it’s no secret that there’s a conspiracy against love and happiness in this world. everything wedding-related is at least 2x its regular price. a wedding DJ costs $1000, while a birthday party DJ costs $350. there have even been studies that have shown that the exact same floral arrangements cost about 40% more if you tell the florist that they are for a wedding rather than a retirement banquet or some other function. it’s absurd. but i was absolutely floored today to learn that the u.s. postal service is in on it!

i went to the post office today to buy postage for our save-the-dates and get them hand-cancelled. because of the flip flop notepads, the thickness of the envelope exceeded the standard dimensions. so, postage would be $0.52. of course, there are no $0.52 stamps, so i would have to buy 3 stamps: $0.39 + $0.10 + $0.03. that’s ridiculous. so i decided to buy $0.63 stamps. wasteful? yes, i know.

so, the post office clerk brought out a sheet of $0.63 stamps. she asked me how many i wanted and explained that i didn’t have to buy them by the sheet. the stamps were small and white with a pencil sketched image of dr. jonas salk. they were not very wedding-ish at all. so, i pointed to the display of “our wedding” stamps. they aren’t real spunky, but they are classically pretty and come in pastel colors. but guess what. the “our wedding” stamps can only be purchased by the sheet. there are 20 $0.63 stamps on each sheet. and, there are 20 $0.39 cent stamps (which i can’t use) on each sheet!

so now i have a ton of lavender “our wedding” stamps. and i’m sure i’ll accumulate more when it comes around to buying postage for our invitations! i do all of my banking online, so i don’t think i can use that many postage stamps in my lifetime. maybe i will start giving stamps as birthday presents. or maybe i will give them to cheryl and greg as a wedding gift =P

this weekend was all about making the save the dates.  we headed over to christi’s parent’s place on saturday to get them printed out.  before heading out there, we had to tackle the monumental task of getting the right envelopes and card stock to print on.  this was much more of an issue than one would think.

the biggest task was trying to find matching colored card stock and envelopes.  though it wouldn’t seem like a hard thing to do, it really was.  we’ve been to a few stores before where we looked at stuff, but didn’t find anything that we liked.  we went to office max and aaron brothers before we finally decided to go to staples which had what we wanted.

it’s still not a perfect match, but i think it’s close enough.  printing the save the dates was actually a lot more difficult than expected, but about as bad as i thought it would be.  christi thought it would be really easy, but we had some difficulty printing out the envelopes.  we had to print them one by one.

i didn’t think that making the save the dates is more than a one person job, but i went along for moral support.  i had a few pieces of input for the whole save the date process, but christi did the bulk of the work.  i think the two valuable contributions i made were to suggest printing the motif on our envelopes to make them look nicer and how to choose the color of the motif on the save the date so that it looked best when printing.  the first color we had chosen didn’t print very well, so we decided to choose a close pantone color which worked out better.

after the save the dates were cut, it was just a matter of adhering the flip flops to the save the dates and stuffing them into envelopes.  they are pretty much done and should be sent out soon.  i guess this means that the web site will officially be seen by the masses soon.