moved! blurbed! not yet wedded!

It's been a crazy week/weekend. Friday night Neil and I finally moved to our new place. The weekend was spent unpacking and shopping for some furniture as well as other new household necessities like trash bins and hooks. He's been an absolute sweetheart with taking care of a lot of the unpacking, furniture deliveries, setting up of cable Internet, etc.

Sunday we shopped and moved some more, I interviewed a prospective applicant to MIT, and reviewed ceremony text with Jen. Monday was sort of a blur, but I did pick up the last of our engagement pictures (Photoshopped to perfection). I spent all day Tuesday working on our engagement picture book using Blurb. More about Blurb in a future post.

Up next: more unpacking and sorting in advance of my parents' and Galen's arrival next Friday, and then marrying in 2.5 weeks.

Even simpler photo collection

My Maid of Honor Zofia wrote to tell me a great way to collect photos at weddings in this age of digital cameras:

Another cool idea is to get a multi-format card reader and a laptop and download people's digital pix off their memory cards as they're leaving. This does require someone relatively computer savvy to man the computer downloading, but it's definitely a possibility for getting more pics from the wedding.

How easy is that?

DIY Photobooth

This is a *great* idea for those who love photobooths but can't afford to have them at their wedding (and are also technically inclined) - a DIY photobooth! I admit my eyes glazed over at the "Construction: Electrical" part, but I know many of my former schoolmates would be up to the task. Too bad WiFi-enabled cameras aren't readily available - I think it would be more efficient and reliable than the disposable-camera-at-every-table and polaroid guestbook concepts. Angela did the polaroid guestbook at her wedding, and Neil said it was a pain manning the table since the pictures take awhile to develop (long lines of guests waiting) and the picture quality wasn't that great (brownish).

Committment and cake blues

I've been depressed lately, I think because the weather turned cold and dreary, Neil's been gone, I'm still in temporary housing, and lastly, wedding planning is sometimes a very solitary process. Saturday I rode the bus for an hour to visit a bakery, only to arrive and find out the owner was out (even though I had called the day before). And, when I saw photos of past work, it was of the awful-80s-white-plastic-pillars variety. Thankfully, the owner did phone me later that day and was very nice, but was unsure if they could do what I wanted, and definitely not within my budget. It got me into a funk: I love cake, but it looks like getting what I love will be extremely difficult and out-of-budget...should I even bother? It's positively depressing having to stay late at work every night just so I have an Internet connection to get wedding planning done.

I started a feeling a bit better yesterday when I went over to Eric's for a great belated Thanksgiving dinner. A lot of turkey put me in a good mood. And I also went to concert of Gordon Shi-Wen Chin's music, sponsored by the Chilin Foundation. The piece I enjoyed the most was actually the encore, one he wrote for his wife on their 10th wedding anniversary. I swear he said (but I may have misunderstood the Chinese, and Jen wasn't paying attention) that love does not come down from the heavens, but is a choice. Anyways, the piece and the presence of the foundation's founders, Mr. & Mrs. I-Shiung & Su-Ming Lin, got me thinking. Particularly Mrs. Lin.

When you get married, you vow to be together, through sickness and health, through the good times and bad times. when you marry, it's a public affirmation that you believe in your spouse and what they stand for. But no one ever imagines that their husband will become a political prisoner of a authoritarian government, and that they will come home one day to find their twin daughters and mother-in-law stabbed to death by the same authoritarian government, and another daughter clinging to life. How do you carry on without your spouse physically present? How do you raise and help heal a daughter when you have your own grieving to do?

Photo shoot photos

Here are some photo collages I made from the photo shoot earlier this week:


I love this photo on the right 'cause I look skinny.


Neil getting ready and us hanging out before the shoot started.


Our lovely helpers, who were our makeup artists, hair stylists, fashion stylists, photojournalists, and more! To see larger pictures, right click (in Firefox) to view the actual image size.

Notes on makeup: I was really unused to wearing such quantities of makeup and was afraid I wouldn't look natural. Mei did a great job because everyone tells me I do look natural on film. Still, for the wedding I won't wear false eyelashes because I found them uncomfortable. I can probably achieve a similar look (at least, good enough for me!) with mascara. And for the wedding itself, I want a lip color that has more berry tones than peach.