"step by step, ooh baby, gonna get to you gi-i-i-irl!"

Please tell me you know where this entry title came from! Hint: one of my favorite songs at age 5.

Andy is still totally perplexed about how all these details are going to come together, but I love the feeling of fitting each piece of the puzzle in exactly where it belongs. I actually think it all is starting to flow quite nicely!

Andy did a great job finding a DJ and negotiating a good price for us, which is the one task I gave him to accomplish all by himself. We are going to be using Platinum Soundworks. The difficult part with vendors is that most of the time you can't exactly give them a trial run before the big day ("Hey Mr. d.j., why don't you just drop by the house Tuesday night and spin us some records?" seems like a bit of an odd request), but we were both impressed by his website and his sound system, and Andy said he was very professional on the phone. Most impressive of all, he is a bona fide acoustic engineer.

After quite a bit of waffling over all the options, we have also settled on a caterer. If you know anything at all about Pittsburg, KS, which is located about 30 miles south of Ft. Scott, you probably know that fried chicken is practically a historical institution there. Much as I would have loved to have had Fabio from Top Chef come with his delectable Italian accent and serve us a delectable Italian entree, super fancy food is a bit outside of our budget. Also, I'm not really sure that anyone I know would be impressed with anything gourmet anyway - the portions are always so small! The chicken and sides that we order should be hot, tasty, and filling, so I think we made the right choice.

Oh, and I also purchased (on sale, of course) some envelopes that I liked for the invitations. This is probably moving a bit backwards since I don't have any of the invitations yet, but I've got a solid idea of what I want, so it made sense to me at the time.

Next up: a florist and a baker.

P.S. If you want to leave a comment and don't want to log in, just choose the "name/url" option and only type your name in. That way you won't have to be "anonymous."

maybe next I should go skydiving!

I'm not totally opposed to spending a decent amount of money on a wedding dress, but sadly, even with all my searching, I have not found something in a store that I absolutely fell in love with. But, there were two that I liked an awful lot. I just had a hard time committing all that money to something that didn't absolutely blow me away. So, I scoured ebay, oncewed.com, preownedweddingweddingdresses.com, and did about 1001 google searches before I gave up on the idea of finding something used that I liked for a reasonable price. This led to the self-realization that I have expensive taste. There are lots of beautiful, simple-ish dresses to be had for under $300...but that's not what I want. And I'm definitely not spending $1000 on a dress that someone has already worn! What is a girl to do?

A few fun forums (at weddingchannel.com, kvetch.indiebride.com, and windsorpeak.com), despite their occasional negativity, convinced me that I could get a custom-made dress for a reasonable amount of dough, in a reasonable amount of time, if only I am willing to risk paying for something I have never even seen, let alone tried on. I can't say that I'm an overwhelmingly gutsy person, but being at my wit's end, I went for it. Yes, last week I sent money (don't get too anxious about that part, PayPal was invented for this very reason) to a man in China who has a somewhat flimsy grasp of the English language (makes me wish I knew a little Mandarin - French hasn't done much for me when it comes to wedding planning!), so that he can buy some fabric in a color interpreted by his eyes via a computer monitor and with it create some sort of fanciful concoction that I am meant to fit into and theoretically look good in on my wedding day. Whew. Needless to say, I am anxiously awaiting my masterpiece, and obviously I will let every one know if it turns out badly. If not, you will be able to see it about 5 months from now!

I am from here forward dubbing myself the Evel Kneival of wedding planning.