Weddingblitz

We've been blitzing wedding nonsense for several days, and I'm starting to recognize what my stepbrother Kurt told me about planning a wedding: It's like a part-time job.

In this case, though, it's a fun job, albeit one where you write a lot of checks instead of earning them. The blitz came about because we compiled our funds from the various places we've been saving, earning and otherwise acquiring cash for the wedding, and realized that once Jimmy's tax return comes in next week or thereabouts, the wedding will be fully funded.

All the money in the bank. Wedding paid for and it's all covered until the fittings. You know, as long as we stay on budget and nothing disastrous happens.

So naturally this was the weekend his car decided to crack its motorhead. A $2,000 repair, plus $600 for a catalytic converter and ominous rumblings from the transmission. Were the gremlins trying to stop us from getting married?

If so, they failed. Several conversations began and ended with, "No, we are NOT postponing the wedding a third time." And not just because of the nonrefundable deposits and our family members who've bought plane tickets, though those are definitely inspiring reasons.

It's not like we hadn't discussed the possibility of the car's demise before. Jimmy's car was a 2007 Suzuki Forenza. If you take nothing else away from this blog, I hope you will take our advice to never buy this car. Its blue-book value would be $2,300 if it was in perfect condition and everything worked. Now roll your eyes back on up to the second sentence of this paragraph, and realize that this is a car that depreciated almost its entire value in six years. My only defense is that he bought the thing before we were together, so it's not my fault.

Given the state of his car, we'd talked about him being unhorsed. And the weekend's carsaster (I just made that up) determined that instead of repairing his Suzuki, we would buy him a bus pass. Hopefully this is not a long-term solution, but he has the good fortune to have a job only three miles from home that is in a fixed location, whereas my job requires me to have constant access to a reliable vehicle to go anywhere. Sometimes I will be able to drive him to work; sometimes he'll be reliant on the buses and the lovely Raleigh bicycle my parents just gave him; most nights he'll need to bum a ride home from co-workers because the buses stop running at 11:30 p.m. and he gets off work at 2 a.m.

But the wedding would not be postponed again. He literally stomped his foot.

We determined the smartest thing to do would be to prepay for as much as possible. Anything that doesn't have to wait, we're doing now. We put down the deposit on my wedding gown and paid the balance on the reception hall. We paid off the boys' tuxedos and are meeting florists and bakers. I'm cruising the internet for any Schtuff we need that we can buy now: jewelry, shoes, LED candles, etc.

It's fun. If I close my eyes, I can pretend we're spending someone else's money. Oh hush, I'm just kidding. We planned for this, and one of the advantages of lower-income people having a loooong engagement is that we have a long time to save cash. We postponed when he was laid off and gave ourselves extra time to catch up, and now it's paying off.

This past weekend, I was a tad stressed, and my friends caught the worst of me at a convention I was doing. Part of it was the car, and trying to figure out if and how we could get Jimmy back on the road. Part of it was that I had an absolutely terrible week at work, am behind on a few projects and was feeling pulled in several different directions. I spent much of Sunday thinking about running away for a writer weekend just to reset my batteries (until I realized how much housework needs to be done at Donald-Smith-Gillentine Inc.).

But I realized I'd given the wrong impression when a friend posited that weddings shouldn't be allowed to cause so much stress.

I had to stop and think about that. Funny. The wedding is the one thing that isn't stressing me out.

The wedding blitz is fun. It's fun to try on overpriced silly dresses while on a Facebook chat with my sister and friends. It's fun to plan a big party with our nearest and dearest. It's fun to shop for this-that-and-the-other-thing, to look at lovely stuff and pick something we like, and Jimmy would say the cake testing is the most fun of all.

It's fun because our friends and family have a sense of humor.
It's fun because we realize what's important and what's not.
It's fun because we planned for it, saved and used our heads.
It's fun because we're doing it together.

And that's the most important part, I think. If I had to do it all by myself, it would become a joyless chore. I had to go to one wedding show alone, because both bridesmaids were sick and Jimmy had to work. And there was no fun to it. I collected my coupons, made my appointments and left. The fun comes in doing it together, in enjoying the planning as a hobby - or our part-time job, as Kurt would say. Jimmy wants to be a part of it, and we get to have fun doing it, and our friends crack us up, and our families are as excited as we are.

Work, writing careers, kidstress, budgets, touring, other obligations... all those things tend to pile on and cause stress in our lives. The wedding is fun. I have no doubt that something (many things) will go wrong and there will be stress and drama at some point, though my bridesmaids have pointy knitting needles and are under orders to stab drama before it breeds.

But for now, at least, it's all about fun. And cake.

Days to Go: 256