Early Morning Blogging

I first awoke at 5:30 this morning, because that's when my alarm went off; after all that, it turns out that I'm not going to Brandy's until 11:00, because she's taking the morning off (still sick). I have two stories for you. Excuse the typographical errors: I need coffee. (I just went back and looked at that last sentence and discovered that I had misspelled "excuse" and "typographical.")


Story the First: My Happy Weekend

I had a crazy weekend. The first part was really good: the fondue party went well, and one of the girls stayed overnight (it was supposed to be a sleepover for everyone, but only one could stay). Christine (the girl who stayed) and I had a good talk, and made french toast in the morning! It made me smile.

After taking her home, I returned to an empty apartment; I was feeling antsy and had no plans for Saturday night. Then my phone rang and it was a cousin who was in town for the weekend and wanted to know if I had plans for Saturday evening! And so, on the spur of the moment, I put together a "Leftover Fondue Party" for my cousin Ian, and invited some of "my boys" -- Former Neighbour Boy Eldon (he came just after handing in the keys to their apartment) and the infamous Ramsey Boys (a couple of my ushers, for the wedding -- they're very tall and tease me like I'm their big sister). We had a very good time, and I discovered this weekend how much I enjoy acting as a hostess. I love getting groups of people together that I think will enjoy each other, and facilitating the good time.

Now Ariann will be jealous; I had a fondue party with a bunch of boys.


Story the Second: My Gross Incompetence

My Sunday was not quite as good, and it was the combined fault of my own neglect and the wedding invitations. On Saturday I dropped off the note card paper and originals for the invitations at Staples, for photocopying. Two different copy centre employees told me that there should be no problem copying our invitations. And so I went to pick them up on Sunday, to be informed that they could only copy the one side, and then the paper became so curved that it couldn't go through the copier (the paper has perforations and pre-folding, and apparently can only go through an inkjet printer). Fortunately, Staples didn't charge me for the copying they did, and paid for half of a new package of note cards (some of mine got wrecked as they tried to get the notecards to go through the copier).

And so I took my computer and the paper to my parents' house, to print the front part of the cards on their printer. And that's where my comedy of errors begins. Apparently, I'm grossly negligent and cannot be trusted to operate a computer printer. First, I managed to print the front on the wrong part of the cards. On all 180 cards. After doing numerous test pages to be sure that I knew how to feed the paper through the printer. Then, I took the forty remaining sheets in the package (that would make 80 notecards) and printed up 80 invitations with the right alignment. However, I didn't notice that my parents' printer imposes a thicker border on the one end of the page, which I cannot eliminate through Word; on forty of the eighty invitations I printed off, there were words being cut off. (And yes, again I printed off a test page first, but somehow didn't notice.)

And so, after hours of work, I ended up with forty good invitations, and 220 that were garbage. I'm going to have to get a couple more packages of note cards and go back to print them at my parents' house. At least I got the RSVP envelopes printed, and Mom and I have made progress on the address database for the main envelopes (although that database was also the source of plenty of headaches).

Was I the one who thought it would be much simpler and cheaper to print up our own invitations, rather than having them professionally printed?