Durable Goods

So this isn't strictly wedding-planning-related, but I think it's important to keep in mind as I start down the road of "becoming Mrs. Rohr", because what is a wedding worth if the resultant marriage isn't strong?

Today, I came across this image on the internet:

I don't know if it's a true story or just fictionalized to make a point, but I like it.  We absolutely live in an age in which items are made and purchased as cheaply as possible and meant to be replaced on a regular basis.  I have an iPhone that I fully expect to replace in two years, when my contract tells me I can for something like $40.  I know that's the norm and I absolutely take part, but think about it for a second.  This little magical box the size of a deck of cards, which can surf the internet and hold days worth of music and take and send videos, technology that we could hardly imagine a decade ago, is now considered replaceable within two years.  

On the other end of the spectrum, Joey and I will be bringing to our new home my grandparents' favorite armchairs, still in beautiful condition despite their age.  These chairs were built in a time when furniture was consistently made to last, when families would purchase one vacuum cleaner and use it for decades.  If things broke, they would be repaired, not replaced.  Remember cobblers?  

The house that I currently live in has had several significant problems over the last two years of my inhabitance.  I have done battle with the gas and electric company because the wires were crossed and mislabeled, installed a door handle on an exterior door that was just missing that rather important piece of equipment, and crafted a kitchen island out of mini-fridges, plywood, and tile.  Most of the people I have lived with have deemed this level of disrepair unacceptable and moved out after a single year of residence.  I certainly cannot blame them for this, since they are merely renting, not buying, so for them the effort to fix the problems is simply not worth it.  I, however, chose to stay until I move to Omaha this May, dealing with the issues as they come up and taking perhaps a little too much pride in my little home projects.  

Joey's and my relationship is not perfect.  It is wonderful and sweet and magical and special and a million other happy (if painfully cliché) adjectives, but I will never claim it is perfect.  Sometimes I get irrationally upset over completely unimportant things.  Sometimes Joey has difficulty seeing my point of view.  Sometimes we live in different states, or on different continents.  But I never want to just give up and look for a new, shiny relationship that hasn't had time to develop broken hinges or scuffed edges.  Every disagreement, every misunderstanding is an opportunity for us to learn more about each other and show that we care about each other even when things aren't sparkly and easy.  Of course it's much nicer when things go smoothly, but I take pride in the repairs we are able to make when we need to make them.  

I am marrying Joey because I think he is the best one for me.  I believe that we have built a beautiful relationship on a solid foundation.  I believe that our relationship and our plans for our future life together as husband and wife embody the perfect combination of careful thought and romantic whimsy.  I believe that, despite all this, we will find bumps and cracks and forgotten essential elements.  I believe that we will be able to smooth out the bumps, fix the cracks, and build all our essential elements together if we remember that some things are not disposable and replaceable.  

It's a Party!

There is one element of this wedding that is very important, requires great care and thought in selecting, and is completely independent of the wedding venue, that stubborn little detail that is currently barring all others from realization.  That element, my friends, is the wedding party.  No, not all you lovely guys and gals who will be dancing your socks off to celebrate our nuptials.  I refer instead to the lovely ladies and gentleman who will stand by our side on our wedding day, remind Joey of his name when he forgets it under the pressure of the moment, untuck my dress from my panties after a hasty last nosepowdering of my unmarried life, and generally share the delightful burden of wedding planning.  I am talking about our Maid of Honor, Bridesmaid, and Best Man.  Yes, we have one and only one of each.  Let me introduce them to you.

Best Man:  David Rohr, brother of the groom.  David is Joey's younger and only brother.  When they were little, they were going to be the first brother team to go into space, until they both got to be too tall.  They were also going to play the first-ever duet for viola and saxophone, until they realized, after Joey wrote the music, that there was a very good reason that such a musical piece had never been composed.  David is currently a sophomore at Pitt, where he still plays the saxophone in the band.  He loves his fraternities, Ella's cooking, and long drives in the car.

Maid of Honor:  Janna Lowensohn, sister of the bride.  Janna is a tall blonde who excels at ballet and math.  Clearly the genes were divided in this family.  She did, however, follow her sister's example of heading south for college and is currently in her first year at Oxford College of Emory University in Georgia.  Janna and Ariella's best sisterly qualities come out when they are getting ready to go out for an evening event and neither has anything to wear until the other finds it for her.

  

Bridesmaid:  Rachel Rohr, sister of the groom.  The youngest of the Rohr clan, Rachel is a brilliant student, creative fashionista, and fiery personality.  She usually prefers green grapes, like her brother David, except for when she is feeling particularly fond of Joey, when she switches to red.  All the Rohrs, except for Joey, will deny this fact.  Rachel is a freshman at Pitt with David, and they have dinner every Sunday.  When she was four and Joey was nine, he tried to use plastic craft scissors to cut her hair.  Thankfully, she has recovered.  

Selecting a Setting

Well, I had been hoping to write my next post when I had some sort of new information to share, but I am beginning to realize that the earliest I can have any new real decision made will be April, when we check out a few venues in LA.  Really, we can't decide anything else (colors, florist, catering) until we know where we're having it, since it will all be dependent on our available space.  If the wedding is in a garden, no florist.  If the wedding is in The Red and Orange Room, the wedding colors probably can't be yellow and green.  I like you all too much to send you away with migraines.

Instead, let's discuss what we're looking for in a venue.  Who knows, maybe one of you will have a brilliant suggestion for a venue for us.

So far, we've mostly been looking in Santa Monica and Malibu, because we like the beach and it just provides a beautiful background for the event.  As much as we like the idea of the beach, though, we realize that the reality of a beach wedding is difficulty walking in the sand, wind blowing hair and dresses everywhere, seagulls cawing or pooping, waves crashing too loudly for anyone to hear, kids playing volleyball, and a million other things we can't control.

The best solution to that is a semi-indoor, semi-outdoor location.  Once I got that thought in my head, I realized that was definitely what I wanted to do.  It doesn't necessarily need to be at the beach, but I love the idea of dinner and dancing inside (you know, so there are lights and you can see what you're doing), with the option to walk around outside, get some air, maybe have a quiet conversation with one of your super-awesome fellow party-goers.  When I think about wedding-like events I've been to, I realize that I don't like spending the whole time on the dance floor at all.  In fact, often my favorite part is getting to spend some quality time, away from the music, with someone I don't usually get to see.  Besides, as HGMers will recall from Winter Ball, it can get rather warm inside when everyone's dancing.

Another consideration is convenience.  We will (hopefully) have delegates from Michigan, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and other lovely states and maybe even countries joining us at our wedding.  After asking people to fly in from far away, I'd hate for them to get lost trying to find some weird location eight hours away from the nearest airport.

Another issue that I keep bumping into is that I don't want to have it somewhere that we've already had a wonderful memorable family event.  For example, a beautiful example of "semi-indoor, on the beach, easy to get to" is Gladstone's.  Gladstones is, in fact, such a wonderful location that we held my mom's rockin' 40th birthday there!  I remember the little betta fish bowl centerpieces that people took home, and singing along with my mom and sister in the car to "When I'm Sixty-Four" by the Beatles as my mom rehearsed for her big performance.  That was a wonderful party and I'm sure many of you who have known my family forever remember it.  I would like to keep that wonderful party and this wonderful party separate.

Joey and I will be in LA very briefly for the weekend of April 6-8 to spend Passover with my family and the Roffmans, my Jewish Holiday family, and hope to spend a few hours on Saturday morning visiting some frontrunners and hopefully picking one we love.  Wish us luck!

Spring Hibernation

Well, Joey is back in Omaha and I am back in New Orleans and school has recommenced for the both of us, which means that wedding planning (and, consequently, blogging) is going on the back burner for a while.

In the meantime, we will be starting to look through venues, though it's rather difficult to get a good feel for a place from two thousand miles away.  If anyone has any great suggestions for LA venues, I am, as I told my mother, "happy to accept all information (for now), with the understanding that I reserve the right to reject it all".  I'm currently liking the idea of places that will allow both indoor and outdoor areas at the same time, since it will be spring or summer (warm), but also nighttime (cool).  My parents kindly visited Huntington Gardens yesterday to scout it out and learned two very important things: first, that the capacity at Huntington Gardens is something like a thousand.  Second, the cost of renting the space, before even considering music, catering, or equipment, is one hundred thousand dollars.  Then again, I guess you don't have to pay a florist...

We're also working on figuring out the guest list, which will hopefully help us figure out what kinds of places we can look into (the options for a 100-person wedding are vastly different from the options for a 300-person wedding).  Joey and I are wonderfully cursed that we have so many people in our lives that we love, it's difficult to figure out how to draw the line between creating a wonderful experience for our loved ones that isn't impossibly large, and not feeling like we left people out.

There's also the added complication that, at this point in our lives, most of our friends have come from schools that we have since left.  There are many people who I consider no-brainers, of course they'd have to come to the wedding, we've been friends for years!  ...only to realize that we haven't actually seen each other in years.  When you're only 22 years old, your best friend from age 5-17 seems like a huge deal because you knew her for half your life, but I haven't been 17 for five years now.  This is not to say that I don't deeply care for these people anymore.  Quite the opposite.  Like I said, my first instinct is to absolutely invite them and sit them at the family table, but perhaps I am being a little bit unrealistic in that belief.

As it turns out, the August 2013 date is not going to work out for us, so we are now hoping for May 2013, though of course we are waiting to hear when Joey's test is going to be, which further contributes to the strange limbo we find ourselves in.  It's very sweet and a little strange discussing the date with Joey.  Contrary to one of my least-favorite stereotypes of men and women, I am the one saying that I can wait until 2014 if that's what works out best, while Joey thinks next weekend looks nice...

Dating our Wedding

If I were a Serious Blogger with a Serious Following, this is where I would apologize for my several-day absence after such a good blog-a-day start.  I was in Chicago and Canada with my family-in-law-to-be [plot twist: crossing the international border was faster than travelling between US cities], and so didn't really have much to share.  However, I am not a Serious Blogger and I really have no idea how many people are reading this, so I won't say any of that.

I've been thinking more about specific dates for the wedding over the last several days, and I have come to the conclusion that we really can't count on the spring/summer of 2013.  As I said before, Joey's big test, the USMLE Step 1 (The Boards), will be somewhere between early May and late July, and it is going to be like the MCAT with a hemorrhoid: extra cranky and less accommodating.  For those of you who knew and loved either of us during junior year of college when Joey was prepping for the MCAT, you understand just how bad of an idea it would be to plan to get married within a month of that, on either side.

The American Association of Medical Colleges, in all their benevolent wisdom, will not tell us when the actual test dates are for another several months, and then Joey does not get his personal test date until this summer.  Rather than plan an entire wedding for summer 2013, only to have it taken away by Joey's evil mistress, Med School, I would like to hold off on concrete plans until we know when his test date is, which won't be for a while.  If he gets the early May test date, then a wedding in late summer could be possible.  The weather will be cooling down, people will be finishing with camp or summer programs or whatever else would keep them from attending, and Joey will have had time to come down off the USMLE 1 plane of insanity and be emotionally and mentally present for the last bits of planning and, of course, the Big Day itself.

If, however, Joey gets a mid-summer test date, it might not be worth it to force a wedding immediately on the heels of the exam.  It will just cement the idea that planning a wedding is, as his mother put it, the most stressful thing we will ever do together, worse than pregnancy, childbirth, or raising kids.  No sense in rushing to a stressful process and starting our marriage off with something so difficult.

Plan B, which is initially a difficult idea but, in light of everything else, might just be the best option, is to wait till spring/summer 2014.  This is 2.5 years from now.  I don't like that.  He doesn't like that.  I'm sure that many of you are wrinkling your noses.  Waiting that long is far from ideal, I get that.  But is it worth it to wait the extra year so that we can all be happy and enjoy ourselves?  I'm not sure.  On the one hand, it's the biggest day of our lives (or at least one of), but on the other it's just one day.  Another way to look at it is that one year in the grand scheme of The Rest of Our Lives, is a drop in the bucket.  Is it really so awful to wait that one extra year to make sure that everything is happy and smooth when we're going to have (God willing) sixty to eighty years to be married?

So here's the basic summation of scattered thoughts:  If everything falls into place and things work out nicely, we'd like to get married in August 2013 (we have a specific date in mind), and if Med School doesn't let us then, we'd like to get married in May 2014 (again, we have a specific date in mind).  The August date is before any of the collective siblings start school (and so hopefully will also accommodate our younger friends and relatives who will theoretically be in school at that time), and the May date is after the siblings' schools get out (again, hopefully that will work out for the rest of our tiny loved ones as well).


BONUS: I have now futzed with the settings so that anyone can comment, even anonymous users.  I ask that, should you choose to comment sans sign-in, you please sign your comment so I know who you are.  Other than that, enjoy your new freedom!  (thanks, Nathalie, for pointing this out to me)

The Academic Approach

My eighth night of Chanukkah gift from my family-in-law-to-be. Over 400 pages of tips, tricks, and new things to worry over.

Oh, and we made weird fig newtony jelly rolly apple winey ruggelachey cookies tonight.

They Sat in the Sun

Tonight we finally got in touch with Ken Chasen, who we are planning to have as our official officiant at our wedding.  We discussed the date issue briefly with him, just to see where his feelings are on it being on a Saturday versus a Sunday (see previous blog footnote for more details).

Basically, his feeling is that it should not be during Shabbat, but waiting till sundown on a Saturday is difficult, as that means the wedding would start around 9pm, which is ridiculous.  Furthermore, we have Shabbat services at a fixed time (at least Rabbi Chasen's and my shared congregation does) rather than expecting everyone to show up precisely at sundown each week.  So, as far as Rabbi Chasen is concerned, the wedding could be on a Saturday evening before sundown, so long as it's clearly "evening" and not afternoon or midday.  6pm is generally considered evening, even if the three stars that officially designate Jewish nighttime are not out.  3pm is not.  Of course, if the wedding were to be held on a Sunday, we'd be able to go for any time we wanted.

Later this evening, my dad called with his thoughts on the matter.  He stressed to me several times that he will support whichever choice I make and most of the people who I love and who love me will make it work no matter what, but there are some points that he would like me to consider, and so I am considering them.  In fact, they were mostly points that I was considering anyway, but opinions are helpful.  So, here they are:

1. Even if we decide with Rabbi Chasen that 6pm on a Saturday is evening enough, and we hang three stars in the chuppah* and have a Havdallah** service before the wedding starts (which I was considering), there are some who would really be stretching their religious beliefs by going along with it.  This is true.  Just because I decide to invoke my favorite Hannah Senesh quote*** and call it "close enough" does not mean that I can ask everyone to do the same.  This is a wonderful point.  However, as I pointed out to my father, I think it only affects approximately 1-3 people on the guest list.  This does not make it a moot point.  As it turns out, those 1-3 are some of Joey's and my closest friends.  At any rate, it is worth considering, though certainly not an insurmountable obstacle.  
2. Things are cheaper and more available on Sunday.  Just like getting married in the off-season, getting married on an off-day means that we will be competing against fewer people for any given venue/caterer/florist/cat juggler.  This could be a lovely stress reducer, as we will then theoretically be more able to get what we want and also not pay through the nose for it.  Well, maybe at least get it down to one nostril.  Bonus: Flying on a Saturday/Monday is cheaper than flying on a Friday/Sunday.  You're welcome, out-of-towners.  
3. There's a lot of pre-wedding stuff that people will want/need to be at.  If we get married on a Saturday and want to have a rehearsal dinner or a family gathering or any other type of event the day or days before the wedding, people will most likely have to miss work all day Friday, instead of just a half day or none at all if they can get a late flight.  And listen, how often do I get to see all my family and friends at once?  I know I'll want to have at least one smaller gathering of folk before the big day.  
4. Weddings are fun!  We will want to stay and enjoy ourselves for as long as possible.  At some point, however, say midnight, most people have to cut things off, no matter how much fun they're having.  If the wedding starts at 6pm, that gives us 6 hours for ceremony and reception, closer to 3 or 4 for most people.  That may be plenty, but wouldn't you rather have the option of partying and hanging out and talking for longer if you were having a good time?  If we plan this thing right, we could get married in the afternoon and then spend the rest of the day and night celebrating with those we love.  I know 6 hours sounds like a lot, but think back to the last time you and I just met up for a quick chat, or I paused on my way somewhere to say hi to you.  Even if we didn't sit down, we were probably there for an hour.  If the party dies down around 8, that's fine.  I'll be glad everyone had a good time and enjoy a relaxing evening with my new husband.  If, on the other hand, people want to stick around for hours and hours, I want to let them!  

That may have been it.  Dad, if you figured out how to read this, and I forgot anything, I apologize.  Feel free to admonish me in the comments.  At any rate, the long-story-short version is that Sunday is probably better for all involved than Saturday.  Thoughts?

p.s.  Did anyone besides me think this title was clever?

*Jewish wedding canopy

**Jewish ceremony of separation, usually between the sabbath and the rest of the week, but in this case also between single and married life.  

***"There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world even though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind.”  (this is particularly handy when Yom Kippur services end before sundown and the break-fast buffet is calling your name)