Does life exist outside of wedding planning?

I'd like to think it doesn't. I honestly never would've predicted I'd get this much into wedding planning. It may be that my fantasies involving that day really only included beer and schnitzel so now that it comes down to the nitty gritty of it I have to research the heck out of it. I started out by buying 3 or 4 wedding magazines then dragging Joshua to the library. In one of these magazines was a list of the best wedding blogs. My interest was piqued to say the least. So I got out my trusty lap top and subscribed to all of the blogs in Google reader. Most of the sites are run by professionals in the bridal industry who show the weddings they have created or ones that inspire them. I found these useful when it came to narrowing down color ideas and overall tone of the wedding but to tell you the truth they are so overwhelmingly stylized that they don't help much. The other day I realized that these blogs are sort of the high fashion or couture runway shows. You love how it looks but there is no realistic way you would ever wear (or afford) them. One gem stuck out though. Wedding Bee. Tell all your friends that are engaged, this is by far the best site I know. In fact, it's no lie that reading this blog all the time made me excited to blog about our wedding plans with everyone. So I basically spend all my time now reading Wedding Bee updates or wedding window shopping. True Confessions time: there was a 2 week period where I went through all three seasons of Veronica Mars and at the same time went through the entire Wedding section of Etsy. You have no idea how long that is. I don't know why I started but I couldn't quit.

So here I am putting off real life (not packing my apartment up) and talking about weddings.

Adventures in things I know nothing about

There are a few things that stuck out right away in my head after Joshua proposed. The first of which is that we needed to do Save the Dates. We didn't actually need to do these but I often see these and like them a lot. Typically they're a chance to show off engagement pictures but I planned to have those done in July when the weather was much nicer. So after Joshua proposed on his trip home, I was determined to have nice pictures taken of us to use for this purpose. I'll show off those pictures that Joshua's brother Paul took of us later.

After we had the pictures done we sat on these until February when Joshua came home again. They didn't actually go out until March - 7 months until the wedding. There are two reasons for this. First, I procrastinate like it's my job. If there doesn't seem to be an urgent need to get it done, it just doesn't register as something in my head. The second reason is that I really wanted to do something creative but I have no experience or equipment to do so. All the time that I sat on the project I could have easily done something intricate with out it being a whole weekend's work. So I decided to use the tools that I have and that I'm not afraid of. A printer and a computer. I found a tutorial on making monograms and Joshua photo shopped us to make us slightly better than usual. Then I kept it simple and just gave the basic information. It was super boring but a big hit with the family. The real star of this whole project was Paul. I wasn't ready for the photo and was laughing. There was no way I could have posed that happy if I tried. It turned out really amazing.
So as you can see I printed out some basic information on one side of the card and then I put the picture on the other using photo corners. The photo corners added a ton of time to this project but the idea was that they could take the picture out to put on the fridge, since it had the date on it.

Visions of boots danced in our heads

I thought I'd start the wedding blogs by explaining to everyone what Joshua and I had envisioned for a wedding before we were ever engaged. I don't think this is a big surprise to anyone but we love good beer. We love it a lot. The Germans to us have really got the beer culture down. German is the only heritage this Irish/Swiss/Scottish girl and that Dutch boy have in common. I'm not sure if that is what secretly motivated our dreams or just fueled them. I know it started when we went to Essen Haus in Madison a couple of years ago. We had both separately been in German restaurants and drank from boots before but I believe that was the first night we had gone together. The Essen Haus is known in Madison for its 2 Liter boots of beer. Not only is it fun to drink that much beer out of a glass boot but what makes it even better is the rules that go along with it. You pass the boot around the table taking turns drinking it. If the person who takes the boot from you finishes the beer, you buy the next round. When it looked like someone was about the finish the boot the entire restaurant, I don't exaggerate, does a drum roll with their hands until the boot is finished. Where am I going with this? Many couples today look for new twists on the clanking of glasses. Our vision was instead of clanking glasses we would have boots passed around the table and we wouldn't kiss until a boot was finished, drum rolls included. It didn't stop there, we wanted Schnitzel and Polka. I even thought that Edelweiss would make a terrific first dance waltz. When I pictured our wedding I pictured long tables with benches that people sat at. I basically pictured the wedding like a night at any self respecting German-American bar.


There are several reasons why this just won't work out. The most serious and obvious is that there would be a helluva lot of drinking at our wedding which wouldn't be very family friendly and could be potentially dangerous. Also, the restaurant we wanted to provide the schnitzel doesn't have a good area to host a 250 person wedding. While I intend to have some polka music played, I sadly don't feel there is practical room in the budget to hire a polka band. We may not be having that wedding but we do plan on having plenty of details referencing our German heritage, along with the Irish and Dutch. Our guests will also see several allusions to our love of beer.

The Brewing side of things... (Joshua's 1st Blog)

Wasn't sure of what to Blog about quite yet so I thought I would talk about our introduction into brewing our own beer.... It was just over two years ago now when Whitney was visiting me at school and we were "pre-gaming" (what kids today call drinking before going out to drink) at my friends place. He happened to have an Oktoberfest that his dad and brother made. We both had one and thought it was delicious! This was both of ours 1st experience tasting homebrew and it was quite the positive experience. A few months later on a whim we decided to go to a local homebrew store that we often passed doing our every days things. We checked out some of the kits needed to make beer and asked many questions to the shop keeper (he looked like he was 15 btw) and decided to sleep on it. I believe it was the next day that we bite the bullet and went ahead and bought a basic kit along with an extra carboy (a glass vessel used to ferment beer in for you non-homebrewers). With the kit we picked out a Bock to brew.

Our 1st beer we made turned out to be the worst beer I have ever drank. To give you an idea of how bad it was, remember making "mud soup" when you were a kid playing in puddles...that tasted exquisite compared to this. We actually still have some left we haven't dumped out (going on two years old now). Further down the road we learned that Bocks are lagers and need to be "lagered" at low temps (usually in a refrigerator). So despite our turmoil with our 1st brew, we kept at it, made better beer and now here we are Blogging about it.

Most of the topics I will be Blogging about will be about beer. I will blog about the beers we make and beer related things we do. I also have interests in cooking and blogging about our travels so you may see Blogs about that as well. I hope is to teach people about what I know of beer and learn from others as well (both homebrewing and comercial beers alike).

Until next time,
Prost!

New Kids on the Blog

Ok, how many times has that pun been used? What you are currently reading is the obligatory awkward first post. In this post I will attempt to introduce our readers, aka family members and maybe a few loving friends, to our purpose of putting yet another blog out on the interwebs. By the way, I'm not using the royal we here, Joshua should be joining me soon as a co-blogger.

I have been an avid reader of blogs for quite some time now. When Joshua and I started dating I slowly started sucking him into this world. As our relationship progressed we got engaged and now we're making our love of Blogs more official too. We intend to use this blog to keep track of what we are working on. For the next 3 months I'll be entertaining you (or boring you) with projects and tales of how wedding planning is going. Joshua may jump in here with wedding stuff but I'm guessing he will want to stick to beer. After the wedding we're planning on using this blog to keep our family and friends in touch with what's going on in Houston. Particularly with our home brewery now known as The Yodeling Goat. The blog name probably makes more sense now, doesn't it? So with that being said I'll sign off of this first post with a quick warning that I won't be caring too much about my grammar and you will probably be bombarded with many 30 Rock references in my posts to come.