Yay for good friends!

Just a little quickie update.

My darling girl Alex has been struggling with her health and all sorts of financial complications. Because of that, I felt that it was much more important for her to focus on getting healthy. So a week or so ago I had to find a replacement bridesmaid.

The first (and only) person that popped into my head was my best girl friend back in junior high and into high school. We actually grew pretty far apart as I got more involved in show choir and she with the clubs she was involved in. She developed closer relationships with people I didn't know so well, but I somehow managed to keep her in my life somewhat.

I must admit that I was quite amazed that she said yes to being a bridesmaid so last minute. She has her life going on, and we really don't ever talk. But I guess I always felt she would be one of those friends that would always be there, even if we only connected once every year or so. Neat, huh?

I feel so blessed knowing that I have a friend like her still. She is just on a whole other level than I am, so it's humbling to have someone like her as a constant in my life.

All of my bridesmaids (including Alex, even though she can't be there) are so incredible. It astounds me that they could associate themselves with me. God truly has surrounded me with amazing people, even if they're a few states away (or across the country). I just feel so honored to know them.

Yubo's song.

A long time ago, I came across Yubo still in bed wrapped up in his cream-colored comforter, with a brown throw bunched up by his feet.

He was so rolled up in the blanket that I said he was like a burrito (especially since the comforter was about the color of a tortilla). And when I draped the brown throw over him, it looked like it could be sauce. So he then became a burrito with sauce.

I started calling him Yuborrito, or just burrito for short.

A friend of ours was fussing with his middle name, Yutaka. He likes to call him yukata, but one night it turned into "you taco." And so Yuborrito evolved into a tacorito.

Late one night, I sang this song to him (to the tune of "Only You" and with a very strange accent).

Only you can make a burrito
Only you can make a spicy sauce
Only you and you alone can be a taco too
You're my dream come true
My one and tacorito.

Yes, I know that last line doesn't make any sense, but it fit the syllables. I suppose it could be "My only tacorito," but this was funnier.

So here's how I actually pronounce the words:
only joo can'de make a burrito
only joo can'de make a spicy sauce ("spicy sauce" sang in a sort of Cartman voice)
only joo and joo alone can'de be a taco too
you're my dream come true
my one and tacorito ("tacorito" sang in a very strange way that I can't really describe with words)

If you're lost, you may need to hear me sing the song, but that probably won't ever happen because it's my special song just for Yubo. LoL.

T minus 31 Days.

Bouquets
My mom got put in charge of the bm bouquets after having Edith do a demo for her. Their bouquets are going to be all white (and perhaps some green leaves) using white peonies and stephanotis. Their holders will be wrapped with a red satin ribbon that will hopefully not clash with the red of their dresses.
My bouquet was originally a cascading design done by Edith using white gardenias and pink cherry blossoms. Unfortunately, I ended up having to redo it. A lot of the pieces fell out and I couldn't figure out how to put them back in the right places. Also, my mom thought it was too big for me and made me look wider when I was holding it. Instead of trying to recreate the cascade, I ended up making it a round design with the gardenias and framed them by bending the cherry blossom branches to create a sort of halo behind the gardenias. Really sucks though because I know Edith spent a lot of time and energy on it, and I can't bring myself to tell her that I had to redo it. She was just so busy with another April bride that I didn't want to bother her. It also seemed like she really didn't care to work with fake flowers.

Bridesmaids Dresses.
Dresses have arrived. Now we all just need to get alterations done. It's been a struggle to meet with Alex to give her the dress. I may just need to drop it off to her some night and have her figure out alterations herself.

Centerpieces.
We finally decided on a design based on something that Yubo and I saw in Michael's. It's in something more like a glass bowl with moss and river rocks with a big lotus and two branches of cherry blossoms. It'll look really nice. My mom's been having a little trouble finding the lotus though.

Ceremony details.
We're going in for our final premarital session with Pastor Wayne on Thursday. We'll get to then talk about the details of the ceremony... what happens in what order and all that stuff. We have the music picked out for the more obvious first part of the ceremony, and now we get to wait to see how much more music we need to choose for the rest of it.

We also need to decide if we're gonna do the unity candle or sand or whatever.

I have my portion of the vows written. Yubo needs to write his so I can send them to Akemi to get translated.

We still need to memorize the song we're going to sing.

First Dance and Song.
Yubo's younger brother was awesome enough to re-record the song we want to use for our first dance. He's supposed to get the track completely done before Yubo's parents come up this weekend. The reason why they're coming up is so Yubo's mom can teach us our first dance. I think the dance will be more traditional than I was hoping, but oh well.

Bachelor/Bachelorette Party.
I'm not planning to have a bachelorette party of any sort (because I'm boring like that), and for quite a long time I was under the impression that he wasn't going to do anything special either. WELL, there has been much miscommunication over this whole thing, and it has created quite a bit of drama.

So, this all started when I was telling someone that the rehearsal was going to be on the Thursday before at 6p. His reaction told me that he didn't know that (even though I was pretty darn sure that I told him). He then told me that was when his guys wanted to "kidnap" him for his party. I thought there would still be plenty of time for his party, so I didn't understand what the problem was. It wasn't until a while later that he broke it to me that they wanted to take him to Vegas. OH. Well then. Most people know just how much I hate Vegas. But Yubo was actually really looking forward to going, and he had simply assumed that the rehearsal was on Friday, the day before the wedding, as it's done at most other churches. (This is why it's bad to assume, guys, especially when it comes to schedule details for your wedding.)

Since this whole thing happened a few months ago, there's still tension whenever we have to talk about it. He's set on trying to reschedule the rehearsal to make things work for his Vegas trip and seems to refuse to figure out something else to do if we can't reschedule.

We had a talk over breakfast today that he was making it seem like there was absolutely no other thing to do but go to Vegas, and if he couldn't go he'd be upset. I pointed out to him that the way he was reacting to possibly not being able to go to Vegas would taint the whole experience of the wedding. I don't want to take any fun away from him, but I don't understand why he can't have a Plan B (or Plan C, really) that doesn't require a 6hr drive. The more details he was giving me about what they planned for the Vegas trip, the more I thought it was a bad idea. But I told him that whenever he leaves for whatever it is they end up doing, I have nothing else to do but to trust that he will arrive right on time at 9am at my parents' house well-rested, sober, teeth brushed, tux clean, etc etc, and ready to endure the ridiculously long day that Saturday will be.

Invitations.
Invitations have been sent. FINALLY! So everyone that I had on my list with a complete address had their invitation put into the mail yesterday. And of course, suddenly Yubo is all, "Oh, did you get one out to so-and-so?" and I'm like, "No, because you never gave me their address," and he's like, "Oh, I have their address in an e-mail."

Anyway, even those super last minute ones got sent out... and I'm expecting to suddenly find more people that were supposed to get an invite that didn't give me their address. I may just end up adding them to the Evite I have set up. =P But I do have, like 14 more stamps that I can use... and we have extra invites that we can give to people that might want to keep one for whatever reason. Apparently some people actually do that. Not a surprise though. I still have Eric's invite to his wedding reception.

Flights and Hotel Reservations.
So I booked our flights through cheaptickets.com. Bad idea, I'm starting to think. Our itinerary has changed three times, once for each flight. Now we have, like, a 7hr layover in Honolulu instead of just hanging out for 3hrs before heading off to Lihue. Bah. We're gonna try to see if we can hop onto an earlier flight when we get there, but I'm gonna try to get us to pack super duper light so we don't have to fuss with luggage for 7hrs if we want to hit the beach or something else while we wait.
Most of our hotel reservations are through timeshare accounts. We have two nights at an Anaheim resort for Saturday and Sunday night using our WorldMark account. The week in Kauai is a gift to us from Yubo's parents using their timeshare. Then I got us two nights in Honolulu using our WorldMark. Just need to find a cheap room for one night in Honolulu, unless the room we're on the waiting list for comes through. Man... I'm so glad we got our WorldMark account.

Bridal Gown.
I still don't know what my gown looks like. I will not have an idea until I go in for some sort of fitting on April 1st. Yup! Just 9 days before the wedding. Yikes!
I'm really hoping that it looks good. My Plan B is to rent, so I'm really hoping I don't have to.

Favors.
Another area of tension between me and my parents. Sort of. We all wanted to do something a little different. My dad came up with the idea to give address books, since nearly everyone uses weddings as a sort of reunion. So in case there are some people that don't use their cell phones or smart phones or whatever to store all their contact information, they can use the address book we give them.

More miscommunication. I thought my dad was going to China to get one specially made for me with a nice red cover. What he came back with was something that was brown and grey with uneven stitching between the two mismatched colors and "My Friends Address Book" printed on in an uneven flakey gold. When my mom showed me, I was gonna start crying.

We finally got to where they're gonna order different ones that are just black with gold print, something that people won't be embarrassed to have in their possession.

The latest snag is what kind of pen to pair with it. I was originally going to get a personalized pen,
but my mom was convinced that no one would use a pen that had our names on it. I disagreed, but found some that could come blank. My dad, of course, had his own idea of what would work. His choice happened to be something that's probably ridiculously cheap. It was a pack of pens that were different colors, but were a good size in proportion to the address book. I found something that is plastic but looks metal, sleek design that looks good and professional, but might be a little too big for the address book. I told my sister that people probably wouldn't care about the size of the pen because they won't always have it paired with the address book, so she's trying to sell my dad on my choice.


And that's about all I can think of right now. It's really coming together. Just a little frustrating that so many things are so last minute.

There's no saving this marriage.

Yubo was talking to some friends of ours and they said our idea for a saving option would probably detract from the seriousness of the ceremony.

After thinking about it for a while, I had to agree. It's really funny to us, and most of our friends would probably get it and have a good laugh, but the majority of the audience will be adults from his church and as much as my family as possible. We don't want them to be confused about what's going on at all, so we're not gonna do it.

Plus we already will have quite a bit going on with the singing and the projected translations and what not. This whole time we've been wanting to keep things simple, and trying to customize a save screen would just be too much work for me. I haven't even started on my flowers yet.

Probably gonna see if there's a way to put it into the video though cuz I still really want it. So I'll have to talk to our video guy and see if it's something he'd be willing to do. ^_^

Entertaining a save option.

After trying out a few games at Play 'n' Trade today, an idea hit me that I thought would be hilarious..... about as fun as my cosplay wedding idea. =P

Yubo and I both tend to save our game before big decisions (and big bosses, of course), so I thought that might be a fitting gag for our wedding day.

We are going to have a projector down anyway and display a Chinese translation of our vows. I was thinking that before Yubo says "I do," he could turn to the projector which would now display a save option to save his "game" before proceeding to his answer. ((I've seen him do this A LOT in most of the games he plays, mostly to try out all the answer options))

Then we would finish to when I say "I do," and I would then turn to the projector and overwrite his save with my save, and then have the screen show something corny like "Save complete. There's no turning back now."

In a more extreme version, he would answer incorrectly and have to load the save point.

We thought it'd be really funny, and fitting for us. Thought our friends would understand it and maybe get a good laugh. Wondering if it might be something we really want to try, or if we should keep it with the cosplay wedding idea. I mean, we just want to have a fun wedding that fits our personalities and lifestyle.

Opinions?

Invitations.

Got the invitations ordered today. Ugh, they were pricey, but they'll look great.

Got most of the addresses on our guest list, but it's been a little frustrating getting the few remaining on both our sides. Yubo's also been a little stubborn about getting things done in my time frame. =P I let him push it off long enough, I think. I just want to get things done and over with now so we don't have to worry so much as we get closer to it. Haha... we'll see how long I can cling to that hope.

Latest on wedding planning.

I spent about a week in L.A. to get wedding planning done. My poor dad seemed to have missed the memo that my visit was for wedding planning so he was grumpy all week. I only got to have lunch with him once. =/

Cake
It was really stressful because I never got around to scheduling tastings before my flight, so when I called bakeries after arriving in L.A. I found that most of them wanted appointments made at least 3 days to a week or two in advance. I was really frustrated, but Mrs.Crumly saved me by getting an appointment with a bakery that a friend of hers used. This bakery ended up being the one I chose to go with.
Creative Cakes by Rockwell in Orange, CA. Their cake was absolutely delicious. They were reluctant about our filled cupcake idea, but the baker actually tried it and it worked out perfectly! I'd post a picture but I don't know how to get a picture off my phone onto the computer. It was the baker that sold us because she was so willing to try out our idea. The other thing that sold us was that they were priced so much better than the other bakeries we went to.
With that settled, we need to get the cake stand built (which Mr.Crumly is going to work on with a friend) and find a cake topper.

Photo/Video
After lots of talking with my mom, she gave up on trying to drag me around Long Beach and we went straight to L.A. Color in Pasadena. I love that they are familiar with both Chinese and American weddings, which isn't something I could confidently say of anyone I would have met in Long Beach. They are pricey.... not the most expensive I found, but pricey. However, we were able to put together a great package with them.
We saw some of the videos they had, and my mom saw how he put together a video of audience reactions to the slideshow pictures. So now she wants to do a slideshow. Mrs.Crumly freaked out a little bit when I asked her to pull pictures of Yubo. =P

Flowers
Unfortunately, the flowers that my mom bought from the silk market weren't quite as I pictured. There was some strange miscommunication. She thought I wanted something like white, off-white, and pink. I wanted pink cherry blossoms, white Stephanotis, and red Chinese peonies. My mom got some Stephanotis that were perfect, but we weren't able to find more. The cherry blossoms had more than 5 petals, unlike the Japanese ones I wanted. And the Chinese peonies she had a few of were white. She got some other peonies (different species) that were this weird dark pink and were too full and bulby.
She didn't want to pressure her best friend about the flowers because she just got remarried, so I suggested to just take on the flowers with our friend Edith up here in WA.

Wedding Gown
Met with Sylvia, Mrs.Crumly's coworker and friend. She's excited about working on my gown, but told me it would have to be three separate pieces (a top and two skirts), which I didn't really want but I suppose that will look best. For now I think all I can do is hope it actually turns out the way I have it pictured in my head.

Bridesmaids Dresses
One of the biggest frustrations. We managed to find this elusive Jordan 543 dress from a lady named Cecile in Glendale that was willing to order the sample for us to try on. I personally don't care for this lady, but she was cheaper than online options. So as of now, we have the dresses ordered and they should arrive at the store in 6 weeks (+ 1 week to get from L.A. to New York and Washington).

Church
I got to finally meet with our wedding coordinator. She's super nice and friendly, so I look forward to working with her. We got the big things mostly settled, and just need to figure out more of the details, especially sound stuff. Determined that the rehearsal would be on the Thursday before around 6p, so we're thinking about doing dim sum that morning instead of a rehearsal dinner.

Hair and Makeup
LOTS of miscommunication. My sister's friend is really nice, but I didn't get to see her work. She recently called me with a sort of quote, which is waaaaay outside our budget. So we may use Akemi's friend, but I'm thinking of just doing my own hair and makeup.

Music
Got to talk with Mr.A about the music for the day. We seem green; I just need to send him a lyrics sheet with notes on how Yubo and I want to sing our vow song. We also need to pick music for walking down the aisle, and whatever else. I trust him though, so I'm not very concerned about this.
Then I still need to contact my cousin about DJing at the reception. Need to get his number from my other cousin. @.@;;


So that's about where we are now. Still lots to do, so I'm taking a break from work the rest of this month. Also focusing more on healthy living............ sort of. =P And there we are.