Random thoughts
I sang at a wedding today…it was a beautiful ceremony, lovely couple, gorgeous day. But after having gone through my own wedding so recently, I now notice all the things that could have gone better had the bride & groom (or maybe the wedding planner?) thought the details through just a little bit more.
The ceremony took place outside, and the bridesmaids and brides had to traverse a very long lawn to get to the site. They did so in 4-inch stiletto heels, all of them. I almost wanted to say kudos to them, but I was too busy laughing (on the inside, of course!) as their heels accumulated rose petals like those pointy canes that pick up trash while they marched down the rose-carpeted aisle. The bride had to be held up by her parents as she walked because she kept falling into the soft ground. NOTE TO ALL FUTURE BRIDES: if you are going to get married outside, make sure you (and your bridesmaids) choose appropriate footwear.
The ceremony music was untraditional, for sure, which made me happy, because I got to sing something other than Schubert’s Ave Maria . Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for a bride who knows what she wants with regard to music, rather than the standard, "What do you suggest?" Because that’s when I end up with Ave Maria or Panis Angelicus or one of the oldies but goodies. I do like a little change now and again, just to spice things up. But whoever picked the music didn’t really think of the timing or the appropriateness of some of the selections. The groomsmen entered to a somewhat menacing Janá?ek piece played by the string quartet, and they were lined up at the front and ready to go before the piece was even halfway over. And my solo, "Ich habe genug" (Bach Cantata, BWV 82), would have been 8 minutes long before we cut it down to a mere 3′50" during the rehearsal immediately prior to the ceremony. SECOND NOTE TO FUTURE BRIDES: make sure you know what all your music selections sound like and how long everything is going to take.
Other than that, everything else went pretty smoothly. There were some problems with the wireless microphones, but I didn’t need a mic in that intimate setting, so I personally didn’t care one way or the other.
In other news, I’ve actually had enough time on my hands that I’ve been surfing around Digg.com (dangerous, I know) and came across this picture , which had the title "Never piss off an engineer." Priceless.
Getting all crafty
So I made a new friend over the past couple weeks. She’s a new addition to The Crossing, and she is fantastic! We have tons of things in common, especially the fact that we both really like to play with arts and crafts.
Anyway, she’s got this blog, and I’ve been following it and marveling at all the stamps she makes, when I realized that I make stuff like that too! Only I did a whole lot of it for my wedding, and then I stopped because I got busy…like I always do.
I showed her a project I did for my wedding last year, and she really liked it. She said she’d post it on her blog, so I said I’d put the template up on my blog for any of you who might want to do this project yourself.
This project is a wedding program that I turned into a fan (I originally got the idea because I knew it was going to be hot out there in Hawaii, and I thought, “Hey, let me stick the program on a Popsicle stick, and then folks can fan themselves during the ceremony.” But the more I worked on it and researched it, the more I liked the idea of a folding fan with panels. So I modified a template that I found on DIYBride and played around with it on Adobe Photoshop until I could get the right width and angles. It was actually tricky coming up with something that was thin enough to fold down and wide enough to hold all of the text.
Here is one panel:
I then played around in Quark Express and figured out a way to fit three panels on an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper so that I could print it out on my printer. The font I used is Aramis, which is a free font.
This is the Quark file.
Once I printed it out on card stock (it’s been a year since I did this, so I can’t remember what weight I used! I do know the thickest weight will not go through a standard inkjet, so go at least one step down), my husband and I went through the arduous task of cutting the panels out and arranging them in order (as a side note, I didn’t think this was going to take very long…after all, we only had 35 guests! But I didn’t take into consideration that each fan had 9 panels each, so there was a lot more cutting going on in front of the TV than I’d care to admit).
We punched a hole in the bottom of each panel and then used a brad to attach all 9 panels together. We originally tried to use a grommet, but all that did was hold the pieces so tightly together that they didn’t move at all. So the next best thing was a brad, and we also threaded a little ribbon through the hole as well so our guests could swing them daintily from their wrists, if they so desired.
So there you are! Have fun.
Don’t Forget to “Buy” Our “Product!”
So I was walking down the streets of New York the other day and passed by a sign outside of a restaurant that said:
We now have “sushi.”
What does that mean? Since quotes are generally used to connote irony or something unusual about the word (when not actually quoting something or someone), I have got to assume that whatever they’re selling is, in fact, NOT sushi, but some parody thereof.
I know I’m a little nitpicky when it comes to little stuff like spelling and grammar, and usually I just snicker at emails from friends (or strangers) and get on with my life. But when someone is trying to sell me something, the least I expect them to do is use proper English. When they don’t, I lose respect for them as a credible vendor, and they lose my business.
For instance, I’ve been receiving all sorts of advertisements in the mail for various bridal-related services: photography, limousines, flowers, etc. One such envelope, upon opening, contained a letter, which read:
Hello Future Bride,
We are a new store which opened recently in May of 2005.
Besides a complete variety of accessories and gift box rentals (bridal doll is our newest), we hand craft your bridal veil “custom” to your exact detail or you can “Rent” A Bridal Veil that we have in stock!
This being the first thing I read, I was terribly confused. May 2005 isn’t that recent. Okay, it’s not quite a year old, so maybe “recently” is still an acceptable word. But either way, why not just say “opened recently” or “opened in May of 2005,” thus eliminating confusion?
The second sentence really doesn’t make very much sense either. Someone clearly didn’t have to diagram sentences in 6th grade, because this one is a mess. According to that sentence, I have to assume they handcraft accessories and gift box rentals, which has got to be difficult. And what the hell is “bridal doll?” Is it a gift box rental? Do they make gift boxes with little dolls dressed up as brides inside? Does the box look like a doll? Do they rent the doll?
The point of the next part of the sentence, I’m sure, is that they will customize a bridal veil for me. But apparently they only need one detail in order to do so. Do I get to pick the detail? That’s why “custom” is in quotation marks, right? Because if I only give them one detail, then it’s not really that customized, right? Right?
If they want me to “rent” a bridal veil, does that mean it’s not really a rental? Do I get to keep it longer than most rentals? Is it like a car lease or something, where there’s a buy-in agreement at the end? Maybe the reason “A Bridal Veil” is capitalized is that it’s patented and I’m renting their product but also advertising for them.
The letter goes on (I won’t quote the whole thing), but it ends with this gem:
And when your wedding is over, I offer “hand” cleaning and preservation of your bridal gown and formal gown cleaning using no machinery or excessive heat, which causes damage.
So somewhere in the middle of the letter, the pronouns switch from “we” to “I.” That’s only slightly bothersome, though: the really scary idea is the “‘hand’ cleaning.” Once again, is that an ironic remark? Maybe they don’t use their hands; maybe they use their feet. That would certainly be different, something to set themselves apart from the pack.
The way the punctuation stands at the moment, they offer preservation of not only your bridal gown but also your formal gown cleaning. How they preserve cleaning, I’m not sure, but however they do it, they use no machinery or excessive heat. I suppose that’s a plus. They never tell me what it causes damage to, but I suppose we all can guess that they’re talking about the gown, not the person doing the cleaning.
Now that my rant is over, I will leave you with this picture I took after I saw the “sushi” sign (I should have taken a picture of the “sushi” sign, but it didn’t occur to me until later). It’s not the same problem, but it is yet another example of a well-meaning, English-challenged company trying to do some advertising.
