O be joyful

I picked up my wedding dress from the tailor’s today. They did a really nice job of shortening and adjusting the dress for me, but oh man, the sticker shock!

I do not lie when I say the alterations cost more than the actual dress did. I stumbled onto this dress in an outlet store near my home. I did not plan on buying an off the rack “deal” – I was determined to buy a swanky dress in an uncomfortable, fancy dress shop. On a whim last April, my mother dragged me to Orfus Road, which has several bridal places that don’t require appointments. She wanted me to see what was out there before we really got down to the serious dress hunting. The first place we went to was a bust. I tried on about 5 dresses that just didn’t do it for me – and the prices seemed high for what were non-designer dresses.



The second place was the outlet. It was the kind pf place where you just want to turn and go back from whence you came. The salesgirl was my kind of lady, so I stayed. (I happen to love bossy ladies from the Caribbean.) As I wandered through the aisles with Pauline, throwing out key words like “lace” and “ruffles” and “I think I am a size 8 or 10”, we both stopped in front of one particularly lacy and ruffled gown. It was unlike anything I had seen online or in magazines. “This one must have just come in!” Pauline told me, while I managed to say “but what size is it?” My mother heard the words and came zooming towards us as we discovered that it was a size 8 – on the small size of my “bridal dress size”, which do not seem to follow any sizing chart known to Man.

Somehow it fit and it was perfect. The lace, the ruffles, the straps, everything was right. This place had a no-holds, no-return policy, so a call was placed to my sister, 15 km away. She dropped everything to come and approve my selection. The price was absolutely fantastic, about a quarter of what I was expecting to pay for a dress based on weeks of online research and leafing through glossy bridal magazines.

And so the tailor bill today is really depressing, especially since reality has invaded my bridal dreams. Last April, everything was delightful; money seemed like no object since D was well employed. Today I am happy at the prospect of my marriage and I am in no way disappointed with our arrangements, but the cold hard weight of our bills is a lot to bear.

I wanted to buy a pair of shoes today to wear on our honeymoon but that will have to wait.

Amidst all of these worries, inexplicably I have three words bouncing around in my brain – O be joyful – and truly there are a thousand reasons to be happy this Spring.

Reply Card Misery

Today I am wading through a stack of reply cards. I let them pile up a bit before I record them in my dysfunctional spreadsheet. The reply date is a week away and I’ve received oh, maybe two dozen replies in all. Out of 100+ invites sent. I’ve concluded that sending out wedding invitations is an exercise in humility and frustration.



The warm glow of the engagement has long worn off by the time you and your fiancé sit down to draft page after page of invitees. After a wrangle with everyone concerned, you have a list of many names and not many addresses. Weeks or months later, after numerous arguments about the practice of nagging, you have an actual assemblage of names and addresses neatly printed on piles and piles of expensive, hand-made (by you) invitations to be sent out at great expense.



You have committed to a significant number of guests at the banquet hall. All that’s left is to dutifully record the replies…that you now find are trickling in at an alarmingly slow rate.

I have reached this point. I now realize that the sun does not rise and fall on my bridal tiara, contrary to what I’ve been conned into believing as a bride. If I hear “but you are the bride! It’s YOUR day!” one more time by someone trying to sell something ridiculous and unnecessary to me, I could scream.

The only plus side to the whole wedding fiasco is, if you’re lucky like I am, you’ve picked out a half-decent groom you get to go home with at the end of it all.

A washing machine to call my own

I’m getting married in less than two months, and there is a lot to keep me up at night. When D. and I decided to get married last April, his job was on shaky ground. Little did I know how shaky. I thought that his company would be downright idiotic to consider laying him off. Turns out they were and they did. He got the axe about three days after putting down a sizeable and non-refundable deposit on the Ring of my Dreams. In shock, I told him to call and explain, and perhaps get his money back. And because he is who he is, he said, “why would I do that?” as if I had asked him cut off his left hand.

To delay our wedding was thus deemed impossible, and so we’ve gone forward, business as usual. Some people think we are crazy. I think we are crazy from time to time. Especially now, a year later with the wedding staring us down, and there is no job lining his pockets twice a month. Severance and EI have come in handy, but there is an undeniable question – Where will we live?

Currently I live at home and he lives at home. We want to begin our marriage in a place of our own. Our goal is to buy a house but that seems like an impossible dream at this point. So I lie awake at night thinking about what may be.

Doing laundry today and I wondered where I would be washing our clothes. I never thought I would be concerned about something as dull as laundry, but there you go.