I had sort of an American Beauty "life is too beautiful" moment today while reading the comments on all the fundraising sites…  (on the right, still not too late to give!)  On one hand there’s the stress of planning the wedding, the heat, Boo Boo getting stung by a bee, a flat on my bike on the way to work today, the humidity, last minute contract work I’m trying to finish, nonstop plans for the foreseeable future, and, oh, the heat…  Not to mention the world.  But on the other hand: I’m getting married to the most amazing woman I’ve ever met!  And we have an awesome house with a kegerator in the basement!  And the best dog in the world!  And – as indicated by the comments and donations – there are still wonderful people in the world who care.  It’s weird, the things that give you perspective…  Duoteam is more than a wedding.  Can’t wait to see everyone and freaking celebrate!!!

… and to that end, I’ve gotta go brew some beer.  Sweet.

Well, kids, as you might have surmised from the complete lack of posts: it’s been a mighty busy few weeks.  On the heels of Justin and Juliana’s wedding I think Karen and I both sort of had a "holy crap, we’ve got a lot still to plan!" moment, and dived right in.  The most immediate result is one I hope most of you have or will soon have: invitations!

We decided to use some nice sustainable and environmentally sound paper from Sri Lanka (look for the fine print on your invitation, I don’t want to spoil it here), and ordered a bunch of 12×12 sheets with plans to cut them in half and fold them.  It all went well, but my printer doesn’t seem to handle the 6" width very well – at the end of every sheet it would start to tilt the feed, resulting in in "stutters" on one side and crooked text.  Crap!

So I ended up hand feeding every sheet – twice.  Once for the top 2/3rds of the sheet, once for the RSVP on the bottom 1/3.  Time intensive, but a clean print.  The only trouble is the paper is a bit fragile on the edges and would occasionally catch as it fed through, resulting in a bit of loss.  I’m afraid the post office’s processing is even less gentle than my printer — a sample we sent to ourselves arrived slightly dinged from the automated rollers they shoot it through…

But, in the end we’ve got a nice single sheet of paper for the entire invitation / RSVP, no extraneous envelopes or redundant packaging!  If they all arrive, we should be set!  At left is Karen making a sweet stamp we used on the back of the RSVP, and at right below is her hand-addressing(!!) an invitation.  Whoa.

We’ve also added a few pages to the wedsite  (hee hee): RSVP, things to do, pies, and lodging.  If you haven’t booked yet, DO IT NOW!  If you have, awesome, go RSVP!

As I imagine all our readers know by now, we just launched Wedding 2.0 (beta), a fun interactive wedding website.  Why have just one day of fun when there’s so much to go around??

As any of you know who tried to play "Dress Nate", there were some problems with the third-party script and server I was using to drive the dragging and image generation.  That won’t do!  I rewrote the script to run locally and it’s super sweet, much easier to use now I believe — and if there are problems I can fix them instead of just hoping they go away.  Let me know how it goes.

Enjoy!