Rules for Suits

Today, Girl Scout Fiancée e-mailed me a link to a Buzzfeed list detailing the Unspoken Suit Rules Every Man Should Know. Turns out, I didn't know any of them. In a fit of amazing timing, just yesterday the Giorgio Brutini shoes I ordered for my wedding attire arrived, and when looking through those unspoken rules I discovered that, according to Buzzfeed, the shoes I bought are not a good match for the kind of suit I want. Hooray. On the other hand, I bought shoes that are about 10 times cooler than I am, so forget what a random news aggregation website says, I'm wearing them on my wedding day.

Shoes that make people say, "Hey, who'd that lame guy steal those shoes from?"

I also purchased the special d20 socks I'm planning on wearing from Diesel Sweeties after they finally got some men's socks back in stock. I've got my Mickey Mouse bowtie, and a Green Lantern belt buckle. Since I reached a certain point in my weight loss, I've started wearing belt buckles (after that Green Lantern one was given to me as a gift), and now it's sort of becoming one of my things; I have one that looks like a classic NES controller, and one that is a replica of the one David Boreanaz wears on the TV show Bones (Girl Scout Fiancée got it for me as a Christmas present). Now, I could wear my Green Lantern one at the wedding, but I've got my eye on another one that might be just as cool, and would be a special thing that I would wear for the first time at my wedding.

"Reversible, to match multiple outfits" he said to justify another Nintendo belt buckle.

Of course, the way men's suits are designed, you actually won't be able to see my belt buckle, but at least I'll know I'm wearing it. Now comes the tough part: the suit itself. I have no idea where to go to get the suit. I know I don't want to spend an arm and a leg, but I'm a little leery of places like Jos. A. Banks and Men's Wearhouse for a wedding suit. I want to look good, but I don't need to make a statement with how much money I spend on a suit; I just want to look good standing next to Girl Scout Fiancée.

Keep Checking Those Specials!

Earlier this week I took advantage of something that everyone planning a Disney wedding, honeymoon, or even just a Disney vacation should know about: special rates! Yes, on Monday, Disney made available special room rates for many resorts. This is something that I've known was coming for a while, but I thought it would be worth mentioning again briefly. You see, I booked our hotel rooms nearly a year in advance simply to reserve them; thanks to Disney's generous cancellation policy on hotels and the courteous nature of their staff, I knew that making modifications and even changing lengths of stay or dates would be something I could do several times as the wedding gets closer. With the initial reservations in place with a year to go, I wasn't taking any chances.

The only Disney-related gambling I can endorse.

Then, when Disney made a new room rate available this week, I was able to call up the reservations hotline, speak with a very nice representative, and asked them to change my reservation over from the rate I had (which did have a modest discount on it, for being a AAA member) to the promotional rate that they had released earlier in the week. The customer service rep was able to find my reservation, and the promotional rate, with no issues, and made the change in a matter of minutes. All told, the new rate is about a 15% improvement over the rate I had previously, which, on a 14-night stay at a Deluxe resort, is no small chunk of our budget. This was also simply a modification to our existing reservation, and the representative had no need to cancel and re-book or anything like that; accordingly, our confirmation number did not change, everything remains linked to our MyDisneyExperience accounts, and there seem to have been no issues thus far. I'm also keeping my eye out for a better discount for Annual Passholders, which has not yet been released, but for which I'm hoping we qualify (given that we'll be Annual Passholders by virtue of getting married there).

I highly recommend booking well in advance to reserve your room, then asking for the reservation to be modified when a new rate comes out. That way, you have the peace of mind knowing that, at the bare minimum, your hotel stay is reserved, even if it's not at the rate you want. You can find the current specials by logging into MyDisneyExperience and going to Places to Stay, then clicking on View Special Offers. Or, just follow this link, which is probably easier right now, though I doubt you'll want to have to route through this blog in the future.

Right there, on the bottom of the right-hand column.

If you've booked your stay (or are about to) but have not yet seen any discounted rates released, you probably want to take a look at this MouseSavers page, which shows when discounts have been historically released. In the case of the Annual Passholder discount I'm looking for, for example, those seem to not show up until March or thereabouts, so I'll be keeping an eye out toward the end of next month. I also spend some time keeping an eye on the Dis Boards resort discount codes forum, and subscribed to the thread pertaining to the time period of our stay. I actually was aware that the discount special was coming some weeks ago, thanks to intrepid Dis board members, so once a thread gets created for the month of your trip, don't be afraid to subscribe to the thread. As it turns out, having a lot of folks looking for the same thing is a lot easier than trying to do it by yourself.

Wedding Wednesdays

Late last year I suggested to Girl Scout Fiancée that we set aside one night a week to work on wedding stuff, and I had suggested Wednesday since that was one of the few nights each week that we could usually guarantee some time together. This was an outgrowth of an earlier idea I had, which involved us watching one Disney movie a week in the ramp up to the wedding and honeymoon, so all of the movies would be fresh in our minds when we reached Disney World. As things often do when you're busy, we never really got either of those things off of the ground, but by the luck of the calendar (with New Year's Day falling on a Wednesday) we had the perfect excuse to kick 2014 off right, starting up Wedding Wednesdays today (yes, we're calling it Wedding Wednesday, a name that beat out MatriMondays, Tie-The-Knot-Tuesdays, and There's-Still-Time-To-Back-Out Thursdays).

Though Fantasy Fridays might still be on the table, if I can get Girl Scout Fiancée to buy some princess outfits.

This evening, after Girl Scout Fiancée made a delicious batch of Hoppin' John as our New Year's Day dish (black eyed peas for luck, spinach for money in the new year), we started by talking about a cocktail hour. Last year, our wedding coordinator had suggested that we consider adding a cocktail hour after the ceremony. According to him, with these afternoon ceremonies guests sometimes tend to wander off instead of sticking around for photos, and a cocktail hour helps give them something to do. We've also been concerned about the amount of time folks would have to go get dinner and then be back for our dessert party at Epcot, and we recently got some news about said dessert party that really nudged us toward considering adding hors d'oeuvres in the post-ceremony, pre-dessert party time. Apparently, the Canada Overlook area where we're having our dessert party isn't great for photos of the bride and groom silhouetted by fireworks. With that being the case, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to pay for a professional photographer to come to the dessert party, so we're considering taking the money we would have spent on that and instead putting it toward the hors d'oeuvres. We also just bought our plane tickets (non-stop redeye on Alaskan Airlines from Seattle to Orlando? Yes, please) and ended up spending less than I'd budgeted, so that plus the photography money should cover the costs of a cocktail hour. So, our first task for Wedding Wednesday was combing through the catering guide that our wedding coordinator sent us last year and seeing if we could put together a basic menu. We came up with two potential menus, and a whole bunch of questions, so my next task was composing an e-mail to Danny asking him about the details of the cocktail hour. We'll see what he has to say, but if things pan out I think the transition from wedding to dessert party is going to go much more smoothly.

Did you know that wedding guest boredom is the #1 threat to fun in America today?

The next task for Wedding Wednesday was to start putting together the mailing labels for the invitations to our Seattle reception. Girl Scout Fiancée designed the invitations on Invitations by Dawn, and we ordered our first wave before the holidays. We've had to break out list of folks we're inviting into different waves, since our venue can only accommodate a little over 100 people, and we know a lot more than 100 people. So our first wave consists of people who live out of town who we would like to come, but we're not sure if they will. Once we get our RSVPs back from them, we can send out the second wave, which consists of our local friends. We're pretty sure we're going to be able to have everyone come that we want to, since we don't expect a lot of out of town friends to be able to make it; Seattle is in a pretty remote corner of the country, and it's a long way to ask people to travel for a four-hour event, especially folks with kids. Still, some of our dear, distant friends might surprise us, so we need to check with them first before we go crazy inviting everyone I've ever gamed with here in Seattle. I spent a little while compiling mailing addresses, printing address labels, and sending e-mails and Facebook messages out to everyone else collecting their addresses. The best part is, I get to do it again in a couple of months!

With one sheet of address labels in hand, we headed down to the living room for the main event of the first Wedding Wednesday: a screening of the new The Little Mermaid blu-ray that I got Girl Scout Fiancée for her birthday this year (which, as she was quick to point out just now, alerts all of you that Girl Scout Fiancée just had a birthday). While we watched the movie, I wrote the names of each potential guest on their invitation (by hand; each of these invitations is blessed with my very touch!) and then Girl Scout Fiancée put the appropriate mailing label on them. Now we need only attach postage (and return postage) and the fine folks at the United States Postal Service will send forth the summons to Seattle for all of our distant friends and family.

They shall come to my wedding reception like Vader summoned before the Emperor.

I'd forgotten how much I liked The Little Mermaid; it's just got a certain magic to it that makes me grin when I'm watching it. Like many Disney movies, it's much shorter than it is in my memories. I guess when I saw all these movies as a kid, they seemed to last so long (especially compared to a 22-minute episode of He-Man), but the movie zips along at a brisk pace. There's no slowness in the film, and even the songs are over before you realize it. Unlike some of my staple Disney favorites, like Aladdin or The Emperor's New Groove, it'd been a while since I'd seen The Little Mermaid, so I kept saying, "Oh yeah, I love this part!" in my head over and over again. I'm really looking forward to each subsequent Wedding Wednesday so we can delve back through the Disney vaults and I can remember why I liked each one of them. Next week is likely going to be the new Mary Poppins blu-ray (also a Christmas gift I gave to Girl Scout Fiancée), and then after that we'll see.

Hipster Ariel meme: where the Venn diagram of Seattle resident and Disney fan overlap.

I'm hoping that, by setting aside Wedding Wednesday for us to work on wedding stuff, we're going to be able to slowly and reliably chip away at all of the things we have to do before the wedding and honeymoon, and the Seattle reception, instead of trying to do it all in one big blast right at the end. Plus, with the carrot of getting to watch a Disney movie every Wednesday and continually psych ourselves up for Disney World, there's something to look forward to other than sticking address labels or going through checklists. There's also some fun tasks yet to do, like writing our vows and maybe working with our officiant on the ceremony, so it's not all work. The big drawback is that we actually only have another 16 Wedding Wednesdays to go before the actual wedding (conveniently also on a Wednesday), so we won't be able to watch all of the Disney classics. What do we prioritize? The princess movies? Only our favorites? Only films we haven't seen in a long time? We've watched The Sword in the Stone recently, and Mary Poppins is next week, but other than that we've got to make some tough calls. I know Robin Hood has to go on the list, and I really want to put Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella on there. What about Peter Pan? Lady and the Tramp? Lion King? Mulan? I feel like I also want to put Aladdin on there because it's my favorite, but I can quote that one more or less verbatim; do I really need to watch it again? I have a feeling Girl Scout Fiancée and I need to make a list soon so we don't end up leaving off something one of us really wants to watch.