Spent much of the weekend being Bridezilla, embroiled in wedding-related activities, such as viewing the actual reception (i.e. "picnic") site, creating a guest list spreadsheet in Excel, involving various family members in planning, setting up a gift registry, etc. Not to mention surviving the Great April Blizzard of ought-five as well as having an online "conference" with Argotnaut (in Germany) and Frinkenstein (now back in Oregon).

I probably could have made TheLimey do the guest spreadsheet part, as that would have likely been a snap for someone in his field. However, a number of factors influenced my being the one (AKA "sucker") to do it. Primarily, I was ready to get down to it and make the guest list, while he was running around doing other very important things. (I won't say what exactly, but let's just say there was smoke and swearing involved.) To be fair, the other part was that I really didn't know exactly what I wanted until I sat down and began doing it.

It took a lot longer than I expected, but I was very proud of myself at having come up with a design that subtotaled the guests into categories according to who invited them, whether they would be one of the few "family and very close friends" squeezed into the miniscule chapel or only the reception, and so forth. With color coding.

When I first made my own guest list (the very first week we were engaged, of course) I immediately hid it away because I was embarrassed at having come up with over 50 people, while TheLimey had been saying he wanted an incredibly small wedding with approximately 3.5 people in attendance.

However, now that he has compiled his own guest list (under considerable duress), I feel vindicated because he came up with--shall we say--a lot more than I did, and will actually have to whittle his list down to some extent.

The other time-sucking thing was the gift registry. However, this was compulsively fun, as we decided to use felicite.com, which allows one to register for anything, anywhere (it's really a web-based gift-buying service rather than a registry proper). So you can have anything from items on a given store's website, to items at your local corner mom-and-pop store, to donations to a specific charity or organization, to donations towards your honeymoon trip. Guests simply log on and view what you want, and either buy it or just put money towards it.

Guests without internet access get to call a 1-800 number and speak with an Inefficient Carbon Unit who will process their gift over the phone. And then the items are delivered right to your house! It also has an RSVP database, whereby guests can either log on by themselves and RSVP, or else they can send you the traditional postcard and you can add the guests manually to the RSVP list yourself.

Therefore I spent quite a lot of time transferring kitchen items from our Amazon registry, adding new items (such as towels from department stores, movie theater tickets, and chocolate bars), looking up worthy charities, and arguing with TheLimey about whether to put light blue bedsheets or only the white ones.

I tell you, it was great fun, despite the fact that we originally were going to try to get people to not bring any gifts at all. After we heard from about a dozen people that we might as well get a registry since people would bring us gifts regardless--and really bad ones, too--we gave in and registered. After all, how many plastic resin Light-Up Holiday Village Scenes can we be expected to tolerate and indeed display year after year?