Yes.  The rumors are true.  I.  Me.  Mwah.  Miss “I’m never getting married I hate all men and all people” is  going to be tying the knot.  Believe you me when I say I’m just as shocked as the rest of you guys.  The hardest thing about this all was not having Facebook any longer and being unable to tell everyone.  (Although I did read the overwhelming supportive response over the groom to be’s shoulder, and I have to say thank you for that Facebook world!)  So I personally called as many people as I possibly could. (Apologies to those of you whom I didn’t.)

So who’s the lucky guy you might ask?  Monsieur Timothy Danger.  My partner in crime and music, and co-host of my podcast. (Yes, MY podcast Tim)

Here we are.  (That was us at a band photo shoot not too long ago. According to Tim this is our official engagement photo.)

The date he proposed was December 20 after a hellacious week that I’d rather not remember at around 10ish at night.  It was the sweetest thing ever.  I may or may not have let my bitter facade fade away a bit and let a tear or two slip out.  Maybe.  It had honestly been a long time coming though.  We’ve been friends forever and were practically inseparable before we began dating.  I’ve known the guy for around 10 years or so.  I put him through hell and back during the courting phase.  He stuck around.  I came to my senses.  It all worked out somehow.  As do most things.

A few weeks after the initial engagement however,  the newness of wearing that ring had faded and reality set in.  I’m getting married.  We’ve got to plan a wedding…. Pick food, find a venue, a dress, flowers, entertainment, have beer… lots of beer… And god knows whatever else.  All of this seems fine and dandy.  But on top of this we’ve got a band to book and promote, a podcast to run, and a summer full of events, festivals, concerts, and comic conventions to cover.

I decided to sit down and look at my calendar and had a minor freakout.  A case of beer and 2 packs of cigarettes later I came to the conclusion that I need to begin the prepping and planning stages of this wedding now before the crazy summer begins.  For those of you who don’t know me well, I’m super organized and a bit OCD about scheduling and planning out my time.  With the way our lives go sometimes, it’s the only way we can keep sane and not double book events and to ensure I get projects out on time for clients.  I’m also a huge ‘list maker’.  It’s the only way I can get the chaos out of my head and into some type of order.   So Tim and I sat down and wrote out a list of what needed to be done and how we were going to do it.

We both decided that we wanted to have a small wedding 50 – 75 people at a venue that required no decorations and that we were going to keep the entire wedding budget under $1500.00.  I’ve always thought the concept of a wedding was a stupid one.  I simply refuse to pay thousands of dollars we don’t have and months of planning and prep work on a party for other people as a way to show them our commitment to each other.  Also, we simply don’t have the money right now to put out more than that.  So.  A small wedding with only the people that matter.  We decided to do pretty much everything DIY (including me making my dress) and what we can’t do ourselves we would delegate to close friends and family members who so far have been ecstatic at the idea of lending a hand on our big day.

Here’s better photo of us two. Without the masks.

This all still seems pretty impossible still, but with our brains combined, we can pretty much make anything work.  As the days and weeks progress I’ll keep updating with the process of how we are going to make this seemingly impossible feet happen and how we did it.

My first goal in this process? Organize my thoughts and the things we need to get done (as stated before).  Once Tim and I made the original list of our plans, I sat down and figured out how in the hell to organize this information so that we (by we I mean ‘I’) don’t go crazy.  I usually prefer binders and paper and pen, but to save money, paper, and ink (there were a lot of pinterest photos, google photos, and notes I needed to organize) I decided to keep everything on the iPad.  Less clutter.  Less chances of losing important notes, and it’s all in one convenient place.

There are four aps that I’m using for this.
(1) The Bento App.  This app is one of my favorite database apps of all time.  I use this app for pretty much everything.  I have everything we need set up  in there with notes, ideas, questions, links, and anything else you could think of organized into libraries.  It’s easy to update and not as messy as paper.  It’s about a $10.00 app.  We’ve had it for about a year now and I still love it.  I use it for podcast stuff and freelance organization as well.   It was well worth the $10.00 I spent on it.

(2) The MyPics App.  I needed a photo organization app that has the ability for me to take all my inspiration and idea photos and organize them into galleries.  I also needed a way to take notes on these photos.  This app is perfect for that. It’s also free.  Bonus.

(3) The Numbers App.  I needed an app that worked like excel.  I also needed it to have the ability to imported onto my computer if I needed it to be.  This app is perfect. You can fancy up the spreadsheet as well (honestly, this was a big must for me).  I’m using this for our budget form and for our guest list.  I had tried about 5 other applications but this was the only one that didn’t crash, have stupid limitations, and could be imported and used on a computer.  This app runs about $10.00 but once again, totally worth it.  I had been wanting to get an app like this for a while to help me with some of the other projects we have but had been putting it off.  I’m glad I went for it.

(4)  The Errands App.  Lastly, I had looked online for free checklists for weddings to make sure I had thought of everything that I needed to have done and in what time frame.  I then went through those checklists and made one of my own that would fit our needs with what we were planning to do.  So I looked for a free task list app that enabled you to organize the tasks you had typed up as well as have due dates, etc.  This one has worked like a charm.  You can organize your tasks into folders, attach due dates and more.  This one?  It’s free.  Awesome sauce.

The conclusion I came to after doing all of this?  Elope kids.  This isn’t worth it.  Kidding!  But really, it’s a lot to take in and although I can somewhat breathe easy now, there’s still a ton of things to get done before the big day.

Till next time,
Brea