Groom-zilla Part II

July 30, 2013 By 6 Comments

Happy Tuesday!

 Last week I presented you with a post about a Groom-zilla, namely ME!  I was married on Nantucket last year and I was very detailed in my planning.  In case you missed it, here it is: Groom-Zilla Part I

Today, I will share two other areas of our wedding that MIGHT remind you of that large dinosaur-like creature that terrorized Tokyo.

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3. MATCHY MATCHY – IT ALL TIES TOGETHER!

Have you ever asked your friend what they think of your outfit and they answered, “It’s a little matchy-matchy!”  This basically means they don’t like it because it all matches too perfectly.  Well, I would never say this to you because I LOVE when everything matches perfectly.

Our Wedding festivities began with a themed Welcome Party.  My husband and I met in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so we planned an old-fashioned college house party.  Everything was red and white, our alma mater’s school colors. There were red roses everywhere, red and white picture frames, red and white cake pops for dessert and YES!  you guessed it, we asked everyone to wear Red and White!

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The Welcome Party paid tribute to where we met, so the next day “The Rehearsal Dinner” honored the place we decided to get married!  We had a very traditional Nantucket picnic by the beach complete with navy blue and white stripes, picnic baskets, white hydrangeas and other nautical details.  And again, everything was “matchy matchy” because everyone wore something blue or nautically inspired :)

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Judging me yet?  Color coordinating may seem over the top and I will agree with you!  Someone asked one of our grooms maids what she was wearing for the welcome party and she responded, “My outfits were decided for me 12 months ago!”

But, WAIT! The most Groom-zilla moment is yet to come!

4. SAY YES TO THE DRESS – GROOMS MAID EDITION

I have a question… Who is the first person in history to come up with the concept of bridesmaid dresses?  Who thought it would be a good idea to have ONE person pick out ONE dress for all of their friends?  It must have been a straight man…  I would like to travel back in time and have a few words with him.

I would like to start by saying I TRIED to be easy about this in the beginning.  But what I should have realized and what I am sure most of you readers have figured out by now is easy-going is not necessarily an adjective used to describe “Tuesdays With Tim!”

Let me paint you the picture.  We had 13 girls in our wedding party!  7 on my side, 6 on my husbands.  13!!!!!  Of all different heights, shapes and styles.  I wanted everyone to like and be comfortable in their dress so, I said “Get a white dress!” Summery, formal, and bright white!”  Then I changed my mind… I said to myself “That will never match!”

So I picked out options of white dresses online.  Then I changed my mind…

I found a white dress in different styles from a bridesmaid dress designer, but changed my mind because I would not get to see them before we ordered and I also decided I hated them.

I was back to “Pick a white dress!

  Since all the girls lived all over the U.S., I didn’t get to see some of the dresses together until about a month before the wedding.  This is what I saw!

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Well, needless to say… This wasn’t going to work out!  However, if you remember from Groom-zilla Part I, my friends came up with a code.  “D.T.T” or “Don’t Tell Tim,” which they used when anything had the potential to go wrong.  No one would tell me this looked as bad as it did!  Not even my future spouse!  It was a month until the wedding!!!  It was my own fault!  Of course, all the different white dresses were not going to match!   It all worked out in the end though.  We found a beautiful white dress in two styles.  We survived what our wedding party liked to call, “The White Dress Diaries” and to this day I still cringe when I see a white dress!

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In closing,  I am a genuinely good guy.  I hope these Groom-zilla posts haven’t made you blog readers despise “Tuesdays with Tim.”  If you have any Bridezilla or Groomzilla moments please share them with me to make me feel better!   If you have planned a wedding, you might find out that you will fixate on some details. As you have found out from these posts, I  fixated on many, but at the wedding, I truly enjoyed the day for what it was all about!  Marrying the love of my life in front of family and friends, no matter what color we were all wearing. ;)

BUT, I will leave you with one more glimpse into the twisted mind of this Groom-zilla.  We were married the weekend before Fourth of July and through-out the three days of wedding events, the wedding party wore

RED,                                        WHITE,                               and BLUE!

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TOP THAT GODZILLA!

See you next Tuesday!

Filed Under: Nantucket, Tim 6 Comments

Groom-zilla – part I

July 23, 2013 By 6 Comments

I am sure most of you girls have encountered a glimpse of her…

THE BRIDE-ZILLA…

Urban dictionary defines her as one ridiculous spoiled b**** that thinks she is the center of the universe, just because her “show” (the wedding) is 18 months from now…

(photo: www.sheknows.com)

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but have you ever encountered a GROOM-ZILLA?

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I mentioned in my first “Tuesday’s With Tim” post, that I was married on Nantucket last year with photography by the incomparable Zofia Crosby of Zofia and Co.

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 I was NOT really a Groom-zilla.  I wasn’t yelling or crying the whole time or anything like that, (maybe I raised my voice once or twice ;)) but I was very detailed, organized and obsessed.  The big joke was “You’re Out!”, which refers to me jokingly uninviting most people for one reason or another, including my fiancé. The other joke was D.T.T. or  “Don’t Tell Tim,” which most of the wedding party and vendors coded and used when something had the potential to go wrong.

EXAMPLE:

“One of those picture frames fell over and  broke!”

“Hide it!  Put it in the oven! D.T.T!!!”

 I would like to share with you all three areas of the wedding where my attention to detail was maybe a little over the top, that I MAYBE could have  been seen as a Groom-zilla.  I guess it’s for you to decide…  However, both of the examples in this post today are great DIY projects you can use for any party or event. :)

1. THE INVITATIONS – MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

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 The fifteen months of planning our wedding was something off of a reality TV show.    James, my husband, once joked that every detail I wanted was the hardest thing to achieve.  Since I was so particular, we did so many things ourselves.  For example, I wanted messages in a bottle for our invitation.  After days of researching online, I felt the bottles I found were a little too kitschy for me because I wanted them to be creative, but still elegant. We tried about 10 different types of paper, but I was discouraged on how crinkled the paper got when I rolled it and put it in the bottle. James came up with the idea of using cotton and linen fabric. After we tested one and it was exactly what I envisioned I laughed and said, “This is why I am marrying you!” This was the process. We bought yards of white linen fabric and white cotton fabric at our local store. We cut out each piece to the correct size, soaked the pieces in starch to make them stiffer, let them dry, ironed freezer paper on the back, cut off the threads, ran it through the printer with the design we created, cut the excess threads again, removed the freezer paper, rolled it tightly with a pencil, tied it with string, put it in the bottle, wrapped the bottle in bubble wrap, put it in the box, wrapped the box in white craft paper, and had a calligrapher address the boxes.  Repeat 120 times!  We will never have those hours and hours and hours back, but the final product was worth it!

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2. CORAL BALLOONS

balloonsDuring all my research while planning this wedding, I fell in love with a picture of a couple holding balloons on a beach. There was something about a cluster of balloons that I found whimsical, yet very classic.  Balloons are another example of something that should have been an easy detail to get, but proved difficult.

The colors for our wedding were coral, white and pale gray.  Let me interject here and tell you something about me and the color “coral.” Coral can mean different things to different people.  Is it orange? Is it pink? Is it red? Is it bright? Is it dark?

I do not like the color orange…  It’s actually my least favorite color.  I think its because I hated Orange starbursts candies as a young boy…  I also didn’t want a pink wedding!   Anyway, I was very specific about the color “coral” that would be used.  Not orange, not pink, but coral!!!!  Does that make sense to anyone else? Sorry, Groom-zilla moment!

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 I wanted coral and white balloons to match the wedding party’s bouquets, but the color coral does not exist in the balloon world.  Who knew? So we started researching how to attain this color.  After trying a dozen different combinations at our local party store, we found that by inserting a 100% latex orange balloon into a 100% latex pearl pink balloon would give you a coral balloon.  The orange inside the pink in the sunlight comes through just enough to get that specific coral color.  This process could work to make any color, so just start mixing balloons to get your wedding or event specific color.

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Tune in next week for Groom-zilla: Part II, where I will share the thing that took the most years off my life planning the wedding:  Finding a dress for the 13 girls in our wedding party! :) (dramatic music)

See you next Tuesday!

Filed Under: Tim 6 Comments

13 Books for 2013

July 15, 2013 By 5 Comments

I have a secret!  I am kind of a nerd.

(Maybe that’s not a secret!)

But I am not ashamed to say that “I LOVE TO READ!”  I may surround myself with hip and cool people like the Milly & Grace Girls, but I am a bookworm at heart and there is nothing like sitting down with a new book to read.

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My friends always call to ask for book recommendations, but since I have moved to Nantucket, I haven’t had as much time to read as I would like.  However, I still have a list of books a mile long I can’t wait to read this year!

So, I present to you “TUESDAY’S WITH TIM’S – 13 Books for 2013”

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Some of these were published earlier this year, some are coming soon, and one on the list I love to re-read every year.  Of the 13, I would like to highlight four I am especially excited to crack open.

1.  INFERNO by, Dan Brown

Most of us have heard of a book called The Da Vinci Code.  I remember reading this book in college, frantically searching the internet for a picture of The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa to see what Dan Brown was referring to.  Well, he is back with a new book all about Dante’s literary classic, Inferno.  I love Dan Brown novels because I always end up learning the most random facts and no one does suspense quite like him.  I am sure Inferno will be just as good as his previous books and that I will be on the edge of my seat, biting my nails as the pages fly by.

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2. AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED by, Khaled Hosseini

Grab a box of kleenex because the author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns returns with a brand new book this year.  I have been hearing such great things about it and I can’t wait to read it.  I might save it when I need a good cry though, because Hosseini knows how to make you care about his characters and pull on your heart strings.

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3. ALLEGIANT by, Veronica Roth

Young adult fiction has produced some entertaining works over the last couple of years and one of these is The Divergent Trilogy, which is coming to an end with the final book in the series this October.  Similar to The Hunger Games with it’s theme, the series is about a dystopian society that is divided into five factions, each one meant to uphold a particular virtue of humanity…  I am on pins and needles waiting to see how it all ends!  Pick up the first in the series, Divergent and its sequel Insurgent and you will be in line at your nearest bookstore to get Allegiant as quick as you can!

allegiant

4. 11/22/63 by,  Stephen King

This book was released in 2011 and it has become one of my all time favorites for many reasons.  First, I LOVE STEPHEN KING!  In fifth grade, I was almost sent home from my parochial school for reading King’s 1000 page tome, IT. So, I have been a fan for years!!  Second, I was a history major in college and I have many historical events that interest me.  I will read anything about the Titanic, Pearl Harbor, and the JFK assassination.  This book is about going back in time to stop the JFK assassination, which leads me to the main reason I obsessively love this book.  My all time favorite plot in fictional novels revolves around time travel.  I love trying to wrap my mind around time travel and how it would all work!  So I have read this book three times already, plan to read it once every year, and strongly recommend it!  I know some people think Stephen King only writes horror, but this book isn’t scary.  It’s a great story, with great characters and a fantastic premise. So, if you haven’t read it yet, put it on your 2013 TO-READ list!

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What books are you excited to read this year?   Is anyone else excited about any of the books on this list?  Has anyone read any of them yet?  If you find yourself on Nantucket this summer, stop by my favorite island bookstore: Mitchell’s Book Corner to find these books and many others!

(Thank you to James Scheurell for taking the photos ;)

Thomas Jefferson said it best, “I cannot live without books!”

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See you next Tuesday!

Filed Under: Books, Tim 5 Comments