Whew! We've been busy with the new house! There's a million things we want to do! We have somewhat put wedding plans on the side as we work on the house. However, the other day we remember that we still need to get our engagement photos taken by Red Gallery. It's the perfect time now with all the nice weather and springtime flowers.

We have been searching for a house these past few months, and have finally found one!! It is in the city of Westerville on the north east end of Columbus. We are currently in contract with a move-in date of March 26. We're really looking forward to painting and furnishing it in the months leading up to the wedding. And then, after our honeymoon, settling in and really making it our home! We have our work cut out for us between a new home and the wedding!

Our invitations arrived yesterday! We'll be working on those today. It won't be too long before you'll see them in your mailbox. Also, the bridesmaid dresses are in and they look great!

As you know from our previous post, our honeymoon plans have been made. We've added a little segment to our web page about it here:

http://www.straderbluewedding.com/story.html#honeymoon

Currently, we're finding a florist. We've visited one so far with more to come soon. But not too soon (as in this weekend), because we're heading to Crystal Mountain Ski Resort with Amy and Joe! We're really looking forward to that because we've been meaning to go skiing for some time. In fact, we decided to give ourselves a ski trip for Christmas 2004 instead of other gifts, but we never got around to it! So we're catching up this weekend.

Take a look at our web site! It does take a little while to load and it does use Flash. If you have a slower connection, you can just use this link, but you'll miss out on the song and dance.

There are still a few things it needs, but you can at least get a preview. Namely, there are a few pictures and even names not in there yet that we'll be adding soon. We'll also be adding more and more pictures over the next several months. We may even post a copy of our slideshow we'll be showing at the reception (complete with music, photos and even a little commentary between pictures) !

This past Sunday, we attended a wedding expo at the Aladdin Shrine Center in Easton. We've already planned quite a bit of the wedding, but there are still some parts that need to be taken care of. Such as choosing a florist and reception music.

After speaking with a couple DJs and only receiving facial contortions when asking for a demo tape of them speaking/working, we were encouraged by another reception music possibility that isn't a DJ. A group from Fermata music impressed us as they played live at the expo. We have a phone consultation next Tuesday to go over details that hopefully we help us make a decision.

Also, we won a drawing for a free dinner and some free play time at GameWorks AND we were presented with a coupon for one free admission to the expo while we waited in line (which saved us $8).

The web site isn't ready yet ... but it's close!

Photographer Chosen!
We've decided to go with Red Gallery Photography for our wedding. Our trip out there didn't really give us much more information, though. We met the photographers face to face, talked a little about the wheres, whens, and hows, and looked at pictures we've already looked at on the web site (which are impressive - you should check out their web site on the link in our last post). Now we've just got to tackle this contract with them (that has some confusing questions surprisingly), write a check, and then our photographer will be set.

There's another choice to be made though, because the photographer includes engagement photos in the package. We already have some nice engagement photos (which will be up on our web site soon - we'll announces when the site's ready to go), so we aren't sure if we want to get some more with them or not.

Cake!
Cake tasting is undeniably one of the best perks of wedding planning! Tonight we've got our last one. The last place we went gave us a lot of cake! We got two cakes that were maybe eight inches in diameter that we tasted from, then got to bring home the rest! It was really really good cake. We're looking forward to seeing if this other cake place can match them. Really though, we're more concerned with how the cake looks rather than its taste. Cake is just good - we're not worried about people spitting their cake out in their napkins because it's nasty. Even any old Kroger cake wouldn't warrant that.