We've been married a year!

Technically speaking anyway, yesterday was our one year anniversary. I've mentioned before that we were married before our wedding so that I could hop on P's health insurance. It also made other stuff that we did last year easier--like buying a house and generally combining finances.
While getting married at the courthouse in Sacramento is a very anticlimactic occasion (lots of filling out forms and listening to them talk about STI's and genetic defects in children), we still took some pictures and dressed up a bit.

My parents got married in the same spot when I was a baby (so they could get into family student housing...we're a very practical family), so they came along to be our witnesses. Did you know that you have to pay to have a witness if you don't bring your own?!? Sort of crazy.


Actually, I think that the hearts everywhere were just up because it was close to Valentine's Day, not for general wedding decor. When we went in I was sort of nervous that they'd think we were crazy for dressing up, but there were several other couples there and a few of them were in wedding gear. One woman even had this giant poofy 1980s wedding dress on!

While my parents took us out to dinner last year, we're feeling the whole recession thing right now so we stayed in last night, made dinner, and drank a bottle of nice wine that someone gave us as a wedding gift. Not a bad first anniversary (and we get another one in September!).

Parking

Because our wedding was at a home, we had limited space for parking on site. One of the many dilemmas of having a backyard wedding.

Since shuttles from hotels weren't in our budget, we decided to ask the elementary school just down the street from my parent's home if people could park there. Honestly, I wasn't very hopeful. I can't imagine that it's great for liability to have a bunch of people parking on school grounds who will be attending a big party. But my mom asked, and surprisingly they were totally fine with it. They even put it on their office calendar in case any teachers showed up that day and were alarmed by the number of cars in the lot.

(School bus photo via Elizabeth Anne Designs)

When we sent out the invitations they included a quick note about where to park and mentioned that those who couldn't make the short walk were welcome to park in my parent's driveway.

All in all this worked out well, and might be a good option for some of you having an at-home wedding (or really any wedding with no on-site parking and a large parking lot nearby that you know will be empty on weekends).

Budget Dessert without Compromising Quality

I posted before the wedding about our decision to serve both cake and pie at our wedding, but thought I'd do a quick recap of how we vastly over-ordered on dessert and still felt like we got a great deal.

First, you probably won't need near as much dessert as wedding websites and cake bakers would like you to believe. We had 100 people, and we kept hearing that six 8-inch cakes and six pies wasn't going to be enough.

I hid one pie for the next day, but we ended up having two full cakes left, and most of another pie. Our caterer cut everything up into those tiny slices and people didn't realize they could take more than one of them so that didn't help the matter much.

But I can't say I really minded having leftover cake and pie, so go ahead and over-order if you're like me! Do keep in mind that some venues won't let you take your leftovers home. It has to do with liability and often isn't negotiable, as my cousin found out when they dumped half her wedding cake.

But even with rampant over-ordering, having lots of individual desserts was much cheaper than ordering a wedding cake (even a simple one). Twelve desserts ended up costing at total of $270. And they weren't discount desserts either. The cakes we had are from the best bakery in Sacramento. I was afraid to even ask what their wedding cakes cost--I'm pretty sure they are at least $500 and up for the number of guests we had. Which really makes no sense if you consider the amount of cake we had. And all we sacrificed was the appearance of a big custom cake! And the pies were special ordered from a woman who used to bake for Chez Panisse, and made with fresh, local ingredients.

I'd highly recommend going this route if you are on a budget and looking for quality cakes. Just keep in mind that you might end up eating cake and pie every meal for a week afterward!

Details: Creating an outdoor seating area

Paul and I had a very lazy weekend. He's been busy lately so he swore off work for all of Saturday AND Sunday. No work emails, no checking his blackberry, nothing. I was pretty impressed that he pulled it off. We spent the time going on a hike, cooking semi-elaborate meals, having friends over, and other odds and ends.

None of that is at all relevant to what I'm about to post, except for to say, that I've had a good excuse for not posting in a few days!

So one of the things that I knew I wanted at our wedding was an outdoor seating area. Couches, floor pillows, a fire pit, the works. Since our wedding was in my parent's yard, they offered to let me drag their living room furniture outside. Have I mentioned that I love how flexible my parents are?

I was given a Crate & Barrel gift card from my old office as an early wedding present, so I used that to buy a rug and some floor pillows that I knew we'd reuse in our house. And I lugged up a big chair I love, because I thought it would look cute in pictures (and I'm going to admit that is a crazy reason to bring a hundred pound chair anywhere).


We set the lounge up on the pool deck, which was located just close enough to the dance floor to be a good place to take a break and people watch, but just far enough away from the DJ to carry on a conversation.
After dark we lit torches all around the patio and floating candles in the pool, got the fire pit going, and people sat around on the couches and curled up in quilts on the rug. One of the great mysteries of our wedding is how there isn't a single picture of it! I've put out a request to my friends in hope someone has one that they've been hiding from me, so if something shows up I'll be sure and post it here.

Having the seating area was a great, super easy addition to the wedding (particularly since we could use stuff we already had on site). People don't really want to sit at tables after they are done eating, and it gave them somewhere to be if they didn't want to dance. I have no idea how much this would cost, but I was at a wedding recently where they primarily rented couches instead of tables and chairs. They did have a few tables for those who needed or wanted them, but in general it was perfectly fine, and a lot more comfortable for seating once people were done with their food.

My brother-in-law & his girlfriend at the couch-seating wedding.

Since I'm done recapping...

Now that I've got the general recap posts out of the way I have a bit more space to write about the details of the wedding, the diy projects, and some other odds and ends.

I can also respond to M&M's post tagging me (though I'm not going to tag anyone else).

Rules - List 5 Obsessions/Addictions that you have, and tag back to the person(s) that gave you the award. Post the rules and tag and additional 5 people.

1. Taking pictures. After my nice camera was taken in Argentina, I've been living with a camera that runs on AA batteries. It's not my favorite, but I'm dealing since we can't afford to buy me a dSLR right now and I'm holding out for that.

2. Blogs. Obviously, I guess. I've had one since I was in high school. That's about ten years of blogging now. Pretty wild. I blog about my life outside my wedding here.

3. Traveling, but particularly hotels. Not necessarily swanky hotels, but I love seeing how different hotels, b&b's, hostels are run, who stays there, etc. My obsession grew when I worked as an innkeeper.

4. Food, but particularly cooking people breakfast. After working as an innkeeper, I became an expert breakfast food cook. I love having breakfast parties and cooking for groups of friends. I'm learning to become more confident cooking non-breakfast foods. Food is also very political for me. We try and eat locally as much as possible and I've cut back my meat consumption to just grass-fed, free range stuff.

5. California. I've never lived anywhere else and it's really hard to imagine doing so. It's diverse in every way--the climate, the politics, the landscape. We've got big cities and wide open spaces. Very conservative areas and San Francisco. It's endlessly fascinating.