Weddingbee Blog

I have one vendor who has been a little unresponsive as of late (I’m not going to name names here, but let’s just say they are pretty crucial to the wedding day ). I try to keep reminding myself that not everyone has my wedding on the brain 24/7, and for every 4,000 times it crosses my mind, they have only probably thought about it once (if that). Each day seems so much longer when you are awaiting a response - where a normal person might check their email 3-6 times a day, I probably hit refresh every 4-6 minutes (even though my browser updates automatically and I also get my email on my phone). So in my mind it seems like they have taken forever to respond (even though in most cases it’s often no more than a few days).

In this case it has been almost two weeks. I think I have been very patient, but I’m starting to freak out. Why aren’t they responding? Are they not coming anymore? What do I do if that happens?

Am I freaking out prematurely? How long is your ‘vendor response grace period’?

…Courtney from Joyful Weddings & Events is our month-of-coordinator!!

When I was looking for a day of coordinator, I did lots of research to find vendors in my area. I emailed a lot of different people and met a few and talked with people I liked, but no one that I was really excited about; or they were so far out of my budget there was no chance. (If you are an OC/SD person and want to hear more details about those vendors, shoot me a message and I’d be happy to go into more detail)

Then I got an email from Courtney and she invited me to meet her at a bridal show she was doing in San Diego. I met her really briefly there and unfortunately couldn’t stay long, but based on her and her awesome booth I decided I wanted to meet with her again.

A great thing about Courtney is that she does weddings in both Orange County and San Diego, so I was able to meet her for coffee in Orange County after class one night. As we chatted back and forth at the local Starbucks, she seemed to just understand me and get what we wanted for the wedding. I loved hearing about her life, family and wonderful business. Our time flew by and at the end of it I felt like I had just found a new friend and most importantly someone I wanted on the team!
Read more…

Hands down, my most valuable wedding tool as of yet has been my Google Notebook. If you’re not familiar with it, the notebook is a sort of virtual clippings book that lets you highlight and select anything (except on flash pages) and store it away on the web. You can set-up as many notebooks as you need, as I have ones for centerpieces, invitations, etc., and you can access them from any computer as they are stored on your google account. Within notebooks you can create sections to help you organize the content and you can also move clipped content around in your notebook, or move it from one notebook to another simply by dragging it. Heck, you can even share them publicly with friends and others!

Sure, you could just collect and save photos on your hard drive, but the best part of the notebook is the fact that it saves the SOURCE of the image or text… meaning that it’s just a simple click away when you want to reference that page again. No more wondering about where in the heck you found that gorgeous flower arrangement or whose knottie bio you plucked a photo from. It’s all neatly stored away, and all you do is right click on your highlighted text or photos and select “Note this.”

It’s very easy to use once you install it, and I’m sure you’ll be able to find many more uses for it outside of wedding planning!

You are my hero.

Love, Miss Plumeria

~~~

I recently discovered Google’s new Docs and Spreadsheets service. Many of my friends and I already hail Gmail as the best email service ever made, and Google just keeps outdoing itself!

With new Docs and Spreadsheets Beta, a user can create and edit documents and spreadsheets, all online. The final version is stored online, like a saved email, so it’s essentially a “live” document that can be updated and saved from any computer that has internet access, without having to download and upload any files! You can add “collaborators” who can access and edit the document as well, invite viewers to see it, and host live chats while viewing it. For those addicted to Word and Excel, you can export any Google document or spreadsheet as a PDF, Word, or Excel file and work on it from your computer if you choose. You can also upload existing documents so you have a working copy online!

Read more…

For the past 3 months I’ve been swamped with wedding planning and house decorating duties. My “To Do List” has gotten so long that I get all flustered just looking at it. When the madness of wedding planning began, I was searching high and low for a good calendar and scheduler. My main reason for the calender was to keep track of my appointments with vendors - I wanted one that had enough writing space to take notes but was small enough to fit in my purse so it could go with me everywhere.

Since I needed a new phone anyway, (I’ve had the same Sprint phone for the past 3 years or so) I decided to purchase the T-Mobile Blackberry 7290 and I love it! It’s the most useful phone I’ve ever had - it’s got a great built-in calendar with set reminders that I use every single day, instant email access for Weddingbee of course , instant messaging, web access for Weddingbee of course , etc.

If you look closely you can see one or more “dots” on each day which represent appointments and things on my “to do list.” Almost all of my days are full!

Read more…

As a full-time University student and mildly neurotic bride to be, I can’t live without my Post-It notes! I use them constantly and have them in several colors, sizes, and patterns. And guess what? Now you can have the same thing, only on your computer!

There are several programs available; and after doing some research Mr. Blueberry told me this would be the best for my needs. It’s a free program and though I haven’t used it very much yet, I’m really impressed with it so far. The only caveat is you have to download a program called “free download manager” before you can download the post-it program itself, but that was easy enough that even I could figure it out for myself.

The one thing Mr. Blueberry had me do is un-check the box with something along the lines of “Run Free Download Manager at startup” as I was installing it (it’s one of the options on the steps to download). After I downloaded that program, the post-it program started to download automatically.

All in all it was a pretty painless process, and now I’ve got a great new program to help keep my life in order! I’ve already made notes about “blog entries to make” and “to-do for the wedding,” as well as “emails to reply to.” Already, I can’t imagine how I got along without this gem of a program!

I hope you find it useful for your own wedding planning or everyday use :).

I first discovered See Jane Work when I saw this Wheeled Carryall featured on decor8 (another one of my favorite blogs) earlier this year.

I love going to the Union Square farmer’s market on Saturdays with Mr. Bee, and thought this would be the perfect way to tote around all my purchases. So much cooler than the hip granny cart I currently use.

A friend recently sent me a link to the site, suggesting that See Jane Work is a great place to shop for things to keep all your wedding planning paraphernalia organized. As someone who clipped out magazine pages, placed them in page protectors, and stored them in binders according to category, I’m definitely one to appreciate stylish and functional organizational tools.

Irresistably cute finds include the Sushi Stationery Set and the Pet & Zoo Rubberbands. Shop for yourself, shop for the bride, shop for your bridesmaids. Who doesn’t need a little more organization in their lives?

What Happens Now is a free site that offers information about life’s changes and challenges, including marriage. Other topics include:

• Life Stages: Birth, child care, college, doctor visit, funeral, hospice, hospital, marriage, senior living
• Personal Events: Car and bicycle accidents; car and home fires; bicycle, car, car break-in, home, identity and wallet or purse theft
• Natural Events: Blizzard, earthquake, flood, hurricane, storm, tornado

In their marriage section, they have a great checklist for a printable wedding day emergency kit for both the bride and groom and articles on marriage related topics like prenuptial agreements, name changes and wedding insurance.

It’s an interesting site to explore and definitely one to bookmark for future reference.

(via lifehacker)

It is officially crunch time! There are about three weeks left until our wedding and we have a lot to do still. Mr. Grasshopper and I have been using Backpackit.com to help us keep track of our shared wedding to do list. Mr. Grasshopper is an obsessive organizer (we refer to him as Captain Schedule) and hates the idea of having multiple to-do lists emailed or floating around, so we are relying on the free version of Backpackit to help us out.

Backpackit lets you create a document and invite others to edit the same file. Instead of 6 Word documents named todo_v1.doc, todo_v2.doc, etc., we have one shared document that can be easily accessed and updated from any computer. There are many software applications that allow multi-user editing, but so far this one has been rather easy to use and shows a great example on the site of how one could use it to help plan a wedding.

Our wedding to-do lists has the following categories:

Miss Grasshopper to-do (strangely the longest list…)
Mr. Grasshopper to-do
Shared to-do
Think about
Done! (my favorite list)