Mike and Music

…to the majority of people invited to our wedding, who RSVPed on or before the deadline.  To the other people (27% of our invitees), who couldn’t be bothered to respond in a timely fashion…  Grrr.  Please send in your reply.  It’s hard to plan an event when you don’t know how many people will be in attendance.  Also, if you don’t respond and I don’t put your name on the list, and then you show up to the wedding, you won’t be allowed on board the ship, and that wouldn’t be fun for you.  So just do it!

Well, some of you have expressed your excitement at seeing our new kitchen, and lord knows WE’RE excited about our new kitchen, so I finally got some tools put away this evening and took a few pictures.

I took these after dark because the lighting in our kitchen is such a big part of what we were looking forward to, and for me, what I’m most proud of about the kitchen itself. The pictures are a bit fuzzy (no flash), but I think get the point across. I will try to take some during the day, in the next few days.
The caption follows each picture.

Looking into the kitchen from the dining room. The in-cabinet lights are on, and the pendant lights are on. The in-cab lights are probably my favorite thing about the asthetics of the kitchen - even more than the granite. You are looking past the dining room light, which is off. The pendant lights are upside-down, mineature replicas of the dining room light.

Looking at the kitchen, specifically the island, from the hallway. Again, a great view of the in-cab lights. These are slim base cabinets (12″ instead of 24″ deep) with glass shelves. The top shelves hold our alcohol (and some glasses, pitchers, shakers, etcetera); the bottom shelves hold cookbooks and some chachki. You may notice how stunning our slide-in stove looks from here.

Looking past the island, toward the sink. You can see the bridge through the window. We had to special order a cover plate for the two switches and one outlet, on the left of the photo.

From the far end of the kitchen (that you were just looking at), looking back toward the fridge and “appliance alley”. Each outlet here (and… there are FIVE) runs on it’s own circuit. Those of you who vistited us last fall may remember that we were running AN ENTIRE FOUR BEDROOM HOUSE on a single fifteen amp breaker. No need to turn off the stereo before you turn on the microwave anymore! The fridge (our first side-by-side, ever) has an icemaker that feeds through the door, plus (down below, you can barely see it) the fridge has a built-in water filter. The microwave is brand new, and BOY is it powerful. The base cab on the left is all-drawers, it’s where our canned and boxed foods go, on the right is a single 24″ door, it’s where our oversized Costco stuff goes. There is a door to the backyard in the space on the right.

Undercab lights… flourescent, so they’re a little blue. I think I’m going to order some color correcting gels to fit in the light fixture to color-match the rest of the lights.

Another shot of the island, with the undercab lights providing more ambient light.

More undercab lights. We’re missing one piece of filler on the upper cabinets, all the way to the right… I hope we’ll get that in tomorrow.

Again, from the dining room, with the kitchen lights on. Ignore the construction debris on the table… we’ve been ignoring it for months.

These are the overhead, ambient lights on. Really lights the place up, but WOW is it bright. I hope to use mostly the undercab lights and the pendant lights… if I’d have known how much light they’d throw, I might have omitted those two ceiling fixtures altogether.

From the dining room, all the lights on.

More of the same.

Toward the fridge, from the dining room.

Layout of the cabinets on the sink side:
30″ drawers, 15″ trash pull-out, 36″ sink base with no cheezy faux drawers, dishwasher, 24″ cab, customized for the rounded corner, and 5″ of filler.

Layout of the cabinets on the inside of the peninsula:
36″ drawers, 15″ pull-out that reveals drawers inside, 30″ slide-in stove (waiting for those 1.5″ filler panels next to the stove), and 24″ drawers.

Layout of the cabinets on the outside of the peninsula:
Three 36″ cabs, glass doors. The lights in these cabs operate on the same switch as the lights in the upper cabs. They all come on at once. Very nice ambient light, even when the rest of the lights in the house are off. These lights are some of the only incandescent lights in the house — almost everything else is CFL. In fact, it probably takes more energy to run these in-cab lights than to run every other light in the house, all at once.

The wedding is officially driving me crazy.  I spend all day thinking about wedding-related things I need to do (call party rental place, contact favor supplier, hire makeup artist, make reservations for manis and pedis the Thursday before the wedding, etc.), and now I’ve started thinking all night about it, too.  For the last three nights, I’ve awakened in the middle of the night, panicked over or nagged by something I need to do for the wedding.  I’ve had terrible dreams (Case in point: night before last I dreamed that Rey had been attacked by a coyote), and I’ve found myself pacing our (new, beautiful, and finally functioning) kitchen at 1, 2, or 4 o’clock in the morning.  I hope it doesn’t get worse as the wedding gets closer, but I’m kind of afraid it will…

After Mike and I met and began dating, he inspired me to get really serious about paying off my debt and building myself a little cushion of savings.  I’d been putting money away for retirement through work (one of the good things about working in the public sector is that I should get a pension of some sort), and I’d slowly been paying off my student loans, but Mike helped me take it to the next level.  So much so, in fact, that now I’m hooked on personal finance blogs!

Well, I’m happy to announce that my personal finance journey continues, even as we deal with the enormous costs of the house and the wedding.  Today I paid off the second of my three student loans!  I paid the first one off some time ago (maybe 2 years?), and the third one is at zero percent interest and therefore won’t be paid off until exactly ten years after I started making payments.   And now the second one… is paid in full!  I’m now just a few grand (final student loan) from all non-mortgage debt.  Not being in debt is a type of freedom, and it’s a great feeling to get “more free.”

Since my brother is staying with us for a while, we’ve gotten into the habit of him putting the dog into his crate before he (Michael) leaves for work.  Michael is the last one of us to go, so it gives Rey a few extra hours of non-crated time.

Yesterday, I left for work and left Rey out as usual.  When I came home, almost 10 hours later, I found that things were actually quite unusual.  As it turned out,  Michael was in a rush to get to work and the dog was hiding.  Michael didn’t check the crate to see if Rey was in there, and left in a hurry, leaving Rey alone in the house.  ALL DAY.

When I arrived home, my first thought was, “why are there chewed up chunks of cardboard all over the floor?”  We have some empty boxes in the dining room because I’ve been unpacking our dishes now that work on the kitchen is wrapping up, but that doesn’t explain the pieces of them strewn about.  My eyes then moved to the small, brown figure laying on the floor of the dining room.  It was Beatrice, a stuffed bear who has been my lifelong companion.  Beatrice is usually kept in our bedroom in a place of honor, but yesterday, she was helpless on the floor.  Fortunately, when I picked her up, I found that she hadn’t been damaged in any way.  By that point it had occurred to me that Rey had some hand (or should I saw paw) in the mess.

The truth came out slowly, in fits and starts.  Michael, rushing out.  Rey, bored and alone.  Beatrice, looking like she wanted to see the dining room.  Mike, coming home, finding the mess, deciding to leave everything as it was so I’d see what happened.

In the scheme of things, it wasn’t so bad.  Beatrice was unharmed.  Rey didn’t go to the bathroom on any of our furniture, or eat anything that would hurt him (or make us angry).  And, I guess most importantly, it served as a reminder that we all need to pay attention to making sure the dog is taken care of appropriately, even when we’re busy.

Because I took the wedding invites to the post office that’s only a few blocks from my house, I wasn’t entirely surprised to receive the one I sent to myself arrive in today’s mail.  I was, however, happy to know that the wonderful civil servant kept his word and hand canceled my invites and sent them on their marry way.  To those readers of this blog who are lucky enough to be invited to our wedding, I say: check your mail box and hurry with your RSVP!

So Mike and I have worked hard on creating and assembling our wedding invitations.  Mike did the layout and printed them all, and I put all the various pieces together (ceremony invite, rehearsal dinner invite, reply card, reply card envelope, ribbon, stamps for the envelopes, etc.).  Between the two of us, we probably spent a good 15-20 hours on them.  (I shudder to think what it would have been had we not taken a friend’s suggestion and used an invite kit!)

This morning, I took the invites– all 64 of them, tucked inside a box– to the post office.  I was the first person there; the head of the line.  When the post office opened, I took them inside and told the man what the woman at another post office branch old me when I took a sample invite in to be weighed– they can’t be run through the postal machine and need to be handled by hand.  He took the box of invites from me and said he’d hand stamp them and put them in a separate bin, and that was it.  I was done.  It was a weird feeling.  How do I know this guy is going to do what he said he’d do?  What if he only did some of them today and left some to do tomorrow?  What if the seals don’t hold and the invites start to come open?  Will he just put some ugly tape on them and send them on his way?  Just throw them away?  I’m sure he’s a very nice man and a good employee who will do what he’s supposed to do (which is take care of getting my invites to people all over the country and world), but still…

Who would have thought that I’d become so crazy in the course of only a few months of planning?  So paranoid that now I’m questioning the integrity and work ethic of perfect strangers?  Wow.

Only 77 days until the wedding!

I had an appointment today with the events manager at the Berkeley and the catering manager from the caterer we’re using; the meeting was to hash out details and do a walk through so the caterer could figure out where everything goes.  I was looking forward to the meeting because I’ve been a little nervous about the caterer– they’ve been a little flaky in the last couple of weeks– and because we’re getting closer and closer to the Big Day.  Now that the meeting is over, I’m even more excited!

Mike was able to join us, which was a big treat.  We talked about the number of tables and set up and schedule and all the arrangements, and did the walk through.  I am reminded of how lovely the venue is, especially on a gorgeous, sunny day (like Sept. 20 will hopefully be)!  The light steams through the stained glass, the wooden benches and accents just gleam, and the the greenery accents pop.  By the time we were done, I was ready to kick up my heels.  It’s all becoming real now, and I was reminded that there is a light (and it never goes out) at the end of this tunnel.

(The “and it never goes out” is a Smiths/Morrissey reference.  If you don’t know who that is, I’m not going to bother to explain it.)