233: Slowly and Steadily
With just under 7 months to go I think we are starting to move out of the planning phase and into the doing phase. Our wedding notebook is fully organized, our budget is basically finished and we've got a first past at the timeline of the day roughly sketched out (in Excel, of course). We've got our photographers narrowed down to 2 (to be decided by the end of this weekend), our caterers narrowed down to 20 (to be narrowed down by the end of the month), and after that we will be looking at bakers, bands, and stationers (or possibly papercraft companies if we go the DIY route).
For me, it's starting to turn the corner from "oh my goodness how are we ever going to get all this organized" to "hey, we don't really have all that much left to figure out". I think it sometimes frustrates Tashia a bit that I'm not taking a backseat like many grooms do, but my organization combined with her planning is making it less stressful for the both of us.
So far, we've only really had two setbacks in the planning. First of all, the officiant we wanted (who is a friend of mine) only has two dates blocked out in all of 2016: his birthday and the weekend of our wedding. So now we have another idea and we will cross our fingers that he is available.
The second setback was with a caterer. We went to have our first tasting at Raffel's catering (which took two visits to accomplish... that's another story). The food was... not good. At all. We really liked their menus and philosophy (the price on the menu is the price you pay, something that's basically unheard of in catering), and their food would fit safely into our budget with a little maneuvering. But the food itself tasted like frozen-then-microwaved leftovers. Granted, it would be a bit much to expect them to freshly cook a dozen dishes for us to taste for free, but how do we know if we go drop a couple grand on food for our wedding that it won't be the same way? There were meatballs in bottled coconut shrimp sauce, greasy eggrolls, salty li'l smokies (which cost 50 cents PER SMOKIE), jerkied pork, chewy fish, and peppers that just tasted like they had been coated in wax that wasn't fully scraped off. I think Tashia even spit a bite out into her napkin at one point!
Needless to say, we decided not to go with them. Strangely, they haven't called to follow up with us and see if we are still interested. Maybe we aren't the first couple to bail after a tasting?
