Engagement Photography

I honestly don't think Jason and I could be more lucky. We have so many wonderful, talented friends. Not only was Megan able to help us with her awesome designs for the picnic invite, our lovely friend Heaven McArthur is going to be our photographer.

Heaven came over a couple of weeks ago to take some photos of us in our element - St. Johns. She spent several hours ordering us around and the results are awesome. Gary even got in on the action ;) I can't wait to see what she does with our ceremony!

Heaven runs Green Chair Studio and is just a wonderfully talented, generous and fun person.

To see our engagement photos and some of Heaven's other work, go here.

Registry

Although the only gift we need is all of you in our lives (seriously), it was brought to my attention that we might need to create a registry. Actually it was more like "You HAVE to do a registry so people know what to get you!"

So, here it is.

Picnic Invites

Hopefully most of you have received your picnic invitations by now.

We are asking everyone to bring a dish or drinks to share. We will be providing hamburgers, sausages, buns, cake, beer, wine and non-alcoholic beverages. We have assigned everyone something to bring, but this isn't a strict thing - if we asked you to bring chips and you want to make your signature coleslaw, have at it.

Here are a few ideas:

Salads: Coleslaw, Macaroni Salad, Potato Salad, Green Salad, Fruit Salad, Pasta Salad... You get the idea.

Condiments: We will have some basic ketchup and mustard. You could also bring: Mayo, BBQ Sauce, Ranch, Lettuce, Tomato, Onion, Pickles, Relish, Avocado.

Chips: Uh... Chips. Bring dip if you're feeling feisty.

Non-Alcoholic Beverages and Booze: While we will be providing some beer, wine, water and soda, we've asked a few people to bring some more to share.

Please contact me directly if you have any questions regarding any of this.

Thanks!

Picnic Invitations

My lovely and talented friend Megan Clark has designed the picnic invitations for us. She will also be doing the announcements when the time comes.

I had the pleasure of working with Megan at Livengood|Nowack for 2+ years. Now that it is no longer in existence, Megan is running her own design business, Studio M. You can see more of her work here.

Keep an eye out for those invites and be sure to mark your calendars for 9/19.

Thank you a million times over Megan for being such a great, talented friend!

July 4th Vacation

Hi All.

We just got back from a 6 day trip to see Jason's family in Arkansas. It was a wonderful trip - it wasn't too hot or humid, the pool was nice and warm and the ribs & beer were plentiful.

It was a great opportunity to see Jason's side of the family as many of them will not be able to make the wedding. It's a little too last minute and a lot of them just can't make the trip. Luckily, it was Jason's grandfather's 80th birthday and we had a great chance to visit with aunts, cousins and friends.

Sorry for the fuzzy picture, but I had to include some of the fireworks. They were amazing! Being an Oregonian, where they don't sell these things, I was blown away by the hour long fireworks extravaganza in Jason's parents' neighborhood. Quite a bit of firepower.

For more photos of our trip, go here.

The Wedding

I believe most people who are on this blog already know us and already know our wedding plans, but I'll outline them here for anyone who might not know.

Jason and I have both been unemployed for quite some time. I lost my job in September 2008 and Jason lost his in October 2008. So, needless to say, things are tight. We're both looking for work and we've been able to keep our house and the majority of our lifestyle is unchanged. Thank goodness for unemployment benefits! While we've been out of work for some time and we feel like our lives are, in a sense, 'on hold,' we decided to move forward in our own way and get married.

So, we wanted a wedding, but an affordable one. After much thought and consideration, we decided to have our wedding at the Washington County Courthouse with immediate family only. While it's important to us to have a small, low-key ceremony, we still want to celebrate with our friends and family, hence the potluck barbeque we are having the day after the wedding.

More details and an invitation to the potluck are to come. We are also sending announcements after the wedding to all, including those who could not attend, complete with photos. So keep your eyes on those mailboxes!

So, where did you meet him?

Now that we're engaged, people are asking us how we met. Well, here's the story:

Match.com

We'd both been on the site for several months and just hadn't met the 'right one.' Well, I saw Jason and thought he was interesting. For those of you who don't know how Match.com works, if you see someone you like but you don't want to write them a long message, you can 'wink' at someone. Lame, I know. So, I winked at Jason. The next day I had a message in my inbox from him. It was a very polite message, the gist of which was 'You seem really nice but I met someone I kind of like.' etc, etc. Oh well, back to the drawing board. This kind of stuff happens a lot on the website and I didn't think much of it.

A couple weeks later, I received another email from him saying 'Hey, well, things didn't really work out, want to hang out sometime?' So, several hysterical emails and a few phone conversations later, we went out. We went to Esparza's and didn't run out of things to talk about. The best part comes now: We were walking around the corner and ran into Cousins Brian and Margaret! They had spent the whole day planting trees up at their property in Washington State and were going to grab a much-deserved cocktail. We stopped and chatted, and I introduced Jason as 'My friend John.' After a moment I realized my mistake and looked at Jason. He was doing all he could to hold in his laughter. When we left the cousins I apologized profusely but Jason just laughed. I knew I liked someone who had a sense of humor about something like that.

And that's that.