Marco&Niki

Today Marco and I officially purchased our wedding rings. Here is his:

I kid, I kid. You think I’d show the wedding ring off before the big day? But the reason I used the Hello Kitty design is because he’s been known to jokingly like Hello Kitty. When I first met him he had a tiny little Helly Kitty accessory hanging off his phone (I forgot who gave it to him). When it broke off, I got him another one as a joke. But of course he put it on there because he liked it! Or me. Yeah, probably the second thing…

And let’s not forget the $1 Hello Kitty band-aids mom found on discount some years ago. He was also gifted those. I think they were found recently somewhere in this apartment.

If it wasn’t going to be a picture of a Hello Kitty ring, I was going to post a picture of the decoder ring in A Christmas Story, another one of my favorite movies. I grew up watching it every Christmas with my folks, and Marco has seen it a few times now as well. Unfortunately it is not actually a ring…

The blog title was suggested by him, but we did just watch the first Lord of the Rings movie (The Fellowship of the Ring). Not sure when we’ll put the second one in.

Okay, it seems like I’ve finally gotten into this wedding thing. (For the record, Marco has up until last week been doing about 75% of the work. Now I seem to be taking charge a bit!)

So here’s the to do list so far, although it’s further along than it looks. Probably the most annoying thing has been finishing up the invitations. But I’m happy to say that I bought a wedding dress yesterday (with help from my aanstaande schoonmoeder, or mother-in-law to be). I just need to make an appointment for six weeks before the big day to get it shortened a bit and a few other things. I really am a short person. Or Dutchies or quite tall…

I’m also scheming on ways to get my mother involved (who unfortunately is still in America until the week of), so there will be a few surprises for her there

Marco and I just came back from looking at shoes, and I think I’ve found the perfect pair.  I still need to buy them, though. We’ve offered some suggestions to my parents, my brother, and his fianceé on hotel options, but we need to find and book our own hotel for a honeymoon suite. We’re also 95% sure what rings we want to get. In terms of the cake, we just got back from the place where we want to get it. We need to set up an appointment with the owner right after we get back from America (early August) and my brother’s wedding.

So the major hurdles left are the photographer (not started yet) and getting the invitations out (one last push needed). But it’s coming together nicely, that’s for sure!

A few years ago, around the time when I first moved into this apartment, I decided I wanted to have some “real plates”, especially as Marco and Roger would be stopping by a lot. I had my eye set on some red plates at Macy’s, a department store. So the next time they were in town, we took a trip to the Palisades Center to get said plates.

We grabbed three of them (since there are only three of us!). But after we got them to the check-out counter, the sales woman said they were buy one get one free, and did I want a fourth one? Sure…

And the check out counter was actually in the children’s department, which wasn’t that far off from the area the plates were in, I believe. But they weren’t really set up for wrapping fragile items, something I hadn’t considered. So the sales woman had to disappear for a minute to get wrapping materials. By then a line started to form. But we survived.

The question, though, was how Marco survived. As we knew we wanted the plates, he had brought his backpack to carry them. But carrying all four plates on your back up a hill is torture. (Or so I have heard.)

The only downside to these plates are that they are heavy… which is not something you consider until you have to wash and dry them a lot. It hurts the wrists! The plates were also a bit on the large side – they fit in the microwave but were too large to rotate, and they fit on the dining table… barely.

While Marco was cleaning his living room table (which has storage compartments underneath) he found this old diagram that I scribbled:

It was a crude map of the local laundromat in New Brunswick, NJ. It was the first time Marco and Roger had visited the town and while they were there, they obviously needed to do laundry. I had long since grown accustomed to taking my laundry about a half mile down to the laundromat. But as I had to go to work and class while they were visiting, this proved to be their first experience with laundromats ever.

Please keep in mind the diagram quickly became tongue-in-cheek. I originally just wanted to draw a quick crude map, but I decided to add the notes in the margins as well (and some of the notes are deliberately “simple” as a joke).