Long story short...

Oh my god we're married!

I am thinking of revisiting this blog and going backwards over the planning process to keep a handle on the whole shebang. I have given it a slight redesign, albeit out of the box, and removed that stupid AdSense thing. Did I really think that was going to fund my wedding?
Lame.
Anyway, I thought this would be a nice diary of my domestic life and will be a handy box to keep all things wedding in. While I am now married (yay!) I still feel the need for wedding blog smack and maybe barfing out my experiences will quell that need.

Mood Board.

We're going to Palm Springs this weekend to check out two location possibilities. Hopefully we will decide by next week when I start a new feature. Then we can get to sending out STD's to our nearest and dearest!
I was sick for about two weeks and am really really glad its over. OtherJ took good care of me which is a good sign and didn't complain when he had to make dinner and do the dishes every night, another good sign.
I have been spending too much time looking at wedding porn. It's wayyy too addictive. Its amazing how you can just kill an entire day just hanging out on the Interwebs. Sooo, I'm trying to cut back on that.
I have begun the search for a dress, a few weeks ago a wandered into Marc Jacobs and Diane von Furstenburg while waiting for J to get off work (they are a block away from his job) and tried some stuff on that I liked but my socks were still on and I'm looking for a sockless experience. I've also done some internet scoping with some positive feedback from my dress troupe. It still kind of depends on the location tho!
While I was sick I spent a lot of time watching Marilyn Monroe movies. Now that girl knew how to wear a dress. Of course, as a wise Chicago-based comic book artist friend once said, its all about the foundation garments.

She/Him

Junior Taxi via a desert fete, Earth Observatory via his blog, Living Walls and Vertical Gardens, reclaimed wood table and flooring from district mill works

Palm Springs!

Dear Internet,
We are now at least three theknot to-do items closer to bona fide nuptials. Josh spent last week in Palm Springs at another-goddamned-photo-festival and I tagged along after a short job to soak up the desert. I found the same ole' photographers roaming around sticking their lenses in gutters and cacti and such, found the same ole' fiance hustlin' rare photo books, and of course the same ole' overpriced fancy sandwiches and microbrew I have come to expect from such events. What I did not expect to find is a general sense of well-being from the high desert air and relaxification from the serious vacation-tude of the town. I love the mountains and the sunshine and the smallness and midcentury architecture that abounds and its relative closeness to LA is great. And there's an airport right there (albeit a small one) so guests unable or unwanting to come to LA early can do a quick little in/out to the city directly.
So we've pretty much narrowed it down to two serious contenders, the Alan Ladd Estate and what we are calling the Ranchy Place . We haven't had a chance to go inside either place but based on photos alone we are super into the Alan Ladd place. Only problem is they charge an event fee whereas the Ranchy place does not. Having made a super realistic budget things are extremely tight and it seems somewhat frivolous to spend extra money. BUT, check out this marlin!
Love,
juddy

I'm still I'm still Juddy from the block

Please enjoy this picture of my left hand!
It is currently my desk top image which is hilariously ridiculous when you consider that I can see my actual hand with my actual ring as I type this and if my laptop is open it is extremely likely that will always be the case and yet here we are with that still being the case.
We've been awfully busy here at casa crenshaw and wedding planning is at a dead standstill, precious gems aside. This weekend we attempted to check out Mount Wilson as a possible location but alas the road up there is still closed due to worries about mudslides what with all the rain we've had lately and that being the site of last year's Station Fire. Well what we lost a location scout we gained in a peaceful afternoon at beautiful La Canada Flintridge's Descanso Gardens. Did you know its camillia season?

Well, anyway. Next week my show will be over and hopefully I'll have some meatier updates. In the meantime please enjoy this meatiness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dly6p4Fu5TE

PS forget about me and my whiny lamentations about no progress on the wedding planning front, I just found my wedding vows!

Love my life and my public
Put God first
Then can't forget to stay real
To me it's like breathing
Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got
I'm still, I'm still Juddy from the block
Used to have a little, now I have a lot
It take hard work to cash checks
So don't be fooled by the rocks that I got, now assets
You get back what you put out
Even if you take the good route
Can't count the hood out

Poetry!

I'll never get out of this world alive

Oh, hey.
I haven't written in a while because I was very busy last week. And this week has been a bit rough. Last Monday I was fortunate enough to get a call to work on a Latin American McDonald's commercial, decorating. That is fortunate because it is a very lucrative endeavor, and also nets me some tasty union days. It was unfortunate because there was a severe language barrier between my boss and the directors and it was a very confusing job with crazy indecision, last minute mind changing, and exploding budgets which all add up to a stressful experience. Also, this week I was in a slight fender bender but even tough it wasn't my fault I hit someone and now they are claiming injury. More stress! Also, and this is the big one, I can't find my lovely, vintage, lacking-in-diamonds-but-heavy-in-sentimentality engagement ring. I left it on the kitchen table three nights ago and I think my shitty shitty cat thwapped it off the table and played with it until it was lost under one of our barely-functioning appliances.
Also, in case you don't live in Los Angeles, its been pouring this week. I know, I know, the rest of the country is under five feet of dirty frozen sludge and pipes are freezing all over the place and and you can't shut your eyes because eyelashes are dripping with icicles and if you close them your eyeballs will be impaled but LA is simply not equipped to handle any kind of precipitation at all. Seriously. What results is severe flooding on highways, triple the amount of car accidents, fatal mudslides and all the roofs leak because roofers are so rarely challenged. So, its raining inside my house, our heater is broken, our washing machine is barely functioning, our (already) insane auto insurance is going to go up and I can't find my goddamn ring. Oh, and I still hate our cat. She peed on our brand new couch too.
I swear I love animals so much but that cat has got to go.

Sweet, cuppin' cakes!

During my scout up in Eagle Rock I stopped by Auntie Em's to get a sample of their cupcakes. It's never too early to scout locations or cupcakes! Well, as I was walking back to the car I was distracted by pretty fall leaves (yes, I know its January, but Los Angeles is bizarro world) and dropped the damn box. The pretty little pastries got smushed and a little dirty. (And this mean old lady who was sitting at a table outside shouted "No You Didn't!!!" Oh, yes I did. I turned back and pouted at her. Thanks, lady!) But it was clean Eagle Rock dirt, much different than grimy Hollywood dirt, or sooty Crenshaw dirt. Yes we ate them anyway. Sampled were Carrot cake, coconut, chocolate with ganache icing, and red velvet. I was on a pretty big red velvet kick for a while but I think I'm on the other side of that now. Anyway, after our little research lab/desert party we decided it would be fun to do mini cupcakes so guests could have a variety because other than poor little red velvet getting left out in the cold we couldn't decide on our favorite. We haven't settled on Auntie Em's as a vendor, much much much more research is needed.
Yesterday I went to scope out the South Coast Botanical Gardens on Crenshaw in Palos Verde.
1. Yeah, Crenshaw goes all the way to Palos Verde! How. About. That!
2. Man, that place is beautiful. You can feel the trees breathing and smell the eucalyptus and automatically 25% of your stress is absorbed by all that photosynthesis.
3. It would be a beautiful place to do some engagement shots. It would be a beautiful place to have a wedding! But maybe not our wedding.
4. I love that this scouting is taking me to so many interesting places! I'm really getting to explore the city in a way that I would probably not have otherwise done. Not that we're namby pambys about checking out cool places, off the beaten path and such, quite the contrary! But we don't tend to put botanic gardens and other such out and out beautiful places high on the exploring dance card, as it were.
And the Eagle Rock place was similar, cool place, glad I know about it, would love to go see some art there soon, not sure if its a great place for our wedding.

The place I went today, I love. I am not going to talk about it tho until I take Other J there. And I know how much it is. I will say while there I went on a hike, and it was awesome.

I'm not feeling very well today. I think its the Baja Fresh (ha! more like Baja Yesterday) we had last night.

I leave you with this recipe (scroll down for the polenta. I made it Wednesday and it was yummy and cheap. thanks NPR!) and this cartoon (now that's what I call fresh!).

Another NYE proposal

gawd, have you seen this?

it made me cry! i'm such a dork.
on a related note, here is a flickr set of our lil' new years eve!
we only had my little elph so the pics are not awesome and the restaurant was only lit by fire and xmas lights so well you get the idea. also we never got a couple shot gal dern it so you cant see my adorable gold crackle shoes. oh well.

Elements of Style

Today I looked at a space. It was pretty cool but it didn't take my breath away. I'm still attached to the idea of someone renting us a bunch of cabins for the weekend with an amazing flat field with a mountain view and some sort of barn with a modern professional kitchen. Oh, and maybe a cute old couple well versed in vegetarian and nuveau American cuisine dying to cook a wedding for 100 people at $25 a head. Something kind of like this (sans old couple I guess). But I digress.

I took a little time out today from location/catering hunting to dream about my dress, because that is one of the fun parts. Yesterday I started to get kind of bummed out and broke my no-drinking-midweek rule with a glass and a half of wine. J calmed me down in the way that only he can (he's good at that! we should just get married, huh?) and I vowed to not get all worked up about everything already. I want this to be fun! So to that end I will spend a little time on the fun things every day. (And by the way, this blog is one of those fun things.)
So I am getting it in my head that I would like to make my dress. I have an idea of what I want and I have not seen it in the world yet. And no, that image is not it, my MOH has already yelled at me for even discussing my neckline around J. But it was fun! Give it a try, you'll like it.
So I came across this crafty gal who made hers and I'm not discouraged yet. But I would definitely need a helper. I stopped in at Home Ec in Silverlake to see if they had any classes of that nature but they are more beginning-oriented. Not that I am an expert by any means but I don't have time to take the scenic route, as it were. I think, and maybe I'm crazy for thinking this, that if I can make a corset I can make a wedding dress. I feel like learning how to build something with such a rigid structure (and many of the elements of wedding dresses such as pin tucks and fancy closures and other stuff I'm not expert enough to mention (and I didn't stay in my garment construction class long enough to learn) would be a great foundation for such an undertaking. I found this lady's blog a while back during my pre-engaged secret wedding porn viewing and that doesn't deter me either!
The only problem is that I definitely need someone to help me in this process, should I decide to take it on. Try as I might its still impossible to pin your own hemline properly without f'ing it all up (to say nothing of darts and bustles!)

Feed the piggy!

In an attempt to get this party started J and I sat down and discussed our finances in a frank and honest way, just like the advice people advise. We both acknowledged that our spending habits have gone a tad wayward, what with the eating out and the 3D movie viewing and the single-handedly attempting to save print media and my Bluefly/Loehman's addiction, and what have you. So here are some depressing bullet points that we have reluctantly agreed to in a boring attempt to save money (snooze!):

Eat at home.
In my defense, I cook, like, a lot. And we rarely buy pre-made stuff with the exception of soysage and morning star buffalo wings and the occasional pizza. However, the amount that I cook is often used as an excuse to go out, as in, I made dinner three or four nights already! Can't we just go to Il Capriccio tonight?
And more often than not, J caves and Yay! We are off to a super yummy dinner with delicious wine (see below) that winds up being $60-100. No more! From now on we will go out to eat no more than once a week defined as a meal costing over $10 per person.



Stop drinking so much you frickin' lushes!
I have recently been deighted to see J begin to prefer wine over the cheap Mexican beer he favors. Yay! How fun it is to savor a nice bottle, running your tongue over your imagination coming up with ridiculous flavors your taste buds detect with your love! I love stretching out a good meal this way and there is even a fun chart that supports the idea that the longer you eat, the less fat you'll be. Well all that toungeing at savoring and nuances of grass and pine nuts-ing really adds up! Whereas we use to spend about $15 per week on a dirty thirty of tecate plus maybe a $10 bottle of wine at TJ's we have been recently buying three or four bottles of wine a week and have been up-selling ourselves into poverty. It's been fun but we have vowed to cut back on our drinking to save dough, so now we will only drink on the weekends! (We'll see.)

No more fancy clothes, no more fancy books :(
I think maybe LA has begun to rub off on me because I have developed a mild addiction to discounted designer clothing. Over the past few months if you ran into me while I was shopping not-for-work it was probably at Crossroads, Buffalo Exchange, Loehman's, or you were gchatting me while I was multi-tasking over at Bluefly. Well, I have vowed to cut that out! Now I can e-window shop for that storied poignant ridiculously priced and worn only once designer dress, the one for my wedding! And J has promised to stop buying so many fancy rare zines and photo books unless its through credit at work.

Make it a Netflix night!
We have promised to only go out to the movies once every two weeks. Its really easy tell yourself: "But I work in movies! I have to see this film!" But then before you know it you have spent $192 on movies alone in a month! We will trim that down.

So hopefully these measures will enable us to start saving some real money so that we can feed you lovely people good food and me and my mom won't be cooking all night the day before to make that happen. I'll post some recipes and other DIY type stuff as they come up that I'm sure will fill my hours now that I have all this extra time not spent shopping and drinking and seeing first run films.

First comes love, ...

Holy Crap, I'm engaged!

That was fun. Now to get to work.
I have been engaged for exactly four and a half days now and have already been broken hearted many times over by the exorbitant cost of having a wedding in Los Angeles!
First, some facts: I have lived with my future husband for a touch over two years. When we began dating it was pretty serious right away. When one of my best friends was married just six months after we got together I admit before Google and everyone that I started fantasizing about what our wedding would look like. I'll even cop to lazily looking at wedding blogs on a semi-regular basis for the sheer thrill of it, noting the gauzy tinted trends as they drifted thru the blogosphere like so many coral colored weather balloons or rolling across my browser like cephalaphora seed. When I envisioned my wedding to my amazing loving creative smart handsome caring FH I imagined languidly copying and pasting my favorite engagment photos and table runner ideas and cozy crafting parties with girlfriends and my guests ooohing and aaahing at our creative and unique handmade favors.
What I did not imagine was Martha Stewart's budget calculator laughing at me when I plugged in what I thought was a reasonable number that we do not yet have any of, I did not imagine the awesome DJ that has all the cool kid's wedding guests dancing all night's fee to be over half that imaginary number, I never dreamed that an Offbeat Bride's super kickass but quirky wedding venue could cost twice what my love paid for his car!
So far the publications and the blogs and the wedding calculators of the world are desperately trying to convince me that no couple has ever been married in front of 100 well fed guests for under $20,000 and gotten away with it.
Well goddammit, I won't take this lying down!
I'm a creative person, my tastes are not exorbitant, I live in Crenshaw for gosh sake! I am determined to win in the battle of money vs. fun and I fully intend to enjoy my engagement in the process because I have no intention of ever having another one. I am using this blog to vent my frustrations and trumpet my triumphs because I'm pretty sure I'm going to get pretty boring over the next ten months.
Thanks for reading.