What an excuse!

As of our RSVP by date (June 20th) we were missing answers from about 30% of our guest list. I'm not sure if that's normal or not. I've only planned one wedding before so I'm a little new to this. Maybe it's because our wedding is a destination wedding to about 50% of our guest list and some are still on the fence about trekking out here? At any rate I started emailing a few people who I knew I most likely wasn't going to hear from unless I emailed them. I had a pretty good feeling about each person I emailed, but it's always good to get something in writing so we can start to finish this wedding planning! (I know it's TOTALLY unrealistic, but it'd be great to just be done with everything so we can relax for a few weeks before the wedding... does that ever happen?)

So I emailed one of my friends, and the answer I got back as to why he hadn't yet RSVP-ed was not a complete surprise (based on everything I know about him), but was probably the most appalling/great excuse I've heard. There's definitely a group of guys that I'm worried about putting near an open bar, but at the end of the day it's going to spell fun. Here's his excuse:

"I was drunk at my house and Stacie goes "fill this out now and send it" and then I was like fine and then made a bunch of rude, crass and unfunny jokes all over it. Like "food preference: fresh poon" and then Elizabeth and Stacie were like,

"That's pretty ballsy considering their parents will probably see it" and I was like hell yeah I'm a badass!

And then I woke up the next day and threw it away so it would never accidentally get sent because I don't know what my drunk self was thinking.

I'm coming to the wedding."

The unfortunate thing is had he been sober in the morning, he would have seen the envelope was addressed to US, not our parents.

At the end of the day Rebecca and I realized that since we're having a family style dinner w/ each table getting a meat, veggie, and fish option that putting a spot on the RSVP that said "Dietary Restrictions: _____" was a tad unnecessary. I didn't know it would lend us to getting answers like "Fresh Poon". However, while I'm on that subject, it's just speculation, but if that is indeed where he wrote on our RSVP, does that mean that he CAN'T eat that and only prefers stale? Okay, I'll stop - this is a wedding blog... class it up Dave...

Not just a videographer!

Scratch another major item off of our wedding checklist. A few weeks ago we hired a videographer for our wedding! Daniel Boswell joins the Temple! Welcome to the family! Calling Daniel a wedding videographer doesn't even scrape the surface, or enlighten you as to how talented the guy is. His videos are cinematic! I really want to introduce him to you all.

When I was a kid, my dad was always the one with multiple cameras strapped around his neck. He had multiple regular photograph cameras as well as video camcorders. Every milestone, play, sporting event, birthday, etc etc was captured onto video. Recently, after watching many home videos, I realized how special they are to me, and how important they are to have. I just watched a video of myself at 3 years old holding my baby sister for the first time asking my mom if she had a vagina - then laughing. A memory that would have been lost forever had it not been captured on tape. Photographs are extremely important, and to me, video is equally important as well.

Saying all of that, when we first started our wedding planning a good videographer was absolutely something in which we wanted to invest. However, as we've been planning and searching for a videographer we watched our budget dwindle. Soon we realized we didn't have two pennies to rub together and videography was starting to look unrealistic. I know this isn't an option for everyone, but because I live in Los Angeles and have friends that shoot behind the scenes footage for DVDs, I turned to them. I figured I'd get two guys to come shoot the wedding then give me all of the footage and in my "free time" I'd edit our wedding video together. When we started factoring in all of the expenses of getting these shooters to the wedding it seemed just as expensive as hiring actual wedding videographers. I also researched buying lots of FlipHD cams, having friends shoot the wedding, loading all the footage to a hard drive, wipe them clean, then returning the cameras to Walmart. I was just too worried the cameras would get damaged, or lost, and I really worried about video quality and sound quality as well. It seemed to be a lost cause and a black day for Temple of Groom.

That was until I saw a video of Daniel's work. Watch it, then keep reading:

Um, what? Wedding videography can look like that? Seriously? I have to have this. It's so important to me. I HAVE to have this. I. Have. To. Have. This. After watching this video twice, getting chills and choked up watching the wedding of TWO STRANGERS, I decided to do some research. Surely this is extremely out of my budget.
When I got to Daniel's website I realized something very innovative and incredible - the video posted above is not something that Boswell took home edited over a couple weeks and sent the newlywed couple - it's something that he shot on the day of the wedding and EDITED on the day of the wedding and projected AT the freaking wedding! Two shooters (Daniel included) come to the wedding and capture everything up until the cocktail hour. Then while the other shooter continues filming everything, Daniel sneaks away and edits all of the footage. It's called his cinema reale package. Unbelievable.
So Rebecca and I reevaluated our budget and moved some things around in hopes that we could hire Daniel. We crossed some things off... x's and o's... DIYed a couple more things.... did the math... crunched numbers... carried the 1 - then emailed Daniel a hail mary "please let this work" email.
He called back shortly after. The impression I got from him immediately is that he, like our other vendors, is extremely passionate about his work. He does it, because he loves it - not because the wedding industry is a great place to make money, but because he genuinely loves the rush he gets from shooting, editing, and watching everyone's joyful faces as they watch his work. It's so special. Then, unbelievably, as if the wedding hand of God touched our phone conversation, Daniel's rate fit into our modest budget. It was, perhaps, one of the happiest moments I've had during this whole planning process.
If you're looking for a special wedding video, look no further.
PS. If you'd like to see the video of me holding my new baby sister - get your friends to follow Temple of Groom! If I get 7 more followers to subscribe to the feed on the left side of the page - I'll post the video.

My Gift to Ben the Groom

This weekend a fellow groom blogger is tying the knot: Ben the Groom. First and foremost, congrats to one of our blogging brothers! I think this is the first groom blogger I've seen get married off since I started blogging!

Ben is faced with a dilemma that in less than 2 months time I'll have to figure out myself: where do groom bloggers go once married?! Hopefully Ben will stick around long enough to show us pictures of his wedding and fill us in on everything he learned from the wedding!

I figured that I would get something for Ben... my gift..... the gift of song. (click play on the youtube video then read my lyrics starting at :15 along with the music).

"Ben the Husband" in the key of "Ben" by the Jackson 5

Ben, we hope that you will blog some more

You finally reached what you were posting for

Grooms can sometimes feel alone,

The Knot won't throw us a bone.

But you, my friend, helped me

you were my Wedding Bee. (you were my Wedding Bee)

Ben, you're always posting everywhere,

about what guys should wear as underwear.

If I'm ever in a bind

and don't know where to find

Your posts, one thing I know

You're twitter's where I'll go (you're tweeting all the time)

I used to say - wedding industry

never had, guys like me.

But I was wrong, obviously

Now it's "us", now it's "we"

Ben, most people would turn you away

People don't listen to a word grooms say,

Tweens don't tweet half as much as you

making weddings work for you

I'm sure you'll post again

as a husband blogger Ben

DIY? Ok, np!

This weekend we saw a major DIY win at the Temple of Groom household. Very exciting when one of these diy projects actually works as planned.

We finally crossed the escort card board off our list. Not going to lie, Rebecca did most of this project, but I was there when we bought everything and I'd like to think I helped out a lot.

Saturday morning was spent at Michael's getting our ketubah put on stretchers and wandering through the aisles for a few hours. One of the larger items on our to-do list is the escort card board.

Obligatory rant: Okay look, I get that there needs to be escort cards, or some sort of cards that tell everyone where they should sit. I just think it's one of those things that we easily start to stress about. Oooh, what's a cool way to tell people where to sit? Look, I love all the little details as much as the next guy, strike that, MORE than the next guy - because I have a wedding blog and the "next guy" doesn't. It just seems like one of those details now where we have to think about what we're going to do, and make it look nice and presentable, because if we DON'T have it, mass chaos ensues. And you know what, I will say this, I wasn't incredibly helpful during the planning stages of our escort card board. Instead of having a definitive idea, and executing it, Rebecca shot so many ideas my way. And you know what? I liked them all. They were all fine. It was something I just wanted to get done, and I didn't really care what the finished product was: cute little paper chairs with people's names printed on them, just printed out little cards, etc etc etc... It was something that I said, and I admit this goes against the nature of my blog, "If you like it, I'm totally behind you". That being said, I do love the end result.

So here's what we got:

Michael's: 18x24 picture frame (50% off!), magnets, small paper flowers, spray paint, chalkboard spray paint

Home Depot: large piece of sheet metal

When we got home I fixed the pool shed roof that I fell through a couple months ago and Rebecca started spray painting the picture frame a high gloss white. Then she cut sheet metal down to 18x24 and sprayed it with chalkboard paint.

I came in with an 18x24 piece of plywood that we mounted the sheet metal onto and then fit it into the frame! "We" made an awesome framed magnetic chalkboard. Then Rebecca took the small paper flowers glued them onto the magnets. Once we have our guest list finalized and our seating charts done, I'll print names out on small pieces of paper and we'll use the flower magnets to put them on the chalkboard.

Sure we could have bought something exactly like this online w/o having to spend a day working on it, but we have such a connection to this damn chalk board now! It's great. At the end of the day we did save money too. We love it. We'll hang it in our kitchen when the wedding is over. Who would have thought, I'd love an escort board?

It's just nice to have a DIY win!

Did you miss me?!

Wow. It's just been a completely insane couple weeks for me, and unfortunately the blog suffered. I apologize! Let me fill you in on what's going on.

SO, let's start with all things wedding. Each wedding bullet point I've got to tell you guys about deserves its own blog post, but I'm being realistic and know I may not get to write 10 more posts this week. SO, I'm going to briefly tell you about a lot of stuff with hopes of elaborating later. I really promise to blog more.

I am less than two months away from making an honest woman out of Rebecca! I can't believe that. We've had a longer engagement than anyone I know, and I can't believe it's coming to an end. I'm extremely ready for it to come to an end. I can't stress that enough - I'm just ready for this wedding to happen! I know it's cliche to say, "it'll be here before you know it!" but that's totally what happened. I guess things are cliche for a reason.

The RSVPs were rolling in about a month ago, then they mysteriously stopped. We now only get one every other day! The RSVP by date is this Monday and we're still waiting for 41 responses! Not really sure what people are waiting for. Maybe they feel bad RSVP-ing no? We're missing responses for nearly 30% of our guest list! Did this happen to anyone else?

We booked a videographer and he's fucking incredible! He's an addition to the wedding I'm extremely excited about and I can't wait to tell you all about him. He will get his own blog post no matter what. BUT, just a spoiler - his name is Daniel Boswell and he's ridiculously talented.

The latest big project I've been working on is a DIY photo booth(ish) station at our wedding for our guestbook. It's a pretty ambitious project. The pictures will be taken with my computer's camera. This is something I'll definitely post about - but basically I've got a program on my mac that all the guest has to do is enter his/her name and it takes 3 continuous pictures, formats them, and sends them to a small little portable printer! Our hopes are that guests will take their pictures, sign them (write notes on the print outs), then put them into a little metal birdcage we bought that will serve as our guestbook! Right now I'm just researching feasible ideas for backdrops (do I even need one?) and little photo table lights because our reception is outdoors at night. I've got my bar mitzvah guestbook and I don't think I've ever looked at it, but if I had photo booth pictures of my guests I think it'll be something I like to look back on. More on this idea to come.

I tried on my suit the other night and I fit in my suit pants! I've lost 20 pounds since I went on my "I will never forgive myself if I'm this fat for my wedding" exercise/diet regiment. That was a big victory. I've got two ties that I'm trying to decide between. I may wear one for the ceremony and one for the reception because one is more casual than the other. I think I'll post pictures of them both and ask for your help. To-do post #3! I've gotta go get my suit altered a bit - that's something kind of big on my list right now.

Rebecca spray painted a ton of these mini ceramic birds to accompany our centerpieces. They look pretty awesome. I'll post a picture soon. We just need to figure out what to fill our big vases with. Rocks? Sand? those little jewel things?

We've been adding songs onto our "To Play" and "Do Not Play" dj lists. This is pretty fun. Thank you google docs. It's an immediate hotline to our DJ (DJ Evoke AKA TeamBride). She's been awesome. We have a meeting tonight with our coordinator who I'm sure will remind us of about 600 things that need to be done before the wedding. That should be fun.

Now, onto my regular life.... I started a new job last week. It's awesome. I just realized I've never talked about work on my blog. For the last few years I've assisted a film/tv director named David Wain. He was on the 90's comedy show The State and directed one of my favorite movies "Wet Hot American Summer". I got a job with him a few years ago on the movie "Role Models" and have been with him ever since. For the last 1/2 a year though I had to take another job because he wasn't working on anything major. Last week I finally got the call to work on his next movie "Wanderlust" which will star Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston and is being produced by Judd Apatow. I'm extremely happy about the new job. It's been extremely busy though. David and his writing partner Ken Marino have let me sit in on writing sessions, and meetings, and rehearsals, and it's just given me so much self worth again. I'm really enjoying it.

Now for the chaotic part - I'm going to have to move for a while. Last week we thought I was going to have to pack up and move on Monday to prep this movie in NYC. I would leave - fly back to LA for my wedding in August - then immediately turn around and fly to Georgia where we'll shoot the movie. It definitely freaks me out to move before the wedding, but I'm happy to do it for this job. The move is definitely still up in the air and could likely happen, so I don't want to breathe a sigh of relief yet.

SO, every free second I've got has been trying to cram things in before I leave, IF I leave and spending some time with Rebecca and the pup because we'll definitely be apart for at least the last quarter of the year.

Oh, and I had a birthday! I turned 28. I cooked a big 9lb pork shoulder cuban style with rice and black beans! It was incredible. I drank the entire day, and it was just perfect. Rebecca and I got wasted and tried to out-embarrass one another in front of our friends. Chris, from The Man Registry, was there and I'm a little surprised that he spared me from a comment or a tweet about something I said or did. I think that was probably his birthday gift to me, and a delicious 6 pack of Fat Tire.

Which reminds me, I'm knee deep in my wedding beer tasting "research" and it's going very well. I let a few friends taste some beer options on my birthday and all were well received.

Man, this post just made me realize that I need to get back posting. I have so much to talk about. I've missed blogging, but hopefully you understand!

Glad to be back(ish).