the winner of the great spreadsheet debate

There were many venues that were very pretty, but also very expensive. Sometimes they would be priced at above $1k for two hours of use! No thanks! There was space to consider... not too small cause you don't want people cramped, but not too big or else it'll seem like you don't fill the place. Easy parking would be an important factor. Somewhere no farther than an hour driving from the City.

But after some excel sheet deliberating... and me getting nervous that it was practically JULY and we haven't booked a place... we decided on a venue! It was, and has been, difficult not getting too exciting about anything until it was BOOKED. So I called up the place, asked lots of questions, and then went to visit it. It was more or less how it looked in pictures online and I was sold! See here!

(Source)

For the price, it's a steal! However, it is a community center which can also translate to little kids playing soccer on the lawn and little dripping kids wrapped in a towel after their swim lesson standing in the middle of the lobby. Hopefully they will not make an appearance for the wedding!

With a concrete date and a venue, onward ho to everything else!

the big stuff

So I um... happen to glance at a few wedding blogs before I got engaged... and then signed up for all of them upon engagement! :-P I knew that the where (venue) determined the when (time and date!) and then everything else after that hinged on where and when the wedding is, so booking a venue was top on the list of things to do!

So first we worked on deciding on a date! A flexible one at that, since we understood that sometimes the venue we wanted might be booked already! We tossed around a lot of ideas ranging from winter break (too soon?), to after Siggraph (a week-long CS graphics conference that rules the graphics world and to which participation and involvement is vital to Tim's ability to graduate), to spring break (but friend is getting married that week), to May (which is what we decided on). :)


More logistical planning included figuring out the budget. Which went surprisingly smoothly. The budget is somewhat small but I am thrilled to shove big budgets in the face of the wedding industry by proving to them that a wedding with over a hundred people IN the Bay Area CAN HAPPEN :-D And when you decide that somethings you can do differently/cheaper/better, you can make anything work! ;)

Welcome

Welcome to the adventures of Alvina & Tim's Wedding where frustrations and setbacks are trampled by finally finding THE dress and successfully booking a caterer! (Though neither has happened yet!)  And also perhaps a place for Alvina to keep track of all the inspiration :)

The proposal! in May was of course where this adventure began! That story can be found on their wedding website and here is Alvina's favorite proposal picture (so you will probably see it more than once) to mark the joyous occasion :)