The Parents meeting The Parents

My parents are on their way to Cleveland (should be landing soon), and Melinda's parents will be coming down for the weekend. This will be the first time the two sets of parents meet. I'm a little nervous about it, even though I expect it to go well.

It's funny. I remember when I was at school, friends' parents tended naturally to meet each other, but now I've met Melinda's parents and she's met mine, yet it's taken over a month from us getting engaged for them to finally have the chance to meet each other.

Seattle

Just a little heads-up to say that I've posted about how I feel about moving to Seattle on my personal blog. In brief: it's a little more complicated for me than it is for Melinda, because I'm going to be working with people in Cleveland for the next few years, but I'm looking forward to it.

location, location, location

A large number of questions have just been answered- I've decided to accept the job in Seattle, which means that we're going to be living there (and yes, having the wedding there).

I still need to schedule it, but my thesis defense will be in early June. We'll roadtrip out to Seattle in mid-June, and I'll be starting work in July. And after we get all of the moving and academic work out of the way, Eldan and I might actually start planning the wedding.

For those of you who don't know, Seattle is one of my favorite places, so I'm really excited about getting to live there again. Big trees! Mountains! Coffee! Bicycles! The ocean! Mild winters! A thriving scene of art and culture! Hooray!

Rings!

Last weekend we bought proper engagement rings. The cable ties had character (and Melinda had the extra privilege of one made by Apple - that's how special she is), but they weren't exactly going to last a lifetime, whereas these ones will.

We decided to start with the many little galleries on Melinda's doorstep in Little Italy. It turns out that not many of them have a substantial selection of rings, but in any case the first pair that caught our eye ended up being the pair that we went back to and bought, after looking at plenty of other ideas. The design going around them represents the passage of the seasons, which seemed appropriate, plus they came as a pair and the ones on display fit our hands without any adjustment, which feels like some sort of sign.

I'm a little disappointed in myself for being quite so happy about a piece of bling (especially after what I said about proposing first, and buying jewellery later), but I like to tell myself it's just because these ones feel as permanent as they are supposed to. So now, of course, you should go and look at the pretty photo of the pretty shiny things.

For the record

I sincerely hope this isn't going to surprise anyone. We are not going to get married at Disneyworld.

It seems like a truly awful idea, orders of magnitude worse than most of the tacky wedding-industry packages, because it's a place whose existence is devoted to being fake. What worse symbolism could there be with which to start a lifelong commitement?

So now I would like to introduce a couple of key terms that may clarify what little we have thought through about the wedding, by adding to Melinda's list of things we will not be having or trying to minimise our dealings with:

The Wedding-Industrial Complex

The vast conspiracy of services to convince couples that they can't be happy unless they spend a year stressing over every last detail of a complex, extravagant wedding that costs more than their education did (OK, so that comparison might be a tad over the top for Americans, but you see what I'm getting at).

Disney Wedding

Beyond literally meaning a wedding at Disneyworld, this is a general term for the kind of fantasy wedding that every girl is supposed to start planning when she is 5 years old, setting herself up for guaranteed disappointment when the bridesmaids' dresses aren't quite the right adorable shade of puce.

That's all for now. I'm looking forward to posting positive things about the kind of wedding we will have, but I feel like there are important issues we have to resolve first, like where we'll actually be living, and planning the move to that place. Until we have moved, wedding plans will have to proceed slowly, because planning our life together is far more urgent than planning one nice day.

there's going to be a WHAT?

There's a lot to do before we even start planning the wedding, but I have a long list of stuff that will. not. be. involved:

• Pachelbel's Canon in D


• Any kind of cake-smashing


• Garter-tossing


• The Dollar Dance


• Bouqet throwing


• The color mauve


• The release of hapless animals (other than the guests) upon completion of the ceremony

I realize that some of the readers of this blog may not know what some of these things are- you may all rest assured that you aren't missing much.

Knowing what you would absolutely hate is a good start, I guess.