We have also asked our 5 best friends to take part in the wedding, so we have a judge to perform the ceremony, a Best Man, a Toastmaster, a Maid of Honor and a Second Maid who have all agreed:)

Only the rest of the planning remains. For example; I’ve been meaning to gather up a list of remaining tasks;)

Since the proposal in January, we have been trying to come up with a plan on how, when and where we want to celebrate our wedding.

We have attended a wedding show, and discussed the pros and cons of different scenarios. Our major issue has been: Do we do it this year or next? I’m a firm believer in the max 12 months engagement period, so naturally I want to get married this year. The Man does not have such a hurry, so he feels that next year would be sufficiently soon. “But I just gave you the engagement ring, can’t we wait a while before you start nagging about the wedding?”

At the same time I’m the one of us who most wants it to be a larger family event. I would like to be able to invite all our cousins, both the ones we see a lot, and the ones who live further away. This raises the cost issue, which doesn’t exactly speak in favor of speeding up things. So we’ve had quite a few debates the past few months, with me constantly trying to discuss things, and him filibustering as best he can… Lucky bastards we are though, both our mums have offered to assist us financially, and of course that helps quite a lot, but we still have had some budgeting to do.

The custom here in Norway is a larger church ceremony, followed by a 3 or 4 course dinner service with the closest family, (often painfully) extended by a large number of speeches, and then inviting the more distant relatives to coffee later in the evening. Usually most of the coffee guests will show up at the ceremony, and then disappear for the appropriate number of hours before the allocated coffee time.

The one thing that hasn’t been up for debate in any degree, is what type of ceremony we would prefer. As neither of us is religious at all, we do not wish to have it in a church. And since we have a friend working as a judge here in Oslo, we would like him to perform the service for us in the reception venue.

After asking around with some friends, it became clear that most guests would want to be able to attend the ceremony as well as the party, so they can see the actual vows being spoken, that being the formal part of the wedding. Since we’re not having the ceremony at a church, it would feel weird to invite people to the ceremony, then tell half the crowd to leave before dinner, only to return hours later (starving) for coffee and cakes.

After much debate the thought struck us recently; hey, why not have a simple champagne reception instead of a full 3-course dinner? So we started investigating that option. After checking with our families that nobody had any heavy objections, we found that to be the best solution for us. So the plan as per now is to have a simple “public” ceremony at the reception, then a champagne (or rather sparkly wine) reception with a tapas buffet, followed by wedding cake, coffee and drinks. We’re not sure whether to have the speeches during the buffet or the coffee, but as we can now (hopefully) afford to invite everyone we would like to share our big day with, it hardly matters, does it?

Ooh; by the way; here is the standard list of speeches in a Norwegian wedding:
1. Welcome speech by the host/hostess
2. Father of the Bride (or the mother if the father does not wish to speak - or can’t)
3. The Groom
4. The Bride
5. The Maid of Honor
6. The Best Man
7. Father of the Groom
8. Mother of the Bride (if she did not speak earlier)
9. Mother of the Groom
10. Grandparents / Godparents (however many of these wish to say a few words)
11. Siblings (likewise)
12. Friends (likewise)
At the end of the dinner service it is customary that someone thanks the hosts for serving such a splendid meal and so on…
I think you can see my point about this dragging a bit out in time…

So I started investigating other options.

Last week I was told to install the Atahualpa theme on one of the Man’s blogs I’m “chief technician” for. I soon realized how customizable this theme is, so on Monday I started working on implementing it here at The Lady.

The hardest part was finding images and colors to my liking, so I spent the first few days figuring that out. On Tuesday I finally “clicked” with Gimp and discovered the Colorify function, and that’s when everything fell into place.

I spent Tuesday evening editing images and carefully noting down html color codes, and Wednesday I was ready to implement. As always, uploading the new theme and activating it, was completely painless. Thank you WordPress! The rest of the evening went to adjusting my new Atahualpa theme to fit my liking. With the built-in Theme options this posed No Worries At All, but it’s real fiddly work, so it still took a few hours. Luckily not quite as fiddly as editing directly in the code though, and less possibility of messing things up completely.

So here I am, redesigned. Please do not hesitate to post constructive comments on things I should change, I’m afraid I’ve gone a bit blind from looking at my own design for too long;)

At a request from a friend who had a part time job in an electronics shop, I once specified the market segment for pink gadgets like the Qtek 8500 Pink phone to “Girls who are interested in gadgets, but at the same time wish to make it abundantly clear that they are in fact, Girls. They care about the look of the product, they use the more complicated business functions to their fullest ability, have an opinion or two on how to make advanced functions suit their individual purposes, but (and this is important:) they are not nerdy enough to completely distance themselves from Microsoft and its quest to conquer the entire world of technology”. We’re not a really large market segment, but we seem to be expanding.

Apparently the new Ladies’ Corner at the Norwegian webshop ps.no is directed at girls like me.

However I get a sort of bad taste in my mouth when they specify why they wanted this special section in their shop. This is because they get a fair amount of complaints from customers that their product specs are too difficult to understand. Instead of focusing on improving their own ability to present their products, they choose to add “explanations for blondes” to a few of their pinker items, group them with some jewellery and makeup, and call it “a special webshop for girls and women of all ages”. To top it off, most of their “explanations” are so basic and in such bad language that they’re more confusing than helpful…

I would have much preferred them to do like my favorite webshop; add product specifications in an easy-to-compare format, and then type a few words of general information about each product and product group. That way they could have solved the original problem without supporting the time-old assumptions that girls are just not as smart as guys.

We haven’t set a date yet, before we do that we have a bit of financial planning to do…

The Man proposed during his own 30eth Birthday party, just after receiving the mandatory peppers for reaching the ripe old age of 30 without being married or engaged… Needless to say, The Lady accepted the proposal, as you can see here:

So all foreseeable future will now be stuffed with wedding planning:D The first bit of work is already done; ordering a couple of “How-to”-books from Amazon.co.uk.

Updates will follow!