Your wedding update (and a little extra)

Hm. Another month gone by and no posts from me. It's not like I haven't had things to write about, it's just that I haven't really had the time to sit down and put fingers to keyboard.

Where to begin...

Julie and I took a romantic weekend away last month to, of all places, Cincinnati. Believe it or not, you can use the words "Cincinnati" and "romantic" in the same sentence.

She had a weekend off, so we rented a car (my little car now has over 150,000 miles on it, so it's exempt from long distance trips) and left Friday afternoon. Cincinnati's about a six hour drive from here. Weather was beautiful, traffic was tolerable, and Cincinnati's not that bad of a place. Julie remarked it looked a little like Pittsburgh (she meant no offense, comparing Pittsburgh to some town in Ohio).

We stayed in the heart of downtown at the Garfield Suites Hotel, where every room is a little suite. It was cool, having a separate bedroom, a full kitchen and living room away from home. We did a couple tourist-y things, had some good food, and had our senses overwhelmed when we visited Jungle Jim's International Market. Words cannot describe Jungle Jim's. Let me merely say it's a grocery store over six acres big with just about every type of food on the planet. They have things I never knew existed.

We were there for an hour and a half and still didn't see everything there was to see.

Since coming back, we've been spending a good bit of time working on wedding plans. As you can see on the ticker to the left of this blog (and either up or down from here...depending on when this is updated), we're just about a year out from THE BIG DAY. We've accomplished a few things in preparation for the event:

• We've ordered our wedding rings.
• We've decided on what the invitations will look like.
• We've come up with partial guest lists.
• We even found cool wedding cake toppers.

The only major thing we have to do, and it's something we both want to have done in the next week or two, is decide where the wedding and reception are gonna be held.

One thing Julie wants, which makes sense to me and I can agree with, is that the wedding and reception are gonna be in the same place. It's convenient. It's simple. It just makes sense. Since my guests will be traveling from out of town, we were looking at possibly having it at a local hotel, so they won't have too far to go (not that there's that much to do around DeKalb, unless you want to go stalk the local Steak and Shake like her son does).

We checked with one local hotel, and it's not a bad place, but I'd like to see a few more places before we make our final decision.

Once we know where, then we can work on the invitations. For those of you select few who will receive an invitation (and you have a pretty good idea who you are), be prepared to see something really simple, yet really cool.

Oh, and we're making plans for us to move in together in a couple months. My bachelor pad days are coming to an end, but you know what? I'm all right with that. I'm looking forward to living with Julie. She does know how to make me smile...

That's the news for now, kids. When more details are finalized, you'll know.