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Planning a Green Frugal Wedding – Dishware

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Dishes | Source: Emily Carlin on FlickrThe wedding planning continues! Most people book a ‘wedding venue’ and with that, they get all the little details taken care of for them, including all the dishware and glasses that the guests use over the course of the night. But when you’re trying to be frugal in planning a wedding, you have to do all the little things yourself – including buying or renting dishes. Based on the experience we’ve had with this, you can save a lot of money here depending on the decisions you make – paper, plastic or china; rent or buy; one of everything for everyone or get lots of extras. All these decisions can represent vastly different price points, and each decision has an underlying environmental impact to keep in mind.

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Links Grow on Trees – Why Can’t My Wedding?!?

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Hulk | Source: Eneas on FlickrPlanning my own wedding has led me to fully understand the value of hiring a wedding planner. I can’t say I expected it to be so much work. One of the reasons for all the work is that our wedding is also happening on the same day, and in nearly the same location, as a major city festival which attracts thousands of people and will totally be clogging up the area. It did not even occur to me to google the wedding date before booking everything to see what might be a competing interest. We also found out that our wedding officiant has booked another wedding immediately after ours, to the point where if our wedding runs late, we are now affecting someone else’s wedding. I don’t even know what we’re paying our officiant for – the whole wedding officiant business in Ontario is a complete and total racket. Other things I never thought I would think about – how much do people drink, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic? Can I just assume everyone drinks as much as I do? Its going to be a hot day, so we’re assuming people will drink more. But what will people want to drink – pop, juice, water, beer, wine…so many options! Where do you draw the line and just shove whatever you want down people’s throats. You’re drinking juice because I say so! I don’t think that works… I fear I am officially on the verge of becoming groomzilla. I’m one more request away from going Hulk on someone, ripping off my shirt and running down the street yelling “Hulk Angry!”.

At least I get to vent on this blog, right? Last week’s post, Planning a Green Frugal Wedding – Guests, was featured in a number of blog carnivals this week, so everyone gets to read about my agony!

Thanks to all the carnival hosts! I’m not gonna lie, its been a crazy busy week, so I haven’t been reading anything in the blogosphere. But I do want to remind everyone to enter Prairie Eco-Thrifter’s iPad Giveaway! And while you’re there, don’t forget to read all the awesome posts she puts up – one of my favorites is one highlighting where to get inexpensive organic cotton clothing.

Happy Weekend Everyone! Look for two posts next week, I believe I can do it!

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Links Grow on Trees – But in Whose Reality?

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Source Code Poster | Source: WikipediaSo badly needing a break from my research work, I watched a movie last night called Source Code. The movie was terrific but, combined with another of my favorite TV shows, Being Erica, it left me going to bed thinking about a lot of philosophical issues. What if there are alternate realities to our own, all operating on a parallel timescale? Who could I be in another reality? Am I a millionaire, a celebrity, the founder of a charity…or maybe an unsuccessful average Joe? What would I have done differently in another reality in order to achieve more or less success? This left me thinking about the impacts of our decisions, both big and small, and how one simple decision can lead us on two completely different life paths. Getting married soon has also prompted a lot of these thoughts. But I only have to look over to the person sleeping next to me every night to to know that I have no decisions that I regret. Because every decision I’ve ever made and action I’ve ever taken has led me to where I am today.  And there are things in my life that I wouldn’t give up for the world. So what did I learn from watching Source Code…that I need to go to bed earlier and stop watching movies late at night :)

Last week’s article, How NOT to Make a Financial Decision, was included in several blog carnivals, including:

I also want to give a shout-out to Modest Money, Invest It Wisely, Bog of Debt, and The Outlier Model for including my articles in their weekly link roundups. Much appreciated!

The past week has been incredibly busy as I am working on some of the final experimental work for my thesis. So that means that my blogosphere reading has taken a direct impact. But there were a few articles that caught my eye and my attention.

I hope everyone enjoys the long weekend! I will probably be working through most of it, so you’ll likely all enjoy it more than I will :D

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Planning a Green Frugal Wedding – Guests

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Wedding Guests | Source: marioanima on FlickrSo let’s see…so far I have written about invitations, food and picking the venue. Who knew there was so much effort to put into a wedding? If there is one thing I have learned so far, it’s that trying to plan a wedding while also trying to complete a graduate degree is not for the faint of heart. I understand just a little bit more now how a wedding planner can be well worth the cost.

If there’s one avenue where you can really cut down your costs, it’s the guest list. That seems pretty intuitive actually, so much so that I debated whether it was even worth writing about. At most weddings, there is a fixed cost associated with every guest that attends – food, dishes, venue, all these things are related to the number of guests that you have. So that begs the question – do you really want to invite your dad’s cousin’s nephew’s boyfriend who winds up getting drunk at the open bar?

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Links Grow on Trees – The Running Edition

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FiveFingers | Source: www.vibramfivefingers.comOn Sunday, I’m running a 10K charity race. Normally, this wouldn’t be much of an issue for me as I usually train year round and do multiple 10K’s a week. But last October, I very badly sprained my ankle and I only started running again in January. Since I basically had to rebuild my ankle from scratch, it has been a slow process. On top of that, I figured since I was starting from scratch anyways, might as well build up my ankle in the Vibram FiveFingers I bought last summer. If you don’t know what those are, they’re basically very minimalist shoes with toes, that are intended to mimic walking barefoot. They also tend to attract a lot of attention when you where them around town on an every day basis. But getting back to the run, the most I’ve run since October is 7K, and that only happened once. My body is used to running 5K’s for the last few months and it is not going to like me very much on Sunday. But maybe this will reinvigorate me and put me back into a running spirit for the summer! I’m hoping for that at the very least…

Last week’s article, Planning a Green Frugal Wedding – Venue, was included in a bundle of blog carnivals, including:

Thanks to all the Carnival hosts! To wrap up this edition of Links Grow on Trees, here’s three articles I read in the blogosphere this week, and they all share a common theme…haven’t had much time to read this week, so good job to these blogs for getting my attention – or maybe there’s just something on my mind?

Happy weekend everyone and wish me luck!

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