Posted by R.

Whoa, the clearing-up was quite something to be reckoned with! We put some memorabilia into the ang pao box that Felicia so painstakingly made for us, and tried as best as we could to stash away everything else. 


So what are we doing now? 

Happily married for one, and Yanxian's staying over this weekend!

Just a couple more things actually. We need to prep for the formal dinner next year, and that includes looking for venues and gowns etc (i.e. the painful part). We also have to keep our eyes peeled for good housing deals - not that we require it at this time, more for the sake of taking advantage of those subsidies that are owed to us. =)

More to come!

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Posted by R.

Computer's still down, so just a quickie. Photos stolen from Andrew's and uncle Dennis' Facebook, for the benefit of those who don't have access to them!



Weijian playing our march-in song













One of my favourite shots =) 






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Post-ROM  

Posted by Twinkle

Yay! We're legally married! Up next: preparations for the tea ceremony and wedding dinner!


Our solemnization ceremony was just wonderful, albeit with a couple of hiccups. The weather was way too hot, I had a mini-freak-out during dressing up, stumbled most of the way up the stairs in my lovely long dress, food was served 1 hour too late... But then, the most important part, 5-5.30pm, was just perfect. Thank you, hubby, I loved your surprise rendition of Colour of my love. :)

Many thanks to all those who have helped: our best man, Aaron, our MOH, Valda, our two MCs, WJ and YK, our two bridesmaids, XX and XW, "receptionist" YJ, stag night guys and hen night gals. And last but not least, our parents (both sets) for their unwavering support and advice. 

The whole event was over by 10pm, and the restaurant manager Kumar was very sweet to prepare us some food, since we hardly had time to eat anything at all. Hehe, after a refreshing shower, we ate our dinner of mushroom soup with bread bowl, steak, veges and mashed potatoes sitting on the floor in our room. I'm so glad we rented a room, I dun think we could have done without it, I wouldn't have been able to make up in time, and we wouldn't have spent the night together after our ceremony. Haha, in my haste to eat, I spilt the soup on the carpeted floor, resulting in a puddle that looked like vomit! Promptly lost my apetite after that. Haha...

All in all, we had a lovely time, and now, we're happily married! Love ya, hubby!

PS: some photos are up already on facebook, if you haven't seen it, go take a look. Many thanks to Andrew, my uncle Dennis, and also Sharon! Can't wait to see Chris'!

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Posted by R.

The day is here at last!!


Alas, I promised a photograph of the bouquet, but i shot it in RAW, and Yanxian's computer can't read RAW files as of now. Had nasty dreams of the bouquet wilting, and woke with a start to check that it's actually still alright. 

Not really sure how i should be feeling though. It's an odd mix of excitement ("It's finally here!") and of not wanting this to end. I must say, the preparations had been fun - who says marriage is a chore? OK, maybe cos it's the solemnisation, and we more or less call the shots. It probably will be different though when it comes to the customary part. 

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Posted by R.

Completed!


Valda came down to help with tearing the rose petals apart, while I worked away at the calla bouquet. The floral glue helps A LOT. This time, Yanxian chose the light maroon callas, and we did away with the bear grass. I've finally completed our hand bouquet - just waiting for the floral glue to set, so that I can start working on the backing. Pics to come soon!

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Posted by R.

We got our laundry back, and wow! It was quite a relief that nothing serious went wrong, after the horrible week. I was told that 1) the bra cups could deform 2) the rhinestones could fall off or lose their shine. Thankfully, neither happened. I am impressed with the ladies there - for future reference, this was at Jelita Drycleaners on the 2nd floor. Highly recommended. 


Going to buy our flowers today, and will make the bouquet later in the day. Yanxian wants something smaller, she says the old bouquet was larger than her head. (That is to say, the bouquet was monstrously huge)

Peng Tze was excellent. He called me up 2 days ago to re-confirm everything, and i filled him in on some changes. Initially we had a VIP table with floral arrangements etc, but after people pulled some stunts on us we decided to just scrape the entire VIP table thing, and now EVERYONE will get decorated chairs instead. Much more festive, I think! 

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Posted by R.

This has been somewhat a terrible week. Maybe as it draws closer to the date, my tolerance for slip-ups decreases drastically. I am now blogging using Yanxian's MacBook, as mine is now DEAD. Yes. Dead. With my last backup 2 weeks ago, this means that my edited photographs, songlists and others are now gone. I was plugging my computer into the printer outside, when it just went dead. Subsequently the computer couldn't detect the startup disk - probably a fried harddisk!! Thankfully, I still have all my RAW images on backup and on the SD card - I'll have to do post-processing again, but at least the photos are still there. Last night, Yanxian re-downloaded the wedding songlist and re-edited the important songs using GarageBand. 


The other silly thing that happened was that we actually missed our appointment at ROM. YES, I KNOW. The website said to go down for statutory declaration 3 days in advance, but the date they gave us was FOUR days in advance. Hello .. anyway, we did manage to go down yesterday, and the queue wasn't all that bad actually, just 3 couples ahead of us. It was a quick affair - verifying our documents, making sure I wasn't forcing her into marriage (heh heh ..) and swearing that I am who I claim I am. 

Also, a small little thing cropped up regarding Yanxian's dad - he's one of our witnesses - and we were slightly worried that he may not be able to attend. But thankfully that has also been settled, I think. 

We're collecting our stuff from the dry-cleaner's today (praying hard that the dress and suit will still be intact!!) and I'll probably drop my computer off for some repairs. Well .. if it's going to cost me a fair bit, I might just bite the bullet and get a new one. Maybe an iMac. 

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Posted by R.

Hen & Stag Parties

My, what a weekend!

Just a little filler before the weekend thing - we spent 2 days at Jubilee Road doing our shoots in our makeshift home studio! I rented 2 very excellent lenses from Desmond, the Canon EF 24-70 f2.8L USM and EF 70-200 f2.8L USM. It turned out to be an excellent decision, even though it set me back by quite a bit. The images were contrasty and tack-sharp, and on hindsight I could have just made do with the 24-70mm lens. The second lens had a focal length that was just too long for my cropped factor camera body, althought it produced really flattering portrait shots at the long end of the zoom.

Here's a pic of the makeshift studio!

Yanxian's very ghetto dressing table. That lamp is actually my continuous flourescent light that is used for product shots.


The shoot covered 2 days - the first shoot was done in casual clothes, but alas! I initially set the camera to shoot in small jpg files while I was doing the lighting adjustments, and later forgot to set it back to RAW! Felt really sore about it, but thankfully the images were nothing to shout about anyway. The good thing that came out of this shoot was that it prepped me for the following day's shoot, and as a result things were done much faster as I was more familiar with the lighting adjustments and ratios.





We went back the next day with our ROM attire and a few other props. The main concept for this shoot was to do a series of seamless high-key shots, and some off-camera crosslighting as well.







I shall leave Yanxian to talk about her hen party. 

For my part, I met the guys at Raffles City for dinner at a Japanese restaurant. I suspect part of the bill was a result of Weijian's flirting with the manager! Anyway, we had a delightfully expensive sashimi platter ($150, whooooo!) made of this odd lionfish, sea urchin and flatfish. To be really honest though, I think I'll stick to salmon. 


Actually before that, we went into Topman to look at some ties that the guys were going to wear for Saturday. Most unfortunately, they spotted this awful-looking T-shirt that went "Does my C**K look big in this?" with a picture of a chicken in front. I was marched to the dressing room, my shirt got confiscated and they paid for the shirt - with me in it! It was seriously quite uncomfortable wearing such a cheeky-looking shirt. 


After dinner we headed down to Clarke Quay. We knew that the hen party was somewhere around, but I put my bet that they were probably in The Pump Room rather than Attica, since Yanxian hates the latter. (too many SPGs and leery guys.) But alas for us!! The stag party met the hens in Attica! They brought along this delightfully huge underwear for me, which read "Size Matters" - I simply loved it!! It's now hanging on the back of my car window, muahahaha. After a bit of dancing and after presenting a pair of frilly red panties to Yanxian down on my knees, we went our separate ways.



I think the highlight of the night was going to the gay bar after Attica. It was less sleazy than I thought it would be - the worst sights being some narcissistic topless guys flaunting their stuff (they do have stuff to flaunt, thankfully!) and a couple others grinding on the dance floor. But the great thing was that the music was better, the drinks were much stronger, and as Yingkai pointed out, people were there more to have fun rather than hawking around to pick people up. It was actually a great experience - one of those places that you'd never dream of going on less-than-crazy nights. Thanks guys, for such a fun night out!!

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Posted by R.

Urgh. Feeling annoyed.

We were planning for a photoshoot tomorrow, and all of a sudden Yanxian's boss magicked some meeting for her and it has to be cancelled. After all my preparation too!

Just had to rant.

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Posted by R.

The last few things ...

Touch up Yanxian's dress tonight (some of the rhinestones that were set earlier by iron fell off .. )
Indoors photoshoot this Thursday 16/4/9 by moi
Send clothes to dry cleaner's this Friday
Finalise wedding vows
Call Prof Low by this week

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Posted by R.

I'm not being OCD about the photoshoot, Yanxian. I just want to make sure everything goes exactly the way I want it.

Anyway, I do not see how much difference there is between me doing it and engaging some photo guy to do it. Wei has very graciously offered to help us take the photos! OK, obviously for the banquet day itself I can't possibly be part of the thing and do the photos as the same time. I'm hoping Chris' work will turn out to be to our satisfaction, and that'll probably be the banquet day photographer settled. If not, we could always get Black Box (they should start giving us a DSO Labs package discount already!)

I'm actually planning for a rather elaborate shoot. But whether it actually churns out award-winning photos .. that's another story altogether. =) I went absolutely nuts and bought an el-cheapo studio strobe. I'm still trying to digest that one now.

We did some finishing touches to the pen stand last night. In keeping with the sea-shelley theme, we wanted the pen stand to sit inside a giant clam shell - the same one which I gave Yanxian some 7 years ago. We'd then use vermiculite to fill up the gap and to conceal the original penstand gap, and adorn it with something sparkly. Problem is vermiculite tends to scatter all over the place, so I bought some clear sealant spray and did a bit of art and craft the other night. The spray was weird though, and it took an hour and several tries to get it right. It tended to make the vermiculite grey... eeeeeks. It was alright in the end, phew.

As promised earlier, pics of the wedding bands!! OK, something is VERY wrong with this picture. It came out kind of soft.

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Horror stories of Bridal Boutiques aka one-stop-station-for-everything-they-think-you-need  

Posted by Twinkle

Hmmm, it's great that everything for solemnization is falling into place. Which leaves us with planning for the tea ceremony-cum-wedding-dinner day... Oh, did we mention that the date is sorta fixed? 21st Nov 2010 (Sunday). 


I've been reading some horror stories from singaporebrides, cozycot etc.. the general gist is: every bridal boutique has it's own share of horrendous service. From empty promises to hard-sell tactics to late deliveries, you name it, they've done it. Which is silly, since the whole point of engaging them is to save yourself some headache, but it appears their entire existence seems to be just to drive you nuts (reminds me of administrators...). 

So, we've been discussing. These boutiques supposedly give you a "package" which includes items/services that they think you need. If we break down the package, it basically consists of: 
  1. wedding gown (aka Big Dress) rental 
  2. evening gown rental
  3. Tea dress rental
  4. Gatecrashing Tux rental
  5. Dinner Tux rental
  6. Car decor
  7. Indoor photoshoot
  8. outdoor photoshoot
  9. Hair and Makeup

Item 1 makes sense. to rent item 2 is a bit silly, since it can be re-used again (depending on how elaborate it is). Tea dress is redundant for us (since we already have a ROM dress). HY thinks he can buy a cheap G2000 suit for item 4. Item 5 already have (ROM suit, which cost me a bomb). Car decor can ask Peng Tze to do. HY wants to do his own indoor photoshoot (OCD again). Outdoor photos are done already. Hair and Makeup can engage our own.... So what does that leave us with??? just item 1! What the.....

So, we're going to get quotations/estimates of the ale-carte items and see how much the 9 items will cost us, then decide if we really want a package...

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Posted by R.

Yay!!! We finally collected our wedding bands tonight! =D And we could still fit our fingers into them, after 3 months. The only thing is, the things actually came in little ZIPLOCK bags. OM. For the money we paid, you'd think that they would at least come in plastic boxes, if not acrylic. The lady took them out from their very ugly bags, and put them into a nicer box. Oh well. At least they gave us a free ring pillow. Pics to come when I get the luxury of taking photos.

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Posted by R.



The seeds are finally here! Was thoroughly excited about it. Anyway, the packets were actually smaller than I expected them to be (250 seeds look like a teaspoon's worth of stuff) but it was fun mixing them up. The pic below is the mixing stage.



So what's in the mix?
- Zinnia elegans 'Lilliput Mix'
- Strawflower
- Nicotiana alata (Flowering tobacco)
- A selection of morning glory varieties: 'Carevale di Venezia', 'Crimson Rambler' and 'Milky Way'
- Arroyo lupine
- Love-in-a-mist
- Four O'Clock
- Sunflower 'Autumn Beauty'
- Marigold
- Cleome 'Violet Queen'
- Some fragrant herbs: Basil 'Genovese', dill, borage, sweet marjoram, black cumin
- Okra 'Burgundy'
- Amaranth 'Golden Giant'
- Portulaca
- Balsam: a selection of heirloom singles and doubles from my own garden
- Cosmos 'Bright Lights'
- Another Cosmos variety from my garden, I have no idea what it is. Bright yellow stuff.

A few lucky people will be getting some zucchini seeds and love-in-a-puff (Cardiospermum) seeds. The whole thing is entirely random of course, so not everyone will get the same stuff. They were packed into the bottles (remember we were busy tying ribbons to bottles a couple of months back?) with some vermiculite that had been soaked in nutrient solution. I'm guessing each bottle should have an average 50-70 seeds. Ha .. I'm going to cheat a bit and put extra lupine and cleome seeds into Aaron's. (BTW, did the cleome ever germinate?)

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