I love to spread it on my toast like it’s f@#%in’ Nutella!
Bronwyn and I are nearly done putting together invitations for the wedding. While we sent out the Save the Dates to a printer, we opted to handle the invitations ourselves with a paper cutter and our inkjet so I managed to get a taste of the joy this guy feels:
Filed under Art & Design, Wedding | Comment (0)Goings On
A lot has been going on lately, so this is just a broad update. A couple of weeks ago for President’s Day Weekend, Bronwyn and I went with a bunch of friends up to Santa Barbara wine country (as in where they filmed Sideways). We stayed in Buelton, and hit up a number of wineries around Solvang, Santa Ynez, and Lompoc. In the process, we spent far too much money, but at least now I have a closet full of great wines and more souvenir glasses than I know what to do with. I’m by no means a connoisseur, but some of the spots I was really impressed with were Ampelos in Lompoc, Artiste in Santa Ynez, Trio in Solvang, and Clos Pepe and Foley in… somewhere between Buelton and Lompoc. The days of tasting expensive wines were balanced out by nights of drinking cheap beers in a hotel room while dancing to “Quemados” and other jams. I regrettably have no photos to report as I haven’t gotten around to uploading anything on my Flickr.
Last weekend, I successfully conquered all ten hills of the “Feel My Legs, I’m a Racer” race. I think I even managed to snag 6th or 7th place overall, with a second place finish on the first hill. Not bad, if I do say so myself. An official write-up hasn’t been posted anywhere, and I’m still scouring the interwebs for photos, but here’s one someone snapped of me. Note the angle of the horizon in the background. That was the first hill, Eldred St., the one this article talks about. While going up the hills was agony (sweet, sweet agony), going down them scared the crap out of me. I had to walk down Eldred St. and a few others, and I think I wore out my brake pads slowly riding my way down the rest. Indeed my fears weren’t unfounded as one rider crashed going down Baxter at 40mph. He hit an unexpected bump at the bottom of the hill, flew off, and slid some 20 feet up the next hill, winding up with a fractured collarbone and a couple of broken ribs, as well as several patches of road rash. But to show you what kind of a manimal this guy was, he still placed fourth overall even though he only did five out of ten of the hills AND he showed up for the after-party at Pure Luck once he was done at the hospital. Insanity.
On Sunday, Bronwyn and I had our engagement shoot with our wedding photographer, Allana of Ars Magna Studio. We spent a few hours wondering around downtown in the Grand Central Market, the Bradbury Building, the Biltmore Hotel, Pershing Square, and a bit of Echo Park. She posted the results yesterday and they’re absolutely fantastic!
Check out her blog or the online gallery to see more.
Finally, in completely unrelated news to anything, other than the fact that I’m Filipino, watch this video:
Time to Dance
It’s Friday! Time to dance.
In other news, today marks four years of dating Bronwyn, in what we’ve dubbed as our “Valiversary.” Due to its close proximity to Valentine’s Day and our mutual dislike of arbitrary holiday card festivities, we decided to roll what would be Valentine’s Day celebrations into our anniversary. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), since we’re set to be wed in May, this will be our last Valiversary as the dating anniversary will be replaced with our nuptial one. At any rate, though Bronwyn has to work tonight, we’ve got a fun weekend planned of picnics, Thai massages, ice cream, cooking classes, and lindy hop. Huzzah! Since I’m rolling solo tonight, I’ll be heading out to Midnight Ridazz.
Filed under Music, WTF?, Wedding | Comment (1)Christmas Recap
Things are finally getting settled back home. Having been away for a week and a half visiting the future in-laws in Memphis for Christmas and New Year’s as well as going to Knoxville and celebrating the wedding of Bronwyn’s cousin, we got back last Tuesday meaning last week was a short one at work and this is the first “normal” work week I’ve had in a while.
Anyways, vacation was great. It consisted primarily of sitting around in pajamas watching the Discovery Channel in high definition. If you haven’t experienced that yet, get thyself to a Best Buy and tell the salesman you want to see some grizzly bears.
I also spent a lot of time acquainting myself with one of my Christmas presents, a shiny new PSP. When we weren’t watching the mating rituals of Galapagos iguanas, one of the things we would do whilst exploring Memphis was drop into the local Gamestops from which I quickly put together a core collection of PSP games. Most notable of those acquisitions are two peculiar games. One is Loco Roco, a game in which you roll a singing blob around a maze, all the while munching on bugs and berries to plumpify your Loco Roco. The hypnotic experience is akin to playing with one of those ink hourglass things that were so popular back in the ’90s, except that this sings and won’t break and stain your carpet. The second game is called Puzzle Quest, which is an unlikely pairing of a puzzle game and RPG. At first the concept seemed a bit too quirky, but the game appeared on the top of 2007 lists of quite a few sites, like Gamasutra’s Top 10 Games of the Year and Gamespot’s Best Game No One Played, so I thought I’d give it a try. Basically, you move around a map completing quests, collecting treasure, conquering undead hordes, and laying seige to cities, except that all manner of “combat” is determined in a puzzle game match up. As odd and dorky as it sounds, Puzzle Quest is ridiculously addictive. I had to give it a few hours of gameplay before the mechanics actually started to click and I figured out why I couldn’t beat the stupid giant bat (it’s his shriek spell, duh! Like Officer Michaels’ coitus interuptus of McLovin, I’ve got to block his mana collection).
At any rate, as great as my shiny white PSP is, it pails in comparison to Bronwyn’s other gift to me: the gift of bacon. It’s a collection of five of the top bacons of 2007 according to The Grateful Palate, which offers a bacon of the month subscription service, so they should know their bacon. We cooked up the first of the bacon this last Saturday morning for breakfast, opting for the Jim Oliver’s Hickory Smoked Country Bacon.
Alls I can say is, “Oh, Glory!”
Filed under Food & Booze, Movies & Television, Video Games, WTF?, Wedding | Comments (3)And Speaking of Claremont…
L.A. is in the high-90’s today. We shouldn’t be complaining, though. Yowch. Thankfully, Mays are a bit more comfortable out in the Inland Empire so we hopefully won’t have any wedding guests spontaneously combusting.
Filed under Los Angeles, Wedding | Comment (0)Wedding Planning
If you know me in real life, chances are you know that I’m recently engaged to this lovely woman. If you didn’t know that, well now you do. Huzzah! I put together a web site, jonwyn.com and was planning on using that as the repository for all things Jon + Bronwyn (Jonwyn), but haven’t gotten around to doing too much with that site. So for the time being at least, I’ll be writing about the wedding process here.
After a month-and-a-half of planning, we’ve finally set a date and a venue. I expect that this was probably the most difficult decision we had to make. Two of the places we seriously considered were the Marvimon in Chinatown, and the Castle Green in Pasadena. I’ll say straight out that the Marvimon was our favorite of all the venues we toured. It was originally built to showcase automobiles in the early twentieth century. The owners found it and converted it into a loft, tearing out parts of the roof to reveal beautiful wooden rafters, and the whole roof entirely in the back to create an enclosed garden. The space was so intimate and unique, classic and historical yet modern and hip. It best matched our tastes and personalities more than anywhere else. The problem was the price (at $5,500 plus additional necessary clean up, staffing, and valet costs it was our most expensive option) and the capacity. It could really only hold about 120 seated, and Bronwyn and I have big families. Our guest list will probably approach the 150 to 200 range. Additionally, while the venue and atmosphere match who we are, there was concern over whether our numerous relatives would be comfortable there, seeing as it’s located in a more downtown and urban place than some would be comfortable with.
The Castle Green would’ve been slightly cheaper than the Marvimon, and in the more tourist-friendly Pasadena. While it didn’t have exactly the same hip vibe that the Marvimon had, its Moorish and Spanish architecture and interior design are extremely charming and unique, which we dug a lot. Most importantly, we’d be able to host all of our guests. We liked it, but we weren’t absolutely madly in love with it like we were with the Marvimon. So the question then was whether or not we spend all this money on something with which we weren’t 100%.
What we finally ended up doing was choosing to go with our mutual alma mater, Pomona College. We only finalized this decision a few days ago and I’ve been increasingly satisfied ever since. To be honest, at first we tossed around the Pomona idea jokingly. We’re still rather fresh graduates, I in ‘04 and her in ‘06, so the idea of heading back to school felt too soon. But the more we thought about it, the better an idea it seemed and it soon became one of our top three choices. First off, we both have personal connections to the place. It’s where we met and it’s where we spent four years of our lives. The place where we would have the reception is the school’s ballroom which is where we spent A LOT of time (we were both on the ballroom dance team). We could even do school-related inside-jokey stuff, like ride off in a “Just Married” golf cart. Second, it’s an extremely beautiful campus. Living there for so long day-in and day-out, one almost forgets that. Third, it is DIRT CHEAP. Seriously. To book the ballroom, all one needs to do is pay for catering, which is $45-$50 a heard. That’s pretty much industry standard for catering alone most other places. At Pomona, the price includes venue, tables, chairs, linens, and flatware. Right there we saved ourselves $5000.
Oddly enough, Pomona being so affordable made it less desirable than the Castle Green for the longest time. At least in my head, I had the silly idea that because we’d be paying much less it wouldn’t be quite as impressive an extravaganza. Truth is, that’s bullcrap. It sounds stupid now saying it out loud, but that’s essentially what I was feeling and that kind of thinking is a product of the wedding industry machine that encourages couples to spend, spend, spend to make things “perfect.” It’s an influence we’ve both been trying to avoid, but it’s something that’s not hard not to get swept up by.
Not until we had received some very sage advice was I able to get over this. Basically, one needs to really prioritize what’s important. We could spend our money to choose some fantastic, elegant, chic, exotic locale, or we could spend the money on, say, traveling around Europe for two months. What’s more important? Some people do want the fantasy wedding and that’s fine. Me and Bronwyn? We want the traveling.
This put other things in perspective, too. We want our wedding to be special, memorable, and fun (emphasis on the fun), but in the end it’s just one day, perfection is impossible, and memories don’t come with a price tag. A place is just a place and a wedding is not about a place, it’s about bringing people together to share in a moment.
So there we go. The wedding is at the end of May. If we can just keep focused with a healthy dose of perspective everything should be smooth sailing from here on out, right? I guess we’ll find out.
Filed under Los Angeles, Wedding | Comments (4)
