hitting my stride

 

Six days into vacation I think I have hit my stride:  wake up, coffee on the deck, cereal, bathing suit and sunscreen, beach, break, beach, lunch, shower, nap, gin & tonic.  It's a hard life.  The beau has only had the joy of vacation a couple of days due to his work schedule, but he heads back to join me at the beach tomorrow and I expect he's looking forward to a little beach, lunch, shower, nap himself (that's like gym, tan, laundry, except without the fist-pumping).

In the land of weddings, I got quite a bit completed prior to leaving on vacation.  Specifically, I sent out the invitations after a bit of drama over them getting printed just slightly off-center.  I did a little hand-trimming, but don't even know if others would have noticed.  But I noticed and cursed myself for trying to use an online printer and not splurging on the time it would have taken to get paper proofs mailed.  Live and learn.

Despite the off-center drama, the invitations did turn out pretty wonderfully.  We used an Etsy artist to design the suite of invitation, rsvp card, and correspondence card.  Jess did a really gorgeous job on our custom invites, incorporating our text and colors into a beautiful floral design that I absolutely adored.  I'll post pictures once all the invites have been received and the "surprise" is over. 

But with that task behind us, I'm enjoying the Olympics and hanging with my family and eating too much and drinking just enough.  We had a delicious arugula salad last night with fresh peaches and toasted pecans in a citrus juice/coarse mustard dressing.  I baked some tofu cubes to go with mine (the others had chicken) and it was the perfect summer dinner.  My mother can't remember where she got the recipe, but just throw those ingredients together and see if you like it too (no recipe really needed).

Okay, off for more Olympics-watching and G&T drinking!

*For other limited-budget brides that might happen across this post, just a little side note on the printing/ordering of Etsy invites:  just use an online printer if you don't already know a good local printer.  I searched high and low at local printers for high-quality paper (over 110lb cotton cardstock) and printing capabilities.  I wanted to use a local business to print the design that we had created by an independent artist.  I thought we were being responsible with how we spent our wedding budget.  But I got major attitude from the owner of the local invitation/print shop, who proceeded to lecture me about how I was putting the invitation industry out of business by using an Etsy invite design.  Needless to say, I did not give her my printing business even though she reluctantly agreed to look at my PDF file and see if she could print it.  Catprint.com had a great selection of papers and except for the off-center printing, I was really pleased with the outcome.