that ring of confidence

Vancouver internet start-ups in The Georgia Straight

One of the things I told students at the Canadian University Press conference

that I spoke at was to always take any assignment offered [jks].  The life of a freelance writer is such that we really never know what will be our last job, and saying no to work is always a risk especially when you're trying to build a relationship with a publication.  While I've been writing for The Georgia Straightfor over a year the spacing between each article is long enough that I'm always a little concerned that maybe they'll forget about me.  The technology section only really has one regular writer (Blaine Kyllo) and having heard enough stories about freelancers who said no to one job and had publications just assume that they were no longer interested in writing, I pretty much say yes to anything and everything. 

Looking back on it I probably should have said no to an article being due just over a week after my wedding.  However I had been pitching the story since I first started writing for the Straightand it was the fall technology issue so it was hard to say no.  I also completely underestimated how much work a wedding was, and moving my wife into my apartment would be.  Which is a long way of being honest and saying that tech editor Stephen Hui had to do a lot more on this one than normal and so while I think the interviews went well the structure of the article is mostly thanks to Stephen, in however good it is.  Anything wrong with it is my fault.

The article is in the Straighttoday and on-line [tgs].  It turned out well in the end though I think if I ever do my song and dance for mold-able minds, I'll ad weddings as an exception of a time when begging off an assignment is probably a good idea. 

A last note about the article that

I feel I should mention is that I did a lot of interviews with people that did not make it into the finished article.  It turned out that I just had too much material and given that it takes at least 100-300 words to introduce and give details about a start-up company, some of the ones I spoke with had to be left out in order to keep in the assigned space.  Those interviews however aren't going to be lost, and I'll be turning them into short pieces for The Georgia Straight's website's tech section [tgs] over the next week or two. 

So we got our Photobooth Vancouver photos

 Apart from deciding to actually get married

we made three really important choices I think.  We found the right venue in the Heritage Hall on Main Street in Vancouver.  It's a lovely old building that didn't re quire much decorating and had that air of history without being anything so formal as a church.  We got great caterers in Presto Catering, who laid on a full Italian style feast for us with pastas, chicken and salmon.  Lastly we hired Photobooth Vancouver [pbv] to do two hours worth of photoboothing rather than buy everyone a wedding favour.

In fact everyone's wedding favours were the photos that they took, at no charge to them, in the photobooth.  Everyone had a blast, and I think in retrospect we wish we'd hired  the photobooth for at least an extra hour if not more, and seemed to really get into having their pictures taken and getting to keep their own unique souvenirs of our wedding.  Best of all after about two weeks we got a disc in the mail with all of the photobooth prints that everyone got to take home, plus the individual photos that make up the prints.  That's 500 photos which have been loading onto my Flickr account all day.  The full Flickr set of our pictures can be found on my Flickr account [fkr].

 

Rejected wedding invitation ideas

We've been working on the wording on our save-the-date cards and our wedding invitations, but yet oddly enough every suggestion I come up with gets rejected. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, so I'm throwing it out to the masses. Below are some of my rejected wedding invitation pitches, phrases and slogans. Read through them and leave a comment supporting my vision for what really ought to go on the invitations.  With the overwhelming support of the public, she'll have no choice but to let me write the invitations my way.

• "Yo we're having a wedding, why don't you come?"
• "Neither of us are preggers & we're still getting married. It must be love."
• "We have so few friends, so please come or it'll be sad."
• "If you're planning on taking your own life, hold off until after August Ninth."
• "If you promise not to eat much we'd love to have you at our special day."
• "No babies."
• "No Homers."
• "Yes I'll probably look fat in the suit, deal with it."
• "Star Trek Themed."
• "Marriage FTW."
• "No MC Hammer Rap Pants."
• "BYOB"
• "Admission $45"
• "With special guests The Mighty Mighty Bosstones"

Another apology

i t feels like every post I make these days is a post asking for forgiveness after another long period of this blog laying fallow. Each and every entry seems like it's asking for forgiveness for the length of time since I've last blogged and promising to be more attentive to you, my dear readers.  Does it feel that way to you?

Again I've been writing for The Georgia Straight [tgs] and though I haven't been working as much this past week I've been travelling with Lydia.  We took a long weekend and went to Vancouver Island to visit Tofino and Victoria.  Lydia blogged about eating on the island [iatl] and I guess I don't have a whole lot to say beyond that, so I'll leave you with the link. 

One of the things we did do in Victoria was look at venues for the wedding.  We checked a few places, mostly heritage homes and none of them seemed to work for us.  They were either not the right type of place, required us to use their expensive in-house caterers or had the overall feel of a bingo hall.  After already mostly eliminating Kelowna from our list of cities to get married in, it seemed like we were crossing Victoria off the list as well.

I don't know how it came up, but talk turned to the Heritage Hall on Main Street in Vancouver [hh], and since I had been to Curtis's wedding there I sent him an email asking for a rough estimate on how much he paid.  His reply was surprisingly inexpensive and so we booked a viewing for Wednesday and after looking at it and talking to the woman in charge of rentals we've booked the hall for August 9th 2009.

Which is a huge relief, since now that we've got a date and location everything else can slot into that.  I guess the last really big thing is the caterers, and once that's sorted we're just having to deal with a few minor details like the flower arrangements for the tables and whether or not we're going to ask people to sit through speeches or a slide-show or possibly both.  Lydia's for neither and I'm for both.  I figure if we're feeding people the least they could do is pretend to care about us for half an hour, even if they'd rather be watching a rerun of The Office.

Kelowna never seems as hot as it should be

We've never managed to hit Kelowna on a really nice weekend since I've moved to Vancouver. Last summer we came down during August and it was cloudy and only slightly warmer than Vancouver. It's because of this that Lydia has never been to the Okanagan when it's stupid hot. We're heading down tomorrow, but sadly even now it looks like we'll be lucky to have the heat top out at 37 degrees.

Oh it's plenty hot, don't worry but it's not quite the heat that I used to have to drive around in back before I owned a car with air-conditioning.  I'd have the window down and I'd still show up for work needing to change and have a mini shower in the Paramount's bathroom before my shift began.  37 degrees, why that's an almost livable temperature.

Essentially we've got three days when we were hoping to scout around for wedding stuff, since Kelowna is where we're planning on having the wedding.  Lydia got a bit disheartened after contacting her choice of a caterer and getting a rather uninterested response.  It seems that offering any information via email or phone is beneath them, but if we're okay with driving to Penticton and meeting them at a farmer's market then maybe they'll be willing to talk to us then.  Or we could go to their special $100 a plate dinner and talk to them there.

Clearly their business is running well enough that new customers aren't a concern.

I'm not sure if we'll end up able to meet with them or not this trip, but it would be nice to get that major planning bit out of the way.  As I see it the major things we need to organize is the two venues (one of which we think is sorted already), the food and then justice of the peace/minister type of person.  Or a sea captain.

My cousin Lindsy got married in Cuba [fkr], and when trying to price out locations and caterers that sort of starts looking nice.  Maybe not Cuba, but a place like Hawaii where my aunt Peggy and uncle Gregg got married is significantly cheaper on us, if not on our invited guests.  For some people it might be an excuse to have a really fun trip, for others it would be a reason not to come.  Which would be a pitty but it would make things even cheaper...

Now just to find a sea captain.

The ring is the thing and other terrible titles

Lydia was away for the last two weeks at her parents.  They've recently sold their motel in Bracebridge Ontario which served as both their home and business for the last five years and so that meant moving homes.  With Lydia's mother going to Mexico to visit family for a week they needed Lydia's help to get everything packed up and ready for the move.

While she was away I lived the bachalor life, which mainly consisted of being less tidy and staying up all night to play Grand Theft Auto IV and Mario Kart.  With her back today I dragged Nathan down to Bellingham to pick up the engagement ring [ial] that she had picked out a few weeks ago.  We had not been able to take it at the time, because it was off getting resized, and I wanted to have it for when she got back.

Having picked the ring (pictured above) yesterday, I picked her up from the airport today.  I had debated pretending to not have already proposed and doing a big showy thing where I got down on one knee in the arrivals area of Vancouver Airport, but decided instead to give it to her in private.

Less romantic perhaps, but also less chance of airport security deciding that we were acting suspicious and roughing us up.

Money and the lack of money

That's right, I'm going to be on Robson Street in a Mexican wrestling mask challenging people to arm wrestle for money this summer the way things are going.  Between the pay-cut at work, and the upcoming wedding I'm quite a bit poor.  My second job at the comic book store [jks] has yet to start, and I'm pretty much broke.  You know the sort of broke that when I reach into my wallet a moth flies out and tries to eat the shirt off of my back.

It's time to start living frugally, which means that driving is a luxury and public transit is my new pimped out ride.  It means that an eight pound bag of rice is my new lunch, dinner and desert while breakfast is an old box of Safeway house brand Grain Os' that I've been trying to eat.  That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but certainly I'm no longer eating at the food court while at work, and certainly not drinking Starbucks on a regular basis.  I'm even thinking of cancelling cable, and if it had not been for the return of The Office this week I would probably have been making the phone call very soon.

Meanwhile if any of you have a free weekend it would be most appreciated if you spent those free days sitting at your computer and clicking on my Google ads.

It wasn't a hoax, I am getting married

From Garfield Minus Garfield [gmg]

Apparently there's nothing like an engagement announcement [jks] to boost traffic, and incoming phone calls.  I don't know if anyone who actually works at the store I do knows, though it feels like the entire corporate sales team has called to offer their congratulations.  Which I suppose goes to show you that my brother whose in corporate sales spends more time talking about my life at work than I do.  He probably talks about pretty much everything a lot more than I do, since he got the vocal chords and lungs whereas I got the good looks and wilily smarts.

Lydia blogged about our engagement a day after I did [ls], and quickly had several more comments than I got.  I'm putting it down to the fact that girls are far more impressed with this sort of thing, rather than that her blog is more widely read amongst her friends.  She probably also does have more friends than I am, since unlike me she doesn't make her companions sign a loyalty pledge.

Why get married, you might be asking.  Well apart from the fact that I'm totally in love with her, and can't think of anyone else I'd rather spend the rest of my life with, it does help me prevent from turning into the total middle aged loser that John Arbuckle from the Garfield comic strip is.

The wedding planning has begun in earnest.  We're trying to decide between having the wedding in Vancouver or Kelowna.  Vancouver is easier for planning, since that's where we are most of the time, while Kelowna is easier since my parents' house can act as a wedding venue.  Also Kelowna during the spring/summer almost guarantees dryness whereas Vancouver is far more touch and go weather wise.

There is also the question of the engagement ring.  For months Lydia sent me mixed messages about whether she wanted an engagement ring.  Sometimes she wanted a pearl one, sometimes one with diamonds, sometimes no ring.  So instead I bought her an iPod touch, which I figure has far more features than any ring.  Of course apparently that's not the point of a ring, so we're looking to get one.  We've been looking, or rather she has, at rings in the States since they're apparently quite a bit cheaper.  If anyone has anything they're trying to pawn, possibly made of white gold with pearls, please shoot me an email.

What else I'm getting aside from a puppy

If you've known me for awhile you probably remember the single days.  The long, long, single days.  In fact you just have to take a look at this blog's "Being Single / Dating" category [jks] to see the last few single years.  In fact back in university I had thought that I could somehow spin my single-dom into a career, since people seemed to enjoy reading articles of my disastrous romantic adventures [teotw].

Lydia and I have been going out pretty much since we first met after she responded to an ad that I put up on Craigslist.  The ad was put up very much in the spirit of, "Well if this doesn't work out at least I'll have something to write about" and so that it actually worked and I've gotten a long term relationship out of it is very surprising to me.  Delightfully surprising.

Last week the two of us went down to Seattle for her birthday and had dinner at The Dahlia Lounge [td], where after the "Cougar Gold, fried green tomatoes, Bavarian beer vinegar, mustard" appetizer was cleared I asked her to marry me and much to my relief she said yes.  So we are now officially, though currently ring-lessly, engaged.

It's been just over a week, but I've wanted to keep it quiet because my parents were on a cruise in Asia and I wanted to tell our folks before we let anyone else into the secret.  Last night I surprised the family with it, and Lydia told her mother over the phone, so now that all the one degrees know, we're letting other people in on it.

So yeah, I'm getting married.  On April 21st. 

Just kidding.  Probably next spring or summer depending on a few factors. 

Photo credit

• Photo by: Jeffery Simpson
• What: Lydia at home
• Date Taken: October 19th, 2007
• Camera: Canon EOS Rebel XTi [fkr]