We got blogged! Hooray!

I’ll be honest. I’ve been stalking my photographers, Mike and Kate Duval from MKD Photography, for a good long time now. Before we even chose them, I was watching them. Kind of like the FBI and Whitey Bulger (how’s THAT for topical, eh?). We knew we wanted to work with them from the get-go, and were floored by the result: the most gorgeous photos I’ve ever seen.

And we’ve been anxiously awaiting the day when we finally got to be featured on their blog. TODAY’S THE DAY!!

Here’s the link. Feel free to cry a little… I did. I am so in love with these pictures.

See if you can figure out which one was “That’s What She Said.”

Sooooo “me”

I may have mentioned this before, but I’m a big fan of a lil’ ol’ site called Weddingbee. I read the blog religiously via Google Reader and hang out on the boards from time to time, making new Bee friends and drooling over pictures. I would love, love, love to be a Bee blogger when the time comes, namely 8 months before my wedding date.

Anywho, the lovely Mrs. Penguin posted the available Bee aliases today, and I just want to let you all know that I have total dibs on being Miss Snow, because it’s way too appropriate for me (with my love of winter, skiing, Colorado, Vermont, snowmobiling, spiked cocoa, fireplaces, and outdoor hot-tubs in the snow and all that) AND for the BF. I really don’t think he’d mind being referred to as Mr. Snow.

Eventually.

The Commute

I just read a post by Jim over at Bargaineering about CNN Money’s report on the average American commute. Pardon me if I don’t feel bad that the citizens of East Stroudsburg, PA spend an average of 40.6  minutes commuting.I do realize it’s an average, but I just want to elaborate on my own commute for a sec.

I take the MBTA’s Commuter Rail into North Station, Boston every morning. From there, I switch to the Green Line to Park Street, then switch to the Red Line to South Station, then walk another 0.4 mile from South Station to my office. On average, it takes me 75 minutes either way. This could get down to an hour if the stars align and the wind’s at my back and the trains are ready and waiting as I arrive at the station, and it can get up to over 2 hours if I miss the Commuter Rail train or have a delay at one of the stations.

Jim makes a point that the poor souls in PA spend 8.85 days in their cars commuting. Admittedly, there is no sitting in a car for my commute, but I sit on a train (or sit waiting for the damn train) for… wait for it… 26.04 days. As I said in my comment on Jim’s post, I spend almost the entire month of February in transit to or from work. That’s 26.04 days I can’t get back every year. I spend most of it reading, which isn’t bad at all, but you have to factor in the smelly/crazy/inconsiderate/whatever-else clientele that takes the T in Boston.

So you say I should just drive and avoid all the hassle of the train? Well, it would probably take just as long (with even less predictability thanks to Route 93 traffic) and it costs $10 a day to park in a garage near my office. That calculates out to $2,500/year just to park as opposed to $1,812/year for the train pass that I can also use on the weekends to go into the city to hang out.

The argument that “time is money” haunts me every day, let me tell you.

App for BlackBerry!

Part of the reason I got a BlackBerry when it was time for a new phone was so that I could blog more often. I sit on the train for ungodly amounts of time every day, so I thought it would be fun.

Fast forward 3 or 4 months.

I finally figure out that I should probably check to see if there’s a WordPress app, since updating from the browser really isn’t happening. Lo and behold, there is! I just downloaded it, so keep your eyes peeled for fun-on-the-run posts from wherever I may be at the time. Maybe on the train (very likely on a weekday) or in the car (weekends) or who the hell knows where else. I’m excited

Link love

Wedding link love

Clearly, I’m not getting married. Well, that might not be clear, but since I’m still calling the BF “the BF” and not anything more exciting, nor have I posted a fully bolded, capitalized, size 15 million font post about my engagement, you can rest assured I am not getting married.

But I am still obsessed with weddings. Rose thinks I’ll be a wedding planner someday, which is something I considered in college. I thought about having to work on nights and weekends, and didn’t like that idea very much, but I think I’d be really happy doing it, and have given it some more thought. We’ll see what happens.

At any rate, these are some of the sites I check for the latest in wedding goodness:

• Brides.com
• TheKnot.com
• Weddingbee.com
• WeddingWire.com

And blogs (the ones at the top are the ones with new content in my Google Reader, then it goes into the other subscriptions… I probably read them all this morning):

• A $10,000 wedding
• We Met in a Bar
• Brides.com Wedded Bits
• For the Modern Bride (feed link)
  
• Twirl Talk
• Weddingbee (feed link)
• 12k Wedding Blog
• 2000 Dollar Budget Wedding
• A Practical Wedding (feed link)
• Blue Orchid Designs (feed link)
• MERGEweddings.com (feed link)
• Once a bride…
• The Adventures of a Bride to Be
• The Broke-Ass Bride
• The Everyday Bride
• The Pissed Off Bride

Am I missing any of the big ones? Any not-so-big ones that I should know about? Let me know!

My hope for this blog is that it starts as a “technically-single-but-not-really-girl-learning-the-ropes-of-being-a-grownup” blog to a bride blog (I have lots of inspiration from the ones above!) to a mommy blog. That should cover the next 10 years, at least, right? Good stuff.

Frugal versus cheap

I first saw this story on Boston Gal’s Open Wallet, a Boston-based personal finance blog I read pretty regularly. Intrigued, I decided to read the story (I couldn’t watch the video because I was on a conference call, so had to try to pay attention a little bit) over at ABC news.

I have this to say: there is a line between being frugal and being cheap, then another line between cheap and extreme. This man, Roy Haynes, is so far into extreme it makes me uncomfortable. He takes other people’s leftovers on the rare occasion he goes out to dinner. Taking your own leftovers is just fine by me– I would say I do it more often than not in an effort to not overeat (I tend to just keep going if I like something enough) and to have another meal made out of the current one. Other people’s leftovers, though? No way. Nuh-uh. That’s just not healthy.

And their ideas of romance make me sad. I understand that people have different ideas as to what’s romantic and special, but a $70 wedding based on dental insurance coverage with McDonald’s afterward and scooping up the rice neighbors threw (an issue in itself, but that’s for another day) and cooking it? Again, no way, nuh-uh, you get the idea. And let me tell you, I’d rather not have any roses from my boyfriend than to be given cast-off roses from a funeral parlor. To me, that’s about as sensitive as digging up the hosta on my grandmother’s grave and sticking it in a vase.

There are lines between frugal, cheap, and extreme. I consider myself frugal at times (other times, no, but I’m working on it). There is no way in my mind that I would become anywhere near as extreme as Roy Haynes. No way, nuh-uh.