Ben and Christy Wedding Blog

Ceremony & Vows

2010-12-14T19:04:00.000-08:00

We'd had a number of people remark that they needed a translated version of the ceremony & vows. It was true there were a number of references to various historical events in our lives so here it goes!

Ceremony

Friends and Family, please be seated.

We have come together on this beautiful rainy day to celebrate the marriage of Ben and Christy.

My name is Mark Ferlatte; I'm Christy's brother and Ben's friend. As we begin, I ask on behalf of the bride and groom that everyone take a breath, close your eyes, and join us in a moment of silence and reflection.

Thank you.

Much like a GPS finds a geocache, Ben and Christy have found each other and it is wonderful. [Geocaching is what we sometimes do for fun. He also proposed using a geocache. Check out the story on the website if you haven't heard it already] Traditionally, the officiant asks if there are any objections to the wedding and gives advice and guidance to the happy couple. If you have objections, I'm afraid you should have said something a long time ago. [It's true, it took us 6 years to get hitched] However, since this is the only time in their lives when Ben and Christy have to listen to my advice, I'm going to give them some. [Part of being a little sister is never listening to an older brother :)]

The first piece of advice comes from me:

This marriage is yours and yours alone. People will express doubt at some point because the world can be cold and hard. You should ignore them. People have all kinds of well meaning suggestions about what worked for them, and they will, of course, tell you all about it, occasionally at great length, because they want you to be happy. Thank them, and remember that it's your marriage, and you both are amazing, and you are doing an incredibly brave and romantic thing, and that marriage isn't the place for practicality.

This life isn't meant to be practical, stable, settled, and calm. You both have lived in interesting places and done fascinating things. Continue to choose the awesome exciting future instead of the default future; in other words, always pick the future with the flying car.

Of course, when you're in a flying car, things can get pretty hectic. This brings us to the second piece of advice, which comes from a wise man:

Don't panic. [Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy] Everything will work out fine. If you choose to have children, they will be amazing. If you choose to live on a boat for a year, the experience will be fabulous. [Ben did live on a boat for almost a year and it was fabulous] If you choose to stay in Berkeley for a while and just be married playing Settlers of Cataan on Thursday nights, it will be grand. [Settlers is our game. You should play it. You should get your friends to play it.] Your friends and family love you and we all want you to be happy. You're not in it alone and we are all here with you as you go.

As you are about to begin this chapter of your lives together, here's the third and final piece of advice, which comes from two wise men:

Be excellent to each other. [Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. This line was actually spoken by Rufus, who incidentally Mark portrayed in a play written by he and his friends.] This is really the only thing that you absolutely, positively, under all circumstances, must do.

I love you both and my blessings are yours.

Christy and Ben have written vows for each other. Christy, would you speak your vows?

Ben, would you speak your vows?

Tina, please give Christy the ring.

Christy, do you want to marry Ben?

Then do so, with our blessings.

Nima, please give Ben the ring.

Ben, do you want to marry Christy?

Then do so, with our blessings.

By the power vested in me by the great state of California and all of us, here together, I pronounce you husband and wife.

Christy's Vows

While our story may have begun at some random ResComp party, our journey together began a little over six years ago. [It's true, we don't know exactly when we first met] It didn’t take me long to realize that I loved you. It just felt natural as though it was something that had always been and would continue to be. In the time we’ve been together I’ve traveled with you, moved across the country, survived two East Coast winters and moved back to normal weather patterns with you. I’ve walked with you in our neighborhood and hiked up some pretty tall mountains. I’ve laughed with you, cried with you, sometimes while hiking those tall mountains, worked with you and played with you. We have created a partnership that is still young but respectful and meaningful. You have been my constant in our life together and if we should ever need to survive on an island I promise to give you a good trade on some wheat in exchange for some sheep. [In Settlers of Cataan one must trade items, wood, sheep, wheat, ore, brick with other players. Wheat can be very useful, few people win with sheep] Today in front of our family and friends I promise to continue this journey with you, to laugh, cry, work and play together. And most importantly I promise to love, listen, respect and continue our partnership with you all the days of our lives.

Ben's Vows
Most stories have one main character; ours has two. Our two characters have been sharing our lives for a while now, and it’s clear that together, we really do make one awesome story. You proved it by asking me out on our first non-date instead of the other way around! [A non-date is something that you go on where it's actually a date but you just don't want to jinx yourself so you call it a non-date instead.] I knew we had something good early on when a pause fell over our conversation while driving across the bridge and it was natural and felt like we had know each other for ages already! [Date #3, though Christy was still calling them non-dates] Since then, though some of our adventures may be a bit more severe than I intend, [Christy somehow seems to get injured in some way whenever Ben plans the hikes] we have stuck together through blisters and bears, [First big hike together Christy couldn't walk the next day due to massive blisters. The last hike we did before the wedding we had a bear encounter in Yosemite involving lots of yelling, throwing of rocks, growling (the bear, not us) and bear canisters making a remarkable resemblance to bongo drums] across the country and treacherous rock fields, even after trading wheat and then calling monopoly [classic Cataan move first instigated by Christy's youngest cousin, wherein one appears interested in needing wheat and then through cunning masked by innocence determines that everyone else has a lot and prior to finalizing any trades calls a monopoly thereby getting everyone's wheat for free. This move has led to multiple game grudges]. Every adventure is better for your company. In front of our family and friends, I promise to always adventure with you, persevere through the climbs and enjoy the waterfalls. We will laugh together, cry together, work together, and play together. And most importantly, I promise to love, listen, respect and continue our partnership with you all the days of our lives.

2010-10-03T22:17:00.001-07:00

Christy and I just finished filling out the online application for our marriage license. Here's what the county of Marin gave us as the completion screen:

Really? Ok, I get that maybe there are a number of wedding coordinators or marriage counselor or county clerks that need to go through the online marriage certificate flow. But you know, they can bookmark the start page. Do you really want the people filling out a marriage certificate thinking about the next time they'll have to do it already? Can't we have at least a few days of the belief that marriage really is for ever?

Thanks, Marin.

p.s. Nothing drives it home like filling out a state marriage license application. We're really getting married in less than 3 weeks! EXCITING!!!!! Cynicism about the state not withstanding, it's pretty cool we can apply online.

The Menu!

2010-09-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

We finalized the menu with our caterer, Insalatas. Here it is!

Salad: little gem lettuces with fall apples, toasted walnuts, and blue cheese

Entree: one of
- Roast loin of pork with sweet corn polenta, summer beans, fresh corn and chanterelles, glazed roasted figs, salsa verde and rich pork jus
- grilled filet of halibut, risotto of farro, baby shitake, shaved king trumpet mushrooms and herb salad
- Sweet corn polenta with haricot beans, succotash and a melange of wild mushrooms (vegetarian)
- Pasta with butter and parmesan (child's plate)
Desert: Cupcakes!
- classic vanilla
- bunny love (carrot)
- hummingbird (banana, pineapple, pecan)
- pumpkin bliss
- lemon kiss
- black bottom (chocolate)
- gingerbread (vegan)
Red wine, white wine, and champagne throughout.

Tasty!

Hotel Reservation Deadline, More Details

2010-09-14T23:52:00.001-07:00

We're less than 6 weeks from the big event! Things are starting to get down to that time when we really have to get our ducks in a row!

I just sent an email reminder to everyone that's coming from out of town that hotel reservations need to be made asap. We were only able to hold a bunch of rooms until one month (and one day) before the wedding - and that's a week from tomorrow! After that, we can't guarantee that rooms will be available. So get those reservations made!

While prepping the email reminder, I also got a first draft of the Things to Do page up and made a few small changes around the rest of the site.

If you haven't yet, RSVP online!

Hooray for two major milestones!

2010-08-17T22:49:00.000-07:00

What a relief! All told, we put in somewhere around 4 solid days of invitation arranging (and that's not counting the time we spent designing). The envelopes arrived first, so we got a weekend's head start addressing all of them. It was fun! We got to practice penmanship attempting to mimic the font used on the invitations themselves. The invitations didn't arrive until Friday, so we spent Friday night tearing them (they came in sheets printed 4-up), Saturday tearing and cutting the backing, Saturday and Sunday continuing the cutting and gluing the invitations onto the backing. The envelope assembling and stuffing lasted long into Sunday night.

Delivery was quick! I handed the envelopes over to the San Francisco Post Office on my walk into work on Monday morning and by midday Tuesday, we were getting reports that they had been delivered! Obviously, only to the folks in the Bay Area, but still. Just over 24hrs? For standard postage? That's hard to beat.

In addition to mailing the physical invitations, I took the code Neelesh and Sachin wrote for Sach's wedding RSVPs and adapted it to work for ours. I had to add in a new event and a new table and column to track food choices. It didn't take too long though. I stared at the code for a while on Sunday, then spent 4-5 hours Monday night, half an hour Tuesday morning (yay internet on the transbay AC transit!) and 2 hours Tuesday evening banging it into shape. The result is an RSVP engine that accommodates the needs of our wedding (food and Sunday's picnic) and has got CSS fitting it into our site perfectly! I'm quite happy with it. I also renewed my belief that I want to stay as far away from php as possible. Despite wishing for python, I bet I would have even settled for ruby. I can't knock it though; Neelesh did an admirable job given the constraints, and I got the code for free.

I am thankful for all the time from Sachin and Nirali in helping us get the invitations designed well, for Becky's time tearing and measuring and gluing, for Sachin's time banging on php and javascript, for Neelesh's code to start the whole process, and especially for getting to create this event with Christy. Sure, it's a lot of work, but we're having a blast!

Detail about hotels

2010-08-11T17:02:00.000-07:00

I added a bit more detail about pricing for the two hotels we've got listed, the Marin Suites and the Best Western Corte Madera Inn. Read all about it on the Places to Stay page.

People and Things

2010-07-25T20:00:00.000-07:00

We've added a Registry page, a Wedding Party page, and a page on names. The first is about us, the middle our Best People, and the last is back to us. Give them a read!

Google PageRank™ and our wedding site

2010-07-05T12:08:00.000-07:00

I was curious, today, how easily it would be for folks to find our wedding website without the URL. It was time for Google Spelunking. I searched on "ben and christy", "christy and ben", "ferlatte hartshorne", "ferlatte hartshorne wedding", "hartshorne ferlatte", and "hartshorne ferlatte wedding". Sadly, only one of these actually gave me the page I wanted as the first hit. (Ok, I'll accept that the result for christy and ben is appropriate, but they come up as the second hit for ben and christy; I'd like to come up as the second hit for christy and ben too.) Aside from whether my name or Christy's should come first, the one that bothered me is that "ferlatte hartshorne wedding" (it's traditional, when referring to a wedding, to describe it by bride's last name followed by the groom's) brought up the Siskiyou Daily News column (correctly) but not our website, and that article doesn't link to our website. This must be fixed.

First things first; nowhere on our website are our last names written out. It's no wonder it doesn't show up! The only place our last names appear is the image in the page header. Google can't read images! Ok, I added an alt tag to the image in the header 'alt="Ben Hartshorne and Christy Ferlatte"' and changed the title of the page (perhaps the most important bit for google) from "Ben and Christy" to "Ferlatte Hartshorne Wedding - Ben and Christy". Now, at least, our last names appear in the page in a way that Google can recognize them. Next I added the meta description tag, with this content: "Wedding website for the marriage of Christy Ferlatte and Ben Hartshorne, October 23rd 2010", adding our last names in a prominent (to the search engine) spot. Finally, to get the exact text of my search in the content of the page, I put in the second paragraph of page, "On these pages, you will find tales and tidbits for the Ferlatte Hartshorne wedding."

Now that the pages actually have our names, I need a little link love. Though this blog is rated weakly when referencing our main site (because it's affiliated), I can still use it to tell google that the Ferlatte Hartshorne Wedding phrase is well suited to our site. Describing the issue here, with all the different variants of the search up top, and including a link back to the site with the text I really want to push up in the page ranking, helps in a very self-referential kind of way. Merely discussing this problem gives google the context that will improve the page rank of the site. Yay! It's not enough though, and here's where you can help. If you want to link to our site, link to it by either "Ferlatte Hartshorne Wedding" or "Christy and Ben's Wedding". I'm already in 1st place for "Ben and Christy", so all I need is help bumping the other two searches.

Thanks!

2010-05-18T21:07:00.000-07:00

Christy and I spent our Saturday wandering from hotel to hotel in search of the best accommodations for you, our guests. Sadly nobody offered us champagne (though we did get to go have delicious gin & tonics with Bill and Tyra afterward...). We've put up short descriptions of the four places we've chosen on the Places to Stay page, along with maps showing where each one is. (Thanks to Harry Baily for showing me how to suppress the annoying label on the map indicators!) They all link to a shared map showing all relevant locations, as well as directions showing you how to get from place to place. Hooray for Google Maps! (I didn't know before that you could save not only places, but directions to a google map! I hope they're not too confusing, with all the lines everywhere. They all funnel to Sir Francis Drake, so it's not too bad.)

Next up, call all the hotel managers and see what sort of group rates we can negotiate!

Being traditional in a non-traditional way...

2010-04-27T21:57:00.000-07:00

So we have less than 6 months left to finish up wedding planning. All in all I think we've been doing a good job getting things done and not going crazy. Of course there is plenty left to do and I think sometimes neither of us realizes how much!
We had dinner with Ben's father tonight and after describing things that we had done so far for the wedding he commented on how we "were being traditional in a non-traditional way". That comment stuck with me and I realized that it was true thus far in our planning and choosing the things that we wanted to incorporate into our wedding.
We've been trying to stay true to our plan of supporting local business as much as possible and when we can't, making sure that those companies that we're supporting are doing good things. Of course sometimes that's not always possible, but we're trying our best!
Some of the things we've done so far:
I've ordered my dress, Ben's ordered his suit along with the best mens suits. ...Okay I guess we haven't gotten that many things checked off the list.
Some things that we've started but haven't completed have been working on the design of our invitations, our wedding bands, and figuring out which flavors of cupcakes we want (tough job but someone has to do it!). I've been doing some best women rangling and will be checking out bridesmaid dresses soon.

In search of a design

2010-04-12T22:33:00.000-07:00

We've been working on making a design for our invitations, reply cards, etc. Part of it is to incorporate the design that will be engraved on Christy's ring. All we have so far is the idea, but I spent some time playing with Illustrator. For the first one, I drew the design by hand and took a photo.

Next came the magic Illustrator "Live Trace". Once in Illustrator, I made it more regular. Finally I applied a different stroke:

That started to look too static, though, so I tried another approach. I took a picture of a jasmine flower, then traced that. The progression:

Well, at least I learned a bunch about Illustrator. I'm not sure if I'm any closer to having the right design for the invitations, but it's been fun!

1 year of engagement!

2010-04-06T14:56:00.000-07:00

March 28 was our 1 year anniversary of being engaged! A whole year! Which of course means that we only have 6 months left to finish up all of the planning...Yikes!
Regardless, in order to celebrate such a momentous day we decided to head out and enjoy the sunshine and partake in some geocaching (what else?!). We heading over to Sibley Park up on the other side of the Oakland Hills. The view was gorgeous and while there are few main trails in the park there are plenty of "mountain goat" trails going up the hills and ridges. Off of one of these trails was our intended geocache and a great view of the Bay. I found the cache first, while Ben was off admiring a circle of stones, which luckily for me meant that he was distracted while I opened the cache and slipped in an envelope with his name on it.
After announcing that I found the cache I handed it to Ben and told him to open it. Right on top was the envelope with 'Ben' written on it. "Hey look! Ben!", he said with no idea that it was actually for him. He opened it up and inside was this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maplebed/4474988123/
specially made for him out of rosewood and maple. (Ben had said he always had wanted a wooden ring made from rosewood)
While my plan of giving him his engagement ring wasn't nearly as elaborate as his plan for me (though I did have to keep the ring hidden for almost two months!) he was just as surprised!

Tentative Schedule Posted

2010-03-04T22:06:00.000-08:00

A few people have asked us what our schedule is for the weekend. When should folks show up? Well, the Bay Area is pretty awesome, and it'd be hard to show up too early or stay too long, but if we are really the only reason to come out, this schedule will help you out a bit. We added it to the pages in the Wedding section, but here is the short version for you RSS readers out there.

Sometime (tue-thurs?) during the week

Bourbon and Branch - drinks on the town for the young folk that arrive early

Friday

Evening Place and time TBD, rehearsal dinner

Saturday

Before 5:00pm show up at MAGC

5:00pm Ceremony

7:00pm Reception

10:00pm We get kicked out

Sunday

Late Morning Hang out in Tilden (weather permitting). BBQ, frisbee, actually get to talk to people, relax a bit on the grass, and make merry.

Monday

Off to New Zealand we go!!

Save the Date!

2010-02-14T20:49:00.000-08:00

We have emailed out the Save the Date!

Because I couldn't convince Google that I wasn't a spammer (that looks like spam, doesn't it?) I sent it from radix; this has the side effect of increasing the probability your mail client will treat it as spam. Go google! Anyway, the people who aren't seeing this page should check their spam boxes to see if the announcement made it there. ::sigh::

There's something slightly amusing about having sent this out on Valentine's day. Neither Christy nor I have ever really put much stock in the day, and we don't celebrate it in the way couples are supposed to. Even so, we rented snow shoes and went over to Castle Lake for a nice romp through the snow and had a wonderful time.

Save the Date!

Subscriptions

2010-02-07T17:14:00.000-08:00

I switched the RSS feed to Feedburner, in order to allow email-based subscriptions. I would bet that most of the people that might follow this blog won't have an RSS reader they use daily. Thanks, Feedburner.

I also updated the layout a bit so that there's no longer a 20px scroll wiggle room. That was an error in my CSS. Sorry... ;)

RSVP!

2010-01-04T21:49:00.000-08:00

This may or may not work. But it's kinda cool. Google docs lets you create a form that you drop in an iframe, and it populates the answers people give into a spreadsheet. So, our RSVP form automatically becomes a spreadsheet! It'll be interesting to see how easy that is to combine with the existing spreadsheet we've got going to track all our people.

Changed the flickr slideshows

2009-12-24T17:51:00.000-08:00

The flickr slideshow player I was using had the unfortunate habit of starting all the slideshows at once. I was sufficiently annoyed by it that I swapped them out for flickr's default slide show. Better now! Sadly it still forces the photos to sRGB instead of using the correct color space for each photo, so some of them appear horribly washed out.

The Website's Up!

2009-08-30T06:51:00.000-07:00

It's gotten to the point where there's enough up at benandchristy.net that we're starting to tell people about it.

Hooray!