Monday, September 12, 2005

I am not, as the title suggests, high on drugs.
What I am "high" on is actually the aftermath of my ROM ceremony on Friday, the 9th of September.
Although there were a few hiccups during, preparation, everything went smoothly and I had my perfect ceremony.


The number of hours on planning the ceremony wasn't that much by all counts. Just that The Boyfriend...oops, it should be The Husband and I are both world class procrastinators. Why do things now when you can leave it to tomorrow?
It's a bad habit which I'm trying to kick. The Husband doesn't look like he wants to kick it anytime soon.


After the proposal, I discovered planning The Event was not a bed of roses.
Instead, I was fretting over the venue, the dress, the decorations, the tables and chairs, always the table and chairs, the food, the head count...countless stuff.
What transpired was this :

1) The venue had to be decided quickly. We had only 2 months to D-Day. Registration in the ROM office was strucked off immediately. Everything is over the internet now, and checking the date availability over the net, what struck me was this : Singapore sure has a lot of people wanting to get married. The dates were fully booked for the next 3 months! The latest date you could book was exactly 3 months later. So for 2 days, after checking the ROM website countless times, I knew the Singapore government has been successful in their campaign to encourage singles to get hitched. Either that or their web system was screwed.
Since ROM office is out (I was secretly jumping in joy then), we had to get an outside venue fast! Furthermore, the date we chose is a super popular date (9th September). Then it struck us that we had to get a solemnizer first. The Husband took care of that by calling 2 grassroot leaders in our constituency. The first didn't answer and the second said he was free on that date. Solemnizer checked!
Then the venue...hotels were beautiful but expensive. So we decided on a chalet. We hurriedly booked a chalet, and luckily for us, we could get a chalet by the poolside. Then the bad news that the pool would be drained during our stay there. But miracles happened. The second call The Husband made to the chalet another person said the pool would not be drained. Wow, they decided to cancel their draining for us! Yeah, right.

2) The dress and the shoes made me worry a little too. I thought I would probably shop for like 2 months and not get my dress and panic and get one I do not really like out of desperation. So my best buddy and I made plans to start shopping immediately. Actually it was an excuse for us to go shopping.
We got the dress and the shoes on the first shopping trip. Unbelievable and we were a little disappointed. No more excuses to go shopping. Then we thought : Who needs excuses to go shopping?
Then we remembered the big hole in our wallets from all the previous shopping trips. Best to leave shopping till when we feel reasonably rich again.


3) The food did give us some trouble. We decided to do catering and BBQ right from the start. So The Husband contacted the chalet catering service to ask for a quote. Then we made A Fatal Mistake. The Husband told them it was for a ROM ceremony and asked them for their rates for decorations too. First they said they do not do decorations, then 10 minutes later, they called back and said they would (coz we wanted catering for 60 peeps then). The quote they sent was a joke.
The food list was a list of finger foods with an astronomical price per pax, with a minimum of 60 pax. Who eats fishballs and fish fingers for dinner?!?!
Then they quoted the price for decorations in per pax too. What were they going to do? Decorate the guests?
So on to other caterers, after we got confirmation that we could use outside caterers in the chalet. We settled on one a friend had used before for her baby's first birthday.

4) Decorations had to be done. After browsing through some florists and looking at their sky high prices, we decided to Do-It-Ourselves. So we decided on ballons, streamers, ribbons and flowers. More on the flowers later.

5) Table and chairs, table and chairs...I almost cried and quarrelled with The Husband over these. We had NO table and chairs for the ROM ceremony. The Husband said he would take care of them and until like one week before the ceremony, he still had not confirm any table and chairs. After much surfing the net and looking for information (on his side) and throwing of tantrums (on my side) , we had the table and five chairs.

6) The Husband's clothes. Let's just say men hate shopping and with The Husband as a world class procrastinator, he was still looking for clothes to wear the day before we checked in the chalet. In the end, he wore a nice shirt and pants he already owned.

Finally, it was D-Day.
We checked into the chalet one day before so we could start decorating it. We immediately set to work, checking out the place and thinking of ideas. The deco team (you guys know who) and the 2 of us immediately set off to the florist after that. We bought roses and orchids and some pretty looking flowers that we had no idea what they were and loads of ribbons.
When we came back, we debated on how to keep the flowers. In the end we stuff them in the ice box. That was when we made Fatal Mistake Number 2. We forgot to set the temperature to the weakest and put the flowers in water....
So the next day, when I opened the ice box, what greeted me was rock hard frozen flowers. After letting them defrost, they drooped and became : Dead Flowers.
So there was a panicked call from me to one of the members of the deco-team to buy 6 red roses for the ROM table. We salvaged some of the roses and baby's breath but the rest were already in Flower Heaven.
The rest of the decorating went more smoothly, although there were still hiccups. Like, running out of streamers, balloons were really hard to tie up, balloons kept popping but we handled them well. In fact, compared to the Flower Tragedy, they hardly merited a bump on the road.

The planning did give me some moments of anxiety but for the most parts, it was moments of day-dreaming on how everything will end up eventually. And seriously, although The Husband disagrees, I thought all the trouble was worth it.

posted at 9:41 PM

posted by  Anonymous : July 18, 2006 6:01 PM