...or they're still sitting in the Dunwoody Post Office. Judging by this morning's events, I won't be able to relax until I start hearing from people that invitations have been received. Believe me when I say the invitation portion of this wedding planning has easily been the most stressful. First of all, I was dealing with more than double the amount of invitations I ever thought we would have (Bryan took me from a small wedding to borderline-massive). But aside from being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity, as you all know, getting the postage necessary to send all of this was another ordeal. The stamps did finally arrive on Saturday and last night, when Bryan and I returned from North Carolina, I sat and proceeded to put the finishing touches on the invitations.
Two-hundred and twenty-two stamps later (yes, that's 111 invitations), I was ready.
I arrived at the post office at 9 a.m. this morning (which is when they open) with my huge box of invitations to find a nice long line waiting for me. To put this in context, I am a person that is used to getting to work by, usually, between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. So for me to still be in Dunwoody at 9 a.m. made me feel slightly out of sorts. Regardless, I waited patiently in line and was finally called up to a dapper-looking gentleman. I told him that I had 111 invitations that I would like to have hand-stamped so that they don't get beaten up going through the meter. "Well, we can hand-stamp them, but they might still run them through - there's no guarantee," he told me. (Sidenote: why would they run them through if they've already been hand-stamped? Confused, but not willing to spend the time asking about the weird procedures of the post office, I told him that this was fine, but I still wanted them hand-stamped.)
He turned to a woman that appeared to be a supervisor who then led me to another portion of the counter. I was handed a stamp (no ink - just a stamp) and put to work. So I thought of all the postmarks I've ever seen on envelopes and was trying to strategize where it could look the prettiest. "You have to cover both stamps," the gentleman said. Fantastic. So I have these pretty wedding stamps and now I get to mark them up. Awesome. So I began stamping...and stamping...and stamping some more. At different points in time I had to wait for the supervisor lady to come back to request more ink (some of the stamps were coming out really light and it was making me nervous). Of course other stamps came out really dark and even though I was trying to allow adequate time for them to dry, I was running out of room and was piling one invitation on top of another - guaranteed to be a hot, red-ink mess.
Finally, I was done. Another woman came over and told me to leave my box. My fear? That they'll seal up the box I was using to store the invitations (with the invitations inside!) and ship it to the address on the box (they would end up at La Belle Weddings). I was never dealing with the same person at any given time while I was there (which scares me) and on top of it, I was over 40 minutes later than I wanted to be for work!
But the good news is, they are at the post office at the very least. Now, let's just hope the invitations arrive to their intended addressees intact and not looking too rough. They looked great as I said good-bye to them today. Now it's time for the USPS to work their magic. According to the post office, our invitees as far North as New York should be getting their invitations on Thursday. I'm imagining our in-town invitees will maybe be a day ahead.
The RSVP cards indicate I want an answer by September 1st. It was the beginning of JULY when I started the invitation process, so September 1st seemed reasonable. Let's just say if I don't hear from you by September 15th, I'm going to panic and start calling people. If you respond to me by my original deadline (the 1st), this will make me very happy (favors and programs depend on getting a count!).
I do want to share some pictures from this past weekend's beautiful wedding at the Raffaldini Vineyards in Jonesville, NC. But I will have to do that from the comfort of our own couch later. Bryan mentioned this morning that it's time to book the honeymoon, so hopefully that's the next bit of news I will have. Until then, it's time for me to go run through some more lab exercises!
No comments:
Post a Comment