Over this previous weekend, Alice and I were busy.

We went to Santa Barbara, did some outlet shopping, almost went to my friend Bryan’s birthday celebration (LA traffic, I’m not a fan), did some price comparison shopping for alcohol for the wedding, looked at invitations, had some amazing cheesesteaks (seriously, amazing) and most importantly, made some paper pomanders.

When you view these now and you’re getting an early preview of some of our wedding decorations.

At this point, we’re not sure how many of these we’re going to make and everywhere that we plan to hang them, but they will play a role in our decorations. (Not just because they take a while to make, but because they’re pretty.)

Here’s the low down: you take a ball of styrofoam, you take some tissue paper (turns out five for the small ones), group the tissue paper, fold it, use some wire to hold the paper together, fluff the paper and then put the fluffed papers in the styrofoam ball.

It’s not overly difficult (except when you forget to round the ends of the paper like I’ve done), but it’s just a little labor intensive.

Still though, they’re fun to make and we’re going to make a few more before the actual wedding so we have more pretty decorations (along with everything else we’re planning on using).

It was Halloween on Saturday and Alice and I decided it was time to carve pumpkins! Back when we went to the corn maze (a tropical vacation in October mind you), we also picked out some pumpkins to carve.

Ah Halloween, I love it.

It’s the official beginning of the holiday season – it turns a little cooler (finally), you get pepped up on candy, then there’s my birthday (holla!), Thanksgiving, Black Friday (I’m a big fan, Alice doesn’t want to go shopping with me, but still, it’s a ton of fun) and finally Christmas.

All the while, you’re eating lots of good stuff, meeting with friends, reconnecting with people you haven’t spoken with all year. Yup, all in all it’s a great time.

To start the whole ball rolling, there’s Halloween…and what says Halloween more than Peanuts and Garfield?

If you can think of something, let me know; but I’ll be impressed if you come up with something more.

Which means, as per tradition, I got out the Great Pumpkin and Garfield Halloween DVDs so that Alice and I could watch them.

As it turned out, Alice had never seen the Great Pumpkin before! On the one hand, I was shocked and appalled that anyone could grow up here and never have seen it, but on the other, I was excited to get to watch it with her for the first time (not just our first time together).

We watched it. We laughed. We cried. It was amazing.

Then we watched Garfield’s Halloween, another tear jerker — another amazing show.

Side note: for those of you who don’t know, I love Garfield and I love pirates. The fact that Garfield went as a pirate (Orange Beard, none other!) in his Halloween special has nothing to do with the fact that I love both (I swear! I mean, I was four when the special first aired [almost five!]).

Long story short, we watched some fine cartoons and heralded in the beginning of the holiday season in style with Charlie Brown and Garfield!

Now, bring on the candy candy candy!

Over the weekend, Alice and I went on a tropical vacation.

Alright, so it was less a tropical vacation as it was a corn maze and harvest festival — but there was corn, bamboo of the west! Seriously, nothing says the tropics like hiking through a forest and that’s exactly what we did.

When we first showed up to the maze, the very first thing they did was give us maps. I’ll admit it, I’m new to this whole maze thing having never done one before, but doesn’t a map defeat the purpose? We promptly ignored them.

We wandered into the corn, ran away from a few groups of families with kids and happily got ourselves good and lost. Then we started taking pictures left and right, imagining ourselves in a faraway place, not just down the street.

Naturally, I used the opportunity to test the waters with Alice and casually mentioned that we’d be honeymooning somewhere similar. I’m pretty sure she was onto my ruse, ’cause she didn’t flinch in saying that it’d be an amazing trip.

Eventually we made it out of the maze, took some pictures with a monster (it gets scary at night), had some lunch (very tasty, god bless festivals) and bought some pumpkins.

For out first tropical vacation, I’d say I’m pleased with the way everything transpired. No one was eaten by sharks, boats didn’t sink and there weren’t any hurricanes.

Really, how much more can you ask from the tropics?

So we went registering this last weekend — well, ok, we went registering Sunday night.

For those of you who’ve never been registering, I’ll give you the quick and dirty. You walk into wherever you’re going to register, let them know why you’re there, answer a few questions and then they set you loose in the store with a scanner.

This is where the fun starts.

Alice and I started a bit slow. We really didn’t know what we wanted to ask for, how much of anything we wanted or where we were going to put all of the new things we might eventually possibly get. To start, we looked at some crystal glasses, couldn’t decide if we liked them, couldn’t decide if they were of good quality, wandered into home section, looked at some towels, felt a bunch of towels (one must feel towels to determine quality) and eventually picked some after much debate.

By this point, we were both a little annoyed, I was kinda hungry and Alice had that, “I wanna get outta here” look in her eyes.

Then something happened…it was the miracle of registering. We started to worry less about stuff, started having a bit more fun and got down to business. An hour later, we’d scanned many, many different things, had traversed the store a couple of times and even returned to the crystal glasses and put them on our list (turns out they were nice, we just weren’t into the groove when we’d first looked at them).

Time was running short at Macy’s (we went there around 5pm, and we had to be at Crate & Barrel by 7pm), so we wrapped it up.

By the time we hit Crate & Barrel, we felt like old pros. We smiled and nodded as they did their introductory speech (it was a registry-only party, so we were only there with other couples, a good deal, if you can find it) and I was eyeing the free food (I still hadn’t eaten.

When they started giving us a guided tour of the store, Alice and I hung back and peeled off from the rest. We then proceeded to add many more, equally important items to our registry. Once we did a quick whirlwind around the store, added some fantastic items and ate lots of their free samples we were ready to roll.

It was finally dinnertime.

So our site is almost ready.

This site has taken us…well, a little while longer than I think we had thought it might take, but overall, we’re both pretty happy with how it’s turning out. (That’s right, I’m going to take the liberty to speak for Alice on this one).

We went through a few different drafts of sites before finally settling on this design and layout. Though, that’s not too surprising since we both work with websites everyday – you’d expect us to be opinionated, and we were!

With this hurdle almost out of the way, we’re going to then start tackling each of the tasks we have left before the wedding day.

Check back often, if nothing else changes, at least I’ll try to put up a new entry to entertain everyone out there.