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).

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.