Um, What the heck happened?

For some reason, when Dan and I walk into restaurants, they always seem to seat us at the worst table in the place. It's always the table that's a little cramped, the one near the kitchen doors, the one the waitress never sees. We never know why this seems to always happen to us, but I would say it is just bad luck.

I have been back from New Orleans for over a month and you may have noticed that I have not mentioned our wedding planning once. People have been asking me about it all the time, and I usually give them a vague, "it's going well" and say we haven't set a date yet, but probably October.

Truth be told, the last few weeks, we have been laying out our plans as carefully and thoughtfully as one would build a house out of a deck of cards trying to get every detail into place. Despite our overly perfectionist-wedding planning ways, yesterday, the entire house fell down in one huge swoosh.

I came back from New Orleans with two top contenders for our wedding reception venue. Place #1 I absolutely loved, it was available in October, but was out of our price range. Place #2, I liked almost as much, was in our price range, but not available until Spring 2010. We spent the last four weeks meticulously weighing the pros and cons of each place. Our hearts were set on Place #1 and so we did everything we could to bring the cost down from cutting our guest list and playing with the menu to make it worth our while. We emailed the wedding coordinator at Place #1 constantly for weeks trying to make it work.

The moment where we thought we had everything figured out--we would get married on October 24 in a lovely church and have our (more affordable) reception at place #1--was the moment everything fell apart. In a course of the last few days:

We learn there is a trade show taking place in New Orleans our wedding weekend and most of the major hotels are booked already, so in a panic, we scramble to find a room block somewhere.

Our church tells us mere days before the deadline for our deposit that they cannot provide us with a local priest like they initially stated. We can't put down a deposit and hold the date without knowing if we have a priest to marry us.

The organization that oversees all the churches in New Orleans tells us in so many words that they won't help us get a local priest either.

After a week of trying to track him down, my hometown priest agrees to officiate our wedding but he is not available on October 24.

We contact Place #1 to change the date where we learn that the wedding coordinator who we've been emailing/talking to for the last four weeks is no longer working there. There is no record of our "hold" and the October 24 date was booked weeks ago and oh, and that in the week that the guy left, all the prices went up like 50%.

It's so horrible and ridiculous, that all we can do is laugh. This whole month of agonizing and planning was for nothing, we're basically at square 1. Place #2 appears to be pretty booked already for Spring 2010 so who knows when we will get married.

Still, I know this wedding will happen one day and yes, we're still into New Orleans, but at the rate this is going, it might not be for a long, long time.

I hope that Dan and I will have better luck at marriage than planning a wedding. Here's to a long and happy and lucky engagement!