i told myself i didn’t want to post any wedding-related bullshit on my personal tumblr (there’s a separate one where i can talk about all the bullshit and now feel like a total doof), but i really don’t know what to do.

a month ago, after coming back from b’s friend’s wedding, we decided we should start doing the wedding planning process, but for real. interviewing potential vendors, seeing venues, but mainly, finding someone to help plan the wedding details because (and there’s a because, since everyone.. but everyone who hears me talk about it seems to think me hiring a planner is ridiculous) with a full-time job that oftentimes requires evening hours, i can imagine myself being completely stressed out by everything. and it’s not what it’s supposed to be, right? this shouldn’t be stressful. it should be fun. it should be easy-peasy-lemon-jeezy. so in researching the idea of having a wedding planner, i realized that if you find the right one, he/she ends up paying for him/herself in the long run, whether it be financially (negotiating deals with vendors) or emotionally (no panic attacks close to the wedding? priceless!), it seemed to be a worthwhile person to invest in.

so there we went. we judged using a criteria of expertise, comfort, friendliness, and basically someone we wouldn’t feel weird about going to and asking stupid questions. fast forward some weeks and we’ve pretty much found our gal. she’s professional-sounding, friendly, comfortable to be around, and had a really off-kilter sense of humor. she was slightly out of our budget, but we were confident that this was it. a few days after meeting with her, we email her some questions we forgot to go over in our meeting, as well as requesting a customized quote for all of the items she would include in her planning package. days go by. a week goes by. she responds. says she’s really sorry for the late response as she’s been swamped with the beginning of wedding season. totally understandable. she gives us a quote for a package that is something like “so.. how about we price it out between our basic package and the intermediate one.” so we clarify some details in our email response back to her, after talking it over for a few days, and ask for sometime around a solid number. more days go by. weeks. two and a half weeks go by. at this point, we’ve met the last person in our list of wedding planners. we weren’t planning on meeting her, but figured we should meet everyone on our list just to give everyone a fair chance. she’s absolutely great. sweet, organized, and pretty much answers my emails in under 24 hours (sometimes within the hour). the only problem is that she’s not based in los angeles, although she’s planning to move here next year.

so after meeting the last planner, we decide to give the other planner a call. you know, the one who, at this point, still hadn’t responded to our email. b got her on the phone and she was surprised, saying that she thought her assistant had emailed us back last week (which b pointed out, was still two weeks after we emailed her). he said she seemed busy, but said that we were definitely a “priority in getting the ball rolling” and addressed some of our questions on the phone with him. b said that she left it with her trying to crunch numbers for us and that she’d get back to us with something close to a solid quote. the same day, we received an email from the last planner we had met, telling us what a delight it was meeting us and that attached was a quote she promised us when we met, a few days prior.

there are pros and cons to each. the anal-retentive in me worries about someone who takes more than a few days, nay weeks, to get back to your questions. i also worry about having someone negotiate contracts for me from local vendors who isn’t necessarily local to the area.

argh.