Viewing: the curry bride

Two years

Two can be such a beautiful number.

How has the second year been different from the first? In many little insignificant-yet-significant ways.

We have more things, more clothes, a new bookshelf by the entryway and new upholstery in the dining room. We color our hair less. Marlon weighs less (and dresses better, if you ask me). We switched bed sides. We fight much, much less than we did in our first year, despite me being somewhat less eager to please and prove myself as a wife. In fact, I don’t remember a single fight we had this year.

We are beginning to see our dreams slowly being fleshed out into reality. We have savings (!) and earn more as a unit. We’ve rented out our spare room. We don’t spend a bomb on groceries anymore. We do Iyengar yoga for beginners on Monday evenings. Actually, we exercise together, period. (Although we swim less often.) We cook together less often, but we still do sometimes, which I find extremely therapeutic and enjoyable. We are supposed to be closer to having a baby, but we keep moving the “deadline.”

I would like to be trite and cutesy and say that the only things that haven’t changed are the love and happiness of being married to my husband. But that wouldn’t be true, because they have — they’ve grown greater and deeper, and have simply become, in a word, more.

Happy second anniversary, sweetie. I love you!

Da who???

okay. so the reason i haven’t blogged about the wedding yet is that i want to select and upload all the photos first. which is way, way harder than it sounds. with four 4.7-gig dvds full of keepers from the dastardly dynamic dagooc brothers of mangored, it’s taking marlon and myself days to plow through everything.

there are tons of beautiful shots, and we’re having a hard time keeping it down to the 250 we’re allotted for the album. what i’m enjoying most, though, and find irrestible to blog, are the shots that definitely won’t make it into the album. and although i know you want to see pictures of the white dress, my glowing gorgeousness, etc etc, i know i won’t be able to sleep tonight without blogging about this mystery.

picture this: it’s a beautiful december afternoon in our little chapel in batangas, and our phenomenal photographers are attempting to take a lovely portrait of the mother of the bride in her gleaming golden dress.


or of little alexa tamayo, the pretenatually photogenic baby sister of my two flower girls dani and ela.


ngunit umihip ang masamang hangin. because instead, they wind up with a snap of…


MYSTERY CREATURE!!!


she’s not related to me. she’s not related to marlon. not a friend, and as far as i know, not a supplier.

SO WHO IN F*CK’S NAME IS THIS WOMAN????? ANSWER MEEEEE!!!!

in need of eye relief? check out some of the official wedding photos on mangored’s blog.

The day that was

before i start blogging, a sneak peek. switch on your speakers or put on your earphones — although i don’t expect anybody to know the song, it’s a gorgeous one.

on-site avp by mg digital video.

This is it

the past two weeks have been something else. sometimes a crazy looping roller coaster, sometimes an easy coast, sometimes a slow trudge, sometimes a frenzied skitter, sometimes a happy and joyful dance.

yet i know tomorrow will be nothing like the past two weeks. it will be nothing like the past, period.

so what will tomorrow be?

a smooth glide, a light step, and a leap into a future that was totally not going to happen.

wish me luck.

All botched up

so after weeks of looking at/re-editing/sending/following up/choosing pantone chips for/double-checking invites that looked like this, in (reddish-purple) plum and (teal-ish) turquoise…

my printer sends me these horrid chocolate brown and grass-green invites. one hundred fricking twenty of them.

at first i am stunned. then i flashback to the meticulous process (see above) i went through just to idiot-proof the design. then i whine about it to all the art directors at work, who, while deploring the color job, say it’s a kick-ass piece of work. this is why i love working in an office full of kick-ass creatives — my seatmate cecil did the layout for me for free. “maganda naman siya eh,” volunteers jl. “itapon mo na lang yung original file.”

then i get online and, with almost eerie calm, proceed to inform the owner of the print shop of the matter. after checking the damn things, he promptly offers me a free reprint, which is just as well. dahil kung hindi, aba pucha, one email to the phalanx of bridezillas in my egroup can potentially derail his business for at least a few months. you have no idea how seriously brides take supplier reviews. really.

since he vows to personally take responsibility for the outcome of the reprints, i am placated. really, if not for the service given me by the owner, i would be bashing this place to kingdom come. which is a shame, actually, because i was pretty happy with them until all this happened.

the reprints are done in a week, which is still too long a delay for me but what can you do. the print shop’s peace offering arrives — the colors are still not true to the original file. at this point, i am still not happy, but not willing to put off delivering the invites for another week. so i simply choose not to feel bad about anything i’m going to give my nearest and dearest, and accept the prints. i tell the owner as much. he feels bad about the whole thing and offers me free thank-you cards — a very gracious offer, which i am gracious (and penny-pinched) enough to consider.

now most of the invites are out, the guests are informed — and on the whole, pleased and wowed by them (except for one major drama). and that is that.

One year old

wow.


time has gone by so fast. the two people who got engaged one year ago today seem so different from who we are today. in a good way, of course.

wow. ang lapit na. or, in the language of a couple who’s had too many tearful farewells at airports, “just two more goodbyes!”

while sorting through photos of ourselves for the wedding slideshows, i came upon marlon’s picture of our paris trip, which i had totally forgotten that he’d taken. reminiscing through the photos was a beautiful way to celebrate the one-year anniversary of our engagement, and i’d like to share some of my favorite shots with you.


(yes that’s a gargoyle on the left. marlon took this from the notre dame church tower.)

Happy house

during the glee club’s tour of Europe in 2000, seventeen of us were thrown together into a multi-room nunnery in koeln, germany, left to fend for ourselves with no host parents – just a bunch of groceries, a kitchenette, the erratic and befuddled but well-meaning protection of a filipina we soon nicknamed tita lost (you can guess why), and each other.

maybe it was because we felt we had to compensate for our kawawa-ness (“ang saya-saya namin kahit wala kaming hosts!”) or because we really did have fun, but we soon came to call ourselves the happy house.

since then, the term “happy house” has been passed down in glee club/acs tour tradition as a house, typically small, crammed full with too many self-reliant, noisy, happy ateneans.

i don’t know why i chose this title for this post. it’s funny that my idea of a happy house is one that’s stuffed full of friends. because pretty soon, i’m going to start making a happy house of my own, with just two people rattling around in it – marlon and myself.

setting up our own home is one of the things i’m really looking forward to about moving to