I know that a lot of you are eager to see photos of the wedding, and I’m happy to announce we just put them up on Charles’ flickr site.  Thanks so much to Jesse Blanner whose gift to us was to take all of these photos!

Before I go on, if any of you have pictures that you’d like to share with us, you’re welcome to send them our way!  If you have digital pics, email is always best (check out my new email address: erin.eldermire@cornell.edu).  But the good ol’ snail mail method works as well as ever, too (543 Brooktondale Rd, Brooktondale,  NY 14817)

Click here to see the whole set.  Enjoy!

From a recent email:

“I am wondering what the overall dress will be so I can plan to don clothes accordingly; i.e. we don’t want to over or under dress…  What do you envision?  Charles, will you be wearing a suit or a tux – or neither?  Just curious!  Another of those silly details questions I’m sure you’ve gotten plenty of…:

One word: nicely-casual.  OK, it’s two words, but it describes what we’re after.  Here’s the way the bride broke it down in a recent email :

• Rehearsal Dinner – super casual – flip flops and shorts encouraged.
• Wedding/Reception – nicely casual – dress comfortably, but with a nice touch (anybody ever see one of those tuxedo t-shirts?  Classy!)  Erin will be wearing a wedding dress, the bridal party will be wearing dresses of their own choosing, and the groomsmen will be wearing relaxed collared shirts with comfortable trousers (and probably shoes)
• General dress for Ithaca – light jacket for evenings and mornings.  Swimming suit – beautiful swimming areas all around, and swimming possible at rehearsal dinner, and kids (and spunky adults) might really like to get in the water as the rehearsal dinner is on the lake. Check the weather before you come-it has been cool the last few days but typical temperatures in late August range in the mid-80s during the day and down into the 50s at night.

Safe travels and see you in Ithaca soon!

Just a quick post to let you know that we’ve updated the gift registry with a charitable giving option:

We’ll each be riding over 100 miles this coming September around Cayuga Lake in an effort to raise support for the Southern Tier AIDS Program (click here to see an interactive map of the course) with our team “The Porch Surfers”.  Last year’s ride raised over $250K, and we’re hoping to help them break another record this year.

Donating to the cause is a worthy and appreciated wedding gift as well, and we wouldn’t have added this option to our registry if it wasn’t something we would greatly appreciate and a cause we feel needs our support!

We hope that you will consider supporting us in this effort–feel free to email us if you have any questions! You can check our online donation site where it is possible to donate securely online. Thanks again for thinking of us-we can’t wait to see you all in just under a month!

Have you made your hotel reservation yet? If not, now is the time to do so! Labor Day Weekend is a pretty busy time of year in these parts, so planning ahead can never hurt. We’ve also received messages from hotels where we reserved rooms that they will be releasing the unreserved rooms in our block soon (July 25th for most of them). So if you haven’t reserved a spot to rest your weary head at night, be sure to act soon!

Cartoon courtesy of A Cyclist’s Life in Tenerife (Canary Islands)

The date is getting close and planning/implementation is starting to go into overdrive! Hopefully we’ll make it to the end of August with a smile still on our faces One thing that keeps us smiling is thinking about all of you heading to Ithaca for our wedding, and we’ve been thinking of the extraordinary distances that you’ll be traveling to get here. To help give you an idea about the geographical spread of the attendees we made a Google Map and a word cloud to get a better sense of the spread as well as the proportional representation of different states at the wedding (click the map for a larger interactive version):

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times: “When are you going to register?”  It’s been a quandary for us. We’ve pretty much got everything we actually need (after 8 years together we’ve accumulated our fair share of detritus), but we’re continually amazed at the desire of people to continue to give, despite having to pay and arm and a leg just to make your way to the middle of nowhere, NY (Ithaca, that is, one of Outside magazine’s 20 best towns in the country…)  So, for those of you hell-bent on making sure the newlyweds are well-provisioned, we’ve tried to make it easy on you.

Click on over to the “Gift Registry” Tab and browse away!

If consumer goods aren’t really your style, we are also participating in the AIDS Ride for Life bike ride: a 100-mile ride around Cayuga Lake to raise funds for HIV/AIDS services in NY’s Southern Tier.  We’ll be putting together a fundraising page soon (more quickly than we put together our gift registry!) and will put a link to it there.

Hope you are well!  We’re counting down the days…

Many of you have read or heard the story of our engagement on a volcano in Costa Rica–if you haven’t, I suggest you click over to erin’s account on her blog, which was written soon after it all happened.  To give you a flavor of what that volcano looks like, I’ve plotted the location of where we mutually proposed to each other, and to the spot where we took pictures (after retreating from the wind!).  You can check it out by clicking on the above picture from Google Earth.

I’ve also posted a video taken from near the summit to give you some idea of what it was like on that beautiful day, and a few pictures from that weekend that illustrate our frame of mind (happy!).

…because we’ll have Los Bandidos playing for the wedding reception! That’s right, this friendly and festive band will keep our feet moving with latin and swing music. They are a seven-piece band which boasts members from both the Ithaca College and Cornell University Jazz Departments. On top of that, several members live in New York City and will be traveling here to make this happen. So thank you Los Bandidos – we look forward to it!

Yum!  We’ve finally finalized the menu for the reception, catered by local favorite Ithaca Bakery: chicken in a citrus-peppercorn sauce, black bean enchilada torte, garlic rosemary potatoes, ginger-lime carrots, salad, etc. etc. etc…The rehearsal dinner will be catered by Dinosaur BBQ, and will feature their well-known ribs, chicken, and plenty of tasty sides, too!  So start starving yourselves now, because we don’t want to have to find enough tupperware for leftovers–and don’t forget to leave room for dessert

Now that Erin has returned from a recent work trip to Argentina, and with roughly 5 months left before the day-of-reckoning, we’ve decided to begin our wedding preparations in earnest (i.e., no more lazing about in the hammock)!  We’ve surveyed the catering scene and are proud to say that Ithaca Bakery will be catering the wedding reception, and we will likely use the Ithaca Beer Company for our fizzy libations.  Other things we need to get going on:

•  What to wear?  Erin has decided on the color red for her bridesmaids, so ladies, feel free to start shopping for a red dress!  Groomsmen clothing is still undecided, though it has been decided that we will at least be wearing clothing…
• Insurance.  One of the weird things about renting the Farmer’s Market for a wedding is that we have to get a $1,000,000 insurance rider, basically in case we burn the thing down  
• Music.  To hire a band or not to hire a band, that is the question…
• Rings.  Self-explanatory.
• Register for gifts.  I’m leaning towards asking for a shotgun, but Erin is a little embarrassed by it…
• Weekend Festivities.  We think it would be fun to set up a couple of fun day trips for anyone that will be in town before the wedding.  As your travel plans become known, let us know when you’re getting to town!

Well–on that note, it’s time for me to finish my coffee and get this day going…