It’s been another week without posts, mainly because I was working on moving Mum’s blog over to a self-hosted platform and transferring her from Blogger to WordPress. The main reason was her love of podcasting - while there are a lot of services out there that offer free podcast hosting, such as Evoca, they have limited numbers of minutes available. Mum has filled up several free accounts, so we needed to move her to a permanent home.

After doing a bit of research, and seeing the WordPress plugin that Grandad has been using, I decided that a move to WordPress was going to be in order if this was all to work. Luckily, the latest version of WordPress (2.2) has be written to cope with the import from ‘New’ Blogger accounts, so the transfer was pretty painless in the end.

I’ve selected a nice summery clean theme for Mum, which her visitors seem to like, but she’s not so sure herself. Still, since there are so many themes available out there, it will be easy to switch her over to another one if she changes her mind. The new Widgets area in the latest install makes it easy to rearrange the Sidebar info, be that over the one or two sidebars that you have in your chosen theme.

Mum’s using Audacity to record her Podcasts, and I’ve provided her with a bunch of tutorials so that hopefully she will take the next step and be able to edit her recordings if it’s needed. At the moment her podcasts (while interesting) are straight read-throughs of blog posts. I like this, as it adds feeling and additional elements to the post and you feel like it’s a memory being told just for you.

The podcasts are then being exported as mp3 files and loaded to my hosting account. There’s a great little plugin for WordPress that I found called simply ‘Audio Player’ that allows the mp3 to be called with a simple tag. I wanted to keep things simple for Mum and have as few steps in the process as possible, especially since I only had a few hours to teach her the new method. She seems to be quite comfortable with it and we’ve had a few podcasts already this week.

Not one to be outdone by his mother-in-law, George spent yesterday evening playing with his theme and upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. He’s made a few changes, mainly to his sidebars, but has had some issues that he’s been unable to resolve, which mean that sometimes the sidebars appear and sometimes not. Hopefully as he posts some more, NOT using the Rich Text Editor, these will resolve themselves.

Oh God, I’ve been meaning and promising to post this for ages, and now that the wedding is out of the way I no longer have an excuse!

Our wedding was originally planned for 120 people, but as a lot of them were from overseas we ended up with 85 at the ceremony and meal. But anyhow, it was still kept to under €10k, which in today’s world is something of a miracle. I can’t guarantee that you can do the same for your wedding, but here are a few tips that might help (and a few geek notes along the way…)

Firstly, find out who in your friends and family you can tap for expertise. Send out a general call to all you know asking for advice, recommendations and suggestions for service providers. To that end, here are my top ten money saving tips!

1. I was able to ask my mother (grannymar) who is an excellent seamstress to make my wedding outfit, and as you can see - she did me proud!
2. My cousin, RichardM, is a wedding photographer. I didn’t want too many formal shots or any ’staged funny’ shots, so going to someone I was comfortable with was a great help, I could be completely clear with him. Most important advice here, have a clear list of any family/friends shots you really want and make sure they know they are needed. Give a copy of this list to the photographer, bestman and chief bridesmaid so that they can locate people in advance and therefore avoid stress for yourself.
3. My aunt is a florist so I was able to get my bouquet from her. Research in advance what styles and colours you would like and have an idea about the size - I went for side plate size (photos will follow soon), but what I hadn’t realised was just how heavy the bouquet would be by the end of holding it for an hour of photos.
4. Ask around and see if anyone knows a D.J. or band and compare rates. Try to see the band/D.J. at a previous gig if possible and give them any requests at least two weeks in advance. Having both a D.J. and band will push the costs up to well over €1000, we went with D.J. only and it was €350 for the night - a massive saving. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the music and the floor was crowded all night.
5. Make your own invitations. We went with plain card and designed and decorated our own, but you can also buy packs that come with invite, menu, placecards etc. Try and find out if anyone you know does calligraphy, always looks best on the placecards.
6. Take the headache out of doing your seating plan and managing your RSVP by using simpleseating.com it automatically takes people who you mark as not coming off the table assignment and displays everything in a nice visual manner. Also makes it easy to share your seating plan with your wedding planner / mother / groom wherever you are.
7. Check our the corkage charges at the reception venue. We found that it was cheaper to bring our own wine and let them open as many bottles as needed. I actually went to Lidl during one of their wine sales and picked up 24 white and 24 red and they went down a storm. Even if it doesn’t save you any money, it gives you more flexibility in your wine choice. We also brought soft drinks for the children and non-drinkers, hotels will normally not charge corkage on these.
8. Serve your wedding cake as your dessert. We cut the cake before dinner and then it was plated and served to the guests as dessert, which resulted in a saving of €1.50 per person to us! It may seem small, but all the little savings soon add up!
9. Decorate with helium ballons instead of flowers. Part of our hotel reception package included them putting flowers on all the tables, but I wasn’t sure about them fitting in with my colour scheme. I contacted a local party equipment firm (and availed of my work discount of 10%) and they decorated the function room for me for €250. This included a bunch of 4 on each of the tables, a small double arch over the cake table and a large twisty arch (solid ballons, no gaps) with flowers and netting behind the top table. I then completed the look by printing up my own menus, and designing my own favours (tall, solid bottomed shot glasses with little wedding themed stickers on them, filled with mini-eggs - because I hate sugared almonds!) and scattering little hearts in purple & silver over the tables (these were my colours).
10. Our biggest saving overall for the reception was doing buffet food instead of serving to the tables. We saved over €20 per person by doing this and no-one complained at all, in fact some people were seen to head up for second and even third helpings! People were able to pick and choose what they wanted from the hot and cold food selections, and they still served the top table so that the parents didn’t need to get up.

Get wedding insurance! Due to illness in George’s family, we were considering having to move the wedding date (luckily we didn’t have to). In the case of anything going wrong you’ll be incredibly glad that you bought the insurance. Shop around online and you can pick up coverage for a €20k wedding for as little as €200.Now for the geeky stuff as promised!

We used WeddingWishlist.ie to put together a nice little wedding website with the ceremony and reception info, accommodation, maps and our wedding registry. The choice of shops to choose from for the wedding is limited, but the cool thing is that you can also set up ‘Couple Funds’ which your guests can contribute to. We did this for our honeymoon hotels, grand prix tickets and our ‘new flooring funds’ for our new house.

Finally, on my blog I used a nice little applet from whenismywedding.com to count down the days to the wedding date - handy so that you can keep a track of just how many days you have left to panic!

I hope that this info is of use to some of you out there, and if you have any questions then just leave them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them!

I’ve had various drafts of this post floating around my head for a while, but I was pushed into action this week by a post by Flirtysomething (which has since been removed) - she linked to an article in the Sindo and asked if it was similar to one of her blog posts. Well, yes, it’s a bit similar, but the fact is if you talk to anyone about weddings in this country then those are the points and stories that are going to be told…

Flirty’s original post on the subject can be found here, and like all writing and commentary on the topic of weddings, tends to make me cringe. ‘The average cost of an Irish wedding is 25k’, ‘Couples going into debt’, ‘Competitive Wedding Syndrome’, etc, etc… Each and every bridal magazine we pick up is exhorting that we should have the best of the best at our weddings, hotels push their expensive packages and bridal gowns are getting more dramatic and more expensive every time I look.

I can’t believe the amount of money that people are spending on weddings these days. I can’t for the life of me consider in any way spending 25 or 30k on one day of my life… Why would you want to put yourself or your parents into debt for the sake of that? In planning my wedding this year, I’ve been focusing on three things:

1. Don’t turn into a bridezilla
2. Find a way to invite everyone that I & the hubbie want there on the day.
3. Keep the cost of the wedding to under 10k.

Not becoming bridezilla is a difficult one, everyone wants to have input into the planning process, guest list etc. The key thing to remember here is that the person paying for the wedding pretty much gets final say, so if you’re the sort of people that run to your parents for money, then you’ve all but given them carte blanche to control the proceedings. In my case, it was myself and my hubbie that were paying for the majority, so we’ve been the ones to make the decisions.

Another key point is to ask the two sets of parents to provide the names of the people they would like to see on the guest list, ONCE. i.e. they can give you one list of names and that’s their last chance at it. They will be worried about leaving people off, so will think longer and harder about it. Make it clear to them that the guest list is at your discretion and the names they suggest may or may not be rejected. An alternative is to suggest that they pay for the dinner/drinks of anyone additional that they wish to invite, this keeps you within your original budget.

Finding a way to invite everyone that the bride and groom want there is harder than it seems. You will often prefer one set of cousins to another, but it’s hard to declare that by sending invites to one set and none to others. The tradition in my family is to invite aunts & uncles to the full day and cousins to the evening. I made exceptions in two cases - my favourite cousin will be one of my bridesmaids and her sister is traveling over from the UK, so there’s no point in her only coming for the evening. Most of the rest of my cousins are a lot closer geographically speaking, so it will be easier for them.
As for the final point - how to keep a wedding for 120 people to under €10k in cost - well it’s a whole other story in itself, so I’ll keep that for a future post or two… Plenty of tips and tricks on the way soon!

The wonderful K8 the GR8 over at cackaloo.com sent me this meme over a month ago now, but I’ve been so busy that I’ve let it slip until now… Sorry K8!

1. What period of history would you most like to have lived in and why?

It’s a hard choice, maybe the sixties for the sex, drugs & rock ‘n’ roll and those groovy fashions; or hanging with the American beatnik poets of the 50’s while watching the growth of the civil rights movement…

But I’d have to be really sad and say that I’m such a geek at heart that I wish I was a true generation X-er. To have been a child of the late 60’s/early 70’s, seen the economic boom and technological development of the 80’s and had the chance to be part of the early stages of the internet. Born in 1978, I straddle Generations X & Y and identify with both of them. I love all the new technologies around the place and couldn’t live without the internet, but I wasn’t born when Star Wars first came out and didn’t use early computers, unlike most of the people I’m friends with…

2. If you were abducted by aliens who had never experienced ‘earth’ music
before, what one song would you play for them to demonstrate what music is
all about?

I think it would have to be one of the songs from the greatest ever live set, yet another thing I was too young to appreciate at the time… Queen playing at Live Aid in 1984. It’s a close call between ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or ‘We Will Rock You’ or ‘We Are The Champions’ but I think I’ll go with ‘Radio Ga Ga’ in the end for the pure crowd participation!

3. If you were to be re-incarnated as an animal, which would you choose to
be?

I’m allergic to cats in this lifetime, but I’d love to be re-incarnated as one - to stretch and sun yourself all day while humans fetched you food on demand…

4. If you had to be stranded on a desert island with any person from the
past, present or future for a whole year, who would you choose?

I think that the only person that I’d be able to stand for a whole year would be my new hubbie - but since I only got married two days ago, I’m kinda obliged on this one! But seriously, I love him to bits and he’s the only one that can deal with me longterm!

5. What was your most embarassing moment?

It’s a while back now, but I was involved in church youth groups and choirs when I was younger. In my teenage years we were asked to perform as the singing group on RTE’s Sunday morning service. On the day one of the two lead singers was sick and I was thrown in at the last moment. Those who know me are aware that my singing ranges from very good to very bad… At the very end of the service as they were fading into credits the sound guy really caught me out as he dropped all the microphone volumes at the end with the exception of mine, just as I hit a really bum note! This was the final sound from the service just as the credits rolled and was really noticeable - and I got slagged about it for years after!

So now I need to pass this meme along, I hereby call out:

Grannymar
The Hubbie
Conor O’Neill
Keith

First, background: Over the last few years grannymar has been worried by the introduction of water charges/rates in Northern Ireland in 07/08. The plan was not to install water meters and she would have ended up being charged as much as a family of four!

Today she sent a mail with some good news, sourced from the BBC:

Proposed new water charges will not be introduced in 2007-2008, First Minister Ian Paisley has said.
The £75m cost of the move will be paid for from extra funds negotiated from Chancellor Gordon Brown.

The decision was taken as the new power-sharing executive met for the first time at Stormont in Belfast.

Mr Paisley said the executive had decided to conduct a review to address financing water and sewerage services, to be completed by the autumn.

He said not imposing the charges would save the average Northern Ireland household £100 in the year ahead.
(snip for length)

There was a wonderful image that ran alongside the article, I have to say that growing up in Northern Ireland I never thought that I would EVER see anything like this…

Gerry over at UnLaoised also had a good image of the new Assembly members today - it made me laugh and reminded me of the (slightly) sick sense of humour that we have in NI…

Every time I drive home to see grannymar, on the run into Belfast you pass the infamous Milltown Cemetery on the left (where Michael Stone killed 3 people and injured 60 during an IRA in 1988). What always makes me grin however, is that on the opposite side of the road in an industrial estate fringing the motorway is a business called Armatile - an obvious play on the Armalite weapons manufacturer, whose guns have figured heavily in the history of NI… but then no matter how bleak it got, we could always poke fun at ourselves.

Still, it’s good that those dark days seem to be pretty much behind us now…

Bonus link: The Armalite and the ballot box strategy

My mum, grannymar, has uploaded a wonderful couple of emotional podcasts over at her site.

She talks about ‘Our John’ and the joys and struggles that he encountered during his turbulent life. I cried, a lot, while listening to these.

For me, this is why I wanted to get her into blogging/podcasting in the first place. Having lost my father to cancer when I was 19 years old and never knowing my paternal grandparents, I want to ensure that any future children of mine get a chance to hear the stories I heard sitting on my parents knees… I don’t trust myself to get all the details correct, so with Mum recording them they will be faithfully retold in the future for generations to come.

When I was talking to Martine at the weekend she was speaking about the heatwave that France is facing at this time… it’s not as bad as the one during 2003, but still pretty severe all the same… I was thinking today about the differences in language and how we describe this period of year:

In the English speaking world it’s called the “Dog Days of Summer” - not because of dogs lying around quietly trying to find some shade to relax in as the word suggests visually, but rather because it is during this time frame that the sun rises and sets at the same time as Sirius - the largest and brightest star in the Canis (dog in latin) Major constellation. In French, the word canicule, from the latin canis, designates this hottest period of the year. I love the pronounciation of that word - ‘heatwave’, ‘dog days’ sound soft and inviting, but canicule is a much harsher word, evoking the hardship it brings to France… It also makes me think of a grumbling Scottish person who ‘canny cool’ down…

Thoughts go out to Mum, who had a bit of a tumble in the garden and is now sporting a spiffy cast on her right arm…

and if that wasn’t enough to deal with, she then woke up the morning after to find this little friend in her bed…

What I’m reading today:
* Still plugging through the back posts on Petite Anglaise, i only wish there were more hours in the day to spend here…
* Wired’s Guide to making the most of your digital life
* Summer recipes on Martha Stewart - may as well BBQ this weekend if the weather is good…

What I’m listening to today:
* George’s mad picks on Pandora, he says he’s in love with it - should I be worried?
* My Italian course from Linguaphone, purchased cheap thanks to the Daily Mail (useful for once!).

That was a good weekend, even if it did pass too quickly!

We got all the household stuff out of the way in the morning as George had his assessment at the gym on Sat afternoon - his workouts are going really well, as are mine and we’re both building up more endurance and stamina - I just hope that we start to see some more obvious results soon.

We’ve also started tracking our daily calorie intakes on spreadsheets designed by Jeremy Zawodny, which uses some cool 5-day averages and monitors our weight, so it should be useful to help us keep tracking our progress! We’re pulling the calorie info from CalorieKing and so far it’s encouraging, we’re both tracking under 2000 calories per day, and are buring about 300 or more of those off with each trip to the gym (every other day at this point). I’m fairly sure that we’re just creating muscle at this point, so hopefully our weights (and circumferences) will start falling now in month 2!!

On Sunday we headed down to Laois for our first full dinner with Avril & Robert since they moved into their new house - it’s really shaping up and it’s gorgeous! We sat down to a great roast pork, with oodles of lovely crackling - I was practically fighting with the kids over it.

Dinner finished with “Eton Mess” - I’ve never had it before but it was a gorgeous, easy to make dessert - some recipes below:

Eton Mess - strawberry, no yoghurt
Eton Mess - raspberry, no cream
Eton Mess - like Avril’s, except she uses Dark Rum instead

from the story of my holiday, anyway…

I was ranting at G today about Mary Harney and he was sick of hearing me go on so he told me to “Blog It”, which now seems to be the house standard response to a rant you don’t want to hear!

We were talking about the smoking ban over here and in the UK, and how they are talking of taking it further. I think that the Irish smokers have been mostly excellent in adapting to the ban - and the pubs that have accommodated them are doing well because of that.

IMHO, if they try to ban cigarettes outright, i will be up in arms about it, unless they ban alcohol outright as well. Alcohol related admissions account for 40% of all hospital emergency admissions and use up way more government resources, so why is the Irish government not trying to do something about that as well? Apparently it’s an offence in this country to serve alcohol to an intoxicated person, but when was the last time you heard of a publican being convicted of that charge. If you go to nearly any city center pub you will see people falling over drunk, someone must have served them enough alcohol to let them get like that…

Anyway I started yammering about Mary Harney, so I should really get to the point! Mary is the government minister for health in this country and she is massively overweight. I’m not kidding here, the woman’s health is at risk, she is so fat. Exactly what kind of message is the government sending to their populace here? Surely with the image consultants that the government uses they could get someone to talk to her and get her on a diet?

I mention this ‘cos my friend Triona is doing WeightWatchers at the moment and she’s doing really well, with over a stone lost to date and she’s looking fantastic. Another friend of ours has also lost three stone this way and the message that they all send is that it is possible. So come on Mary, get thee to your local meeting and lose some of that blubber - set a better example to your country!

Third day of the holidays and my first blog from George’s PDA phone. It’s wierd typing on these teeny keys, feels almost like texting instead of typing…

Today was a great day, we woke up late and started planning our week off. tomorrow we are going to look at an apartment in the morning and then off to Jonnie Foxes Pub for lunch and off to Glendalough for a walk afterwards.

Wednesday we will go up to see my Mum in Ballyclare and stay there until Friday. Thursday I plan to take G up to the Giant’s Causeway, Dunluce Castle and the Bushmills Whiskey Distillery. He’s never been around the North Coast before so it will all be new to him.

I’m really relaxed compared to the last couple of months, just the thought of not having to head in to work for the next few days feels so good. And speaking of work, i finally got news on the new job. It’s been offered to me and now we simply need to talk about the package.

In other news, G is still off the ciggies and is doing well. We hope to run down to see his parents this weekend.