#postagefail

YA OKAY.  So I've been MIA on the blog the last little while.  It's tax season....back off!  Wait!  Don't go.  Please keep reading.....

The wedding is less than three months away, and while it's not too bad yet, I can feel the stress creeping up and ready to strike.  We're in the "three months before" category of our wedding checklist now and all of a sudden the number of items on the to-do list triples.  And inevitably, as soon as you feel like you've checked something off the list as done, it just reappears for you to "confirm" it again in another month or creates three more things you have to do.  Wedding planning is fun, don't get me wrong, but it can feel never ending at times!

I do have wonderful news in that we sent our wedding invitations out this past weekend.  Our stationer Ashley did such a wonderful, beautiful job, and I couldn't be happier with how they turned out.  Here's a peek!

Front...

Inside...

 

 

The whole beautiful set!

When I started addressing the invitations, I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of anxiety because first, handwriting on beautiful paper is nerve wracking because you want it to look perfect and second, I was deathly afraid we would miss someone on the list.  Thankfully my wonderful fiance put together a foolproof spreadsheet with all the addresses and guests and it was easy to double and triple check the list.  (Spreadsheet whiz....reason #6548 that I adore Eric!)

What I didn't anticipate was all the bloody problems we would have with postage!  (Seriously, who mails anything anymore.  Whatever.)  First of all, if you want to put a stamp on something and you go to a post office to buy a stamp, these are your choices:

1.  Gophers.

2.  The Queen of England.

3.  Winnipeg Jets logo.

Wow, really?  So I have to slap a rodent on our beautiful wedding invitations, fine, whatever, not a big deal.

Then Eric smartly realizes that the invitations, with their heavy cardstock, probably aren't going to be the same price as a normal letter being mailed due to their weight.  So after I've lovingly placed a gopher stamp on all the wedding invitiations, I take them to the post office and the girl working looks at me as if I'm just the dumbest human being on the planet and is like, "ya, they don't have near enough postage on them".  Wonderful.  So I go to buy 100 more gopher stamps (potentially bringing the total number of gopher stamps purchased to 200 more than I ever wanted to buy) and they are out of gophers.  What?  So now I WANT the gopher stamps and I can't even get them?!  This is what I've been reduced to?  At this point I don't even care anymore so ultimately, the invitations get sent out with the Queen of England mean-mugging three gophers on the upper right hand corner of the envelope.

So they all finally get mailed, and I start receiving text messages from our guests letting me know how nice they think the invitations are, and I start breathing a sigh of relief that my postage woes are over and everything has ended up where it should have.

 

Success.

Then Canada Post decides it's not quite through with me yet, and rears its ugly head again in the form of my reply cards.  Yes, reply cards.  You'd think with my views on mail as an old, antiquated form of exchanging information in this digital age, that we would have just went with email replies.  If not for one thing - I love getting mail.  And when the time came to make the decision to do mail replies, I just imagined myself sprinting to the mailbox like:

 

WE'VE GOT MAAAAAAAIL!!!!

So we include a return envelope stamped with a gopher with every invitation, and we find out that March 31, the price of stamps is going up from 63 to 85 cents.  WTF.  I don't know what bride checks to see if the price of stamps is going up anytime soon before she mails her invitations, but I sure as hell didn't.  So according to the dragon nice lady I spoke to at Canada Post, because our reply cards don't have a return address on them, if they don't have enough postage they won't be delivered and will be destroyed.  Destroyed!  Not even just, put into a pile somewhere at some mail processing center where I have a hope of actually recovering them.  Just straight up put in the shredder.  They open the envelopes, and if they don't have money in them, into the fire they go.  Greeeeeat.

So if you have received our invitation and you don't drop your reply card in the mail before Monday, I'm sorry to have to make you spend the extra 22 cents to send it.  I hate inconveniencing people so if you want to send us the news by Facebook, email or in person that's okay too! 

Oh and Canada Post?

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!



~M