What a Blast

Hello again! Thanks everyone for helping us celebrate. We had the best time. We love you all! Here's some photos we got back from the cameras that were out on the tables, and from our honeymoon.










more to come....

xoxo,
the q's

Oh So Close.

Hoo Ha.
So this it! The home stretch…
Our shower is coming up this weekend… We are both starting to get very, very excited. The shower I am especially looking forward to because this will be the first time that all of our friends and family will be together and celebrating. I’ve been looking at it as kind of the first pre-wedding party. The Bridal Party has been putting it all together and our dear friends Christa and Berke are hosting over on Laurel Lane.

That’s Marissa and Berke one night during one of our margarita fests at Trudy’s.
Stay tuned for pictures and stories in the week to follow…

We’ve already started receiving presents… Unbelievable!!! Registering was something that kind of caught me off guard… At first, the whole idea was so cool! You know… Kind of like that whole “shopping-spree” feeling… But then when it actually came down to doing it, I realized how truly terrible I was at it! It’s a difficult thing trying to forecast what kind of things you will need as a married couple versus just the things that you want. Eventually I surrendered much of that responsibility to Marissa. She was much, much better at that than I. It would have been much easier for me if you could register at places like Guitar Center or at record stores, but… Ha!

Bring on the Party!

-a

Bill McCullough.

For me, one of the key factors in determining the date of our wedding was the availibility of the right photographer. And I knew, even before I popped the question who it was that I wanted.

Our good friend Christa who has been helping us out immensely from day one, had been working with Bill McCullough for quite a while. And I can still remember the day when she first showed me some of his work. That was before a wedding was any kind of a possibility for me, and even then I recall thinking to myself, "man, that's who I want". So thank you again Christa.

Anyway, I think Bill's great, and I am really excited to have him as our photog. He has a journalist/documentarian eye. And a real nack for catching the most charming of moments. I somehow thought that he was just so appropriate for Marissa and I.

He called earlier this week to set up Marissa's bridal portraits. I can't wait to see what he does.

-a

2 Months Away.

Less than that even!

We spent this past weekend in Dallas, visiting my family and taking care of some Big Day details.

Got into town late Friday night and immediately hit the bars! Met up with my buddy John.

John and I go way back. Known each other since the 7th grade, moved down to Austin together for school. We've got plenty of stories to make people feel left out whenever we get together. Anyway, John's one of my groomsman. One of four. There's John, my buddy Aaron, and Marissa's two little brothers Anthony and Marcos. (Check back for more on them.)
And then of course I wanted to repay the favor to my brother...
Joel is my best man.

We had our third and final meeting with The Roch on Saturday morning. He's still going to marry us!

Marissa then spent the rest of the day trying to find shoes for herself and her bridesmaids. Who are the bridesmaids you ask? Well it's my sisters. My whole family has been really great about helping us out. I think they are really excited... The girls have already picked out their dresses and it looks like they had fun doing it...




Marissa's Maid of Honor is a friend of hers that she's known since high school.

They're like sistas!

It was a pretty successful trip. The more things we check off our list, the more excited we get...
But we'll both be very happy if we don't have to look at another list for a VERY long time.

-a

Encounter Weekend

This weekend Ariel and I went on a retreat for engaged couples. We spent 42 hours talking about ourselves, our relationship and our future. It was intense and exhausting but it was so worth it. We had talked about all of the topics in the program before, a lot of them were things that most serious couples talk about, but we had never concentrated and focused on them quite the way we were asked to this weekend. It was amazing.

Checking Things Off

Wedding Dress....Check.
Honeymoon...Check.
Grooms Shirts....Check.
Caterer...Check.
Cakes...Check.

These are a few things we've checked off the list in the past couple of weeks. We have an "Engaged Encounter Weekend" starting tomorrow. I don't know what to expect. Ariel's not to keen about spending two nights with a total stranger. We'll let you know how it goes.

Viva Mexico and the Mayan Riviera

I've been online all day looking for the perfect spot for our honeymoon. Ideally we would like something all inclusive but not huge and resorty. Is that too much to ask? I found a few choice spots that are off the beaten path (I think). What do you think about these?

Hotel Deseo
Maromar Resort
El Dorado Seaside Suites
Blue Parrot

Any suggestions?

-m

Speaking of the Roch

I wouldn't want any one else to marry us either. Father Roch has been great. I was very nervous the first time I met him but when we left our appointment I knew that he was the right one to officiate. I felt so comfortable with him and I felt so sure that Ariel and I were doing the right thing.

It's nice having a lot of special connections and meanings to our celebration. We're getting married at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Austin. My great grandmother used to be a Guadalupana there as well as my grandma. My mom, my uncles and thier cousins went to grade school there. A lot of things have changed since then but the old school is still standing and in use. I've heard my mom tell countless stories of her childhood at Our Lady's school.

I've been going to mass every Sunday since we decided to get married at Our Lady of Guadalupe. It just feels like home. I love it.

-m

The Roch is in the building.

Fr. Roch, my Form Master from Cistercian is going to be officiating our wedding.
I haven't kept in touch with him since I graduated...
In fact 10 years had passed since I had last seen him at our graduation in 1993. When I showed up at out reunion last year he says, "The prodigal son returns!"

After 10 years, I would expect somewhat of a stranger... He's been in an abbey, I've been through school, am now cultivating my career... And yet I forget that I've spent 8 years with this guy. And that he probably knows more about my adolescence than my parents do. With Fr. Roch I know that someone's always thinking about me. Even if it's been a decade since I attempted to make contact with him.

I would want no one else to marry Marissa and I.
The date we picked was based largely on his availability.

Here's Marissa outside the Cistercian chapel when we first went to meet with him.

Fr. Roch loves her.

-a

Posters

There's a graffiti crew in France that I've been kind of in love with for a couple of years now, and seeing (perhaps wrongly) our wedding as the perfect excuse to try to do some cool stuff, I contacted them at the end of the summer to see if they might be interested in doing a poster for our wedding.

It's been funny trying to comunicate with them via broken English and even worse French (8 years gets you nowhere!).
Here's an example of one of their emails:

"Hi Ariel
i will try to manadge some times to do it.
we will be in Nyc for 2 weeks, mail us again after this 2 weeks for make us
remember

peace out
Klor"

Pretty great.
I won't embarass myself with some of the stuff I tried to tell them.
But the crew's name is 123 Klan, and they're incredible.

Here's what they put together for me:


So if you start seeing this around town in the next couple of months, don't be surprised...

-a

95 Days Away

Well, we have 95 days before the big day and according to theknot.com I've still got a ton of things to do. One of the major things is making sure the invitations go out. I'm just a little panicky right now because I've had several nighmares about no one showing up to celebrate with us. That would be a shame. I'm not really panicky I just want it to be done. I want it to be April 23 now.

I just entered a bunch of addresses in our guest list data base and I gave Ariel some info on the hotels where we have blocked rooms for all of the out of towners. So I feel like I've accomplished something today.

I've decided to make dresses for my maid of hornor and my two flower girls/ladies. I found some patterns over the past weekend and I'm going to order the fabric Wednesday night. I think I can have them finished by the end of February. That's the plan anyway.

If I can have invitations out and dresses made by February I'll be one happy bride to be.

-m

And so it begins...

A few weeks before the holiday, Marissa was on her way back from the fabric store, and she called me to tell me that we were going to be having a "Tex-Mex-A-Pino" wedding.

Still makes me laugh when I think about that.
At first I was worried that our Big Day would be just a cultural mish-mash. Now I am pretty excited about it. Filipinos are essentially the product of cultural mish-mash anyway, so I guess it will be fitting.

I just hope all the guests are ready for it.

So we are about 3 months out, and I think we are doing pretty well.
Marissa finally found herself a dress, so I think the "major" things have been taken care of.

I wish that we had gotten this website thing together earlier cause there's so much that has happened in between our actual engagement and now... So we may flashback occassionally through this blog as we remember things.

The thing that immediately comes to mind, and I'm not exactly sure why, was our trip to South Carolina.
We made the trip back in mid-October. Marissa's Granny (her dad's mom) was just turning 95, and it meant a lot to M that I make it up there to meet her and the rest of her dad's family. Understandably, Granny probably will not be able to make it down for the wedding in April. So it was great to be able to meet my future Granny-In-Law.

She's a sweet piece of sugar, that Granny. She still isn't able to say my name, so she just calls me "Son". When ever Marissa calls her, Granny tells M to say hello and that she loves me.

It kills me...