Saturday, August 1, 2009

Memories

It's my friend's engagement party on Saturday night and its got me thinking about our party. What went well, what went wrong and what we've learnt for the wedding.

What went well - I organised a party that: looked good and had a fun theme (carnival), had everything set up and ready to go with enough time to relax and get ready, came in on budget, we had heaps of great food, heaps of drink and lots of friends and family to share the night with us, and I did it all in a short period of time.

What went wrong, that list is very very long, just listing the major problems - it poured rain for hours, flooding part of the backyard (read: party), the verandah roof leaked drenching the bar, the power shorted out leaving us in darkness. We had hired a spit and a fairy floss machine - both got wet, shorted, actually sparking (it was a horrible 20min waiting to find out if we had destroyed the equipment and lost our money - thankfully we didn't). Our room mate the night before said he didn't want the party at the house, and said no one was to come into the house under any circumstances. In the end, we had no choice but to let everyone in. During the chaos, I was asked 1000 questions; some understandable, like where can we move the bar to, where is the power box, others silly and trivial (I realise people were trying to be nice and I'm greatful I have friends and family that wanted to help but with everything I had to deal with at the time it would have been really helpful and decreased my stress if people could have just taken care of some of the obvious problems by themselves without checking with me first...)

So what did we learn for the wedding? Make sure everyone knows whats going on so people aren't asking me anything on the day - if it hasn't been organised I don't care (and I really do mean that) I don't care about heaps of the little stuff I'm suppose to care about. Make sure I tell people that I don't want to know if something has gone wrong - if they can fix or fudge go for it, if its something really bad hopefully I can deal with it the next day. Make sure everything I've hired is out of the way and can't be damaged. Don't plan anything outside, Ok so my ceremony is but I have a backup venue and I'm actually expecting it to rain so I'm preparing myself to get wet and dirty to get good photos. Plan the day you want - don't do something just because its tradition or because its expected - it your party have fun and enjoy it.

Oh yeah I forgot we also had to move house the next day - worst idea ever! It wasn't planned that way but the house (rented) was sold so we had to get out. And we had a small fire (almost burnt down the house) during the day when we were starting the spits.

I'll post some pictures later

P.S: At the end of it all we had a great night, even with all the things that went wrong.

1 comment:

anna and the ring said...

Live a little, learn a little!

The good news is that no matter what happens you'll have fun.