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Honeymoon Time
Cath and Matt - The Wedding CD
Both Cath and myself are music lovers, there’s always something being played in our house, the car, work, wherever either of us happen to be, so when it came time to put together a play list for our wedding we were looking forward to it……..yep, I said ‘were’.
What a job it turned out to be, how could we possibly sum up our relationship and joining of our lives in just a handful of songs? They had to be things we liked as well as being audience ‘friendly’, this was a pretty tough task considering our taste in music, we mostly listen to punk, rock and hardcore with the occasional ‘classic’ thrown in.
I decided to take the job on. The only condition I was given, apart from the audience friendly one, was that Cath wanted to walk down the aisle to the music from Bittersweet Symphony.
After a few frantic days, a whole bunch of ‘tweets’ for help, I finally found perfection. Perfection came in the form of The Vitamin String Quartet.
Vitamin Records was formed in Los Angeles in 1999 to provide music lovers with high quality string quartet, lounge and electronic tributes to major pop and rock artists. Vitamin’s mission is to offer fans exciting versions of their favorite songs performed in new musical contexts.
Anyway, needless to say if I’ve got the time to write a blog post I’ve already settled on the song list hey so here we go.
Pre Ceremony
- Swing Life Away - Rise Against
- This Aint a Scene, It’s an Arms Race - Fall Out Boy
- Cute Without the ‘E’ - Taking Back Sunday
- Cherry Bomb - John Mellencamp
- The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows - Brand New
- Dance, Dance - Fall Out Boy
- Soul Meets Body - Death Cab For Cutie
Walking Down Aisle
- Bittersweet Symphony - The Verve
Signing Register
- Comes A Time - Neil Young
- Sweet Caroline - Neil Diamond
End of Ceremony
- You Shook Me All Night Long - AC / DC
- I Was Made For Loving You - Kiss
- Sweet Child O’ Mine - Guns N Roses
- Heroes - David Bowie
- Ohio Is For Lovers - Hawthorne Heights
First Dance
- Everlong - Foo Fighters
All of the songs have been given ‘the Vitamin treatment’ with the exception of the Neil Young and Neil Diamond tracks, they’re original recordings. It’s a pretty diverse and fun song list, plenty of stories behind a load of the tracks.
Anyway, with only a couple of days left I don’t think I’ll be blogging too much as there’s still quite a few things left to organise. And then on Saturday we head off on our honeymoon. Cath doesn’t know where we’re going on our honeymoon, as it’s a surprise, however we will be posting photos and all that once we get where we’re going.
Wedding Venue Dramas!
Recently we’ve been ringing around confirming all of our bookings for Cath and my wedding in August, yesterday I rang the venue to confirm our booking and pay it all. No one answered so I left a message.
Lastnight we got a phone call at around 10pm, it was the venue. They’ve double booked that day and we can’t have the venue. When I informed her that we had made a booking last year I was told that it was “only a tentative booking and you haven’t confirmed it prior to now”
She also added, “we would’ve called you when the other party booked to see if you still wanted it but no one returned our call”.
I asked her what number she called and she proceeded to rattle off some random number that I’ve not heard of. So basically we have everything else booked, confirmed and a number of things completely paid for, but we have no venue! Arghhh!!
Today’s priority is to shortlist possible alternatives and to start ringing around!
If anyone out there knows of a function room, surf lifesaving club, or some other venue, in the Newcastle area that is nice let me know.
So far the list is;
- Cooks Hill Surf Lifesaving Club
- Nobbys Surf Lifesaving Club
- Blacksmiths Surf Liefsavving Club
2nd Anniversary, aka ‘Cath-iversary’
Today is our 2nd anniversary, well mine and my fiance’ Cath’s to be precise.
We met on myspace (via mutual friends), we then met again at a BBQ I had at my house (I put some ice down the back of her shirt), we then met again at the Cambridge Hotel on a Wednesday night and I gave her a lift home and put my ‘moves’ on her…..and the rest is history.
Anyway, Happy Anniversary to us!
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Back Home
I go away for a long weekend with my fiance and this is what I come back to;
- 300+ rss updates in Google Reader
- 250 actual emails, plus 300 or so spam
- 4 blog posts that didn’t publish
- 30 articles to publish on IWTB blog
I was expecting to come back to a chock-a-block full RSS Reader but 300+ is a bit much, damn all you bloggers for not taking the weekend off as well. So far I’ve made my way through 175 of them, that is to say I skimmed through that many and didn’t find anything that needed more than a ‘glance read’.
One thing that did suprise me a little was that even though nothing was published all weekend I actually gained a couple of RSS subscribers, and stats wise my daily traffic didn’t dip at all. In the past I would’ve expected to lose subscribers and the daily hits to drop next to zero.
Anyway, bear with me for a couple of hours while I try to work out why those articles didn’t get published, and while I edit some photos and write a blog on our long weekend.
In the meantime, why not subscribe to my rss feed so that you get my updates sent straight to you!
No More Energy Drinks!
Well today is the first day of the new me, well atleast the less ‘unnaturally energized’ version of me.
Hi my name is Matt and I’m addicted to energy drinks, Red Bull, Rockstar, Monster, Mother, V, you name it and I’ve drunk it at some stage.
Actually I’m not addicted to them but my better half has suggested that I shouldn’t drink so many of them and she’s probably right so as of today I’m 100% Ginseng, Guarana, and Taurine free! Hopefully no late nights coding and surfing the net because I cant sleep, fingers crossed anyway.
Anyway, I need to finish a couple of other articles up but figured I should write this one first seeing as it’s so short and sweet, and I didn’t blog anything over the weekend for the first time in a long time.
Playing catch up
For the first time in a long time I ignored the callings of my computer all weekend, it was actually quite good.
We had a wedding on Friday afternoon, then another one on Saturday which went till some time past midnight, and Sunday was spent doing pretty well nothing.
Anyway, this will be a super short blog this morning as I have 200 plus emails to wade through and about 400 something updates in Google Reader…plus I need some breakfast and a coffee..
Talk to you this afternoon, take it easy.
Lost Wallet
Earlier today I posted a blog about a little DIY project I was about to start. Well it’s been put on hold..
I got down to Bunnings and had gathered everything I needed to buy to create this project, I walked up to the register and the girl scanned everything, I reached into my pocket to pay and WTF my wallet wasn’t in it!!
I’ve pulled apart my car, I’ve pulled apart my house, I’ve pulled apart my parents, I’ve been back to Bunnings twice, and my wallet is nowhere to be seen..arghhhh.
I’m giving it till 3pm for someone to find it and ring my number that’s in my wallet, if I haven’t heard anything by then it’s time to get on the phone to all the credit card companies, the bank, the private health care company, etc. to cancel everything and have it all re-issued. I’ve then got to find my old drivers license to take down to the RTA to get a new one, I only just renewed my license 2 weeks ago! Arghhhh..
I think I’m going back to my teenage punk years when I had my wallet on a chain, atleast I’m less likely to lose it that way….even if I do look like that kid who has his mittens pinned to him on the first day of school……
Watch this space!
Every now and then I like to get a little DIY, a little ‘blokey’, a little ‘handy matt’, and today is one of those days.
We have this space in between two of our bedrooms and outside of a bathroom which is too small to do anything with but leaving it bare kind of looks bad, as well as needing some furnishing to hide the bad choice of the previous owners decision to locate the phone line. Anyway I’ve been looking around for a hall table or something similar to put in this spot but cant find anything that suits or is reasonably priced, so today I’m going to build something for it.
I’ll be documenting the building process and writing a bit of a ‘how to’ guide so that anyone who’s interested can build their own, or atleast be inspired to try something similar. For now I’ll leave you with the ‘before’ photo which shows you the blank space I have to work with.
Christmas Recovery
Well we’ve mostly recovered from Christmas around here, though I am left with a pretty horrid chest cold from Christmas Eve up at the in-laws farm house in Gloucester, and are slowly getting back into the rhythm of day to day life and in my case daily blogging. Today, I’m going to ease myself back into the blogosphere by doing a photoblog of our Christmas Day. Enjoy…
This was the outlook from the farm house on Christmas morning.
Presents, presents, and more presents!
Cath was pretty suprised with her present!
After we finished unwrapping presents, we had the traditional James breakfast of ham and eggs on the BBQ all wrapped up in a bread roll… So tasty! From Gloucester we headed back to Newcastle to go and have Christmas lunch with my parents.
The new ‘traditional’ lunch at my parents house consists of various salads and seafood. This year there was lobster, calamari, and prawns. Very, very tasty!
And for dessert we had a Strawberry Cheesecake, and strawberries.. Mmmmmmmm..
Needless to say after all this food and merriment Cath and I were both pretty tired and after making it home later that afternoon we crashed out for quite a few hours. Later that evening when we managed to raise the energy to get out of bed we realised there was next to nothing to eat in the house! Arghhh! Bad timing as it’s pretty difficult to find anything open on Christmas day! If I recall correctly we scraped together a couple of potatoes and some herbs and had a pretty basic dinner..hah..
Boxing Day was quiet as my cold was starting to kick in, we basically just went and caught up with a few more relatives. Also, I went and checked out the sales on at the local Drummond Golf….too be continued.. 
I did pretty well nothing on the 27th, umm Thursday, as my cold was really rocking. I felt so drained and completely stuffed up, the drugs were barely helping and it was quite warm in our house which of course was making me more uncomfortable.
Anyway, that’s got you all caught up to about now.. Who needs a drink?
