1 month till the big day!

It is so crazy how quickly a year of planning can dwindle down to being one month away. We are in the home stretch. The majority of the stressful wedding planning is done. Now we are just finalizing and confirming a lot of things. Oh, and hounding people for their RSVPs (such a tedious lame job to do).

I have a feeling this month is going to fly by! Then suddenly we will be sitting in Hawaii. Ahhh, this is so exciting.
~N

Celebrity response #1

It's official we are in our last month until the wedding. The past two weeks have graced our door step with wonderful gifts, cards with honey fund gifts and lots of nifty things.

Yesterday, we received a letter from the Governor. Oddly, it was very exciting. It has our wedding date and Mario and Nicole Perotti on it. Wow my name in print with my new last name. Exciting.

Needless to say yes we did send him an invitation and this is what we got in return. It has his signature on it and we keep debating if it is a stamp or something. It really doesn't matter, the fact that we got a response is good enough.

While we know that they will not be showing up to the wedding (thank gawd it'd be a total media circus) it was still nice to be recognized by our childhood friend.

I think it excited us more knowing that Kindergarten Cop signed the paper than the actual Governor. What can I say we love Kindergarten Cop!

The Bubs: Battle Tomato

Every so often Mario and I put our cooking talents to the test in good ol' Iron Chef style. This past weekend we decided to participate in battle tomato. Our tomato variety ranged from Heirlooms, Cherry Tomatoes, Sun Dried, Tomato Paste, etc.

Whenever we do these little battles we have three categories in which you can win: Best Presentation, Taste and Creativity.

Mario presented a menu of Heirloom Tomato Sliders, His version of a Tostada with a side of fried plantains, and Chilean Sea bass on a bed of pasta covered with a tomato mint salsa.

My menu consisted of a Tomato Ceviche with Flour tortilla triangles, Roasted Heirloom Bisque and Sun dried tomato pasta with Gorgonzola and flank steak.

In the Category of Taste we had a draw. Neither of us were willing to let the other one win. Both of these dishes were fabulous.

His tostada layered with grilled chicken, peppers, tomatoes and a slew of other great flavors all topped with a flavorful tomato based salsa.



My dish the Bisque was rich with the flavor of roasted tomato, pine nuts and butter accompanied with a parmigiana crouton.

The other categories were split right down the middle. Mario's tostada won also for creativity while my Ceviche won for best presentation.

Now with all this creativity flowing around sometimes dishes just suck. Well during this battle we both had dishes that did not do so well. His Sea bass and my flank steak dish both were not very good.

A labor of love...Part 2

First I must say that I have the greatest mate in the world and he helped out with this "labor of love" sooo much. I can proudly say that this was a task done by both of us. At times I felt as if i was doing it alone (only because I embossed for months) but then we got to the RSVP portion of the invitations. This was largely done by Mario.

Once we had decided to make our own invitations we also decided to be non-traditional and do a website where people would RSVP and get the most personal experience possible. It was also a neat little way to show Mario's talents, save some trees, and not have to wait for snail mail RSVPs.

So, that meant that by the time we sent out the invitations our website had to be done and all of the personal urls had to be set up and ready to go. Then he had to make each persons RSVP card with their personal url. I was so proud of Bubbie! Not only did he get all of this done on time he also clipped all of the edges on the RSVP cards and all of the purple cardstock.

Granted, we did have a few rough spots along the way, like the mook at Kinko's who did not cut the RSVPs correctly. This was a lesson in wedding planning 101 on "don't sweat the small stuff". We just ran with the mistake and went with another option. To our guests they wouldn't know the difference. And the guy felt so bad that he didn't charge us for all the cutting he did.
After all of the cutting and prep work was done I headed up to my girl crew in Modesto (Mom, Tena, Rosie, Neet, Idie, Re, and Raquel). Mario and I cannot begin to thank these ladies enough. They sucked it up and assembly line style whipped these bad boys together. We ran out of glue at one point so Tena ran to the store and saved our production line.

After about two hours of assembling, addressing and embossing envelopes we were done. They were proudly boxed up and were sent out on that Monday. And by Tuesday we were actually already getting RSVPs.

A labor of love...Part 1

Since our wedding invitations are out I figured it was time to talk about them. Mario was a great support of making sure that I had the invitations that made me happy. The only problem was that with a theme like stars there was nothing that made me happy. After hours and hours of looking at disappointing invitations, I decided I wanted to have a try at making some invitations.

Granted, I'm not the most crafty person in the world. I just knew that if i didn't at least try to make an invitation then I'd be settling. Bub and I had agreed that the invitation was the first glimpse of what our wedding would be like. We really wanted it to reek of love and intimacy.

I gave it a try a couple times on my own. I got some inspiration from a few websites and just went with it. The two prototypes seen did not do it for me or Bub. They were missing something. For some reason the invitations still were not looking the way we wanted.

Finally, one day I was talking with a then co-worker (now friend) about embossing. She gave me some tips on wet embossing and then told me about dry embossing. (Oddly enough the link uses the materials I used).

I took her advise and thought about it some more. Then she brought me a light box and a few stencils to see if it was something I enjoyed. From that moment I was hooked. I was able to make the most beautiful stars. This started me on a very long journey that took me several months.

My bright idea was that I would work on them for a long time so it wouldn't seem as long. I really wish I would have logged the hours I spent doing invitations. I just know that I started them while still in school and graduated and they still were not done lol.

Overall, it was a pretty lengthy process. All of the paper had to be cut and the corners cropped before they could be embossed. In the end it took about 7-10 minutes for each invitation to be embossed. And a product that Mario and I are both very proud of.

California says it's ok!

Its official the State of California is allowing us to get married. We went on 8-8-08 to get our license before Mario's Uncle Ed's wedding. There were tons of people there. I guess the date had some magical and special significance.

All went very smoothly due to the fact that we were both born here in California. It was so exciting to get this silly little paper that allows us to do the deed.

In all of the wedding blogs I read, the couples take the obligatory marriage license picture. So, why be different?

The Bubs Blog begins

I guess most people know that I have been blogging for some time over on LJ. I think it is time to move along and keep that as my personal blog. I've been wanting to make the switch for some time. So, officially this is The Bubs Blog. For those who do not know Mario and Nikki make up The Bubs. We've been together going on seven years and are getting married come September 27, 2008.

We'll see what gets put here. I know that with the wedding quickly approaching, we have a lot of good things coming up in our future. If I'm lucky I might even be able to get Mario to be an active blogger here too.

I've realized that we are such an active couple and so many people have no idea about the things that we do. So it is time for the world to know a bit more about The Bubs.