Lean, Mean Bridal Machine

I spent hours yesterday trying to make our wedding invitations. The invitiation part is pretty easy--we bought high-quality blank notecards and matching envelopes in this attractive sage color, and to these I glued three or four square-inch cutouts of nature images: lava spewing into blackness, a field of wheat browning in the sun, the sheer granite pitch of a mountain, bright orange tropical fish ain an azure sea. Then I accented this with a few choice placements of Joe's beloved Chartpack tape...it's laborious, but worth it in that normal storebought wedding invitations are both expensive and a poor reflection of me and Joe's aesthetic. The little booklet inside is the problem part. These days you can't send out invitations without a little printout of a Yahoo! Map and a list of places to stay and things to do. Our wedding site is particularly difficult to locate, and we do have a fair amount of guests coming from out of town. So my verbose writetly instincts launched into gear, and I expertly pounded out a veritable "Best of the East Bay" for friends and family...I tried to format it into columns in Word, and then tried to import the file of of map as an image. This is what took forever. I'm no computer-savvy graphic designer; I can't even fix the margins on Word halfway right! So I broke down and decided to do what I know how to do, and that's 'zine-style cutting and pasting. All our our invitees are basically getting Joe and Sara's wedding 'zine. So listen up, gals and parents: 'zine-making in youth pays off in adulthood! All of those late-night Kinko's Xeroxes and tasteless black and white political collages WILL lead to bigger, brighter, more matrimonial things. This is like my life's star performance 'zine...So this is all good fun, but it's labor-insensive fun. I keep on thinking "geez, it's good that I got fired--I'd never have time for this otherwise." What I should be doing now is writing and looking for a job, but instead, until August 13 (well, more like August 21, which is when we'll get back from the honeymoon), I'll be a lean, mean bridal machine. All of which makes me realize that the drawback to a DIY wedding is that...you have to do everything yourself.