Happy Friday!
I was here at the office bright and early today waiting for the new office furniture to be delivered. I’m still waiting. But I have faith — I confirmed it had actually arrived on the island last night. It’s only a matter of time now. The delivery guy will come here when my stuff is blocking the next stuff he needs to get off of his truck. Makes perfect sense… But I’m too impatient to get any real work done while I’m waiting, so it gives me a chance to write about something I get asked about a lot — what’s the best way to announce your engagement when you know from the get-go that you have every intention of running away to get married on a Caribbean island rather than inviting everyone who has ever met you to a big old-fashioned wedding in your hometown?
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Hi Everybody!
If you could see the mess I’m working in today, you would understand why I haven’t been blogging! We moved into new offices this month and everything is still under construction. Now you have to understand that time moves at a different pace down here — I may be able to get vendors to wedding events on time, but trying to get a contractor or repairman to show up at my office building is another story entirely. As I write this, Bill and Jim are installing blinds in the staff office next to me (if you’ve never heard a hammer-drill in concrete, it’s a really special experience!). I’m waiting for the AC installation guy and he has to somehow coincide with the guy from the machine shop who will install the wrought-iron (called rayhas) bars around my window air conditioner so it doesn’t find itself a new home the same night we install it! Ahhh, living in the Caribbean is so much fun. At least it’s always an adventure! 
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Happy Saturday Everybody!
It’s been a super busy week and now we’re getting ready for Marta Guevara and Greg Springer’s sunset wedding tomorrow evening. I did manage to sneak in a few hours on the beach this afternoon — don’t want to start looking as pale as my clients, do I? We’ve been working so hard all week in the office and I desperately needed a break.
Today’s blog is all about floating candles. Exciting stuff, floating candles. Romantic looking on the magazine covers. Beautiful in clips on the wedding TV shows. Lovely as part of a layered centerpiece on top of submerged Cymbidium orchids with a floralyte underneath them in a big tall cylinder vase. Absolutely gorgeous in pictures — but has anybody ever seen this kind of centerpiece actually work (read: stay lit) successfully throughout an event with actual guests (as opposed to in the controlled environment of a photo shoot)? I think not. (Read More…)
Hi Everybody!
As I’ve mentioned before, I often get emails from brides (and sometimes grooms) asking wediquette and other questions about their wedding planning in Puerto Rico or on other Caribbean islands. The emails always begin by apologizing because they’re getting married someplace else, but they’d like to ask me a question. Don’t apologize — I’m happy to help. Unless, of course, you’re getting married on Vieques or Culebra Islands. In which case you need to hire me! :) Anyway, most of the questions people ask apply to a number of brides in a variety of places, so I’m going to make an effort to answer the questions here in my blog once a week or so. If you have a question for me, email me at info@weddingsinvieques.com and put the words “Ask Sandy” in the subject line of your email! I’ll make every effort to answer it the next time I blog. If it’s a busy week, it may take a few days — but I won’t leave you hanging!
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Happy Saturday Night!
Yes, I’m a big nerd and I’ve finally got a Saturday night off and I’m home on my butt doing nothing. Well, not nothing exactly. We moved my office from my house to our new offices today and now my bedroom looks like a tornado hit it. We have an enormous master bedroom, and my office took up fully half of it. I can’t wait to go out and find a big squishy chair and a reading lamp for that end of the room. That was always what I imagined doing with it before I opened my wedding planning business. I’m excited to get back to it and turn my house back into a home. Don’t get me wrong — running Weddings in Vieques out of my house for the first couple of years was a very smart thing to do. But we’ve outgrown it and we’re tired of having employees in our house all the time. So yay to the new office — I can’t wait to work there tomorrow afternoon!
Meanwhile, wedding season is gearing back up again. I’ve got a wedding next Sunday and then a really big wedding on November 7th. By November, we’ll have all our new systems in place that should really streamline wedding planning for our company. No more running back and forth to the storage unit to prep for a client’s wedding — it’s all under the same roof now. What used to take several days of prep for us will now take an afternoon. I’m a big fan of working smarter rather than working harder, and I see this new office space as a big step in that direction. It’s a concept that I think applies to most brides and grooms as well. You can make wedding planning take months and months and you can let yourself get all stressed out about it, or you can listen to your wedding planner, do things by deadline, and have a stress-free, dream destination wedding in the Caribbean.
Here’s a little calendar checklist to help you move smoothly through the last weeks prior to your wedding.
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Hello Everybody!
As I was writing a catering contract for a welcome party and pig roast for a client today, I ran into a dilemma that has become more and more common — what to do about the one or two vegetarians who were invited to the wedding when the bride and groom eat meat. I figured the issue comes up often enough that it’s worth writing about it for those of you who have the same questions. Do you check political correctness at the door and serve a whole pig if you know you have members of PETA on your guest list, and do you have to alter the details of your own special day just to accommodate a couple of people on your guest list? Or do you simply say “it’s my day,” and do whatever you want, regardless of who might be offended? It’s a tricky situation.
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Hola!
It’s another fabulous day on Vieques Island, so I figured I’d better get my blog written early or it wouldn’t get done at all! I have so much to do. I wanted to make sure that I finished answering Part 2 of Amy’s question from yesterday’s blog — how to choose bridesmaid dresses for her upcoming island wedding. It’s rarely an easy task if you have more than one bridesmaid, but there are some things you can do to make it easier on yourself. And ultimately, you’re the one who has to be happy with the decision because you will be seeing those dresses in your wedding pictures for the rest of your life. Here are 10 tips to make the process fun!
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Good morning!
Well, I got my wish and it really rained on us last night! Off and on, but we got up to check the windows to make sure it wasn’t raining in during the wee hours because it was raining so hard. You can really hear the rain coming from one side of the house or the other with these metal ventana windows, and I’m always a bit paranoid. It’s a holiday, but we’re working today. Bill is over at the new office space with a crew installing new locks and ceiling fans, and I’m doing paperwork and catching up on client files. Fun fun fun! But before I jump into that mess, I thought I would write a quick blog entry about a topic I get asked about a lot — choosing the wedding party.
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Hello there!
It has been raining hard, off and on, for the last couple of hours, and I’m so relieved. The island needs the rain. It’s been a very dry fall and the grass looks terrible and the horses are having trouble finding water sources. We need a few days of good soaking rain to tamp down the dust on the roads to the beaches and make everything green and lush and happy again. It’ll also clear out the dust that is probably in the air from the most recent eruption of the volcano on Monserrat — hundreds of miles away from us but still a factor because of the tradewinds. Before tonight, we hadn’t had but a sprinkle of rain in the early morning each day for a couple of weeks. It’s been clear and beautiful beach weather. We’re nearing the close of yet another uneventful hurricane season. And that’s what I want to talk about today — whether or not it’s a good idea to get married during hurricane season.
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Hello Loyal Readers!
I’m back. After a fabulous month off in September, Bill and I have finally returned to Vieques to get back to the wedding grind. I learned an important lesson — leaving the island for an entire month is more time away than I (or my house) can handle. I came back to a broken water pipe in my driveway, a flat tire on Bill’s truck, a dead battery in my Jeep, a mouse in my kitchen, and a really psychotic rooster on my front porch (can roosters be rabid?) that Bill had to shoot with the air rifle I gave him for his birthday last year. So as you can see, I have had my hands more than full trying to get everything under control here. And that’s not even the big news — the BIG NEWS is that Weddings in Vieques took over new office space on October 1st!
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