Vegas Vows

Jan192016

It’s Been A While….

Hey friends!

I am still around. Things are crazy busy between my MPA (I ended my first semester with 2 A’s!!), working 2 jobs, freelancing, volunteering with my board and trying to keep my head above water. Husband graduated with his MBA in December and started his Doctorate this month. Needless to say, we’ve been keeping very busy since we have no children still.

To be fair, we did stop the foster license process back in August when I was beginning my Master’s classes. We do have a contingency plan in the instance of getting the opportunity to parent.

What we’ve been up to since the last post (I know, I always do these..)

  • We celebrated 5 years married on 10-10-10!
  • We found out we are having a NEPHEW(!!) in February from my baby brother and his girlfriend. For our longtime readers, they came to Vegas with us for our wedding.
  • I got a new laptop – only a big deal to my techies, but it’s lighter and smaller which means I can throw it in my bag and carry it with me everywhere to do homework and freelance work.
  • My Foster association created a petition to help foster children and within the 1st day we got over 1,000 signatures! We have surpassed 5,600 to date.
  • I became active in the Miami Geek Girls Brunch chapter and made awesome new geeky friends.
  • Puppykins developed a horrible ulcer in her eye and had to wear a cone for a month. She hated it and slept the best in her life the day we removed the cone.
  • Met. Richelle. Mead. Only one of my all time authors on the planet!
  • Decided to leave Miami. Like for real this time. There may be a slight bump in the plans, but I can’t discuss it at the moment.
  • Met Peter Davidson.
  • Met Jenna Coleman.
  • Met Billie Piper.
  • Meeting Matt Smith tonight!

I feel bad saying I’ll post more and then not. But I will try…

 

spacer
Aug222011

2 Years Ago Today…

Have you noticed Facebook’s new feature in the upper right corner of some pages stating something like “On This Day In 2009” with your status from that day? As I was reading and commenting on my post about wanting to be a mommy, I noticed that 2 years ago I booked our wedding.

I remember that day. I was so happy to have booked the most popular day of the year in Las Vegas. Little did I know that we would have the owner of the company as our photographer.

Vegas Wedding Booked | BeccaBlogs.com

We ended up with well over the 100 pictures. In the end, our ceremony was in our tower hotel suite at the Luxor and the photos were in front of the fountains at The Bellagio. I will never forget that “Your Song” by Elton John was playing during the pictures. <3

spacer
Dec062010

Post-Wedding Update Type Post (Including TTD Pictures!)

Whoops! Had that OvernightPrints link all wrong! My bad.

Wow, has it really been 3 days since I last posted? Craziness!

This weekend has been really productive for me in terms of post-wedding stuff. And considering that we bought ourselves a Hanukkah/ early Christmas Wii, that’s really saying something!

Let’s see, in the last 5 days I…

+ordered our marriage certificate
+received our CD of Trash the Dress pictures from the amazingly talented Emeric Photography
+ordered our holiday cards (using an Emeric picture) from Shutterfly
+wrote, completed, changed, and ordered our holiday newsletter from Vistaprint
+ordered our Thank You cards (also using an Emeric picture) from OvernightPrints
+just finished and ordered our 2nd Inkubook that we won in the giveaway (all Emeric pictures)
+played lots and lots of Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga
+spent loads of time with my amazing hubby
+began knitting a pair of socks for a test knit

You want to see some of them, right? Seriously, I am in love with these pictures!

Using my Ebates account for Shutterfly, OvernightPrints, and Vistaprint, I am expecting a nice big fat refund check soon. I will never again shop online without first checking there to see what rebates I’ll get. It’s like the best “discount” ever! For OvernightPrints, I already had a coupon (HOLIDAY) for 50% off the cards, so not only was my order discounted, but I’m getting cash back. Yes, I’m cheap like that.

Most of our stuff was dependent on getting the CD, which is why so much happened so quickly. I had everything all laid out and just waiting for the picture. Of course, even then, I was still popping different pictures into the layouts.

This post is not sponsored by any company, I just happen to love Ebates and online shopping. <3

spacer
Nov302010

Scammers Abound – Even (Especially?) in the Wedding World

I just had a pretty eye-opening experience. A mere month and a half after we got married, I decided to finally order our marriage certificate. Yeah yeah, I’m a slacker. You don’t have to tell me.

Anyhow, I’d received 2 letters in the mail shortly after the wedding with 2 different websites to order our marriage certificate from. They both had our certificate number and looked official enough. I didn’t think much of them, and put them away. Today, as I went to finally order the certificate, I pulled the letters out. Different addresses, different prices, different websites. Weird, right?

First I DM’d my go-to everything wedding Vegas girl, Jennifer, then started digging around on the Clark County website. As it turns out, it WAS weird to get those 2 letters. On the Vegas Recorder page, there is an “Important Consumer Alert” front and center telling recent married couples that other sites aren’t legit and aren’t associated with the court house.

These companies may charge significantly more for copies of documents than what a customer would pay if requesting certified copies directly from the Clark Country Recorder’s Office.

Wow. Just wow.

Marriage capital of the world and of course there’s scammers!

The good news is that the certificate has been ordered and from the official site so my credit card is [hopefully] still safe. Good thing I know to check up on these things before blindly handing my credit card over to random people!

I sure do hope more people dig around before ordering stuff online.

And so ends my PSA of the day. =D

spacer
Nov252010

Designing our Holiday Cards

Tonight I decided to spend my down time after Thanksgiving dinner festivities working on our holiday cards, thank you cards, and a few photo books on Shutterfly. I have a few coupon codes, plus all our pictures – professional, mine and Cathy’s – were all uploaded to Shutterfly, so it’s about time to work on them. My biggest problem is picking which pictures to use! There are so many great pictures between the wedding day itself and our Trash the Dress session 2 days later. Jessie and Jason Emeric took some truly phenomenal pictures of us laughing and having a grand time and I have a strong feeling that their pictures will be on both the thank you and holiday cards.

This pictures is another possibility as it’s one of my fave from the wedding day itself. Tough decisions!

I’m still awaiting the disc from Emeric, which hopefully will arrive soon as our free book code expires on November 30th!

When you make holiday cards, do you use their templates and pop pictures in or do you upload a full design? I typically have been uploading my own design whenever I make cards of any type, but the ones in Shutterfly are actually super cute!

Also, for those still awaiting the Trash the Dress pictures, I will post them once they arrive! I don’t want to post the slide show as there’s a few I didn’t like how I looked in them, so y’all will just have to wait a bit longer. =D

spacer
Oct262010

October 26 TMW Post

Hello hello! Did you miss me? I know, I know. 3 of us brides sorta dropped outta sight there for a few weeks between our weddings then honeymoons. Me? I have no excuse for last week. We were in Vegas until October 13th, and I can’t wait to go back!

Tweet: Ok folks… Here we go! New twitter name time. It should automatically work, but i’ll be @rbfletcher in a few minutes. Bye bye @msrib

Tweet: it looks odd having a diff name! i’ve been Ms. RIB since i was born. on to bigger & better things as Mrs. Fletcher!

So yeah, I’m MARRIED! We had a truly truly amazing time in Vegas. I know it was one of the craziest, most hectic weekends of the year (and since 07-07-07) there, but it really wasn’t bad at ALL. Sure, there were tons of people and a crapload of brides, but isn’t there always? I mean, it’s Vegas Baybee!

Taken by my brother’s girlfriend

Hopefully by now, 2+ weeks later, you’ve seen my wedding day #OWT feed set up by @TweetMyWedding. Seriously, I can watch this over and over again and never tire of all the amazing folks I’ve met on Twitter over the years. So many well wishers!

Tweet: pro pics in hand, so it’s time to make my @inkubook that i won like a million years ago. saving 1 for our pics from @emericphoto

Our pictures are awesome! I look slightly pregnant, but well, I didn’t really do anything to lose weight before the wedding. I know, I’m a bad former bride. Watching all my friends struggle to lose weight and look even more gorgeous on their wedding days, I went the less stressful route and relaxed and spent time sitting on the couch instead of working out. Working out aggravates my horribly knee and ankle, so I decided not to do that. I swam a bit, but that’s about it.

Tweet: RT @emericphoto check out Becca & Steve’s Freemont St. Day-After Session on the blog! http://fb.me/A8MDnD3r

Tweet: We’re on the @LasVegasWed blog!! http://bit.ly/cEarxu  #101010

My last few weeks have been filled with excitement over receiving our video, pictures, and putting together numerous photo books. I am also trying to get our pictures posted on as many blogs as I can. Seriously, how many people really take 6 months to hand knit their wedding veil?! I might not be gorgeous or skinny, but I still deserve to be posted other places, right? It’s been a great experience being on the TMW blog and I want to expand on that feeling before my fascination with our wedding fades and I switch into mommy blog mode. Hopefully that’ll be soon! Oh yes, I totally bought What to Expect Before You’re Expecting this weekend and we’ve been discussing kids quite a lot. Then again, we are 34 and 3 months shy of 40.

Tweet: This 2 part wedding thing is awesome! Last night our “party committee” started giving themselves assignments so we have to do nothing for it.

My aunt, brother’s girlfriend and her family have basically taken the reigns to plan our January reception. Hello dream come true! They started planning the desserts, meal, music, photography, and everything else. When I asked what they were talking about, they pretty much said don’t worry about it. I know there’s going to be a few surprises – though I did figure out the Mariachi band part already – and I can only say that I am thrilled about it! Sure sure, I’m sure they’ll ask me if there’s something really important and I do hope to find out anything major first. There’s definitely a handful of things that I’ve already started on for the party.

I’ll leave you with a few of our pro pictures… all below taken by Scenic Las Vegas Weddings

spacer
Oct202010

Picture Pages

OK my friends, I have a small dilemma. Or as @atomichris would say, #1stworldproblems.

We have over a thousand pictures from our week in Vegas. Tons of photos from Cathy, Steve and my cameras. There are also nearly 150 pro pictures from the wedding day and an unknown amount from the photo shoot 2 days later. I think it’ll be around 50, but since we haven’t seen or picked them yet, I have no idea.

Last summer, I won 2 photo books, each worth $50, from Inkubook. They expire on November 30th. Off a recent Groupon, I purchased 2 additional books/ whatever from Picaboo up to $100 each. They expire August 12, 2011. I was recently (2 days ago) told that if you submit reviews on TripAdvisor.com, they’ll send you a free 8×8 photo book from ShutterFly. Also, I purchased a 12×12 scrapbook a few days ago for all the things we collected and pictures.

As I wrote this post, I think I solved my dilemma. I do believe I’ll be using the Inkubooks for both sets of pro pictures – 1 book for each day. Using the 2 Picaboo books for our reception, and using the Shutterfly books for parent books, gifts, or anything else. If those don’t get used, I know I can get more by just writing a new review. Oh, and the scrapbook for trip pictures – no wedding pictures.

I have no idea if I’d make all these books if I hadn’t already won or purchased them.

What would you do? How would you handle it?

And I couldn’t leave you without a picture after mentioning that I have over 1000 in my possession right now. =)

spacer
Oct152010

We did it! Got Married, that is

I would like to introduce you to… Mr. and Mrs. Steve and Rebecca Fletcher!

For reals, we had an amazing time.

We gambled a little bit. We won some and lost some (money, that is).

We ate a crapload of cake and cupcakes from the utterly amazing Retro Bakery. We were even featured in their blog! (Scroll to “The CUPCAKES/CAKES O’ the WEEK”)

We saw two Cirque de Soleil shows – KA and Zumanity.

We took over a thousand pictures between our cameras and cell phones.

We walked more then our feet could handle and even got a few blisters.

We had a gorgeous suite at the Luxor for all 5 nights thanks to the amazing upgrade.

We met the lovely Danielle (@d_consiglio) of the @luxorlv twitter feed.

We played dress up – twice.

We spent a ton of money on food and a few souvenirs.

All in all, we had a BLAST!

spacer