Only one week for the big day now, I can hardly believe it!

Almost everything is done and paid for. Photographer, venue, rooms, chair covers. I just need to pay for the dress when I pick it up on Friday. Last time I was there I forgot my wallet… Clever…

I had a hair and make-up trial with Russ’s cousins Gemma and Dawn. Boy they are skilled! I looked great! And to think I was thinking of doing everything myself. How silly, tut.

We are leaving to Derby on Wednesday so that I can visit Dawn’s salon on Thursday to get my fake nails and lashes tinted and then it will all be a rush!

Friday we are going to the venue for the final arrangements, meeting the DJ, the master of ceremony and pick up the dress. And at night it’s Dana’s hen night, one of Russ’s cousins who is getting married one week after us

Saturday will be a rush! Drive from Derby to Luton to pick up my mum, Vanda and Rui, pick up the cake, rush back, check them(and us) in the hotel, pick up my dad and Maria from Derby’s train station, rush to a restaurant for a very close family and friends dinner – we figured we are not going to be able to pay much attention to them on the day, go back to the hotel and check in my dad and finally unpack and get some rest. Although I am sure we won’t be able to sleep much

And then the big day! which I will not talk about, only after the event

- All the invitations have finally been made, the last of which have gone to my work colleagues today. We’ve had quite a few replies from those we posted, and most of those people coming to the full event have replied.

- I bought Adam’s suit and mine from eBay and they couldn’t be better. They look much better than the £50 we paid for them, that’s for sure. All that is left is to buy Adam a dress shirt, and two cravats.

- We have a meeting with Tracey at the venue to finalise some details etc. We also get to see the chair covers woman for the first time

- Cat has successfully made the table decorations. My attempts were pathetic. They ended up better than we had hoped. We’ve seen identical looking ones in town for £19.99. Ours probably cost a tenth of that!

- My cousins have kindly volunteered to do Cat’s hair and make-up on the day

- Adam is well on the way with his speech writing. I still haven’t started mine…

All in all, I think we are in good shape for the day!

As the “technical editor” of this blog, I get to do all the fun behind the scenes things to make the magic happen. The theme we are using requires several images to be made for all the various locations they might appear, and each needs to be put in a specific folder. This would be a tedious exercise to do manually for every post we make, so I’ve found a great program (ImageMagick) and written a batch script. It automagically resizes an image to the correct size for each type of image we require, and uploads them to our website in the correct location.

So that means no excuse for not having lots of lovely images on our blog!

Sadly in testing, it doesn’t seem to be sending out any emails (a bit useless for an email subscription system!)

So if anyone does sign up, and doesn’t get the email (you’ll have to manually check the page for updates – just like in the old days when we were kids) could you add a comment to this, or any post, and hopefully one day I’ll get to the bottom of it!

So expect lots of changes, pictures and whizzy things on the site before you hear a lot about our actual plans for getting married!!