Man vs. Machine

Today is a momentous day. I am dropping the first round of invites in the mail. No turning back now. I even planned to have them in the mail on June 1st and son of gun, I did it. Woo Hoo! Last night, Jon and I worked on getting the addresses printed on the envelopes, stuffing them, and then stamping them.

The overall job was pretty easy, but of course there were some technical difficulties. I put all of the addresses in an Excel spreadsheet, so I could just do a Mail Merge in Word to print all of the addresses on the envelopes. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Tip: Find out from the printer the type of font they used for the invites and make sure it is available in Word if doing a mail merge. I had no idea what they used. I went through all of the available fonts on Word at least 5 times plus Jon gave it a whirl. We ended up settling on one that was pretty close. With the return address on the back flap and no other print on the front of the envelopes, we figured it wouldn't be that noticable.

Once we settled on a font, we tried to figure out what size of font to use. Jon preferred to take up the whole envelope, I preferred a smaller, dainty font. We chose a 36. Big enough for the Post Office to read, but not overwhelming. I ran the first envelope with the font in bold to see what it would look like. Not too great. Sorry, Andrea. You get the guinea pig envelope. We ran the second envelope without the bold. And Voila, we have our winner!

Now, I just had to print the remaining 90 envelopes. The funny thing about technology is that when you are actually trying to get something done or you are under a time restraint, it just doesn't want to work. Its like all of the computers, printers, scanners, and faxes have gotten together and formed a conspircacy against all of mankind. So, I start the printing and everything is running smoothly. The printer is kicking out envelopes beautifully. And then it freezes. I have 7 envelopes done. WTF? I save the Word document and shut everything down. Restart. Try again. This time I get even less, only 5 envelopes. At this point I am really angry. I'm saying some choice words. Jon hears me in living room. I'm sure he was debating whether or not to ask me what was wrong. He has witnessed my anger with the printer while in school year and knows it can get ugly. I resolve to print only 10 envelopes at a time. Eureka! This works. Although it is now shooting a blank (teehe) before each one it actually prints. I swear my printer has a mind of its own. But regardless, its printing. So 10 at a time, I get through all of the envelopes.

During this fiasco, Jon has stamped all of the RSVP postcards. (Tip: Make sure to get the 'Wedding' stamps from the post office. The clerk told me they just came out with a new design so I am ahead of the curve. Yay!)  After they printed, I stamped and stuffed the envelopes. But of course I couldn't just stuff them. After the first one, I realized there is an art to stuffing envelopes. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would take the time to figure out the best way to arrange the contents of an envelope. After I got a bunch stuffed I handed them off to Jon to seal. He tried using a sponge, but it just wiped away the stickiness. Then he tried good ol' fashioned saliva. Couldn't stand the taste. One of my duties at my job is to pay and mail bills. So every week, I lick and stick about 20 or so envelopes. Apparently, this has been preparing me for my role as a Bride-to-Be. I said, "Hand 'em over." So each envelope is sealed with the saliva of yours truly. ;)