Marriage plans

After a certain amount of internal musing, the currently prominent plan is to have a wedding (with vows, contracts, awnings, as many of our friends and relatives as we can manage, etc) in spring 2012, but the necessary legal arrangements beforehand on 29th Feb 2012, the anniversary of our officially getting together three years ago (with just us, parents and two-three siblings or witnesses each).

The reasons for this are:

* We really want to be able to count the anniversary from our existing anniversary. I was surprised we felt strongly about it, but we did.
* We don't want a church wedding or a synagogue wedding, and we want to have the wedding in Cambridge town, and there are no venues with civil wedding licences we like there.
* We would rather have the wedding in spring when there's slightly more light, at a weekend, and outside academic term, when some guests will find it slightly easier to make it.

Obviously we can arrange anything we want, but I want to ask if splitting the event like that sounds sane to other people?

The biggest risk is that the actual ceremony will feel like it "won't count", but if it's arranged beforehand, and includes all of the things we find significant, we think it will feel ok.

The other possibilities are (a) hold the wedding on the 29th, even though it's midweek (b) forget the anniversary, and have the wedding in spring, with the registry office arrangements earlier that day, or the day before (c) find a civil wedding licensed venue we like.

The other, related, question, is that we planned to, instead of taking the two of us half way round the globe on a honeymoon, take away a medium sized group of close friends for a week to a cottage (or castle) somewhere in the UK. Does that also sound sane?

We hope to get this sorted _now_, as in, this week if at all possible. At which point we will have a date and a venue and can move on to other planning, and can tell people a provisional date.

Google docs

I've used google docs when I want to read attachments from people, for which it was very useful. But today, for the first time, I actually created a document in google docs, to do shared note-storing between Liv and I, and I was very surprisingly impressed. It's obviously competent at basic text editing (however excellently or badly it handles more complicated stuff) but what I hadn't realised before, though I'd seen people alluding to it in passing, was how easy it was to edit a document together.

I assume a wiki would be better for tracking changes but google docs has the very simple interface for joint editing that you both see each other's cursor and can type into the same thing in different places. I know there has been software with that functionality before (you can almost have it just by remote-accessing a normal text-editor on someone else's computer, although by default that only lets you edit in one place).

In retrospect, it's really obvious to let people do that, once you think about people editing a document in that strange place between perfect simultaneity and perfect asynchronicity, but I hadn't realised how convenient it would be to let people do that simply and easily.

You can write separate parts of the same document, without worrying if the other person is writing right now or not. And you can see where the other person is typing, and jump in with other entries in their list, but see where their attention is and not clash with them in the middle of a sentence. I only used it for half an hour, but it was ever so handy.