CONFESSIONS OF A COFFEECIONADO (Starring our Favorite Green Siren & Alamid)

• Its official: the days of coasting through work, heading home for Mommy’s staple dinners (consisting normally of crispy fried food, salads and Knorr soup) and afterwards finding the next couple of hours splurged on serious relaxation and “cushy planning” is as dead as the Kiwi bird and Milli Vanilli.  Competing events, obligations and preparations for work, wedding and post-nuptial life have been chewing at our sanities and ripping apart our schedules the past few weeks; We are juggling our work and wedding dues/payments, with regular meetings with the contractor working out an “affordable” but suave design for our condo.  Each day, we chance upon a fantastic interior design, an accent piece, or a room worth having, and we remind ourselves most of them are eye-candy.  Just eye-candy that we can imitate with a far smaller budget. Hehe!  Its financial overkill, but we’re looking to survive everything with a smile

• It’s a healthy dose of insanity and a necessary mind-bending process we suppose…but surely, there are times we miss our less-than-haggard days, and our spend-foolish ways.

• Last year, in view of our need to save up for significant wedding expenses, we reluctantly gave up luxurious dinners that used to be bi-weekly affairs for us during our first 6 months together (we’ve only been together for about 16 ½ months).  Despite the evidence plastered all over Facebook or on this site throughout 2010, yes, a hella LOT of restraint went into our practical ban of 5-course dinners, 8oz-Wagyus and stellar gastronomic delights wherever we could find them…

• .…this year, Debbie Downer meets Patrick Ality (um, practicality).  For an engaged couple taking pride in our self-styled ChocFrappe alias, we’ve “lessened” our propensity to down that Sexy, Mighty Frappe.  That is, we don’t spend as much time at Starbucks (and other well-lit brands) as we used to/want to – even if either of us are a couple of minutes away from a branch.  It’s among the colder, more implacable realities we’ve had to contend with since 2011 decided to come around in its full, unclothed and very costly glory. We’ve vacillated about the “Decision” several times over, and vacillate about it still.  Albeit a silly compromise allows us to “sit, sip and talk for a while” at any Starbucks on a Friday, Saturday and a Sunday.  And of course, to helpings of bread and cheesecake.  Ha-ha, take that, pragmatism!!!
 

In our element, with our ever-favorite green siren :)

• We’ve never viewed Starbucks as just a “coffee shop,” or a decidedly expensive gourmet café for gourmands like many others like us; Starbucks is that third place closest to home, inasmuch that a Chuck Taylor or Levi’s is for sneakers and jeans. The brand has accomplished this: made the feeling of “home” – or some resolved nostalgia – equidistant to anybody and everybody who’s been situated near a similarly-styled café.  You maybe drinking a hazelnut latte at an international airport, around the bend, across the subway, outdoors on a sunny day, indoors on a rainy afternoon, while sharing gossip/ridicules with friends and officemates, or with a book, I-Pad or your fiancée on a dormant evening – that unmistakable green Siren-with-flowing-locks will for us always imbue that familiar calm.  Watch the lights of buses and trains and cars flicker from a window seat, or casually leaf through a high-gloss, urban-flavored magazine as fellow customers pass-in and out of your peripheries like an adagio rolling over a Vivaldi overture. Its all the same: Starbucks will have a space for you, one cup at a time. 

• I couldn’t imagine spending more than an hour in McDonalds when I’m gaining nothing but a circuitous, insoluble fixation with Grimace, his specie, sex, and origin.  Quite the opposite, we once spent 5-hours at Starbucks in Camp John Hay, sharing a single Frappuccino. Grande-sized.  We hardly lifted our asses from a cool window seat that stared at the still-beauty of towering pine trees.  And that ranks as among the most lucid and magnifico moments during the Baguio trip.

• We never posed to be coffee critics, especially as we share a distaste for dark-as-sin brewed coffee; but we do embrace today’s inflated coffee-culture in the same way we’ve always enjoyed our cups of iced latte and mocha frappes coated in chocolate drizzle and a thick layer of whipped cream over the past 10 years.  Gourmet cafes such as Starbucks, CBTL (The Ultimate Mocha) and Gloria Jeans (Macadamia and Irish Crème chillers) deserve their fanfare because they offer the best-tasting chilled coffee-based drinks out there. Simply put. 

with Gabby's favorite, self-styled iced tall latte w/three squirts of Hazelnut syrup, whipped cream, chocolate drizzle and cocoa powder-- slightly stirred not blended.. whew!!!!

•     Might it be time to look for pet civets in the black market, and accordingly purchase a parcel of coffee-bearing land in Benguet?? Civets – locally called “Alamid” –  are weasel/mongoose-like tree-loving critters, and they’ve earned this winning reputation of having coffee fruits in their day-to-day diet.  Then their stomachs ferment the coffee, which they later dispel (defecate) out in gooey, beany filaments.  Farmers and local foragers in upland areas collect these civet crap from the forest floor and through a process are able to extract among the “most expensive coffee beans” in Asia.  We saw civet coffee once being sold at Sonya’s Garden, a 300g bag sold for nearly a thousand pesos!! We want our civet farm too!!!

•     Speaking of the mountainous provinces, Cordillera Coffee in UP Diliman, and the Riverbanks, we hear, serves great coffee as well.

2011 IS WHEN EVERYSECOND COMPLETES OUR MIRACLE

Hello 2011, first and foremost.  Its barely over a month into our sparkling new year – the first of the new decade – and we already love you!! 2009: you were amazing, 2010 you took a million of our breaths away; 2011, you shall be our everysecond gift. Already, the seven remaining months loom – to be defined by both the gentle and powerful rise and recession of tides, recollections and revisitations, dreams and miracles. Our hearts overflow with honey-sweet anxiety and excitement as if drawing nectar from the gods!

We remember the first time we ever started planning about our wedding.  It was, as it remains today, a hazy, dream-like midday episode right about a year ago in our project office in LWUA.  It was a casual progression of events, but never too casual that you’d be inclined to forget the details underpinning the sweetest happenstance of our lives.  We were working on independent things, side by side on a makeshift mess hall at the office.  Then Gabby raised an innocently playful but inwardly important question: “If we’d get married, who’d form our guest list?” I was taken aback with mild surprise, but it was a caressing, most heartwarming surprise; I was speechless at first, but my eyes and body language betrayed any trace of reserve whatsoever.  That one small question sparked another, gaining voluptuousness, fire and momentum with each swing.  Until exhausted and left to melt unto the singular passion of our discourse, we found ourselves remaining nearly motionless in our seats creating and working on what would be our first and only working copy of our Excel-powered Wedding File. Its first 8 syllables pronounced everything we’ve embraced, worked for the past 15-odd months, and wished to happen like none other before:

“De Vera-Obmina Nuptials,”

I remember US being enthused at and enthralled by the newfound, joyous feeling.  We’d fall further for each other as we meticulously/carefully typed in the names and basic details that would comprise the heart of our wedding celebration.  Tito. Daddy. Tita. Mommy. Kuya, etcetera, etcetera.

Exactly a year since that crazy tidal wave swept away at the casualness of that midday episode, we are still using the very file and the same file name – only the contents are updated with every chance we get.  Its only fitting that the file manages to trace how so far along we’ve come along in terms of planning; how much we’ve learnt, unlearnt and the dozens of awesome people who’ve touched our lives throughout the planning process. 

Now that we’re down to our last 7 months, the body of work and changes has become truly evident:

·         Our guest list, which we had originally set to a ceiling of 180 pax, has soared to 250! It’s admittedly among the hardest items to accomplish because of the considerations that every couple has to make for themselves, their family, friends and extensions (here and abroad). But we’ve more or less agreed and worked out an immovable ceiling of 250.   Sorry for those guests numbered 251 and up, we love y’all still! :-)

·         We’ve managed to haggle and insist our way to create our dream team of wedding suppliers! We can’t stress “haggle” enough, because if you want your dreams realized, a lot of work, PR, and compromise have to fit the equation.  [unless, say, we got a limitless budget?] Some people have asked us if its really worth their time to attend wedding fairs and such, or if the better, less-mainstream suppliers are more likely at their home-based offices clandestinely completing their obra maestras?  To that, we say: YES to BOTH.  What we mean is that, do your homework and fieldwork because we’ve had rewarding and not-so-rewarding encounters with both types of suppliers.  Sometimes, you look hard and often enough, you’ll suddenly realize your preferred design had been staring you at the face all the while.  And sometimes, nothing can be farther from the truth.   One true benefit of having a long planning horizon as we did is that you get to scout every nook and cranny for possible vendors or designs that are within your domain of possibility.  And that has meant a world of difference to us!

·         After 15+ months of real planning, its no secret that the wedding budget we originally estimated was meant to be destroyed! :-D It’s an epic fail, as the budget and timeline we set were revised several hundred times over.  Inevitable changes take place with every other week or month of planning: add a friend or two here, add another cake layer here, pepper the place with a few more lights, enlarge the portraits, upgrade the buffet, rent a snazzier limousine, add a few more Swarovski bits down the train – all of those cost money, money, money!  “Budget today, gone tomorrow!” :) Say it with me…haha!

·         But – just the same, we just can’t believe we’ve nearly completed our “planning,” and will be spending the remaining 7 months executing (or paying for) the things we want to happen.  Seven months is like a hiccup, it’ll come so quick – and we know that as a matter-of-fact.

We’ve spent the last few weeks of January burning out our laptop batteries while going over our wedding sheet timeline and reviewing our most critical next months TO DOs. Allow me to proudly share to you our timeline and some pictures for the first quarter months of 2011 It makes me blush in anticipation…

		REMARKS
2011
JANUARY
29	Measurement (Camille Garcia)	OK
	DP 15,000.00 Camille Garcia	OK
	Compilation of chocfrappe pics	OK
	Finalize SAVE THE DATE design c/o Creative Prints	OK
FEBRUARY
19	Mock fitting (Bridal Gown)
	Book musician
	Meeting w/ Josiahs (Maui) (re: set-ups, food, sched)
	Meeting w/ Fernwood (lala) (re: air cooler, Lights and set ups)
	Finalize Songs (church & reception)
	Meeting w/ Nice Print (re: concept of pre-nup and sched)
	Finalize/book Cake Design
	Reproduction of SAVE THE DATE c/o Creative Prints
MARCH
12	Kat's confirmation
	accomplish CHURCH requirements (birth cert, confirmation cert)
	Distribution of SVD
	Purchasing and Order of wedding Favours (Principals, CF Team)
	Payment - Bleu (5,000)
	Mothers, entourage Measurement ( Camille Garcia)

Seems to me we’re doing pretty well!!!

It cannot be said enough, but this timeline – and the wedding sheet in general – has become such a wonderful and effective guide for keeping track of  our deadlines, arrangements and other obligation. Just going over it is pretty much an inspiration to recall how much we’ve accomplished given the breadth of wants and whims.   We recommend every engaged couple to keep one.

Measurement w/my gown designer Camille

Finalizing details of my  gown  :)

  

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The life we wanted together starts with a commitment to a miracle emanating from an 8-syllable statement.  And that’s why we’re treating every month, every week, every day, every second of 2011 as a communion drawing grace and purpose from that commitment. 

Seven months more.

Seven months more.

That’s all there is to it, before we humbly set aside our Wedding File and work on our Blank, New Excel Sheet