Countdown: Folding and Flowers

Wednesday (T-Minus 3 days) was 9/9/09 ... this was the day we had originally planned to be married. That is what was in the back of my head ALL DAY LONG. I could not dwell on that little tidbit of nostalgia of what could have been ... I had work to do.

Folding
That morning the napkins were delivered by the uniform company we already have an account with. I only paid 17 cents a napkin!!! If there is a local uniform company in your town give them a call. They had all the same colors that the party rental place have for a quarter of the price. It was a great deal.

Now that I had 120 napkins in my office I needed to start folding them. I had already sent off my 4x6 Flickr card to Walgreen's and had 120 printed for 10cents each. I could have made smaller ones and done them cheaper, but I wanted them to be seen and not lost on the tables.

The 4x6 worked perfectly when I did the pocket fold as well. I worked all day at the office during the down time between phone calls and customers. By the end of the day all 120 had been folded and packaged into stacks of 10 and boxed up. Here are the napkins with the flickr card peaking out before I packaged and boxed them.


Flowers
Today was the day we had also arranged for FiftyFlowers.com to deliver the sunflowers for the centerpieces and my bouquet. I had went ahead and purchased 160, knowing that I could use the extras as fill in decor about the house and yard.

Unfortunately the problems started right away. My mom was set to be at the house all day Wednesday to wait for them. Then we got a call that she would need to drive and pick up a guest at the airport ... in San Diego (which is about a 6 hours drive round trip)

I called FiftyFlowers first thing in the morning, which is 8:00am for me. The tracking numbers I had been given were coming up invalid on the FedEx website. The customer service rep that I spoke too told me that she would look into it and get back to me. I wait about an hour or so before I tried calling back. This time I could not speak to a live person. I left a message that I stated was urgent, left my contact number and wait some more. At about 11:30 I emailed with "Urgent" in the subject line. An hour later I got a response. I was told that the tracking numbers were for a company called Ontrac (has anyone else heard of them? I had not) and that they would be there by 5pm. I replied back asking for more information, and did not receive a returned email. Luckily my mom got back to town earlier than expected and was at the house before the delivery driver arrived.

I arrived at the house at 4:55pm to see the delivery van leaving the house. The 2 large boxes looked man-handled and were slightly crushed. Upon opening the boxes I was very worried about my sunflowers. They looked very sad crammed into the boxes. Many head were bent over and were crushed from being smashed against other flowers in the box, some were even losing their petals. Take a look for yourself:

I followed the directions and filled up our 5 gallon buckets with fresh Reverse Osmosis (filtered) water and began cutting the stems of all 160 flowers. Because they looked so sad we cut about 6-8 inches off each sunflower to be safe.





I had been told that the flowers would perk up and hydrate so I did not contact customer service (but I should have). I left the flowers soaking in a room with sunlight and air conditioning until Friday. This saga will be continued! LOL