My parents are throwing us an engagement party at the end of the summer. I'm not even going to try describing the ruckus over the invitations to avoid melting your brain. I will, however, mention that a certain mother of mine started bugging us about wedding registries before the party date was officially set. I opted to ignore this apparently necessary excursion in favor of playing video games for as long as possible. This was an excellent plan until relatives started asking where we registered.

"You said we didn't have to register until mid-July!"

"Well, I didn't take into account Grandma telling everyone immediately."

Groan.

But wait! We don't actually need anything! Couldn't we just pick a charity and tell people to donate there? Apparently not. People still prefer to give actual gifts, even if they donate something, and without a registry we'd end up with twelve olive green bread warmers. Oh fine.

So here we were, in early June, with no time to spare. I picked Crate & Barrel and Bloomingdales because I did. After a Tuesday full of work, we went to Crate & Barrel to begin scanning that which we don't actually need. We reconnoitered the entire store and found a few things that we could actually use, somethings that were sharp and pointy, and many things that are best described as completely random. Fifty-six items in total. That was more than enough for the time being, right? RIGHT?

The store was about to close and we both wanted to leave. Matt put the scanner in the machine, and I poked options on the screen. Hmm. This doesn't look right. I must have hit the wrong option. No matter, I'll hit the back button.

You have zero items.

What?

WHAT?

The geniuses who made the machine apparently thought that deleting everything off of the scanner immediately was a feature. And if that wasn't bad enough, the back button was not accompanied by any sort of persistence. In other words, after two hours of scanning barcodes, all was lost.

Two employees tried intrepidly to recover that which was lost, but with no success. They were, however, nice enough to let us stay past closing to rescan everything. We ran, and I do mean ran, around the store, quickly rescanning everything. After round two, we only had fifty-one items. Oh well, close enough, let's go.

When half of your items are three dollar napkins, fifty-one items is no where near enough, sadly. In other words, Thursday was Bloomies day! They take registering VERY seriously there. This includes a personal shopper and a bag of goodies, including a $70 bottle of Vera Vang eau de parfum.

We set a world record for making a decision and chose a kate spade china pattern called Crescent Drive. The registry assistant set a place setting with our fancy new plates so we could see how different flatware styles worked. That didn't go quite as well so we put off the decision.

The registry assistant next turned to crystal. Ack! No! No more crystal! We already have sixty-two place settings worth of Waterford; what on earth could we possibly do with more? Collect dust? The assistant was incredulous at the idea of not selecting crystal, but I stood firm.

Another fifty or so items, registration complete.