Continued from Part One.

Upon arrival at the stationary store, I opened all the boxes to confirm everything was correct. The R.S.V.P. cards matched perfectly, and the inserts and thank yous were boring, but functional, as expected. The invitations, at first glance, were gorgeous. I had to admit I liked them better than the ones we originally picked. Well, except for the lack of ink in the "T" in "The Ritz-Carton". ON EVERY SINGLE INVITATION. If it was any other piece of stationary, I would have just dealt with it. But on the invitation? After we paid for rush and overnight delivery? This had to be fixed.

Linda was on vacation, but, after a call from the sales clerk, she was all over it. It was too late to call Checkerboard that afternoon, so she called them first thing the next morning. Then she called us to let us know that Checkerboard was reprinting the invitations that day and we would receive them tomorrow morning.

If nothing else, the delay provided time to order stamps. We were planning on ordering pretty stamps, but first we needed to know how much postage each envelope would require. Unfortunately, it's rather difficult to determine postage without an envelope to weigh, but that was no longer a problem.

We used of the offending invitations for weighing, assuming that the weight difference between half a "T" and a properly printed "T" would be negligible. The post office declared the fully stuffed envelope to require 84 cents. Now we could finally order the stamps!

We quickly agreed on using a pair King and Queen of Hearts stamps for the outer envelopes and a Breast Cancer Awareness stamp for the R.S.V.P. envelopes. An excellent plan, which Matt attempted to execute on Friday afternoon. After visiting three different post offices, he discovered that the King and Queen of Hearts were no longer being sold in post offices and every local office was sold out. We were more than welcome to order them online, and wait 2-3 business days for delivery. Seriously? Are these people not aware that one of their peons stops by our house every day? How difficult would it be to put some stamps in the mail bag in morning? Useless.

The best Matt could do was was the boring standard wedding stamps. At least the breast cancer ones were in plentiful supply in all three post offices, so he was 50% successful. I'll be nice and bump it up to 100% since at least he came home with the correct number of stamps.

Admittedly, I was mad at the stamps for not being pretty enough, not to mention nauseous, so we decided not to deal with the stamps until the next day.

The next morning, around eleven, UPS dropped off a box of correctly printed invitations! Hurray! Did I mention it was a Saturday morning? I was very impressed. Before I could call Linda to let her know the world was no longer going to end, she called. Apparently she had been tracking the package online, and was worried that it didn't say delivered yet. I assured her that the package arrived less than five minutes ago, and the contents were perfect. And for such amazing service, while she was on vacation, I have to recommend that everyone go to Linda at Arts & Letters.

It was finally time to start stuffing all 102 envelopes! I was planning on getting dressed, but after Loretta woke up sick and wouldn't be able to help, I decided that pajamas were the appropriate attire for such a chore.

In the stationary store, Matt happened to have been the one to inspect the envelopes with addresses printed by Checkerboard. Due to time constraints, we forked over $1.80 per envelope for address printing. For that much, I expected printed script and nice spacing. Instead, I was really disappointed to discover what resembled a quick home-printer job by a teenager. Alas, I would have to live with the results. Though I will recommend that people who want a formal-looking address avoid Checkerboard's Easy Addressing service.

Somehow we managed to stuff all envelopes in about three hours. This included hand-addressing the ones being mailed to Israel (Easy Addressing doesn't apply to foreign addresses) and phone call to confirm one of the Israeli addresses missing a zip code.

We were so close to being finished with the invitations that we went to the post office before lunch. The clerk was amazingly nice and more than willing to put the invitations aside for hand-canceling. Then she asked if they were our wedding invitations, after which she congratulated us and shook my hand. Finally, she weighed and stamped the invitations heading to Israel. And on that note, the invitations were DONE.

I may have danced all the way back to the car. The end!