Weekend Update + A Review

Grad school graduation can't come soon enough because I'm seriously burnt out. The past couple of days have been quite interesting. My sleep-deprivation has led me to be a complete mess. Let's recap:

1. One morning this week, I got on the wrong subway to work--heading BACK into Brooklyn instead of uptown in Manhattan--when the train that I was originally on decided to go a different route. I got on the Brooklyn-bound train and realized, holy crap, I'm going the wrong way, and had to turn around.

2. I ended up locked out of our apartment on a day that Steve wasn't coming home right after work. All I wanted to do was go home after work and watch the season premiere of Glee that I had DVR'd, but instead I had to sit at a cafe for a couple of hours until Steve could leave his meeting.

3. My friend and I went out to dinner last night, and in our mutual delirium, we misread the bill and inadvertently under tipped, just to have the manager ask us if there was anything wrong with our super sweet and pregnant server! We were so embarrassed and ended up apologizing like crazy, which made the manager apologize like crazy, and we just threw more money at the waitress so she wouldn't feel bad about herself and go into pre-term labor or something.

4. This morning, I burned my finger (my engagement ring finger!) on a pan after I took it out of the oven.

Ugh.

To have nothing but work and wedding planning to worry about in just a few weeks will be a serious reprieve from the craziness that is my life right now.

But anyway, I wanted to at least check in and give you an update! I have a florist appointment to tell you about, but right now I'm going to share my experience with using one of the wedding google documents. This morning, I used their address book template, and customized it for my needs. Basically, I need our guests who received our save-the-date email (about 60 people) to give us their mailing addresses. We already have the mailing addresses of the rest of the guests, who received a paper save-the-date.

This is what my form looks like. I love how they have different templates to make it pretty. I know nobody else cares how pretty my address form looks, but it makes me happy.

Screen Shot by Me

This process seemed like it was going to be a piece of cake. When you open the excel document that the form generates, you can click a link to email it out. I tested it by emailing it to myself and it looked great. The form actually gets embedded into the body of the email, so people don't need to click anywhere to fill it out. But when I went to email to my guests, it got annoying and I wanted to kick Google in the face. I used that link to email the form to half of the recipients. I had divided the list into two groups, so there was less of a chance for the email to be considered spam. The email to the first group went out easily, but then when I went to email the second group, I got this message:

You've temporarily exceeded your email quota. Please wait for a while and trying sending again.

Really? I only emailed 30 people!

I Googled the issue and found out that it's a recurring problem and it doesn't seem like Google is planning to do anything about it. Just great. I then thought I was going to only be able to use the form for half of these guests because the form wasn't working. I would just have to email the other guests, have them email me their addresses, and enter them into the grid myself. But then I realized there was a solution, which was to simply email the form link to those guests. I took the introductory text and put that into the body of an email, and explained that we'd created a Google form to make the process easier. So half these guests received an email where they can fill out the form in the body of the email, and the other half has to click the link to fill it out. In the end, as long as they fill it out, it's all good! Since sending it this morning, I've already seen a bunch of addresses pop up on the excel grid. The addresses automatically feed to the grid, which is super convenient.

My Review: This Google Docs template is user-friendly and convenient, and I love how customizable it is. But I suggest you email the link to the recipients rather than using their email tool, which is flawed.

Happy Weekend!