Nerd Wedding Rings

Occasionally, we spot truly awesome wedding things floating around on the internet and have to share. These Cat 5 rings, for example, warm the inner geek cockles of our .com hearts.

TheBigDay Wedding Vendor Listings and Reviews

When TheBigDay first started back in 2001 as a registry company, we noticed that couples kept asking us to help them with their honeymoon travel plans. After we added honeymoon travel advising a few years later, brides started inquiring about destination weddings. After we incorporated those services, couples wanted to know, could we help them with their domestic weddings?

In response to these questions, we're happy to announce our new wedding planning section, where wedding vendors can list their company, review other companies they've worked with and ask for reviews of their own services. We've included lots of goodies like an optional Google Earth map with your location, a large image and a link to the vendor's website.

Learn more about the wedding vendor program on our sign up page or check out existing listings for inspiration or research in our wedding planning section.

Airport Health Clinics and Flight Refunds for Illness

The flu season must be running long this year, because I'm seeing lots of stories about flying while sick...or, how to get out of your flight because you are sick.

Not surprisingly, because airline tickets are so expensive - and airlines so inflexible - most people board the plane, even when they have contagious things like the flu, bronchitis or, as evidenced in 2003, SARS. Chris Elliot has a number of suggestions on how to take on the airlines, but there is definitely no magic bullet. Looking like you're on your death bed only works sometimes...ditto with asking nicely or escalating to a supervisor. Read the full article on traveling when ill at MSN.

Alternatively, if you can't get out of your flight and you must fly, more health care options might become available, such as a airport clinic. These businesses will diagnose anything from strep throat to providing flu shots - much like walk in services at your local pharmacy. You can spot them in Atlanta and Newark and they'll soon open up in Philly and JFK.

Shakespeare at Sea

I've heard about Semester at Sea, but now, thanks to a Tony-award winning local group, students can experience the wonder of Shakespeare on the water as well.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is sponsoring their second Shakespeare Cruise in November, touring through the French Caribbean.

The trip aboard Holland America stops in Tortola, St. Lucia, Barbados, Martinique, St. Maarten and the Bahamas, with three live performances, seven lectures, two cocktail hours, four workshops and a half-dozen movie productions of the theatrical works.

For more on the Shakespeare cruise, check out Insight Cruises.

Historic Preservation: Portland, Oregon

We usually blog and brag about far flung sand-and-sun destinations around the world, but from time to time, we like to to draw attention to our own hometown city of Portland, Oregon, which, despite its size, gets a lot of compliments from visitors who come here and fierce defensiveness from its inhabitants. The most recent kudos came from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. By way of CNN, I learned that PDX is doing its part to keep up and restore the old architecture. I see this every day - I'm taken aback to learn of homes near the city center that are less than 70 years old and even the building TheBigDay is housed in - called the Studio Building - has neat busts of famous composers on the facade. It's nice to know that we're keeping up our old architectural gems.

The Green Bride Guide

The eco trend of reduce, reuse and recycle has entered the famously over-the-top wedding space. One bride, Kate L. Harrison, as incorporated her experiences on planning a green wedding into a book, the Green Bride Guide. It's not due out until the start of the 2008 engagement season - the holidays - but she's blogging with plenty of eco wedding advice. My favorite suggestion of hers so far is the time-consuming but beautiful use of small-increment stamps.

High Tech Wedding Ceremony Thousands of Miles Apart

Rev. Christopher Tuttle, author of Questions to Ask Your Wedding Officiant on TheBigDay, recently officiated an unusual wedding.

After a sudden deployment, a couple decided to marry each other while thousands of miles away. The bride was home in Oceanside, California while the groom is stationed in Fallujah, Iraq. The high tech wedding was made possible through the Freedom Calls foundation, which offered the use of the satellite phone.

Watch the new report on this high tech wedding.