u/Lizhasausername

I’m on my honeymoon on Paros island, in Greece. It’s Saturday morning here. I am very near sighted and wear daily contacts. Yesterday I took a short nap (unintentionally) in my contacts and had a new floater when I woke up, like a small thread or eyelash. I took my contacts out and went about my evening.

It’s still there this morning, so I googled it and got myself nervous. I take the ferry back to Athens tomorrow (Sunday) and fly back to Boston on Monday afternoon. I called the various opthamalogist offices on Paros but they are closed for the weekend; presumably there would be someone open on the weekend in Athens but definitely not a given in Greece!

How seriously should I be taking this, especially in terms of getting an appointment before flying? I do not have travel insurance so changing our flights is no small thing. If I rock up to an Athenian opthamalogist’s office at like 8 am on Monday would you expect they will see me quickly enough and resolve the situation enough for me to catch a 3:30pm flight that day?

Edit to add: no other symptoms, no flashing, no dark curtain, no headache. Just a squiggle slightly off center of my vision.

I love my 2nd gen SE and want to keep using the SE phones as long as possible. But my phone needs some love - my battery health is at 68%, which is starting to get annoying, and I just cracked my screen badly. :(

What's a better idea at this point -- get the screen and battery replaced in one expensive visit to a repair guy, or get a new refurbished SE2 or SE3? Might be better value to opt up to the SE3 at this point so that I get as many years as possible before it is fully nerfed, yeah?

My husband (Greek Cypriot) and I (American) are finally going to some *other* Greek islands this October, instead of just annually visiting his family in Paralimni. We have both only been to Crete!
It will be roughly the first ten days of October, and we are struggling with island-picking for the shoulder season. Cyprus is still open and beachy in October, but it seems smaller islands in the Cyclades are already packing up then!

Here's what we know:
He wants to go to Santorini (fine, fine, at least it's not high season)
I want to go to Tinos, specifically for their world music festival on Oct 9 and 10
We have ten days, so we figure we want a third island, since I can't imagine either Santorini or Tinos is worth 5+ days for on this rare stint of being regular tourists in the region
We will start and end in Athens.

What should we consider for the third pick? We had been thinking Milos, for contrast? But the ferry routing doesn't seem to work very well with it in October. We'll have had plenty of beach in Cyprus leading up to this leg of the trip, and we also will have a few days in Athens visiting his brother. My husband's sister pooh-poohed Tinos and said it's just where people stay when they can't afford Mykonos, but idk it looks nice! What's a "logical" pairing with Tinos and Santorini, ferry-route wise, for the shoulder season?

(current draft itinerary is: Oct 1-4 Milos, Oct 5-8 Santorini, Oct 9-11 Tinos, but nothing is booked yet except our return flight from Athens on Oct 12)

edit to add: basically I really want to see places that are NOT LIKE CYPRUS. Both in terms of geography and of tourism/development.

Seeking ideas and suggestions for wedding ceremony rituals and traditions that are not Orthodox, for our second wedding / antigamos in Cyprus! My husband is Greek Cypriot but he and his family are not Orthodox; I'm Jewish-American. We got married in America a few weeks ago, and we are having another celebration in Cyprus later this summer for all his family who couldn't travel abroad. We don't want to repeat the Jewish wedding traditions we did at the first wedding, since we did them already and they won't mean anything to the Cypriot guests.

My husband has lived abroad for his whole adult life so he hasn't been to a ton of Cypriot weddings, and I have only been to one!

We have been calling the second wedding an antigamos, and my husband will have an allamata and plans to dance a zeimbekiko. But we're at a loss for what might take the place of a ceremony! What have you seen non-religious people do? Any Orthodox traditions that have been secularized for atheist couples? Any other cultural revival activities like the allamata that we might not be aware of?

Our wedding was on Sunday of Memorial Day weekend in the Boston area, for 135 guests (including 15 small kids), and now that we've settled all expenses, I'm proud to say we qualify for posting in this group with a final cost around $32k, give or take depending what *counts*.  

This was an extremely DIY wedding, to an almost absurd degree, and that's the only way we managed a pretty big guest list and a transit-accessible venue in a VHCOL city.  We had a few great deals, particularly on live music, and skipped some other unnecessaries (like florist, video, bridal party, HMUA).  Extremely local wedding, our only vendor from outside the Boston area came from Vermont, and many vendors were businesses we already knew.

Here's the breakdown:

Venue: Arlington Town Hall, $500/hour plus $700 police detail, total came to $6500, includes nothing but the building and tables/chairs

Catering: A local seafood restaurant, which mostly caters much smaller parties -- flat rate of $13,500 for all food, rentals, and labor

Bartending: Labor only, $1000

Alcohol: Wholesale so we only paid for what was consumed, $1500

Reception band: Terrafunk, a local funk band (not a wedding band), eight musicians played for three hours, $3000 + $200 tips

Cocktail hour band: Local buskers we hired spontaneously a week before the wedding who played for one hour, $400

Ceremony music: A volunteer choir of friends, plus $100 for an accompanist

Officiant: $500

Photography: $3000, no opinion yet since we haven't seen the finals, but so far so good

Photo booth: Kruu, $400

Ceremony sound system: $200

Dessert: Sundae bar from the local ice cream shop where we had our first date, $650

Decor: $100 of good fake flowers off FB, $100 bouquet from florist, $130 of Trader Joe's flowers for bud vases, $120 of bud vases off Amazon, $100 of some other decor sundries from an estate sale = let's call it $600.

Cat transportation to/from ceremony: $100 well spent

total: $31,500

Not including in the "total":

Ketubah lettered and illustrated by local artist Nate Devarie, $800 and couldn't be happier

Auxiliary events (welcome picnic and next day brunch, costs were around 1k total)

Non-traditional bride attire: $400 colorful gown off TheRealReal, $100 in alterations, $300 accessories and makeup = $750, all will be re-worn (well I'll have to get invited to a gala for wearing the gown again, but some day I'm sure!)

Groom's attire: $1000 custom suit from local shop, perhaps another $500 on shirt and shoes etc, and he'll get a ton of wear out of all these things, including at the second wedding.

We haven't gotten real rings yet, we used stand-ins

Second wedding: We're doing this all again in September in my husband's home country, but things are cheaper there, so we are figuring 100-120 people and budgeting 20k plus flights and hotels.

if you want to include those things in the total then it's $35,600 plus future rings plus second reception in September, yes our real budget for the entire year of wedding events was $60k.

What felt like a good deal:

Music!  We had so much great live music for extremely reasonable costs.  We found our band at a local festival last summer, and they are definitely not a wedding band (we had to make a special request for them to learn Hava Negila!), so we basically paid their private party rate, and they were incredible.  Then we spontaneously hired some local buskers just a week before the wedding to play during the cocktail hour.  And I'm a choral singer, so my choir friends provided the music for the ceremony, as is common for choir people.

Art!  Our ketubah is an incredible work of commissioned art by a local artist we have long admired, and it will hang in our home forever.  Custom ketubahs by people who focus on ketubah work can cost upwards of $2500, but we went with someone whose work we know and just did a regular commission (and skipped hebrew lettering).

Alcohol: Going consumption-based really worked out in our favor with our light-drinking crowd, as we knew it would.  It's amazing that wholesalers lets you return any alcohol that's unopened!

Photo booth: This was a silly splurge but it served as our party favors and it was very popular! 

Sound: Kept getting 1k quotes for a sound guy and equipment, but finally found a friend of a friend who runs karaoke in bars who was able to do it for $200.  

Friends: We made a "labor registry" so that local friends could sign up for tasks to help with, and thus we got programs and signage designed and printed, bud vases arranged, kids' craft organized, choir managed, lots of stuff hauled and set up, and much more.  No way we could have done this without tapping into an amazing and capable friendship network.

Skipping bridal party: Never once did we miss having a bridal party.  As I said, we really leaned on our friends anyway.  And not having people in designated roles meant that we asked for help based on who was available and skilled, not based on who was on the official bestie list. 

Mixed:

Catering.  We wanted a pescatarian menu, so it was between the seafood restaurant for clambake-style and a paella caterer; which had similar costs, so we picked based on vibe and menu.  But the team was obviously inexperienced at full service catering, and though the food itself was great there were many hiccups throughout.  Would have been totally fine if we had a day-of coordinator, would hire again if we also had a coordinator, see below.

Officiant: We went back and forth on having a friend do it, then finally decided to hire a rabbi, only to get several quotes over 3k!  Ended up finding a rabbi who only charged $500, but also he was only alright.  Maybe should have gone with a friend after all.  Nice guy, only okay officiant.

Regrets:

I wish we had hired a day-of coordinator.  We had planned originally to do so, but then the venue coordinator at Town Hall told us that we didn't need one, that she would be there to make sure everything went smoothly and communicate with the vendors.  This turned out to be unrealistic, and she was nowhere to be found for much of our event, and with the rain we needed a lot more coordination than if we had been able to use plan A.  We ended up leaning heavily on friends and family, and it's great that we were able to do that, but since we had money budgeted for a coordinator I really, really wish we had gone ahead with hiring one, instead of trusting the venue coordinator would make things run smoothly.  We came in under budget, and that's nice, but I would have preferred to use our whole budget and had much less stress.

Strategy:

For some vendors we followed the reddit advice of posting on our regional wedding FB group with date, request, and budget, and this worked pretty well!  This is how we found our photographer and our bartender.  I'm sure it helped that it was a Sunday wedding, though we didn't officially get any discounts for that.  It also helped that we didn't care much about decor so shopped opportunistically on the secondhand market. The big thing of course was that we used almost entirely non-wedding vendors. Both bands, the ketubah artist, the caterer, the sound guy, dessert, and bridal attire were all not in the wedding market, and the venue does a lot more non-weddings than weddings as well. This had mixed results, but when it worked it worked!

That said, 32k is still an awful lot of money, and we did an awful lot of work, and we leaned on our friends and families in a big way, and I really wish we could have picked two of the three. I suspect the wedding felt less expensive than it was.

edit to remove some vendor names since this isn't a local/regional sub

I'd like some advice on a somewhat unusual arrangement I have with my current clients. I'm an independent contractor, and I have two separate clients right now who are both themselves working on contracts with the same state agency. Essentially the state agency needs a variety of trainings, and some of the trainings were contracted to Client 1, and some were contracted to Client 2, and both Clients 1 and 2 hired me to do the design and development work. All well and good, it's very collaborative, the clients are in contact with each other, and it is beneficial to all parties that I'm the designer across clients because I'm ensuring consistency.

In the process of developing a training under Client 1's purview, I made a set of master slides and templates as a job aid for myself. Client 2 expressed interest in using those masters for the trainings under their purview as well, which was fine with me, and Client 1 signed off on this as well. However, I am not the only instructional design contractor working with Client 2, who has a lot more trainings under their purview; specifically, they have an ID agency working with them on some other trainings. And I just found out that Client 2 also passed my slide masters on to the agency for their trainings, because they like my designs better than theirs!

This now feels weird. The agency and I are direct competitors; they were working with Client 2 before I was, and they charge more than I do (since they're an agency and I'm just me), so I've been eating away at their pool of work with Client 2, but now they're going to be using the tools that I created as work for hire for Client 1. I created these masters as a job aid for myself, and I would have billed differently if I knew they were going to be used by other IDs that are two businesses removed from the client who directly paid for that work.

Clients 1 and 2 are in direct communication and collaboration with each other, but I have no communication with Client 2's other ID agency and nor does Client 1, and there's where things feel off. I especially feel uncomfortable with the idea of the other ID agency using my work with further clients! Anyone have suggestions for how to approach this, or similar stories?

I'm wearing a very colorful gown (blue, green, and yellow) for my wedding in three (!) weeks and I am very excited about it. But I am second guessing my decision to not wear a veil. I just don't know what kind of veil would work, and I wasn't keen to order things blindly. Did you have a colorful gown with a veil? I'd love to see pictures if so!