gaffe.

Although my abhorrence of wedding websites has been pretty well-established by now, I did manage to take away one useful post-wedding tip from The Knot Dot Com. "Try writing your thank-you notes in batches!" it said. "Writing just a few notes at a time will be much easier than doing them all at once."

And lo, it is true -- even if you have nothing to do all day, the prospect of writing 60 personal-but-polite variations to people you may or may not see with any regularity, all of which amount to some variation on "Thank you for the [thing]", is significantly less daunting when you don't try to cram it all into a single afternoon. So thank you, The Knot Dot Com, for giving me some information which did not make me want to poke my eyes out with a stick.

I actually care a LOT about these thank-you notes -- more than I cared about any of the other paper goods associated with the wedding -- because they're the only thing that's coming specifically from me. If something had gone amiss with, say, the invitations, I could always blame someone else. ("Oh, yes, that was the printer's mistake-- my mother-in-law's name isn't actually 'Wilbur'.") Not so with the thank-you notes.

That's a lot of pressure.

Also, I heard somewhere that if you fail to send them within 2 months of the wedding, a roving pack of grandma-aged ladies comes over and beats you to death with a copy of Emily Post's Guide to Etiquette, and then sets fire to your house.

So with just a few weeks left until deadline, I was feeling pretty good as I toted a pack of freshly-written cards, snug in their stamped envelopes, out to the mailbox this morning. I felt good all the way down the stairs and out the door, felt good as I turned the corner, felt good as I crossed the street. And I would probably still be feeling good, had I not happened to glance down at the envelopes in my hand to see that the stamps which I had so lovingly affixed only moments ago were one cent short on postage.

At which point my good feeling was replaced by a sort of waking nightmare -- in which my thank-you notes, in their pretty white envelopes, were received by the thankees with the words POSTAGE DUE emblazoned across the front in giant red letters, and in which the roving pack of grandmas dragged me out into the street and shot me in the face. Aghast at what I had nearly done, I made immediately for the post office, where I was fortunately able to buy some one-cent stamps and then mail my now-legit envelopes without incident.

Which is great.
But, you know, it would really be great if I hadn't already mailed twenty of those things last week.