Coming up with a registry is just one of the many troublesome things about arranging a wedding across an ocean, what with the currencies, the multiple addresses and the where to send things, and the very far away prospect of one day getting things shipped to the USA. That's a whole lot of price and hassle I'm not thinking about right now.
I was convinced that we couldn't have a 'normal' registry of actual physical gifts because of these factors, but Mark, and OBB showed me otherwise. Mark has had his heart set on good wedding china, and we'd already spent an afternoon walking around the King of Prussia mall eyeing up crockery and testing the weight of spoons in our hands, pretending to be the normal kind of couple who'd do this on a regular Sunday afternoon and not the kind of couple that only gets to spend Sunday afternoon together three times a year.
A couple of weekends ago I lounged on the sofa with the cat, my mum was cutting fabric for my dress (squee!) and listening to the football, while Mark and I surfed shopping websites together on Skype and picked our favourite china. It felt almost like a normal lazy afternoon, a long-distance tableau of domestic bliss!
So this month I had to do a lot of travelling to the Highlands for work - the kinds of places without phone reception or even ATMs. During a spell of signal on my phone I saw an email from Macy's in my gmail and guessed Mark had registered for the china. In the past week I got 4 or 5 more emails from Macy's, all vaguely spammy "Woohoo! Wedding Registry! Get Spendy! Look at this DEAL!" kinds of emails, which I tend to ignore but not delete for a while.
After I'd come back from business travel, and Mark had returned from his own business trip to Atlanta, we actually got a chance to chat on Skype and Mark told me that I had to 'activate' our registry (he got to have fun with the barcode bleeper all by his lonesome, not fair!). I found one of the emails from Macy's and loaded up the 'make a registry page' and after it tried to sell me Gold Reward Stars or something, AND a Macy's card, I finally set up a registry but it had nothing in it.
Mark realised then that I'd started a new registry, not activated HIS one, so I tried to delete it, and when it wouldn't let me, I changed all the details to fake details, including the wedding date, made it private, and changed the account to an old email address. Yeah, I'd opened the "selling you the Gold Reward Stars" email and not the "activate your account" email by accident. Boob. But then the real 'activation' wouldn't work; first Mark couldn't find our special code and had to rummage round his paperwork, and then the computer was all confused because now I had two registries, kind of.
Mark gave in and called Macy's to explain and asked them to delete the one I made by accident, but because I'd changed some of the details, they couldn't find it in the system. The Macy's lady asked what the name of the couple was. It was still in my name, but the 'husband' was different. While still on the phone to Macy's, Mark asked me over webcam what I changed it to, exactly.
Me: Umm, Bobby Billybog.
Mark: You're kidding me? Um, ma'am, it's uh, Bobby Billybog.
I burst into fits of giggles and Mark was staring at me over Skype as he was trying to be serious to the Macy's lady. She asked to clarify all the details of mine and Bobby Billybog's wedding, for security purposes I imagine.
Mark: What address did you put, Gill?
Me: I can't remember. The zip code was the same. I don't know. It was something silly, like Silly Nanny Street (Family Guy reference).
Mark: Oh god...
The Macy's lady actually asked if that's where he lived. I'm not sure she quite understood what was going on. Mark even tried to explain to the poor lady that I was cracking up over webcam at him having to say silly things over the phone to a stranger.
So that's how I broke our registry and laughed myself daft at my future husband (a serious upstanding bloke who graduated from Military School) saying his 'name' was Bobby Billybog to Macy's while he was not laughing at all.
It's also how I have earned myself a new nickname from my serious upstanding future husband... Gilly Billybog. I know I totally deserve it
