Planning a Wedding

Here it is again, my old friend stress. It likes to shower me with gifts of panic, fear, frustration, tears, and the occasional pimple. The cause? My wedding.
Sure, sure, Doom and I have all the time in the world to get married, but I would rather do it within this year. Why? I'm not entirely sure... maybe because next year I'm hoping to go to grad school, and I feel like it would be easier for financial aid and taxes and stuff if we were already married before 2014. And it has to be this summer if we have any hope of my brother and his girlfriend coming. So that means ~2 months. And I feel like Doom and I are ready to be married, if only we could get away with being married without the whole process of a wedding. Of course, we could just do that but my family and friends would strangle the both of us. They want to see a wedding, a real wedding, with music and dresses and shit. And I feel like I owe them that-- they are there for us, of course.
I wish planning a wedding wasn't so complicated... At first, being the outdoorsy type, I wanted an outdoor wedding. And then I remembered I live in the desert, and July/August in a desert is not a place to be standing outside for an hour. So I began the hunt, and I do believe I've narrowed down a venue. Which is good. Then comes the reception, which we're going to have at my house. I mean, the pool will be used and appreciated I'm sure, but I'm going to have to do something with the dogs. I don't trust them with ~40 people milling around, someone could leave the door open and they could escape, and there will most likely be children there, and last time the children were here my dogs were terrified of them, and I just don't want to deal with my dogs biting a child or trampling a child. Also, if I confined my dogs to a room they would just bark the whole time. So I may consider day boarding at my veterinarian, or dropping them off at a pet hotel or something like that.In fact, that might just be inevitable.
Doom and I are planning to rent a tux and a dress, so hopefully that won't be too expensive, although I haven't hunted around for that yet.
And finally, I'm going to allow my dad to make us a wedding cake, to save money. But, as I told him, "You're cakes taste amazing but they're ugly." So I politely asked him to work on his cake-decorating skills beforehand. If you remember from my birthday, I said something similar.
So expect wedding updates as I go along... this should be an interesting summer.