My parents dropped round their broadband router this morning, so we could test if it was our hardware at fault before BT came out, declared that it was and charged us a fortune for daring to question the brilliance of their telephone network.

I plugged it in and it appeared to be working OK, so I reasoned that it must be our router (which is recently out of warranty, of course) at fault. I plugged ours back in and wondered if any of its settings could be corrupt or anything - then noticed it had connected and we were online. Rather strange, but I’m not complaining - at least not until it happens again.

So the web site is back, to the delight of the zero to two visitors it typically gets of an evening. Hurrah. (If you find it’s down again any time soon, this problem has probably come back - sorry.)

*Oh dear, you know I’ve gone too far when more readers are likely to be confused by an apparently rogue ‘or’ than to have ever heard of the Love song title on which this is an appalling pun. Sorry.

(As opposed to technically hitched, as we will be from 3 September.)

Unfortunately, our ADSL broadband connection has just died. PlusNet have got BT on the case, so if we’re lucky we’ll be back online before the wedding.

The worst side-effect of this (aside, obviously, from our tragic lack of internet access except through painful pay-per-minute dial-up) is that the main zoolyweds web site will be out of action until our connection is restored. This could take us beyond our hoped-for newsletter publication date (Sunday) and into next week if we’re unlucky. And the fact that we have no internet connection at the moment suggests that we are indeed unlucky.

Sorry for any inconvenience, etc. We’ll be back as soon as we can be.

Time flies when you’re not updating a dlog, it seems - it’s been over three weeks since my last post, so now we’re preparing for a couple of deadlines that are rather imminent.

The first, and therefore most pressing, of these is the wedding list, which we promised would be finished by the end of this month. We then proceeded to do very little about it for a couple of weeks, so we’ve been dashing about looking for things to add to it at the last minute! Even as I type, Edith is updating the database with some of our final items, several of which are summer-related and therefore unavoidably ‘retrospective’ gifts.

The good news on the retrospective gift front is that, to make it a bit less of a giftless money-gathering exercise, and generally add a bit of ceremony to it, we’ve now prepared and published special printable gift envelopes, which you can cut out, fold up and stick together to give us! You’ll find the corresponding envelope linked to from each retrospective gift’s information page.

Meanwhile, our other equally self-imposed deadline is to prepare a newsletter to be sent out on 3 July, a month after the previous one and just two months before the wedding. This is proving a little difficult on account of the thinness on the ground of news, but we’re working on that too, with some more additions and updates to the web site, not to mention a zoolyweds executive committee meeting this Thursday (OK, it’s actually just Rosy visiting us). By this time next week we’ll have more news than BBC News 24 on a good day. Hopefully.

There are just three months to go until the wedding now, so things are hotting up in zoolyweds-land.

The first thing that most of our readers will probably have noticed is that the first of our zoolyweds news update e-mails (also available as a PDF) has been released into the wild - or at least into our guests’ e-mail inboxes.

One of the main points of the newsletter is to highlight a recent change to the coach arrangements, whereby we now have a slightly more limited number of places available. I suppose I ought to try and put together some kind of ‘places remaining’ counter for the zoolyweds site, but it’s been a while since I did any serious PHP coding so for now we’ll make do with counting ticks regularly to make sure we haven’t gone over!

We’ve also been busy this evening putting together a brand new page on the main zoolyweds site: the Wedding Party.

Way back at launch-time, Duncan requested that we put some photos on the web site, even kindly providing one of Edith and me at her graduation ball last year. (The snippet of Edith on the Wedding Party page was taken from this.) This idea seemed good but for some reason we never really got around to doing anything about it. When I’d prepared the newsletter last night, though, Edith suddenly suggested a page profiling those people in the wedding party, with photos, at last realising the dream!

The photos proved quite a challenge for some people - indeed, I had to get one of Kaie by taking a freeze-frame from a video filmed when visiting her flat in 2003 - but we got there in the end, and we hope you’ll find the page interesting.

Since we only put the page together tonight, at the last minute, we also rather hope the people featured on it won’t object to their descriptions or pictures (not that we chose them to be flattering - although the giraffe mask certainly conceals my worst side ;)), as we haven’t run them past anyone yet. Gulp.