How to seal 100 envelopes

I love going on factory tours.  Watching raw materials get sorted, processed, packaged, and assembled for delivery is a remarkable experience.  Beer bottles going through the Pabst line, filled at 20 bottles per second; redwood logs, twenty feet long and five feet across, being peeled of bark by high-pressure water jets.  It's all very 19th-century technology, a series of gears and chains and cams and levers that make magical things happen.

And that kind of technology is required to do things at the scale we live now.  We consume 183.9 million bottles of beer a day in the US, and 131.5 million board feet of lumber (Rain Man moment there); you're not going to get to those kinds of numbers in backyard industries.

Our wedding is somewhat smaller scale than the work of Pacific Lumber, but there's still quite a lot to do.  For instance, here's what it takes to send 108 wedding invitations:

• A Macintosh computer with PrintShop software and a 20" pro monitor
• A dozen or so hours to lay out the pages of text and graphics
• Three people to review the text
• Three different printers to try to align the front and back sides of the card
• A trip to two crafts stores to buy seven different colors of ribbon
• A return to one of the crafts stores to buy three more spools of the ribbon we decided on
• Three boxes of custom paper
• One pack of transparent labels
• A trip to New York to buy three (!!) test envelopes
• Two friends to buy 100 of the envelopes we selected
• Another trip to New York to pick up the envelopes (okay, so there was another reason for the two New York trips...)
• An evening with Herb and Nora tying 100 packs of cards with ribbon
• A trip to the post office to get 100 envelope stamps and 100 postcard stamps
• Printing a set of color tests for the address labels
• Choosing a color, printing four sheets of address labels and additional sheets of return address labels
• An evening with Herb:
• putting be-ribboned invitations into envelopes (while watching two episodes of American Chopper, in which the crew designs and assembles a custom motorcycle for GoDaddy.com)
• putting address labels onto envelopes (while watching a biography of 1960s and '70s NASCAR driver David Pearson on the Speed channel)
• putting return address labels onto 35 envelopes, and hand-addressing the returns for the rest (we didn't have enough labels) (while watching an excellent movie, The Notorious Bettie Page)
• using a sponge to moisten the glue flaps and seal the envelopes (while watching the last hour of Iron Man, in which yet another violation of the core villain rule—don't gloat while the superhero is still alive—once again caused the villain's downfall)
• A trip to the Medford Post Office to mail the finished invitations, and to buy four international postcard stamps and four international one-ounce stamps.

That last one's not done yet.  Ask me in an hour.

Seems like there ought to be a machine for all that.