Wedding Weekend

Here in Canada it seems like they’re having long weekends all the time. We took advantage of that and planned the wedding for the “May long weekend,” which always falls on the first weekend preceeding May 25. We figured it would be nice to have a 3-day “anniversary weekend” each year. Plus there’s that much more time to party.

Mark, our friend from Florida and man of honour (< —see Canada, let me work already!) arrived on Thursday. When I left Seattle with nothing but cats and a suitcase and a couple of boxes of my most precious belongings (the stuff that was easiest to grab out of storage,) I was forced to leave behind my car. For some reason they don’t allow those on airplanes. Must be those heightened security measures…

Thanks to the wonderful krt and fire, who generously fetched the car from the pricey airport parking lot, let it sit at their house, and even cleaned the darn thing out, and man of honour Mark who offered to fly to Seattle from Tampa and drive the silly car all the way here – my baby car is now here, in one piece, no thanks to the bad tires she currently sports.

Friday night, in lieu of a traditional stripper-and-beer bachelor party, we invited a bunch of etc’s coworkers over and got all drunky-drunk. Knowing the Big Day was to follow, we kept our alcohol consumption at safe levels – you know, to avoid wedding day hangover. But we did have a great time, and I got to meet a bunch of new people who were very fun.

The ceremony itself was perfect. Originally we planned to have it outside in the garden, among the strawberries and hopps that we’d recently replanted and that looked pretty darn good. But the weather had other ideas – rain and slush, so we assembled in the living room.

We limited our real life guests to very close friends and his immediate family. My own family isn’t able to travel due to health/caregiving reasons so we set up a fabulous webcam and let people watch it all live. There was no sound, but they got the idea.

And then because we are irc addicts we also had Mark broadcast an irc play-by-play of the event. Incidentally that transcript is funny and precious and something that I’ll treasure forever. And how Mark kept from cracking up laughing while talking to those loons is so beyond me. It’s almost as good as the wedding photos that idiot jhb deleted. Yeah. rm and I are not really friends anymore.

Mr. Ron Kromm, (who is wonderful and if ever you’re in Calgary and need a wedding commissioner, he’s your guy) waved his magic wand upon us, and *poof* in the most incredible few moments of my life, the deal was sealed.

Then we all headed out for pasta at the spaghetti factory, which I love because the spumoni and coffee are included with the meal.

After dinner we returned to the house. etc and mark got shit-faced and did upside down margarita shots for our web cam audience, and at some insanely late/early hour those two drunken geeks walked to the gas station for chips and smokes.

Luckily we didn’t schedule anything for Sunday, so we slept in.

Monday was meet the in-laws day. We invited all his brothers and sisters and their families and had a celebratory barbeque. Needless to say I was nervous. You never want to be the wife that they all talk about. “Did you see what she did!?!” “That’s totally something jhb would do!” We ate everything in sight and drank boatloads of wine that didn’t even come from boxes! (Never a good idea, according to those queer eye guys, but interestingly, ok in the eye of this month’s Real Simple magazine.) In the end all the worrying was over nothing. etc’s family is amazing and warm, and just as weird as my own family.

It was the perfect ending to a perfect weekend, and I honestly couldn’t be happier.

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outed

So after all these years I’ve been outed. I didn’t realize at first. I’d stopped looking at logs months ago, so I honestly have no idea how many of you are still reading. Here’s the thing. etc linked me on his olj page. And his blog page. And my family and everyone else my mom speaks to has the url for his main page. The normal curious person will go poking through the links on his page and end up on his journal, and eventually, they will stumble upon my page.

Great.

So that’s kind of weird. I’m glad I took the old stuff down. Again with the googlecache. Anyhow… New design again.

The whole daily updates for the week leading up to the wedding didn’t last beyond the one entry. It’s no wonder I never finish holidailies =) .

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One Week

A week from today we will be married. I’ve decided that now is a good time for daily updates, seeing as how this is my last week unwed.

Tonight I cleared out the junk drawers. etc is not a flylady person. TWO JUNK DRAWERS. I had to explain the evils of the junk drawers as I went through them. A lot of the stuff in there was trash. There were some important things too, the kind of things that deserve a more specific place than a junk drawer. There were also a million unsharpened pencils. I don’t really know what to make of that. But now those are cleared out and I feel like I got something really important done tonight. You can always use an extra drawer or two in the kitchen. But I’m circling around my point. This house was his. Everything in here was set up by him. (shhh. For clarity’s sake, and for denial purposes, we’re ignoring the fact that he almost certainly did have some help in setting the place up.) Those junk drawers, they were his idea too I bet. And now I have weaseled my way in. Per jhm, no more junk drawers.

And then there was the photo album. Old pictures of things. Mostly the kids when they were younger. But there were a few of the exwife and a girl he used to date. And of him, too. He was so cute, even back then. It probably wasn’t the easiest thing for him to have to watch me go through the photos, but I asked, and he was cool with that, and I’d really rather look at them when he’s around, than when I’m alone with just my mind to jump to conclusions about his past and how happy he may or may not have been. (Generally the rule for jumping to conclusions is a worst case scenario: he was overwhelmingly happy.)

So yeah it wasn’t the easiest for me to see those. Photographs are funny. They hold life apart from circumstance. You couldn’t tell what was going on in the background – smiles, cakes, candles… Unhappiness was hidden in the shadows.

I’d like to pretend he doesn’t have a past, that he’s never shared love with anyone prior to me. That it isn’t all so complicated. But that’s just not how it is and I have to suck it up and deal with that. He is the man he is *because* of that past. Is that a dumb way of looking at it? Am I just making up excuses, coaxing myself out of feeling crappy about this? Of course we’re all products of our past, but who’s to say I wouldn’t be who I am regardless of my past. Alas, there’s nothing that can be done about that now. All we can control is how we react to the past, and how we use that to move ahead.

Mush.

A couple of days ago I picked up the wedding bands. It was thrilling really. You wait all your life to do that – not pick them up, but see them, wear them… Meet The One. Be married. I grew up in one of those Leave It to Beaver families, where there was always a mom and a dad and they never ever fought (I’m sure they did, just quietly, and not in front of the kids.) So I’ve always thought that I’d get married and have kids and be married forever, just like my parents. This whole live with boys and break-up with boys and live with other boys and break-up with other boys thing wasn’t exactly in the original plans. A few years ago it became apparent to me that I wasn’t destined to have the happy family life that my parents had. I decided my time clock needed to go and gave up on the whole mommy idea. I came to terms with the fact that I may never have kids.

And then BAM. I met him. Just when I had decided that living the rest of my life alone was perhaps not such a bad thing. And now there are rings and people are coming to see us. And nervousness and excitement. One week.

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