I've been working on the wedding
They're workin me hard for this wedding, let me tell you. Printing place cards and programs all day, hanging out and drinking all night; see, I'm even still awake! But I really shouldn't be: there's lots more to do tomorrow. So it's to bed for me.
being a bachelor is good fun
Leah did traditional-type things for her bachelorette party: went out to dinner and then went to see a cross-dresser's cabaret. That's not for me, and my groomsmens knew it, so instead they arranged a day of sailing and wiffleball and an evening of music. I think they were a little disappointed when I told em it was about time to wrap things up at quarter to eleven, but late nights aren't for me either. They weren't suprised, I'm sure. We bachelors have to get our sleep, you know: there's alot of things I have to do tomorrow, not to mention the Sunday!
marriage accomplished!!
We're married! Woohoo! Now it's off to the honeymoon. We'll bring back pictures, and stories.
the honeymoon is over
And I mean that title in the most literal sense. We just got back from five days on Martha's Vineyard, where we had wonderful weather the whole time and ate a tremendous amount of high-quality food. Both of us have previously said that we're never eating again, but on this honeymoon trip we both said it with a frequency never before achieved in our life together, and we meant it every time. We did other things besides eat, but it was all delightfully unstructured and relaxing so I don't really remember very much about it. Anyways, who wants to read about our boring old vacation?! Now, I imagine some people might want to read about our wedding--those few readers of these pages who weren't actually present--but that's sure an awful lot to write, and I don't know if I can face it now. I confess I took a notepad with me to the island, thinking that perhaps I'd jot down some notes for a future recounting of the wedding ceremony and reception; you'll all be relieved to know, however, that said notepad did not leave my bag.
So it was a good time. Now we face some effort to reintegrate ourselves into real life; may it be sucessful.
gouging is for eyes
So yeah, gas is now $3.09 here, and that's at the cheap places: $3.39, which was the price everywhere a couple days ago, is still to be seen as well. Even that's nothing, we hear, compared to some places in the South and Midwest, where prices have topped five dollars. Since folks like driving, naturally the airwaves are filled with talk of 'price gouging'; and I'm filled with doubt as to the appropriateness of those accusations. Sure, it may be that gas station owners or gasoline suppliers may be trying to make a buck off the hurricane, but come on: is this a market economy or isn't it? Folks are in the gas business to make money, I believe. If people paid the gas station attendent extra when they were feeling flush, I might understand if now they wantet a break; failing that, either that we have to either pay up or go without. It seems only fair. Anything else is naught but socialism!!
present(s) and accounted for
Somebody needs to get with program here, and get some blogging done! Aren't we busy doing things? Don't we have stories to tell? As a matter of fact, we do, but I fear we're not in any condition to tell them. Or rather, I'm not: Leah still has the excuse of her hiatus. But she sent me a link to a post in a friend of hers' blog, and I read a few entries, and was shamed. I used to be funny like that, and incisive and clever... what happened?!
One thing that happened (though I don't know how much this affects by humor and story-telling abilities) is that I clonked my head pretty good on the side of the cabinet the other day: better than I ever did before. Better? Worse! I almost knocked myself out! And Leah wasn't here to take care of me: she had to run off on a business trip practically right after we got back from our honeymoon! So why did I hit my head on the side of the cabinet? Because, you see, I was trying to step over the piles of wedding presents that were filling our entire house at the time.
Getting several thousand dollars worth of gifts has to be the most embarrassing aspect of getting married (aside, perhaps, from having to kiss at instigation of the photographer while cutting the cake). Not that I regret any particular gift, but the shear volume seems something like consumer culture gone mad. We registered at Crate & Barrel; by the time everything was collected in our hot little hands our living room resembled nothing so much as a Crate & Barrel warehouse. And don't even get me started on what it was like when we got all those boxes opened up! Let me tell you, the good folks at C&B don't skimp on the packing material.
And then there was the fact that, while everything we registered for and subsequently received was wonderful and a marvel of home design and/or kitchen engineering, it was clear that it wouldn't all fit in our house. So we took a good lot back to the store, to trade in for more prosaic items such as cooling racks and garlic mashers, objects which I actually had added to the register but which were insignificantly glamorous for folks to want to buy them for us. That was what we did this evening. After we got over our shame at dropping this cart-load of returns on the poor store clerks, we quite enjoyed ourselves: there's something to be said for a prepaid shopping spree where, when your haul is finally rung up, you are not charged but instead presented with a gift card containing an amount of money I am to embarrassed to reveal that we have still to spend, at a later date. We might go into the Boston store to look at furniture. It's that drastic.
So yes, folks did us proud, and we have some classy friends and relatives who aren't afraid to splurge on us a little. And boy do we appreciate it! Thanks, guys!!! Anyone who's in the neighborhood is welcome to stop by for some dinner: we're now ready for some serious cookin and entertainin. That is, when we finally manage to clean up all the styrofoam peanuts.
I'm sorry, do you work here?
In Starbucks this morning, i am third in line and there are two cashiers working. The first woman in line is reaching into her wallet to pay the cashier on the left, when she suddenly and excitedly turns to the cashier on the right, who is about to take the next woman's order.
"Hey, i recognize you! I saw you at the Bedford Garden Show last week!"
"Oh Yeah? You went to the Garden Show too? Why didn't you say hi?"
"I didn't recognize you! I mean, it's so hard when you see someone out of context..."
They continue excitedly talking, as if suddenly unconcerned with to the other customers in line. The cashier on the left, still waiting for his cash, is actually holding out his hand to the oblivious customer. The woman in front of me is impatiently following the conversation like a tennis match. The chatting barista seems non-concerned.
The customer continues:
"Do you usually go to those things? I mean, do you think you're going to go to the next one? I always think..." blah blah blah, etc. etc.
After about a minute, the woman in front of me has had enough.
"Excuse me," she says, "Can i get a cup of coffee?"
I guess she only like to see people IN context. As in the context of: You make coffee here, right?
PS: Maybe you don't think this story is so funny, but if you could have heard this woman say this, with such irritation but without a hint of irony, it would have rekindled your faith in the possibility of authentic responces in our all-tropes-exhausted post-mordern world. Plus i almost snorted coffee up my nose.
PPS: This weekend, a post wedding recap, i PROMISE.
better late than... no
So what is my reason for being I up so late, you ask? Why, it's because I've been printing out wedding pictures, of course! It turns out that the ones Leah's mother took are at least as good as the ones from the professional photo-guy; they also have the added advantage of being available for high-resolution printing now, rather than in six months or something. We'll be getting a fancy fancy album from said professional before that date, but Leah wants something to show off to folks right now! She's cutting them out and putting them in the album as we speak.
So where are the online versions, you enquire further? Those online versions which would go so nicely with a well-written account of the procedings of, what, two full weeks ago now? To which I reply HA!... er, I mean, patience, grasshopper: these things will come in time.
The other reason I'm up so late is that, clearly, my mind is so used to being mazed by tiredness that it wants to prolong the situation to the greatest degree possible. The post-wedding disorientation thus continues!
close encounters of the RACOON kind
I was upstairs listening to a painful baseball game, and Leah was watching the tv downstairs; she heard some disturbing noises coming from the direction of the kitchen and called me down to invistigate; I crept into the kitchen and indeed, there were noises, but they weren't coming from within. No, they were coming through the open window, and I instantly identified the source: racoons! Racoons in the trash, to be precise.
Having previously witnessed the devestation they could cause to a poor defensless kitchen trash bag, I of course leapt into action: flung open the door, jumped out and gave them my best growl. It works on squirrels... The three racoons munching away down there barely looked up. They did, however, grudgingly back up a few feet when I went down the porch stairs, and then a few more feet when I grabbed a dowel and started waving it at them. They looked at that point like they were giving up, so imagine my suprise when, after I had stowed the trash can safely indoors, I turned around to see one of the racoons watching me from less than ten feet away. They're cuddly enough creatures and all, but there's something unsettling about animals--wild animals, allegedly--being that fearless. Although, I threw some stuff at em too and hit one of em a few times, and that didn't have any particular effect either; so maybe they're just dumb. In any case, one of them got a little bit of a mean out of something they managed to extract before I got the can away from them, I got a number of flash photographs of him. Or her, I suppose.
It's like we're living in a jungle out here!
Why the policy says "No eating at your work station"
I just poured chocolate shake all over everything.
Just to be clear, Everything includes:
my work shirt
my undershirt
my pants
my shoes
my neck
my hair
the mail
the floor
the keyboard
the fax machine
the scant remnants of my dignity
And i am not even kidding, i actually hit all of these objects with chocolate shake. In an hour, the jewelry store will smell like rotting soy.
If you smell me coming down the street later this evening, consider it a cry for help.
Why so slow on the wedding pix, losers?
We would love to write for you, our dedicated readership, a detailed account of our beautiful wedding day, the most wonderful day of our lives, a day so perfect that everyone involved might as well kill themselves now in despair that we will never again see a day as beautiful and perfect as this day.
Anyway, our desire is to make a nice long blog post with nice pictures from the wedding, and then write funny things next to the pictures like "doesn't he look like he's about to fall asleep during the ceremony" etc. But unfortunately, our stupid photographer has stupid copy-protected all the stupid pictures, so that the thumbnails we can see on our stupidconfidential web site can't even be copied in their stupid teeny tiny nature for viewing on other web sites, even though our photographer doesn't design stupid websites so there's no way we're stealing from him we can't print 8 by 10s from that size for pete's sake we only want to show the web our stupid pictures!!!
So if you have a desire to see our wedding pictures in their entirety, because we're being so slow about it, i invite you to clog our photographer's website by going to the following link:
www.cachetphoto.com/online.htm
click on our names
type the password: 050904
And if any of you are smart enough to hack the copy-protection on these photos, the internet will thank you for it.
Happy Birthday Daddy2!
Today is David's birthday. David is my new father-in-law. Gosh, that's weird to write: "father-in-law". On my first try i wrote father-AND-law, and then i looked at it for a minute like a dog who's smelled something funny but doesn't know quite what, and then i realized that the AND must be IN because you call them your "In-Laws" not your "AND-laws. " As in "they're your parents withIN the law" not "they're your parents AND they will also judge you on all your poor qualities and immedietly phone your husband to tell him what a horrible shrew he's married because THEIR WORD IS LAW!!!"
Anyway,
David is having a party thrown in his honor this evening, a SINGING party! Good thing one of the A-------d clan up and married a soprano! Sing out Louise!!!
*If anyone else in the world know this reference, then You Too are a Dork. Sign-ups are not open for my new course entitled:
equal nox
Today is the first day of fall, otherwise known as the equinox. It is so called because the day today is equal in length with the night tonight, or perhaps last night; thus equi-, Latin for 'equal', plus nox, 'darkness' or 'night' in the same language. The preceding etymology was invented by me out of my own head just to be silly, but it turns out to be for all intents and purposes correct. I have internalized the internalities of the English language, apparently.
Happy Fall!
And Oh yeah, happy birthday Dad! That too. Leah is better at celebrating the birthdays of my parents than I am myself.
It's Saturday and i'm at work, lazy bums.
David's birthday party last night was a big success -- everyone sang out to their little heart's content, and i blasted out some high Gs, though no As i'm afraid, even though some of them did make themselves apparent in the score but unfortunately not in my throat. Dan and i cleaned up on our duet of "If i loved you" from Carosel, but in the end the crowd wasn't that hard to please. The downside of my job in the wonderful retail business is that while everyone else can drink themselves silly late into the night on Friday, i have to be mindful of my just-anouther-week-night bed-time. Especially since i now have a husband to support in the luxury to which he is accustomed.
Speaking of marrying, i showed everyone at the party my little pink album of wedding pictures and they all said, "Awww, look how thin you lookED." If i hear one more person say how pretty i "WAS" three weeks ago, i am going to hit them over the head with my disgustingly massive ogre belly. That'll teach 'em.
like flipping a switch
The seasons, we're told, are an artificial construct, or at best an average of what we can expect at a particular moment in the year. Snow doesn't automatically begin falling on December twenty-first, for example. Out of the infinite variety of meteorological randomness, though, things like that may come to happen now and again: as they have, it seems, this year.
Two days ago it was summer, and the air was warm and humid and summer-y. Yesterday it became fall, and obligingly the weather turned cool and brisk overnight. What more could you ask for! Today there's even a little overcast, and all together it just makes me want to go out and drink cider and play football. I'd add 'rake leaves' to that as well, but I'm afraid that with this lawn I'm not entirely looking forward to that this year.
Also: thank you to Eric for cracking the mystery of the copy-protected wedding photos. Now any delay in posting a few of them for your perusal here is due only to our own lack of diligence.
"it makes my heart sing"
In Boston, usually, people tend to get down on our local sports teams. They do so publicly on the radio and in newspaper columns, and the bitterness flows like bad wine. Yes, both teams that matter to us here are reigning league champions, but there is a strong sense that it can't last, that bad times are always right around the corner. There was a period during the summer where the flow of desperate pessimism was checked by the suprisingly good performance of the Red Sox, but a week ago bad losses by both the Sox and Patriots, followed by the Sox's slide out of first place, brought the naysayers out again in full voice. It's like folks around here can't be happy unless they're miserable.
Well, since I complain so much about this phenomenon, I feel it's my duty to report a notable exception to it. Yesterday both teams won their games, and the Patriots did so in exciting fashion at the last minute. Not everyone was wholly pleased--there were those on the talk radio who said that the local footbal club was more lucky than good--but they were the minority. No, even at WEEI, that bastion of negativity, one of the hosts was heard to say that the performance of the Patriots against the Steelers and the character of the team in general 'makes my heart sing.' Now that's wonderful to hear. I only hope they win again next week; it would be a shame if they were transformed back into a bunch of bums so quickly.
A fever is a sign of weakness -- you will be assimilated
A note to children everywhere:
Enjoy your sick days while you can!!! Those sleepy mornings when you wake up with a sore throat and a tummy ache and your head feels all hot and your legs feel all noodly... Lap it up munchkins! The day is coming when you will wake up and feel like that, and thn you will suck it up and go to WORK, because the world is a harsh hard place with no sympathy for kiddles with the flippin flu.
On a brighter note, Dan woke up at 6 in the morning to bake me muffins, and when i woke up moaning and groaning and collapsing on the bathroom floor, he also make me tea and oatmeal. He is now home cleaning the house and planting new flowers and lord knows what else. Yesterday he brought me lunch in the middle of the day. Married life is apparently wonderful, especially if you afford to support a full-time homemaker. I can afford to support mine for about anouther month-and-a-half, at which time i will need to either get a raise or a second full-time job. A second job AND grad-school; are you crazy leah??? Crazy for muffins, i am!
sooooo sick, wah wah wah
This morning i woke up cursing a world in which one could be this sick and still be obligated to return to work. I think i even said to Dan, "The world is a mean place and i don't wanna live here anymore." I HAVE THE FLU AND I HAVE LOST THE WILL TO LIVE!!!
Dan made cornbread this morning at 6am. He doesn't deserve this shit.
I do indeed fear that Dan will soon leave me for anouther wife, who does not get the flu, or if she does, does not complain about her stuffy head like it surely signifies the coming of the appocolypse. I often get sick like this, just when i am sooooooooo overwhelmed at work i have dreams that the computer files are eating me. Then, when i think work could not possibly get any more stressfull, my nose becomes a snot volcano. I AM DROWNING UNDER A VOLCANO OF SNOT AND PAPERWORK!!!!!!!!!
Can you actually drown under a volcano? i didn't think so. Great, now i'm not only sick, but retarded.
The time has come...
It has happened. And now it is officially Fall.
For the first time this season, i rolled up balls of paper towel and stuck them up my nostrils because i was tired of blowing my nose over and over and over and over and over again. This will happen approximately 19.5 times over the coming fall and winter.
Nasal spray, you're next!
Pumpkinaliscious
Last night Dan threw a wonderful dinner party, in true Iron Chef fashion, with a single food theme running through all the dishes. To celebrate the wonderful fall bounty, Dan made pumpkin rice, curried pumpkin seads, and pumpkin soup cooked in a real hollowed-out pumpkin. Everything was absolutely delicious! My favorite was the pumpkin soup, which felt good to my sickly little head, so vegetably and wholesomey. Josh, our guest of honor, also made a pumpkin pie which was pretty good too. He was a famous (read: employed) dessert chef before he moved back to this area recently to pursue more career-like careers. All in all, a real pumpkin success!
Anouther dinner party approaches Saturday. It's almost like we're real adults!