The Marriage Post

This post has been a long time coming. Sorry for all of you out there waiting to hear about it. It took a while to get the pictures (I'm still waiting for some) and then the time to write. Apparently marriage does stuff to your time. My days are now split up into two categories: work and Mark. Everything else has been pushed aside. But he's a Sunday afternoon napper and I'm not.

We were married on July 23, 2010 in the Ogden Utah temple.

All our parents and siblings were able to come, which was a great blessing. I haven't seen all my siblings in the same place at the same time in many years. After the ceremony the photographer took over. It was a bright sunny day and we were facing the sun and in many of the shots you can see us squinting.

We actually had some extra time between the ceremony and the reception. We had so many people helping us set up that we had time for a game of Munchkin. If you do any sort of role-playing, you have to play Munchkin. Its a card game that has elements of role-playing, but instead of everybody working together to defeat monsters, its every man for himself.

We only had two little problems the entire evening. The sugar jewels on my cake melted, so Mom spent most of the afternoon fixing that instead of relaxing and playing games and eating pizza. Not that you can tell that anything was wrong with the cake. Mom is brilliant that way. And the button hook on my dress ripped during one of the photos. The photographer had the groomsmen make a chair out their arms and put me in it. The dress ripped as I was getting in. (Sorry I don't have a picture of this yet. Its on its way.) But a safety pin kept everything in place for the rest of the night.

We had a pretty good turnout for the reception. My friends from high school came, and Mark's cousins, and a bunch our parent's friends whom neither of us knew well.

And here are some random pictures from the reception. Sorry about the quality of some of these. You know how disposable camera are.

Canstruction

Every year the Society for Design Administration has a contest called Canstruction. Its a food charity donation program where groups of architects and engineers form teams to build sculptures out of canned goods and other non-perishable food items. I'm not sure what the teams win, but at the end of the contest, all the food is donated to local food banks.

San Antonio has been a participating city for several years. One year the sculptures were assembled in the Central Library, which is how I became aware of this project. This year they were displayed at a mall. Mark and I went this afternoon to see them, and, unfortunately, we were not impressed. I remember the sculptures as being very colorful and whimsical, but the ones out there today were not nearly as good. Its possible that food labels have changed so that they are not as colorful. Perhaps the manufacturers are using more white space then they used to; I don't know. I do know that the sculptures were mostly blocky, dull blobs, except for the Norte Dame remake, which actually had some shape and color to it, but was still not quite live up to my expectations. I hope there's better stuff out there next year.

PS We don't know where the sculptures on the Canstruction website were hiding. We didn't see any of the ones posted there, except for Norte Dame.

Its done

All the wedding stuff is over with. The planning, the traveling, the ceremony and receptions are finished. Yesterday was our Texas open house and it was the last wedding party we had. So in total we had:

2 bridal showers
1 bachelor party
1 work luncheon/pot luck
3 flights
1 rental car
3 photographers (1 for Engagement photos, 1 for Bridals, and 1 for the wedding)
1 Temple ceremony
1 reception
3 days of open sea travel (with 1 day of semi-sea-sickness)
1 day of snorkeling
1 day of site-seeing in Nassau
1 New York City off- Broadway show
2 days worth of sunburn
1 week of peeling
and 1 open house

Now maybe I'll have some time to blog about all of it.

PS. A big "Thank You" to everyone who came, wished us well, and helped with the wedding madness.

Poetry depression

At my library I run a poetry open mic night. I started it in 2007 and it went really well for a long time. We didn't have oodles of people, but we had a good variety every month. This past year has been really rough though, with only 2 or 3 people coming in. And tonight we had no one, not even our one faithful regular who has come every month for the past year and a half.

There could be several reasons for this. The economy may be playing a factor here. People are more concerned about their jobs then about the arts. The library is also undergoing repairs, so there's scaffolding outside and occasional banging, which could be keeping people away. Also, we're downtown. For some reason people do not like to travel downtown unless they absolutely have to, or they're a tourist. But we're out of the way for tourist too because we're not right in the middle of the tourist attractions. *sigh*

I don't know what to do. I don't know whether I should just give it up or try to change something. I hear of poetry programs in other libraries that are really successful and I wonder what their secret is. What are they doing to get people into their programs? What sort of incentive would you need to go to participate in a library open mic?

Princess for a day

This past weekend my sister came down to help doll me up for my bridal pictures. We spent Thursday night and Friday morning doing my hair (overnight curlers) and then rushed to the studio in the morning.

I normally don't like getting my picture taken, but this was an exception. After the photographer took some studio shots we headed to an outdoor location, the Landa library. The Landa library is gorgeous. It looks like an old mansion, it may very well be an old mansion, with a marble porch and columns, a massive ornamental lawn, and dark wood doors and stained glass.

As we were taking pictures two little girls walked by with their mothers, and they got so excited when they saw me. Their conversation went something like this:

"Look, its a princess!"

"Do you think she's a real princess?"

"She has to be one, she's so pretty."

I wonder what the librarians would have thought if they told them there was a princess on their side porch?

Reading plan update

So out of the 8 books that I've picked out to read for my chick lit reading plan, I've only managed to read 2 so far. All my reading time seems to have disappeared into wedding plans, my fiance, and facebook. Not that I'm complaining about the wedding plans or the fiance. Oh, and all the other books I'm suppose to read for work but can't read on work time. But never mind that.

The books I've managed to read are Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding and Bookends by Jane Green. Bridget Jones was what I expected from chick lit. A single 20-30 something looking for love and dealing with parents, jobs, and the single scene. There are a couple of possible love interests, one is a player and one is not, and you wonder if Bridget will get the right guy. But of course she does in the end.

Bookends was not so typical. Cath is a single in the city, but she's not looking for love. She has her best friend, Simon, and a group of other best friends that she's been with since college. What more does she need? James is an artist who doubles as a real estate agent and is obviously interested in her. They would have gotten together sooner if not for all the Drama happening in her friends' lives. This book started out as a fun light read, until the Drama happens. The abrupt change of tone was a bit jarring and completely unexpected. It tries to get back to being light and fun after, but it doesn't quit succeed. Considering the nature of the Drama, its possible it wasn't suppose to.

Overall I give both books 3 stars. No, I take that back, Bookends gets an extra 1/4 of a star for mentioning the TARDIS.

Cats and Ladders

Over the past couple of days Mark and I have been trying to fix my accent wall. A seal near the chimney became unsealed and water would run down the wall every time it rained. So its taken some time, but the sealed is resealed and we've now got supplies to make the wall look better. One of the supplies is a ladder. This morning Max decided to explore the ladder.

Max has always been a climber.