Well, so, the wedding

--was lovely. Truly. Just what we'd hoped for. After a week of anxiety and tension headaches and a variety of things that almost went wrong the day of, including:

• major water-line construction right in front of the church;
• the discovery that, when you enter the church's address into a GPS, it takes you to a town fifteen minutes away; and
• the next-door neighbor's announcement that he had an excavator coming to level his backyard exactly during the time that our backyard reception was going to take place.

But: the construction was done by four o'clock (our wedding time), we called everyone who might have had a GPS and they all showed up on time, and the neighbor agreed to reschedule his construction.

The ceremony itself was lovely. I enjoyed it even more than I'd expected; I think that I'd imagined feeling embarrassed and a little uncomfortable, up there in the front of the church, but instead I was just happy. Our friend--who is also an Episcopal priest (but mostly a professor) (this is what you get when you marry a minister, by the way)--performed the wedding itself and did a magnificent job, despite its being her first wedding. It was very hot in the church--no air conditioning--and I could feel the sweat running down my arms and legs; woe betide the men in suits, for I was this warm in only a light cotton dress! But despite the heat, I felt wonderful: strong and confident and beautiful, not at all how I thought that I would feel, as goofily self-conscious as I usually am. Maybe having my sister-in-law and her sister gush over how BEAUtiful! GORgeous! I was for an hour before the ceremony had a salutary effect. TM had tears in his eyes. It was, all told, even more moving and joyous than I had anticipated.

(I was also very pleased with my last-minute bouquet decision: I had bought some gerbera daisies and a few regular, white daisies at the grocery store that morning, and my stepmother wrapped them together with a bit of raffia and purple ribbon. The bright simple colors of the gerberas against my white dress (cotton, as I've said--it was a sundress from J. Crew) looked really nice. I'd also picked out a yellow daisy for TM's boutonniere and wore (fake) yellow and white flowers on a barrette in my hair. In the few pictures that I've seen so far, it was visually all very clean and cheerful.)

The reception was in my mother's backyard, and we (along with my family, who were enormously helpful) worked all week to get it ready. My brother was the sound and lighting guy; he actually gave us, as a wedding gift, this gorgeous stereo, which he made himself:


He taught himself electronics, a fact that continues to astound me.

The yard itself was very cute, with lots of flowers, white helium balloons, odd sculptural things (my mom's an artist), and prayer flags:

(before)

(during)

We'd had a big pizza dinner the night before, which most of our guests had attended; this took a little of the talk-to-everyone pressure off of the reception itself. Still, my one (inevitable!) regret was that I didn't get a chance to spend as much time with ANYone as I would have liked. Oh well! Now my desires for various trips to visit friends and family is only renewed.

Enough dilly-dallying for the morning: Classes start Wednesday. Am I ready? No! So I will leave you with one picture that will disappear in short order (but it's one of my favorites, so far--we've only seen the pictures that my parents took):

*poof*

Sorry for this, but I'm truly stuck

I have a wedding question, and my mom and I aren't getting anywhere with this.

Would a three-stage wedding--with the ceremony in one place, the dinner somewhere else, and the drinking/dancing/party at a third location--be weird? (The dinner would be about a 15-minute drive from the ceremony and the party, which would be very close to each other.) Is this a thing? And how likely would you expect guests to be to bail after Stage 2 (dinner)? We're just having a terribly hard time figuring out venues, esp. how in the world we can feed all these people.

Thoughts welcome. Thanks....

This, That, Other

Today felt like summer. This is dangerous, but not too dangerous: three days of school to go, and I actually don't have much school-related work to do at the moment. I will soon, of course (I get papers and/or exams on: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Monday (x2)), but there's a bit of a lull here, when the grading hasn't started to roll in and the actual teaching portion of my year is pretty much over.

I gave my Presentation yesterday, and it was okay. Seven people were in attendance, including The Minister--about what I expected, actually. Approximately 8 minutes before I began, a student was sent in to tell me that the luncheon started at a quarter to twelve and could I cut my presentation 20 minutes short? Would that mean I'd have to skip a lot? Um, yeah, like half the presentation. So I told my little audience that they could leave early if they had to get to lunch, and I cut a few things out (weaker portions of the presentation, anyway) and wrapped it up about 10 minutes early. It wasn't painful. I did feel that I was babbling, as I so often do when I straight-up lecture, but it's over, and it was fine.

Now I just have that Kalamazoo paper. It's drafted, but I'm not at all happy with the last 1/3. In rereading part of Huge Middle English Dream Poem (HMEDP) last week, I think that I figured out an angle to help make that portion of the paper more compelling and to deepen the argument. Now I just need to do it (and read around to see whether other people could help me out here, and possibly read a little bit more of HMEDP).

What else? Well, we're supposed to be planning a wedding, so I guess I've got that going on. So far we're keeping it on the cheap, for reals, even though it looks like the guest list will be longer than originally anticipated. I bought a J. Crew dress for $78 and got some cool Fluevogs on enormous sale, although I'm considering wearing some $2.50 thrift store shoes instead (they're white strappy little sandals with low heels; the advantage over the Fluevogs is that they'd be a lot less hot, since the Fs are closed-toe) (also, the Fs have 3" heels, and I never wear heels, so this is scaring me kind of a lot). We've got a church and the reception will be in my mom's backyard. The officiant and the photographer are our friends; Mom (an artist) is designing the invitations; music will be a combination of ipod and family members, using my brother's homemade amps and speaker system. There's a restaurant near Mom's that does pretty chichi organical American fare; while the restaurant itself is a little pricey, their DIY catering is way cheap--as in, we could easily get a substantial and interesting meal for like under $8 a person.

All this cheapness is good, because of course we have to move soon--sadly, my delightful little cottage is waaaay too small for two people and two cats, especially when one of those people likes a good kitchen and both of those people own, you know, clothes--and the rental properties around here are few and far between. Not eager to buy, we're currently working on convincing a seller to rent her place to us for a while. Hopefully that'll work out; the house is a good size for us, although it is on a busy road (but across from a cemetary, so maybe that will even things out).

In other news, I went "running" on Friday and today. I use "running" loosely because I am so not a runner; I swim and do yoga, but the pool had been closed for repairs since February, and my home yoga practice, while usually regular (I fell apart a bit this month) and very good at keeping me in touch with my body, or something, doesn't give me much in the way of a cardio work-out. I also don't like seeing yoga as primarily a fitness activity, so I think that I need something else. So I've tried jogging (more appropriate than "running") for ten minutes at a time; since I don't have a watch, I carry my cell phone--with the alarm set for ten minutes and on vibrate--in my sports bra. It works pretty well, although the phone gets a little gross. But then, I'm apparently a person who buys sandals at thrift stores, so what the hell.