Latest Evidence of Insanity

I must be insane. Not because of the loony tune I'm about to play for you, but because -- in my heart of hearts -- I don't actually think this is insane. Only I know it is. C'mon, even I get that. Only I don't. Not really. There! See? Insane! (And talking to myself!)

Starman [-- who's legal now! Did I mention that? Yup -- we had the interview on 25 September with a seasoned USCIS officer who was more interested in how I could get divorced one week and remarried the next; seems he'd gotten divorced the hard way 18 months ago and was still getting over it; anyway, he approved Starman on the spot, and even approved of me, which was nice] and I were in England over the weekend, staying with High-and-Mighty and Multitasks-With-Ease (Starman's brother and sister-in-law, using their "indigenous peoples" name). I'd already planned this trip with my "Crone-of-Honor" (Coffee Jones; her husband rejected the title "maid of honor" in favor of this version...) but when USCIS said Starman could come too, we just juggled the arrangements slightly. Starman nipped off on his own to visit his mother in Oxford, than on to London to see his two sisters. Coffee and I drove (yes! I drove! I'm not that bad at the whole "wrong side of the road" thing) from Manchester to Yorkshire. First, we visited Fountains Abbey, where the wedding will be, and then we went on to Naburn, south of York, where H&M and MWE live. (During the week of the wedding, the American contingent of the wedding party will be living here, which is a nice perk to this experience.)

On the Friday, Coffee, MWE and I went back to Fountains Abbey, met with Jenny Arugula (representative for the caterers) at Fountains Hall to discuss menus, and so forth. That afternoon, we met with the florist -- Elspeth, a lovely person! -- and then on to Trevor, the baker everyone had recommended. This is where the insanity starts.

I gather the traditional English wedding celebration is slightly different from the traditional American wedding. While a lot of modern UK couples get married in the late afternoon (rather like we do here), the tradition there is to get married in the morning and then sit down to the "wedding breakfast" which is actually lunch. The meal has three courses: a starter (our appetizer), a main course, and "pudding." Yup, that's what they call dessert. All desserts are "pudding," perhaps because they don't have Bill Cosby. I don't know. But the weird part about that, of course, is not the name, but that it exists at all. You're going to be eating wedding cake, so who needs dessert? Okay, I accept that isn't actually the point. I also get it that the cutting of the cake -- a traditional element on both sides of the pond -- is at the very end of the shindig, so why make people wait. And finally, it's traditional in the UK to serve fruitcake in a royal icing (shiny & white; dries solid and hard) shell with an underlayer of marzipan for good measure. Nobody needs a huge slice of fruitcake, so you can well imagine a traditional three-layer fruitcake wedding cake serving everyone within 2 miles. So, the guests have sticky toffee pudding (served with double cream -- yum!) for dessert, and then sleep through the speeches before waking up for a wafer-thin slice of fruitcake.

The trouble started with Trevor (we suspect him of being Wallace & Gromit's kindly older brother -- he definitely had the family smile!) and his fruitcake -- it wasn't very good. (And that's assuming you can have a "good" fruitcake. If you don't even accept that, then this was really bad.) So that option gets crossed off. The alternative is to have his sponge cake with chocolate truffle center. These were much yummier. (He had little teeny ones for us to try; one wedding option is a tiered stand with lots of these teeny ones in place of a solid cake.) So I tentatively approved -- but didn't book -- a smaller version of the sponge cake: two small layers, which he said would serve 50 people. (We're only planning on 30 people, so that would seem to be a no-brainer.)

But the whole thing stuck in my head, as though I hadn't resolved the issue at all. Think of a check list: Venue {check}; food {check}; flowers {check}; photographer {check}; cake {check}. Cue the crickets. And this is crazy, right? The sponge cake with truffle center is very yummy. And if I'm just worried that a small, two-tiered cake is only going to serve teeny slices to people already full from "pudding," then I should just order a bigger cake. Right?

Only that's not the way my brain works. I realized this just recently: when I'm falling asleep, I solve problems. Real problems, imagined problems, other people's problems, whatever. It is, I gather, a nice soothing activity for me. Who knew? Now that I see this, I recognize myself doing it all the time. Which is how I knew that I had somehow put The Wedding Cake back on the list of problems to solve. Here's the analysis:

• I bake. I'm not great at it, but I'm good for an amateur. I like to bake. And I like to bake for family and friends.
• Guess who's going to be at this wedding? You got it: Family and friends!
• I could bake a fruitcake no problem. I have a great recipe (assumes you like fruitcake; if you don't like fruitcake, it's merely in the "if I liked fruitcake this would be really good, no, really" category) which has to sit soaking up bourbon for a month and can be transported, safely, at room temperature, so it would be easy* to do that a month before the wedding, then take it over, drape some fondant (solid white but soft icing) over it and let Elspeth do flowers for decoration.
• If I know I can do a fruitcake with no effort at all* then why not see if a more traditional American wedding cake would be possible. You know the style: somewhere between a layer cake and a pound cake, with really yummy filling and buttercream frosting? If I could take the layers over frozen, it wouldn't be impossible** to frost it there and let Elspeth do the flowers...
• I would really like to be able to say I made the cake.

You see immediately where this is heading, don't you? And let's be honest about this: * means I'm exaggerating the ease of a) hosting a bunch of guests in a foreign country, b) getting myself & Starman ready for the big event, and c) serving as my own pastry chef in an unfamiliar kitchen; ** means I'm outright lying to myself.

At its lowest level, this is what we have: I think it's a harmless obsession, good for falling asleep, to figure out how this MIGHT be done, even as we all know I'd be insane to try it. So why not do trial runs of wedding cake recipes to see if one suits? What's the harm (other than to my waistline) to practice frosting techniques? So what if I'll be presenting guests and loved ones with suspiciously nuptial-looking "birthday" and "holiday" cakes. No harm there. In this country, no one dislikes wedding cake, right?

But I'll be brutally honest: It's that last bullet point that's the killer, so to speak. I would totally love to be able to say I made the wedding cake. I know that looks boastful, and maybe it is, but it's also who I am. I find it hard to do stuff that other people take for granted, but baking is relatively easy, and problem solving how to do something is -- well, it's a snooze, innit?

So, I'm insane.

I kinda think that's implicit in the title of this blog.

The Wedding (part three)

While I was working on Part Two, Camilla emailed me some more pictures! This is a nice one. (Thanks, Camilla!)

Bryony. She was unsure what to wear, so she bought something and took it back, picked out a skirt but changed her mind, and then bought this outfit four days before the wedding. It's lovely, she is lovely, and the colors were exactly right. We do love it when a plan comes together...

My favorite photograph. It even has some non-wedding goers on the left. We made quite the colorful party wandering around the grounds. I assured other tourists (in my unmistakable American accent) that there would be another wedding at 4:00 -- all part of the National Trust approach!

Amelia with a white chocolate curl off the wedding cake.

A special request by Coffee Jones. There's a photo, in black & white, of her parents kissing on their wedding day. That inspired by Coffee and her brother to have a similar pose on their respective wedding days. Here's ours.

Don't worry, there's more! We still have Damian's photos to pore over, and of course we want to get all our guests represented. Many thanks to Byrony, Camilla, Hub 1.0, and Nicky for sharing your photos with us.

Successfully Married (Again!)

Starman: He's so nice, I married him twice.

We didn't actually include that in the official service of marriage. (Starman read a poem by Christina Rosetti, I read a poem by e.e. cummings, and the "other Jill" from the registry office read the "Apache Wedding Blessing" which turns out to have been from a 1950s movie!) But it is true that we're now doubly married, and no way am I undoing those legal vows! We're well and truly hitched.

Photos? We have photos. You will get photos. LOTS of photos. We have photos taken by Starman's sibs, by Hub 1.0, and by the photographer, Damian, who was so lovely that even a devout conscientious objector like myself (it's against my religion to be photographed badly, which is pretty much the only result possible) didn't have a problem with it. Coffee Jones, my crone of honour, and her husband, Dino Burger, also have photos; we just don't have them yet because they flitted off to Amsterdam after the wedding and only just got home themselves.

So, while we're in black and white print for a while, I'll settle for a couple vignettes. First of all, everyone was magnificent. All our guests were absolutely perfect: Harry & Mary represented our new Harmonic life; Starman's former co-editor & his wife represented Starman's former professional life; my friend Jay represented pretty much the totality of my legal career; there were even old friends of Hub 1.0's there to signify the intertwined histories Hub 1.0 & I share. My former mother-in-law was there, and had a great time. Now, that's an accomplishment, wouldn't you say?

Starman's sisters, brother, in-laws, and nieces & nephews were all there. Such nice people, and as Coffee J. pointed out after a very successful party at the best man's house -- just the nicest group of people she can recall spending time with. Very multi-generational: From 4 to 80-something, and everyone got along great. Among the pleasures of the week was seeing the four English children playing so well with the two American kids. Hopefully they'll see each other again.

As for the house, the wedding, the flowers, my dress, the food, and the locale -- I'll save some typing and wait for the photos. But here's an anecdote Damian (the photographer -- did I mention how nice he was?) told me. He has a fairly standard format for traditional weddings: he starts with the bits & pieces of the wedding outfit, shoes, jewelry, the dress, etc. in still life shots. (I denied him access to my shoes, which were nothing special, but did ask him to photograph the two stuffed animals we had with us at Choristers' House; what can I say, we're weird.) When the album is finished, it starts with these shots before moving to pictures of the bride being groomed by her mother/her maid of honor/etc.

Well, in one wedding, the bride had bought very expensive Jimmy Choo shoes for the event. She made Damian take nine different shots of these prized footwear. They must have looked great, but did they fit? She managed to walk up the aisle and back down, then off with the shoes (I actually typed "shoos" which seems right for this brand...) and they were never worn again. Too painful!

I have some sympathy for that bride: My shoes got little more use than that. They were the right size but didn't fit right. Didn't matter -- I wore them for the vows and the subsequent photos, then we trooped out for photos in the Abbey ruins wearing our wellies. I believe I was barefoot during the wedding breakfast etc. The shoes have already gone off to be donated to a charity shop!

I can still feel mildly superior, though -- I paid a fraction of what the Jimmy Choos cost, and didn't feel like the money had been wasted at all. Chances are, not a single photo shows me wearing those shoes at all.

I know, I know . . . it's been a LONG time!

Did you ever get a postcard from someone who was midway through a long vacation? Like a month in on a 6-month sojourn? You get this card, and it's all chatty like "We're here now and then we're moving on, and next week we're someplace else," and meanwhile, you're right where you always are, standing in your own home, reading this breezy missive from people you won't see for months. You think, "Well, okay. That's nice for you, but what about us at home? Hmmm? A postcard simply isn't cutting it for us!" Like, either they should come back (if you miss them) or they should just stay quiet (if you were getting on quite nicely without them).

This blog post is like that postcard.

You haven't heard from me in ages, and all you get is a measly blog about two things, quilting & the wedding. What good is that? But it's all I got for you, honest.

Yes, I finished the Harmony Triangle quilt. Here are some pictures:

I even tidied the bedroom a little teeny bit for this photo op. Mind you, the quilt's a wee bit small for a queen-sized bed (which this is), so I suspect I'll move it over to the front guest bedroom. That will make the covers in that room really lovely and heavy -- a condition I personally like in a cold bedroom. However, my problem here is that when the down comforter is on top of this quilt, it's too warm and I end up kicking all the covers off me and onto Starman. Our bed looks a whole lot less tidy when that happens!

If you stare at this picture, you will eventually be able to see how the blocks got mixed up. Have fun, if you decide to figure that puzzle out. I can live with it; I've made my peace with this quilt.

Incidentally, the night (an embarrassing number of days ago, I have to admit) this photo was taken was the first ever night I slept under a quilt I'd made myself. It took some getting used to, if you want the honest truth.

I can't explain it -- I just felt odd. I'm glad that feeling wore off. I want to sew more quilts for us to use, not just own. It's a pretty bedroom in a pretty post-Colonial era house. Quilts are the perfect decorative touch.

A close up of the quilting. A couple quilters visit this blog, so this picture is actually for them. I got the quilting design from a magazine. I was looking for a different fill pattern entirely, but I couldn't find it. (Note to self -- read quilt magazines with a bunch of those plastic tabs close at hand!) I think this works well, though.

I did do (badly) feathers on the border, but you are not getting a close up of those! Trust me, when I do nice freehand feathers, you'll be the first to know.

I have picked out and washed the fabrics for the two baby quilts, and I have a block to do for the quilt guild I visited last month. But nothing's getting done until after . . . well, read on.

Other than quilting? Well, there's that other item going on now -- the wedding. Lists of Things to Do, Things in Process, and Things Done has been slowly evolving from three equal columns to two columns (in Process and Done) and now is looking more done than anything else. We leave in nine days; we get married in 17. But who's counting.

I could rattle off all the details, but it's just too too boring. I'm obsessed with it, and Starman is worried by the complexity of things that really ought not be complex (don't ask about the bags for the wedding favours or the sashes for the bridesmaids!) but really it's coming out pretty smoothly.

There is one detail about the wedding I want to share, though. I'm 52, and I'm old enough that there are no "but you have to invite so-and-so" situations. I'm so pleased that everyone who will be attending this event is someone I really like and enjoy. What a pleasure that is. There are tons more people who won't be there that I love, so it's not an exclusive set. Just a nice group of people.

The only other news is that I got sick :-( and lost weight :-) I lost enough weight that I needed new bras, and that means the Famous Stephen may need to adjust my wedding dress. I really didn't think that would happen, but I'm secretly pleased. At my size, these little bits don't make a huge difference, but I'm down more than 25 pounds from last spring, and most of that has been in the past two months. Way to go, me.

Well, that's pretty much it. Sorry for the postcard nature of this post -- too little, too late, and not much to offer for the next few weeks, either. But then there will be wedding pictures, and if you're at all like me, that will be a lot of fun.

Our Trip to Yorkshire (Part 3)

Okay, the last pre-wedding photos are here. First, the pattern for the girls' bridesmaids dresses. Both Starman and I really wanted to have his two nieces (well, he has three, but we meant the ones under 18!) and Coffee Jones's daughter (Beanette) as bridesmaids. That's a lovely English tradition -- think of Diana's bridesmaids, all under 14. Starman's nieces are just right for this important role: The "Senior Bridesmaid" is Lucy, who will be nearly 12 on the day. Beanette (the "American Bridesmaid") will be 8. Amelia (the "Lively Bridesmaid") will be 4 going on 30. (Seriously -- while we were there, she got a pair of high heels from her godmother, and she went to town wearing them! I can't manage shoes like that, that's for sure.)

I found some gorgeous fabric for their dresses -- white lawn embroidered with periwinkle sprigs. The sashes will be in the same deep blue peau de soie as Coffee Jones' "crone of honour" dress. We picked Style "D" (the dress in the lower left corner) -- very simple, but with a poufy skirt. We've picked very pretty white sweaters for the girls: White cotton cardigans, cropped short (like a bolero but not too extreme) so that they'll fit the Empire waist. The details are lovely: Scalloped crocheted edges all around, and lovely seed pearl details, all very age appropriate.

Now, this isn't the floral selection that Elspeth, our crack florist, is putting together, but these are what the girls will be wearing in their hair, at least stylistically. Lucy (Senior Bridesmaid) and Beanette will have the hair bands. Amelia will have the chaplet of flowers, which Elspeth -- a traditionalist at heart -- would like her to wear as a crown on her forehead, rather than as a halo back on her hair. Amelia, it should be pointed out, used to have lovely blonde curls but she took some scissors to her hair, and now she's sporting a rather shorter `do. Still cute as a button, of course.

In fact, all three girls are delightfully pretty without in any way suggesting a Ralph Lauren ad. I've told our photographer, Damian, that this is NOT a bride-centric event. I picked him, in fact, because his website had the best photos of the children in the party. You can check his work out for yourself; he has a lovely slideshow set to some tinkly new age piano music. (I like that sort of stuff, but if you don't, just turn it off.)

You know, I've thought a lot about all this. This isn't my first wedding (technically, it's not even my second...) and yet it's the one with the fancy dress, music, flowers, etc. Isn't this a bit odd for me at my age? (52 on Friday, in case you didn't know.) It's not cheap (cough cough) and I don't feel rich at the moment. I don't really think of myself as a conspicuous consumption kind of gal.

But Starman's brother and sister-in-law's wedding pictures are all over the place -- in a very tasteful way, of course -- and it's such a nice anchor to family and a particular point in your life. Plus, I gather that the third niece -- now 21 -- was the tiny bridesmaid in that wedding, and had a blast. So much so that Lucy has really wanted to be a bridesmaid for the longest time. She'll do a great job, as will Beanette and Amelia. And everyone will have the photographs for decades to come. Which makes this whole wedding worth it.

Weekend Roundup

Occasionally, I do a weekend roundup for Coffee Jones (or she does one for me). We have such completely different lives: she's got two school-aged kids in a major metropolitan area, a full-time working husband, and her mother living with her. I'm childless, both Starman and I are pretty close to retired, and we live alone in a very rural part of Pennsylvania. Her weekends might involve a play date for one or both of the kids; mine might involve solving a cryptic crossword puzzle or two!

But, as we spent the weekend with the Joneses (mostly keeping up with them), I'll do the weekend roundup for you. There was family bridge (rubber bridge played with no goal other than having fun), computer bridge practice, some TV, some games with the kids, some games with the Joneses, and lots and lots of yummy food. Oh, and what's becoming almost an annual tradition: a trip to Newburyport, Massachusetts for Coffee J., Starman and me. This is a lovely seaport town that's good nice quirky shops and restaurants, an antiques mall called Oldies, and wonderful New England architecture.

Last year, the trip to Newburyport involved a conversation that changed CJ's life for the better; given how hard change can be, even for the better, this year we kept the topics real light! We got some good shopping done: the independent stationery shop had everything 50% off, so I was able to get absurdly overpriced Vera Wang place cards for the wedding reception, and something I think will do for wedding invitations, and a book by Angela Lansbury (?) on giving wedding toasts and speeches. Hey, at half-price, everything was only a little exorbitant!

We also bought a table at Oldie's for the Morning Room here (so called because its windows face east and south; in the afternoon, its robin's egg color scheme looks a bit cold and uninviting, but in the morning it's yummy). The Oldies table is handmade and pleasantly rustic -- it has a single slab of wood for the top (which isn't big -- maybe 18" x 24" ?) with nice breadboard edges. The table it replaced was bigger, but literally made of pressed cardboard; one corner of the top had started to delaminate to the point that you could strum the layers like a deck of playing cards! Hub 1.0 and I had bought it and two other tables for $15 from a sidewalk display in Philadelphia; they were to augment the meagre furnishings at my niece's college dorm suite. When she and her roommate graduated, two of the three pieces came back to us. We have been able to give one back, but the cardboard table mysteriously stayed here...

The interesting thing about this shopping experience was the negotiation between Starman and me about the table. I saw a beautiful rustic piece that's perfect for a 200+ year-old house. To me, the only drawback was the large knot on the table's surface. To Starman, the table lacked a cross-brace and therefore was potentially rickety. If it had to do anything other than hold magazines and a cup of tea, I'd worry, but it doesn't. Luckily, CJ was there to have an independent opinion. Clearly, she voted in favor of getting it, and her vote persuaded Starman. I'd have been fine if she'd persuaded me that it wasn't so special. I wasn't in love with it; I just liked it. And now that it's in place, I think Starman likes it too.

The thing I did regret not buying was an odd metal hoop, about four feet in diameter, that had two sturdy cross bars at the bottom to serve as feet. At the top of the hoop was a dangling hook, as if for a gong or bell or something. The hoop and its feet were painted fire engine red; the result was vaguely Asian. It would have looked great at CJ's house, which is mid-20th century modern. But we spotted it at the end of the tour of Oldies, and anyway, aesthetic touches like that are low down on the list of must-haves for that house, I gather. I had a teeny pang, though, when we got back to the house and I thought how perfect the red hoop would be just to the right of the door, where there's a bare stretch of wall and porch.

That observation may have been moot for CJ, whose purchase of powder blue Wellies (i.e., quintessential rain boots for the English garden/hunting/walking set) for the wedding was enough to put her in a VERY good mood for the rest of the evening. Color coordinated Wellies aren't a foreign concept at British weddings, we've learned. If everyone has appropriately rain-proof footgear, who cares if it rains? And, as CJ pointed out, having bought hers already, it won't rain for our April wedding! Now, I just have to find some in my size...

Our Travels (part 1)

Here we are, in Warwick, Rhode Island, about to enter the church where two people we had never met before got married. No, not wedding crashing. The bride is Mary's daughter (and Harry's stepdaughter), Laura. Under the little-known federal law, The Nuptial Reciprocity Act of 1874, because we'd invited Harry & Mary to our wedding, we got invited to Laura & Ryan's. (I'm kidding about that law, btw.)

The wedding was lovely, the reception was at a nice country club (which is high praise indeed) with a stunning view of Narrangasett Bay, the bride was particularly gracious to us, and we had a lot of fun. There was even a picnic on Sunday, with new opportunities to eat wedding cake!

But before we could go to the picnic, we had to revisit the awesome dog park in Warwick. We'd gone there on Saturday with Mimi, who really needed more time with other dogs. There were only three dogs when we arrived: a brindled boxer named Damian, an amorous cocker spaniel (you can make the obvious pun; I'll refrain from doing so) named Joey; and a really mellow bull terrier named Bogey. Bogey, despite being un-neutered, permitted Joey's insistent if useless advances. The people at the park on Saturday (we were eventually joined by a retired record company executive with two English springer spaniels) all agreed that Mimi has the look of a Rhodesian ridgeback. Right color, right ears, and even a slight suggestion of the characteristic ridge of fur on her back. Mimi's way too small, though -- she's about 19" at the shoulders. Anyway, every time we've seen a "Rhodie" mix on TV, it's looked like Mimi.

Until we met Gee, pictured here with the yellow football we donated to the dog park. Gee, we were told by his owners, is pure bred pit bull. Now this is perplexing to me because the two breeds recognized by the AKC associated with pit bulls, American Staffordshire Terrier and Staffordshire Bull Terrier, are both not Mimi. She has a faint look of an Am Staff if you catch her just right, but neither type comes in her distinctive cinnamon brown. Gee here is an Am Staff, clearly -- the color (buff) is right, and the ears are right.

Which isn't a huge surprise -- we'd been told that Mimi was a pit mix. It's what she's mixed with that so engages people. Oh, and the fact that she's a love-slut. No, seriously. Other dogs and owners would arrive and she'd be right there at the gate, greeting each new human with a look that fairly shouted, "Hi, there, big guy/gal. Come here often? Care to scritch a bitch who's all alone in the world?" Mostly, people were thrilled to comply.

Here's a partial list of the other dogs we saw: a blue Weimaraner, a foxhound, a corgi, two basset hounds (different owners), two puggles (pug/beagle mixes -- a designer dog) (also two different owners), a Shar-Pei, two golden retrievers in very different weight classes, a Wheaten terrier, a chocolate lab, a border collie, two greyhounds, a great dane, an Irish Setter (everyone went "ooh" when that dog pranced in) and Gizmo, a black Chihuahua - Miniature Pinscher mix. We went today to a wonderful, 6-acre dog park here in Portland where the dogs can run around paths through the woods -- the entire place is well fenced. We met two Old English Sheepdogs and saw -- their owners weren't really feeling like socializing -- another lab and a pointer. On our walk this morning to the Prout's Neck Cliff Walk, we saw a whippet, or at least, a small dog that seemed precisely like a whippet. (I really have to stop looking at the AKC website...)

So, yes, we went to Scarborough Beach, briefly. (Dogs not allowed on the beach, and anyway it was fogged in.)
Here's what we could see at low tide, through the marine layer.

Five minutes of that -- long enough for Starman to get his English toes wet in the Atlantic -- and we decided to head back to the road on foot and go find the famed, but notoriously hard to access, Prout's Neck Cliff Walk. I kept having to explain to Starman that the Cliff Walk is not meant to be used by anyone but the locals. If you happen to know how to get to it, fine, but they (the Prout's Neck Association) isn't going to make it easy for you!

This is on the Cliff Walk, looking at Scarborough Beach through the haze. Winslow Homer lived on Prout's Neck, and there are quite a few of his painting in the Portland Museum. Didn't go see them, though. Nope, we did the Cliff Walk, didn't get a ticket because we carefully parked legally at the state park access to the beach, and marvelled at the REALLY high-end real estate, all inaccessible to mere mortals like ourselves.

Here's Mimi, enjoying her day by the sea. Tomorrow it's off to the mountains in New Hampshire and Vermont. We checked Google Maps on the best way to get there -- we can go 240 miles in 5 hours on all interstates, or 175 miles in 5 hours on the back roads. With gas at $4/gallon, it's back roads all the way!

A Nuptial Update

It's okay, you can breathe again. Yes, Coffee Jones, my intrepid "crone-of-honor" talked me off the cake tier, so to speak. She mounted many sensible arguments why it would be a BAD idea for me to make my own wedding cake, including stress, scheduling conflicts during the pleasantly social weekend we have planned before the wedding, and how no one would care but me. (To her credit, she did not suggest this was a bad idea because either a) the cake would be a disaster if I did it, or b) there would be no cake at all, just some crumbs and chunks left over after I'd taken a chain saw to it in frustration. She's so loving, my crone!)

The winning ("icing on the cake") argument was this: It would be like having the bride step aside and sing at her own wedding. No matter how pretty her voice is, that's just wrong. (I actually saw something like this, but it was the groom and he played the guitar. Still wrong though.) Mind you, I worry I won't have a cake I personally care to eat, so the deal I've struck with Coffee is this: no matter what I arrange or do, no one will know but her and she'll know only if she turns to me during the cake-eating segment of our reception and says, "Well?" and I respond either "Mmm-hmmm," or "Unh-hunh." How subtle is that?

For the rest of you, you'll just have to wait for the post-wedding blog report next spring.

A Tiny Bit of Patchwork

I'll just run through all my reasons for not sewing, or doing anything quilting-related, for the past few months: the wedding, the wedding, and oh, uh, hold on, it's coming to me -- oh, right! the wedding.

But here we are, and it's no longer a valid excuse. (Yeah, right, like "oh, I need to look at the wedding photos!" is going to cut it as an excuse. I so don't think so.) Meanwhile, I'd agreed to sew a 12" block for the Chenango Piecemakers guild. The way this works is, they give you some focus fabric (in my case, it's the large scale blue & white print on the outside of the block) and then invite you to make a block on any design you want.

This proved to be a good exercise for me. I had bought a CD with a lot of blocks on it, alphabetized, and analyzed in terms of what sized pieces you need to cut. This block is called Memory Wreath; I picked it because it had large areas of the focus fabric. (In fact, the large scale print was supposed to be in the on-point square in the middle, but the amount the guild gave me wasn't large enough to cut out the large triangles and then cut out the middle square. I discovered this tiny detail just too late to reconsider my block choice, or figure out another way to cut the triangle. Hummph.)

The rest of the fabrics are from my stash. I wouldn't have this many blue & white prints except that I collected them for a full year in order to make Coffee Jones's "signature color" quilt. Even so, I fussed about over this one single square until I was happy with the final result. I like it, though, and it also helped me with sewing raw-bias triangles. (That's the hypotenuse of the triangles -- it's on the bias of the fabric, which means it can be pulled out of shape really easily.) I had problems with the Harmony Triangle Quilt, which had a lot of exposed bias edges. This time, I bought some spray starch to stiffen the pieces before I sewed. To almost all of you, this means nothing. But look closely -- the points in this block are pretty good. That means they meet up neatly without getting cut off.

So, that's the first sewing I've done in a while. Next up: the two baby quilts I said I'd make before the children in question enroll in day care...!

Our Trip to Yorkshire (Part 1)

Very interesting discussion about goals in the previous post's comments section. I agree that living a good, happy, productive and ethical life is paramount. I still have a nagging sense that I ought to be more goal oriented. That's just me. But I don't have an answer to my own question, so moving on...

It must surely be the case that ONE goal I should adopt is uploading photos to this blog a lot faster. Starman and I have been back from England for a couple weeks, and this is the first you're hearing of how the trip went.

Well, it was wet. Very wet. Not quite biblical proportions wet, but getting there. It rained every other day that we were there. When it wasn't raining, it looked resentful that it wasn't.

Starman's brother Mike & family live in a tiny village south of York called Naburn. It's on the River Ouse, which was rising to near-flood stage. I gather nothing actually bad happened, although the road we took out of town on our last day there was just beginning to flood to impassibility. We felt like we got out just in time.


Here's the River at the boat slip in the village. Ordinarily, you can walk all the way down past these buildings. You can see that flooding is not unheard of in these parts, though -- you wouldn't put a window any lower down than they have.

I don't have a photo of the house near here where the front door is a good twelve inches up from the ground. Nor one of another house that had sandbags along the bottom of the garage door.

I gather Mike's house is just a big higher than some of his neighbors. Certainly we were lovely and toasty warm and dry while we were there.

A close-up of the swans on the swollen river. It just wasn't very good sightseeing weather, plus we were there primarily to get some wedding planning chores sorted out. So, no stately homes this time. (I do have a photo for a future post of a really fine private residence -- I know all Americans think all Brits live this way, but it just isn't so. Still, when you meet one who does, it's nice to see.)

What else did we do? We had a lovely excursion to Harrogate, a charming town -- even when dripping wet -- near where we're getting married. We had lunch at the famous Betty's, a tea shoppe & lunchroom that is usually so packed there's a queue to get in. The weather was our friend that day -- no queue!

We visited the florist (more on that in another post) and ordered the wedding cake. Yes, that's right -- no cake making for me this time. Given than there are roughly three desserts for this event (the "pudding," which is the generic term used to describe any dessert, chocolates served with coffee, and the wedding cake itself) I opted for a pleasant three-tiered vanilla/white chocolate sponge cake with raspberry filling. Elspeth, our florist, will put flowers on it, and it will be fine.

Also on the must-do list was picking out suits for the groom & his best man. There's a "designer outlet" near Naburn, so we went along to a tailor there and selected a serviceable gray suit. I still need to find ties and shirts to match, but the tailoring was the real chore: Mike is 6'5", so not a standard length.

Otherwise, it was all about family. Starman has two sisters and a brother; they have five children among them, ranging in age from 21 to 4. We were able to see them all, which is really nice for both of us. I don't have photos of everyone, but they'll all be at the wedding, so you'll get inundated with pics then.

Halloween Tricks and Treats

The really scary event this Halloween was this morning's "Budget Conference" for the wedding. Talk about your sticker shock! The crazy part is that we just bought a new car this week, and it cost way less than the wedding will do. And it's not like either of us is fanatical about this event -- I'm not being Bridezilla, and Starman's not the Groom from Hell -- we just want to have a nice, happy event for everyone to remember. I think our mistake is having it in an expensive place, and at an expensive exchange rate. But when we sat and thought about it, we decided it was okay. Scary, but okay.

So out went all the deposit checks, along with letters intended to keep the schedule the way we want it, not the way the last couple to get married there had it. (Really, I think "cut-and-paste" has a lot to answer for in these proposals!) Starman got his visa application done as well; yes, I need a special visa to enter the U.K. with the intent to marry my own husband. Anyway, that's something done for the time being. And I've created a lovely temporary file with all the bits and pieces sorted out. To my surprise, an impulse purchase of Martha Stewart's Wedding magazine paid off: we found a fun place to order the tiny number of wedding invitations we need, and the cut-out organizer (including budget page) has proven very useful.

On the treats side of the page, we have our first dinner invitation from the new group of people we've met because of the lawsuit I'm working on. Sue and Irv live around the corner from us (that's still three miles away -- they're big corners here) and stopped by recently to see the house, drink tea, and invite us to dinner. I've made a pumpkin cheesecake, which should be yummy; that remains to be eaten, for now it just looks good.

And now, here's the trick/treat conundrum for my readers: Someone has issued an INternet-wide challenge to blog every single day in November. I'm going to try to do it, although I'll warn you, some days you'll be lucky to get a sentence or two. (A noun and a verb I should be able to manage; asking for subordinate clauses and parenthetical phrases might be a bit much.) So, whaddya think -- is that a treat, or a trick?

So Far So Good

We got done this weekend what we wanted/needed to get done. How often can I say that??

My motion in limine (with alternative forms of order) is done (the first draft -- but I'm not a multiple-draft kind of gal); my plan is to get it to Charlie this afternoon for signatures and have it filed tomorrow. That will truly be "something accomplished; something done" as my mother would have said. I also have some other work to do today for Charlie, but it's not too much (I hope!) to get done in the time allowed.

The Christmas ornaments have been put away (we follow the tradition of my parents -- the tree goes up just before Christmas and stays up for the twelve days of Christmas, which takes you to January 6) although we haven't yet gotten around to the Christmas cards and advent calendars. We have also denuded the refrigerator of its extensive magnet collection. The fridge is very elderly and so gets replaced on Wednesday with one almost precisely the same except that the drawer for cold cuts and cheeses won't fall down so often!

We also collected the basket o' books I won at the Forest City library raffle! I was in there mid-November and the raffle had just started: $1 per ticket or 3-for-$2. I really love this little library, so I handed over a $20 bill and then spent a LOT of time writing out all my raffle tickets. I was told once that you want to fold your slips of paper (which is what these raffle tickets amounted to) more than just once, so I did most of them into quarters and some into thirds. (Mind you, that technique didn't work at the Farm City Feast, where Starman had his heart set on winning a John Deere toy tractor, but hey -- that's life.) A couple days after Christmas we got the call: I'd won! So we drove down last Friday and collected it -- a huge basket filled with a couple dozen books at least, and of all sorts: Madeleine Albright's memoirs next to a Nora Roberts romance next to a James Patterson thriller next to Margaret Truman's "Murder at the Opera." And a fair selection of children's books, which have been sorted out for Starman's nieces and nephews, and the Jumping Bean & Beanette, Coffee Jones's little ones.

And we finished (even the extent of finding the last piece on the floor) the 1,500 piece jigsaw of a thatched cottage with extensive spring garden. We've been in a jigsaw groove for a while; we did one when Hub 1.0 was around for Thanksgiving, then another with him over Christmas, followed by the puzzle Starman got for Christmas (a challenging jazz painting that was borderline abstract), and now the behemoth cottage.

And with the holidays officially over, it's back to wedding planning: We're having trouble planning a tasting for the caterers. First of all, it's amazingly expensive: £350 (roughly $700) plus VAT (another 15% or something). I figured no way, but Starman -- who is worried that we're spending a huge amount of money on food that we've not tried -- seemed willing, provided it wasn't just us. We'd have liked to have had his brother's entire family come along, but the caterers can't do the Saturday (already booked for another event), Starman's sister-in-law can't do the Friday, the caterers can't do Wednesday or Thursday, and it's iffy for the Monday, and we can't do the Tuesday. *sigh* I'm not encouraged, but then I was okay with not doing the tasting. We'll just have to see how that all plays out.

I am relieved that an authority no less than Martha Stewart allows a nice, large window for getting wedding invitations out: two to four months before the event. I figure as ours is a small wedding and most of the invitees know they're invited and what the date is, we can wait until after our trip to England to get them out. That will be just under three months before the date, and I think that's okay. Which is good, because I don't think I have time to do them before we leave: They're a bit fussy, and I'm doing them myself.

Tomorrow -- if the fates allow! -- I'm off to see the famous Stephen, who I want to design & make my wedding dress. We've had half-a-dozen appointments fall through, mostly because of the weather. Tomorrow is supposed to be well up into the 50s here, so I think this one may actually happen.

The one thing that's a pressing deadline for me is also weather-dependent: quilting. I know that sounds weird, but as I mentioned before, I have to baste my current quilt (which is bed-sized) out in the barn, and it takes a long time, so I don't want to do it when it's around freezing. Tomorrow is supposed to be the warmest day for ages, so I've got to get out there. This is a bit of a crunch -- we're also due in Binghamton to sign our wills & other legal documents -- but I can do it if I make it a priority. So, it's a priority!

And that's my life: recent past, present, and tomorrow. As I say: So far, so good.

Our Attendants (Part 3)

Ah, the ubiquitous "wellies shot." What, you mean every wedding album doesn't have this picture? These were purchased specially for this wedding, and were only slightly less expensive than Coffee's dress. But worth every penny, particularly as a) they can be worn again (unlike the dress, which is a tad situation-specific), and b) they helped to ensure a dry day for tromping around Fountains Abbey. My wellies were not such a perfect color match, but they were -- unlike my specially-dyed shoes -- very comfy.





Thank you both, Coffee J. & Michael, for being so happy and attentive to us on our wedding day!

Shout-out to Teena!

This was our birthday cake a couple weeks ago (yeah, yeah, so I'm behind in my blogging -- just try suing me!). Coffee Jones, Dino Burger Jones, Jumping Bean Jones and the Beanette came for the annual Winter Holiday, along with Granny Jones. Granny J. and I nearly share a birthday, so I baked this cake for us both -- well, frankly it was for everyone and the neighbors. This is a very generous recipe.

I got this recipe from a wonderful blogger, Teena. Teena is a mathematician and professor at Indiana University. She's also cooking her way through the Gourmet Cookbook. The cake is not from The Book, as she calls it. It's her very own recipe.

What happened was, she entered the Bloomington, Indiana chocolate festival, and won a ribbon for this cake! So I asked for the recipe, and that's when the most amazing thing happened. She actually posted the recipe here. A responsive blogger! What a wonderful thing.

I did promise Teena I would make the cake and post these photos. (Flash-free photo below.) It's very very dark, rich, moist chocolate cake, with a lush peanut butter/chocolate frosting. I wasn't all that successful with the decoration. But I don't have Teena's cake decorating skills. Check those out here. I found her through these cakes -- they're made from a recipe in The Book that's also on Epicurious.com for a wedding cake that could be frozen. (Remember the temporary insanity where I thought maybe I could somehow make my own wedding cake? Well, the photos of this chocolate cake will confirm that really it's much better for everyone that professionals make the wedding cake.) Her review on Epicurious included the link to her blog. I've been a constant reader ever since.

I don't know her whole life story, but I gather she went to culinary school. Each recipe she makes from The Book looks beautifully plated, so I can well believe it.

That's not the best part. What I love about Teena's blog is that she seems to have a nice, balanced life. She's not a lot older than my older niece, so a whole generation younger than me. Her blog entries start with the recipe, a photo, a grade, her fellow cooks and her dining companions. After a discussion of the recipe, she writes about her life. And it's all so delightfully straightforward. No navel gazing or angst in sight. Not that there's anything wrong with navel gazing, mind you. I gaze at my navel a fair bit. For all I know, Teena occasionally peaks at her navel. But if she does, it's in between working on advanced mathematics, catering her friend's baby shower, visiting her special gentleman friend, and chatting with fellow passengers on all these flights back to Boston and Stanford.

I could say how much I like her, but I'd sound like a stalker. I'll just say instead that I really like the cake! Thanks, Teena.

Off to Old Blighty!

Starman and I fly to England tonight. We've got ten days in which to register for the privilege of getting married there in April. I can almost see their point (if I squint really hard) -- they don't really want people showing up to get married in a lay-over at Heathrow. But we're just going to stay with Starman's brother & sister-in-law for a week, then tell the nice people that we've been resident for the requisite 7 days, then fly back home. We could have done this in April, but I think Starman was (properly) concerned that we not leave this to chance. Also, the registrar's office in Harrogate might have balked at an assurance, "No, really, guv, we'll be there a week ahead ..."

So off we go. Also on this trip: a visit with the lovely woman doing our flowers, a visit (I sincerely hope) with the harpist that Starman wants to play before and after the ceremony, a stop at the up-market Waitrose pastry chefs who'll make the cake (I'm trying to make this sound fancy-schmancy, but it is a supermarket when all's said and done), and a shopping trip with two not-so-metrosexual men to buy suits. And then there's the tasting.

Yes, people, we decided to have the astronomically priced tasting. I can say no more about it -- I will report in with the results when it's over.

In non-wedding-planning news, we hope to see all of Starman's siblings and their progeny, including Lily who's at Sheffield University. We are registering our residency there. Lily's busy, but we hope she'll have lunch with us. We start, though, with a visit to Starman's mother, who's been increasingly unwell. She's a lovely woman; I know this even though I first met her just weeks after the fall that precipitated the hospital stay that led to having full time carers in the home . . . it's been a rough two years for the whole family. I'm pleased that my sweet man gets at least one more chance to be with her.

No sightseeing, no shows, no fancy meals out (other than the tasting -- but I said I wouldn't say more about that so I won't), and the only shopping is for wedding suits. Hardly the classic holiday. Still, I love my in-laws. We have lots of gifts for the kids. And it will be wonderful to see how happy Starman's family is about the wedding.

I'll blog as I can, but if you don't hear from me, don't panic. I'll be back.

The Wedding (part one)

The happy couple. I'm the one in the gorgeous dress -- didn't The Famous Stephen live up to his name? Starman is the guy next to me. What a sweetie. These aren't the official wedding photos -- we haven't even begun to look at those! -- but digital pix taken by Starman's sister and sister-in-law. Thanks, Nicky & Bryony -- all your photos look lovely, these are just getting us started. (The harpist is Georgina Wells -- I'm afraid we didn't listen to much of her playing, but there's a digital recording, so we'll listen then.)

Not much doubt what we're doing here. That's my bouquet decorating the table with the cake.

The bridal party: Starman, me, Amelia (Nicky's daughter, aka "The Littlest Bridesmaid"), Beanette (Coffee Jones' daughter, aka "The American Bridesmaid"), Lucy (Michael & Bryony's daughter, aka "The Senior Bridesmaid"), Coffee Jones herself (aka "Crone of Honour"), and Michael (aka "Best Man"). (Sorry, Mike -- I'll post a better picture of you later on!)

My bridesmaids, Beanette, Amelia & Lucy. They all have beautiful blue eyes, which lead to the pretty embroidered fabric for their dresses, which in turn gave us the overall color scheme.

Not precisely the bridal party, but I thought my regular readers would like to see Hub 1.0 (on the left) with me & Starman. He was a vital part of this event, not least because if he hadn't introduced us, there'd have been no wedding. But also because, as I told him later, he's the family of my heart. He represents my history -- we've known each other for 37 years! -- and he's been a wonderful support during the past two years. I believe we've been good friends to him as well. (And sharp-eyed readers wondering who that is at the back of the photo will be gratified to learn he's Dino Burger, aka Mr. Coffee Jones.)

Domestic Bliss (just don't look at the garden...)

(Or the dust...) (Or the kitchen counters...) Oh, hell -- I'll admit it, we're lousy housekeepers. And gardeners. But mowing -- I got that one covered! The front meadow has been mown twice and looks awesome, almost (dare I say it?) lawn-like! And I used the flail mower on the closer bits of the middle meadow, and it is looking good as well.

So, you ask, if I haven't been cleaning, or gardening, or weeding -- and I clearly haven't been blogging! -- what have I been up to? Well, we got married. Does that count? Now, don't get all excited. No matching table linens were involved. Coffee Jones, my person of honor, offered generously to host the ministerial wedding that we needed to have performed before we could file for Starman's green card. And it turned out to be a particularly nice thing for CJ to have done -- they'd only moved into their new home weeks before, and then she got sick! I know she wanted everything to be perfect for us, so she was bummed that it wasn't as she'd envisioned but she doesn't seem to grok the essential fact that it WAS perfect because she was there for me. (I have abandonment issues...) And we have some lovely photos and memories to boot.

Meanwhile, we've started to plan the wedding for next year -- we've booked a large-ish house at Fountains Abbey, outside York, to stay in for the week. England is different from America in that you can't just get married anywhere you like. You have to get married at a spot licensed to have a wedding. Fountains Abbey have three such venues: one small (20 people, max), one large (60 people), and one that is just right (40 people) but closed on the day we want to get married. [I need to sic Al Gore on them: their reason for the garden venue being closed is that it is unheated, so they don't open it until May. Well, this April, I gather it was over 70 every day for three weeks -- the warmest April in recorded memory. But fate's an odd thing: Guaranteed, if I insisted on using it on April 21, 2008, the weather would be gunmetal grey, drizzling, and 43 degrees for the high. We'd all be huddled in overcoats or something.]

As soon as Starman and I got married, we hustled to get all the paperwork ready for his green card application. We had not appreciated that we needed the medical report before we could file, and that it would take over two weeks for the report to get back to us, so everything else is ready but we're still waiting. Tedium defined. While that's going on, I've put weight loss on "project status." (Bad news at the doctor's office, not all my fault. Unexpectedly low thyroid function had a lot to do with the extra ten pounds I put on over the winter. But still ...) So we've bought a high-tech scale, loaded the bikes almost permanently on the car, cut back on portion sizes and amped up the ration of vegetables at lunch and dinner, and made exercise a priority. Between the doctor's scales and our new one arriving, I'd lost four pounds. (Yahoo!) My first goal is to lose 20 pounds in 8 weeks. Second goal is another 5 pounds by the time I next see the doctor. Third goal is to weigh less than I have in almost 20 years. After that, well, we'll have to see what my psyche can accomplish.

Otherwise, we play bridge! I know -- how positively 1950s. The thing is, I grew up with the game, and always loved it. My first husband (new Blog-o-Nym: Hubone) didn't take to it, but Starman has glommed on to the challenge. What amazes me about this is that Starman didn't play cards as a kid. (I can just about wrap my brain around that factoid. I suspect I would have once considered that to be evidence of child abuse, but I've mellowed, and I now recognize that some families have Other Ways of Raising Their Children.) Still, he's a puzzle guy, so I think he's approaching it from that perspective. Oh, and he's using this comprehensive, effort-intensive approach: he's actually reading BOOKS on bridge! This is way too much like hard work to my mind. I've learned a few new tricks since taking the game up again -- I actually used Gerber the other day, although I gather I used it inappropriately but still! -- but reading books is too much like school. I didn't read books when I was in school, so let's keep this in perspective. Plus, I figure if Starman learns a new convention, he'll teach it to me.

We now go to a local bridge studio, to learn and play a little. I love (LOVE!) Mary, the woman who runs it. She's older and has just such a sunny smile and disposition that I keep having tiny little flashbacks to points in my childhood when I wanted desperately for a special person to Like Me and Befriend Me and so on. It's mostly dorky, but a little sweet to feel that way again, at my age.

The other thing we've done is find bridge-based websites that allow us to play for practice. (The better website allows us to practice being partners against reasonably intelligent robot players.) Amazingly, this bridge obsession hasn't abated in the last few months. Both Starman and I tend to be more fickle in our passions, but maybe that's really the Old Magdalen and the Old Starman. Now that we've found each other, maybe we can make lasting commitments to other things, like bridge. And weight loss and exercise. And gardening . . . Okay, okay, let's not go overboard.

So Little Time, Part 3

In other news, I met two important people this week: Stephen, or as I like to call him, The Famous Stephen. The Famous Stephen is the man who's going to make my wedding dress. As you can see from the photo below, I'm no willowy size 6 bride! And not meaning to disparage anyone's anything, larger women in wedding dresses can sometimes look like a Rubic's cube in white satin. The Famous Stephen is going to fix that. As he put it when I left, I'll look like I've lost 30 pounds.

It's all, I gather, in the bodice. Now, I'm not completely unknowledgeable about fashion design and the history of dress design. I can probably get within 15 years the date of most dresses made after 1750. But when Stephen started to say, "Oh, well of course that was only in style for eight years," and you just know he could tell you which eight years... I'm well & truly out of my depth.

He's now going to start making a toile (a muslin version of the dress) for me to try on. Bless you, Famous Stephen. That's all I can say. (Ooh, and he's going to come up with something for Coffee Jones, aka The Crone of Honour!)

Other important meeting? I met My Surgeon this week. Dr. Castellanos -- he looks like a bunch of famous people, the only one I can think of now is Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish director. I know -- too obscure. I'll keep thinking about it.

Anyway, he would have whisked me into an operating room on the spot if it weren't that this would be seen (by the insurance companies, at the very least) as premature. So, even though he doesn't think any test will show my gallbladder, he's going to do some more investigation. Next up: a contrast study of my upper G.I.

But of course, none of that happens until after Starman and I get back from England. We leave on Monday! Which means the next 58 hours are jam-packed. Gotta go now to the local township meeting to discuss our washed-out road!

Scheduling

I have never been good with a diary, a Filofax, a calendar. I just don't think that way. I keep all my appointments in my head. If you think that system works, you are as nutsy as I am.

Starman has instituted a calendar online for us to share. This is ingenious. We can both access it, put stuff on it, refer to it several times a day. His opens as soon as he logs onto the Internet. Mine . . . doesn't. I don't look at mine. I should. I mean to. I feel bad when it's clear I haven't and bad things happen. Hell, I feel bad when it's clear I should be looking at it, but bad things haven't happened.

I don't know what my problem is. (Incidentally, nothing about that last sentence was meant to suggest that my calendar phobia is my only problem. Not even close!) I don't even think it's an old-dog-new-trick problem. I just don't work that way.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I know what today's calendar says. This morning we're driving to Philadelphia to see those nice people in the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) about two things. First, Starman's green card came and was right in places, and wrong in one place. They had his middle name -- the name he actually goes by -- wrong by one letter. Kinda matters, particularly as the resulting misprint is a GIRL'S name. (This comes out like a Will Shortz puzzle on the radio: Take a four letter first name -- masculine -- change the last letter to an A, and you get a four letter girl's name.)

So he followed the instructions on the website, sent the green card in, and sat back & waited. Which probably would have been okay but for two wrinkles. First, he hadn't read all the fine print that explained they can take up to 90 days to send back his green card, and he won't be allowed back in the country without it. Well, to be fair, he sort of knew that he might have to go to a USCIS office to get his passport stamped (again) with a temporary green card, closer to the date in January when we want to go back to see his family.

But that's not the big, hairy, obnoxious wrinkle. We come by the wrinkle-from-hell courtesy of the Social Security Administration. The rule is, as soon as he got his Employment Authorization Card (which he still has) he can get a Social Security number. So he applied. He didn't get a SS#. He got a form letter that said it might take four weeks. That was seven weeks ago. You can't call to inquire about the status of this. Our fear is that the Social Security Administration has been told by Homeland Security that Starman's paperwork is "under review" even though his green card was granted and is merely having a typo fixed, and that somehow translates into "Do Not Give This Person A Social Security Number NO Matter What" in the Social Security system.

Just pause with me for a moment, and think about all the things you can't do without a Social Security number. Get a driver's license. Have a bank account. Credit cards. An investment account. All he wants to do is invest in our (shaky) economy, and he can't. It's beyond bizarre and annoying.

So, we're trying to get that fixed. Good luck to us, hunh?

And the one other thing on my calendar today? Meet with a producer and costume designer in the Binghamton area to discuss the possibility of his taking umpteen yards of offwhite damask and making me a wedding dress. He's been recommended by a friend, he's seemed really nice in our e-mails back and forth, and I've even seen him onstage (dressed -- by himself -- as Pooh Bah in The Mikado) and he looks smart/talented/delightful.

So -- confrontational interview with government employees jaded by post-911 policies or friendly talk with talented person to discuss my wedding dress. Guess which one I'm dreading. (Insert ironically smiling emoticon here. Which is what? :-/ ?)

The Groom's Side (Part 2)

Sam:

Nicky's husband, Fritz:

Fritz talking to Alison:

Camilla's family (Lily, Francis & Sam):

Bryony, Michael's wife, listening to his speech.

Can I tell you how wonderful Bryony was throughout this whole thing? In addition to the obvious over-and-above, such as hosting us multiple times, dealing with the wedding suits for Starman & Michael and Lucy's bridesmaid dress, and responding to countless emails from me, Bryony was a rock through the entire process. We picked Fountains Abbey because they took us there on an outing in 2006, and because of its proximity to Michael & Bryony's home. I could make a cynical comment wondering if they knew what they were getting themselves into with that excursion, but such doubts would be unfair. Bryony and Michael would do the entire thing over again if we asked them, even hosting seven people for the weekend and putting on a wonderful tea & supper party the day before the wedding. These people are complete stars in our book!