A few weeks ago on December 30th my little brother got married at Garvan Gardens in Hot Springs, AR. It was a lovely day for a wedding and a lovely wedding it was. It was also all for a quite lovely price. Unfortunately things often only come cheap with large sums of cheap, or in this case, free labor, and when you get amateurs running you frequently get a little bit of chaos thrown in as well. Such was the case with the wedding of Adam Tyler Crabtree and Ashlee Beverly Hilliard. Despite the fact that it appeared to go off relatively error free, the errors and difficulties were mostly just beneath the surface. Shall we begin?
The story begins with 5 people and a dog squeezing into a 5 passenger car with multiple pieces of luggage, multiple Christmas and wedding presents, and a substantial wedding dress.
They would have taken a van, but the vans were sold out that day. They would have gone the next day, but the wedding couple forgot to get a wedding license and needed to get there as soon as possible.
They then drive about 16, 17, or 18 hours from Denver, CO, to Little Rock, AR in pouring snow and raining sleet.
There is no room to move, no vision out the back window, and the dog periodically tap dances on the back seat passengers' crotches.
They arrive safely and the next day proceed to prepare, preparing all day and spending only two hours at the local Michael's.
By the way there isn't enough champagne.
By the way you just drove over a cement parking hazard.
By the way your younger sister cannot make it due to blizzards in Wisconsin.
By the way your older sister with her broken foot will be late. As will your poor visioned grand mother and your air sick cousin.
But things get done and late that evening it is time to set up the reception hall.
But where is the reception hall?
Oh, locked up and in the middle of nowhere.
Unload the supplies, move tables here and there and then back again, and at 11:00 pm we are done. The next day will be wedding party festivities!
Like paintball!
Wait, some people don't want to go so there's only 8 of us. Wait we're running late the girls don't have time there're only 4 of us. Wait, dude doesn't want to come he stayed at the hotel there's only 3 of us: my brother, myself, and a friend of mine from high school. Maybe see a movie instead? "I am Legend" it is!
Oh the dog puked in the car.
Time to pick up the plates and silverware!
But the silverware is dirty, and the wine glasses are wrong.
Time to pick up the wedding dress!
But we're late for the rehearsal, let us attend!
Thankfully the rehearsal is about an hour and a half away. Plenty of time to relax and reorganize. And get lost.
If everyone gets lost it's not so bad, though, right?
Rehearse quickly sans the groom's family and one groomsman, and back to the city.
Finally unload the plates and silverware. Finally find more champagne. Finally fix everything up at the reception hall. Finally get some sushi and watch the Aggies lose in the Alamo Bowl at the local hotel. Tomorrow's a wedding!
After Scooter and Matthew pick up the cake, buy some ice, retrieve some heaters, and drop it all off at the reception hall that is.
Bridesmaids and bride get there on time, but the groomsmen and groom a little late. Thankfully someone remembered to pick up the tuxes.
No time for photos though!
Oh, that's curious, Seth's tux didn't come with shoes.
Play the piano without them!
Oops, the groom's dad did not go down the aisle with his wife. Run!
But... at last... we have a wedding. They laughed. They cried. Ashlee repeated 5 minutes of vows. They were married.
And the reception?
Equally glorious.
If you weren't a groomsman or the mother of a guest at least. Someone's got to clean the plates and put out the wine glasses and place all the chairs and tables away.
And just when you thought it was all done, it's back to the hotel where the bridge and groom are spending their wedding night to drop off forgotten items, pick up opened presents, provide them with some wet but unwashed laundry, and make sure the groom's family remembers to pick up the dry cleaning that the groom hadn't remembered to retrieve.
The end!
I'd like to say good times were had by all, and I believe they were, but they were a busy good times. A very busy good times.
And that's all I got to say about that.
Congrats!
Friday, January 11, 2008
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go
I have generally always felt that skiing and snowboarding were luxury items reserved for the landed elites when not otherwise engaging in polo, yachting, or a good fox hunt. Undoubtedly fun, but also undoubtedly expensive, and, as such, hard to defend in an already resource lopsided world. This was all before I smoked the crack pipe of winter mountain adventure, however, and now that I have I can more easily embrace self-indulgence. Skiing, it turns out, is not just fun, but very fun. Perhaps addictively so. I have and continue to rationalize my participation in such activities with the fact that costs have always been significantly reduced by free housing complements of Paul's family, but who am I kidding? I'm rich and I may as well not pretend otherwise.
The socioeconomics of skiing aside, my third and latest skiing trip the week before Christmas was notable for my final surmounting of the black diamond barrier. Last year I barely made it through blue-blacks -- bouncing my way down Frosty's Freeway on my back -- but this year I deftly descended a groomed black -- Cinarron was it? Cinnamon? -- with no problems. In my controlled chaos way of skiing at least. We also did two double blacks which sent me tumbling, but even when the tumble lasted the better part of a minute and involved several somersaults and an extended slide on my back it was a better experience than the accursed Frosty's Freeway. All my bravado aside, I cannot say I have ever felt a compelling need to constantly push myself to the limit with skiing, and so it was nice to ski joust and generally fool around on some greens and blues as well.
There was of course more to our trip than just skiing; we snowshoed as well! After paying heavy fees and acquiring the tacit approval of the mildly disgruntled majority we donned some shoes, Megan donned her ear flap cap, and we were off to see the waterfall. The waterfall never really materialized thanks to a thick blanket of snow, and Liz and Rachel had to turn back for sugar related issues -- it would seem Liz is a very stoic hypoglycemic --, and my snowman was a complete failure, but overall in the measure of most snowshoeing trips I'd say the trip was a success. Everyone had a good sweat at the very least.
And finally there was also much card playing. Specifically, the playing of Nertz. Normally card playing doesn't make for a very exciting subject to write about, but it is in this case because Drew and I were an unstoppable Nertz playing forced to be reckoned with. I imagine this was due more to Drew's prowess than my own, but I will nevertheless take equal credit for it. We rock. Undefeated. Booyah.
We also played some seemingly fabricated game involving player-selected famous persons -- or in our case mostly cartoon characters it seemed -- but as no one knew who El Cid was I don't want to talk about it. One fact I learned from the game, however, is that in some circles Xena: Warrior Princess was a show about lesbians. You decide!
Finally, finally, what truly set this ski trip apart from all the others -- aside from the lack of any in car brawls -- was our trip through northeastern New Mexico. More specifically it was the fact that we, or rather I, ran out of gas and our minivan puttered to a stop in the middle of nowhere just outside of Las Vegas, NM. In my defense I don't believe we passed a single gas station in the preceding hours before our unscheduled stop, but regardless an extra hour was added on to our trip in the acquisition of more fuel. We tried to get help from the local trailer home folk, but aside from a brief chat with a friendly Australian Sheepdog no help was to be found. This was probably for the best, however, as according to a cop Drew and Angie got a ride with the locals would have sooner sold us to coyotes than have sold us a gallon of gas. Oh wells, what're you gonna do?
The socioeconomics of skiing aside, my third and latest skiing trip the week before Christmas was notable for my final surmounting of the black diamond barrier. Last year I barely made it through blue-blacks -- bouncing my way down Frosty's Freeway on my back -- but this year I deftly descended a groomed black -- Cinarron was it? Cinnamon? -- with no problems. In my controlled chaos way of skiing at least. We also did two double blacks which sent me tumbling, but even when the tumble lasted the better part of a minute and involved several somersaults and an extended slide on my back it was a better experience than the accursed Frosty's Freeway. All my bravado aside, I cannot say I have ever felt a compelling need to constantly push myself to the limit with skiing, and so it was nice to ski joust and generally fool around on some greens and blues as well.
There was of course more to our trip than just skiing; we snowshoed as well! After paying heavy fees and acquiring the tacit approval of the mildly disgruntled majority we donned some shoes, Megan donned her ear flap cap, and we were off to see the waterfall. The waterfall never really materialized thanks to a thick blanket of snow, and Liz and Rachel had to turn back for sugar related issues -- it would seem Liz is a very stoic hypoglycemic --, and my snowman was a complete failure, but overall in the measure of most snowshoeing trips I'd say the trip was a success. Everyone had a good sweat at the very least.
And finally there was also much card playing. Specifically, the playing of Nertz. Normally card playing doesn't make for a very exciting subject to write about, but it is in this case because Drew and I were an unstoppable Nertz playing forced to be reckoned with. I imagine this was due more to Drew's prowess than my own, but I will nevertheless take equal credit for it. We rock. Undefeated. Booyah.
We also played some seemingly fabricated game involving player-selected famous persons -- or in our case mostly cartoon characters it seemed -- but as no one knew who El Cid was I don't want to talk about it. One fact I learned from the game, however, is that in some circles Xena: Warrior Princess was a show about lesbians. You decide!
Finally, finally, what truly set this ski trip apart from all the others -- aside from the lack of any in car brawls -- was our trip through northeastern New Mexico. More specifically it was the fact that we, or rather I, ran out of gas and our minivan puttered to a stop in the middle of nowhere just outside of Las Vegas, NM. In my defense I don't believe we passed a single gas station in the preceding hours before our unscheduled stop, but regardless an extra hour was added on to our trip in the acquisition of more fuel. We tried to get help from the local trailer home folk, but aside from a brief chat with a friendly Australian Sheepdog no help was to be found. This was probably for the best, however, as according to a cop Drew and Angie got a ride with the locals would have sooner sold us to coyotes than have sold us a gallon of gas. Oh wells, what're you gonna do?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
