A few wedding notes

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So... where have I been, and what's my excuse for not updating this website?
A picture of the bride and groom...

All in all, I think I have a decent excuse. (At least, this time.)

After being deeply in love for over three years, on May 18th, 2002, I married Conan McGuinness Magruder. The wedding took place in Milham Park in Kalamazoo, Michigan, at 4 PM on a Saturday.

As well as getting married, I've been kept busy with graduating, moving cross-state, finding an apartment, and searching for a new job. This takes time, money, and energy-- more of it than I ever would have anticipated, on all three counts, with particular stress on energy.

I am currently every bit as blissful, googly-eyed, and ridiculous-behaving as you would doubtlessly expect any new bride to be. The players' relationship, however, will not bleed over into GemStone-- although Tanager and Jacinto share a deep bond of friendship, there's simply too many social contrasts and contradictions between the two for it ever to be in-character. As well, neither of us wish conflicts between our characters to spill out-of-game and become conflicts in real life... so friends alone they will be, no matter how many matchmakers keep trying.

None of the wedding pictures on this page are professional, because the professional ones haven't come back yet. Instead, these are the ones that the mother of the bride and the father of the groom snapped over and around the shoulder of the professional, or just whenever they felt like it. I'm looking forward to the professional photos rather a bit. Considering that I was an absolute wretch to the photographer (what do you mean, stand here? No. Go away. I'm getting married.) it's rather amazing. (Right up until roughly one week after the wedding, I saw no need whatsoever to have a photographer at all-- it seemed like the most efficient cost-cutting measure possible, as I'm not one to spend much time looking at photographs. Fortunately, my parents firmly prevailed.)

You don't get to see any of the reception pictures because I didn't particularly want to have any taken at the reception and people kept taking them anyway, and, as a result, I was about as photogenic as a cat that's been brushed the wrong way. "Snarl for the camera, dear..." Carolyn goes fake mink.

Here (if everything aligned like it ought to) is one of the only pictures there is of me looking warm, and rather smug as well. (The girl with her eyes shut was another bridesmaid, and she is also Conan's sister Mia. For some reason, it looks vaguely like he's presenting me with her severed head.) The cold weather had a bit to do with my surly disposition during the rehearsal. When I planned a May wedding, I expected it to be seventy-five degrees Farenheit, if not higher... and, instead, for half the week, the forecast said "snow", and it was barely fifty.

Some women have dream weddings planned out from when they are very small. For my part, I had only one aspect planned out: I wanted to have a butterfly release at my wedding. I read about it in a short article in Scientific American and I thought it was the most romantic thing I'd ever heard. (This is not where Jacinto's delight in butterflies comes from, but it did make me think of Conan's character as well.)

A word to the wise. Butterflies do not fly when it is below seventy degrees. My brother and father released them three days later, when it was finally warm enough. (If any butterflies didn't survive their enforced three-day hibernation, I didn't hear about it and I don't want to hear about it.)

One of my biggest trials during the wedding was... my dress. Other people wonder about whether they're doing the right thing; me, I wondered whether I was dragging half the county behind me and whether or not I'd just gone and torn it with my heel. If I were still in Beloit, I would track down the seamstress who altered it and give her a firm piece of my mind. My dress came with a train, a beautiful, showy, gossamer thing... which I couldn't leave down because the ceremony was outside and because I insisted on dancing at my reception. Therefore, the seamstress put buttons on the train and bustle loops, which, if properly put together, would hold the train out of the dirt by attaching it firmly (but gracefully) to my rear. Right?
She got an alteration for her wedding?

Wrong.

She's no Sukara, but I owe my bridesmaid Wendy a great deal. She spent the entire ceremony and reception running after me with needle and thread and dragging me into bathrooms and behind trees to re-attach my bustle again. Towards the end of the reception, she and my maid of honor gave up on subtle. As wedding souvenirs, we gave out tiny sewing kits marked with "Conan and Carolyn, May 18 2002" (more my style than matchbooks, less my style than date-stamped 10-sided dice) to those who attended. Since we had about twenty spares, Wendy and Theresa raided all the extra sewing kits for their safety pins. After the chicken-dancing disaster, in which I stepped on my dress and went flying twice, I wasn't allowed to do the hokey pokey. Ah, well. (After going flying twice and catching myself with my right hand both times against the dance floor, I also dented my engagement ring-- at the time, I was too dazed and happy to notice, but I can't wear it now until a jeweler has a look at it.)

A wedding dress is supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime dress. Mine definitely was, unless someone's brave enough to go ahead and mend a few ripped holes in the train and remove the ingrained dirt and grass stains along the hem. But it was beautiful for its one lifetime.

The wedding party-- three GemStone players, three Vampire players, and two devout Shadowrunners. I love my geeks.

The wedding party-- three GemStone players, three Vampire players, and two devout Shadowrunners. I love my geeks.

Most of the amateur pictures of the wedding party as a whole are from a distance. As a result, it's rather difficult for me to show you a decent one, particularly given the way in which pixelation distorts images on the Internet. I have no pretensions; I'm putting this on a GemStone player page, which means that, in all likelihood, no one will ever see it except the GemStone players, and you folks don't particularly care how good the pictures do or don't look because five of the eight people in this image aren't GemStone players. (The bride, groom, and one of the groomsmen-- brother of the bride-- are the exceptions.) I'm going to put a picture of the party up anyway. Whose page is this, after all?

From left to right: Mia, Theresa, Evan, Carolyn, Conan, Nick, Matt, and Wendy (or, if you prefer, a street samurai, a Malkavian, the Lesser Known God of Cheese, the Guardian Angel of Sloth, the Patron Saint of Really Wrong Comments, a gangsta rappin' Silver Fang, Gnurr, and a Setite ghoul. We're all geeks in this trade.) Figuring out what anyone looks like is impossible because of the reduced image quality, but take my word on it anyway. Conan looks vaguely Klingon in this picture, don't you think?

And the pink stargazer lilies with the teal dresses came out well after all. I'd wondered if they would.

My mother was the organizational force behind this wedding. She didn't know much about weddings, but by God her daughter was going to have a proper one. This sometimes meshed well and sometimes meshed poorly with my, "Er... I don't know... whatever you think is appropriate?" approach to the wedding. It really says a great deal about my parents that they both responded to the wedding with intense organization... specifically, my father made a Wedding Website, and my mother set everything up in Wedding Task Lists in Excel. Both my parents are mathematics majors, and I'm certain they often wonder how they wind up with a child like me. My mother also bought me Weddings For Dummies. What's worse, I read it....

It's so much easier to design a wedding in Elanthia-- it doesn't count for anything real! (And you don't have to work on the same kind of budget....)

The mother of the bride cuts the cake.

Everyone around me was incredibly supportive, but my mother really pulled the event together and made sure everything would happen. I don't think she breathed a sigh of relief that it was finally over until we'd been firmly pelted with birdseed and sent on our way. (Due to the ghastly cold weather, they threw birdseed at us after we left the reception rather than after we left the ceremony site, as the bride was turning an interesting blue color. Originally, the plan had been butterflies rather than birdseed, but you already read the end of that story.)

A side note on birdseed: loft it over the bride and groom so that it falls on them... do not use it as a missile weapon! Either our friends and family love us very dearly, or it was far past time for us to make our escape... or possibly both.

I love this picture because it looks as though my mother's finally given up on the bride and groom entirely and decided that she's just going to take the cake-cutting task over herself. My grandmother snapped this picture on the sly. (And, no, we did cut the first piece of the cake ourselves, though I was laughing far too hard to properly feed a bite to Conan-- it almost hit his nose instead of his mouth.)

They almost made me redo the flower toss because the photographer wasn't ready when I went ahead and threw the bouquet. If you look back up, you'll see that I had a fairly large bouquet. It was quite heavy-- I almost dropped it in the stream when the photographer had me bend my wrist at a strange angle while standing on a bridge. Fortunately, there was a smaller bunch of flowers specifically intended for the bouquet toss, and, fortunately, it also hit someone who was engaged-- though not, to my amusement, who I was aiming for. Every time I peeked, they reshuffled-- or, to be more precise, all the crowd tried to shuffle to the back. Apparently I nearly hit the ceiling with my toss, too. Ah, well.

If there's one thing from the wedding that I regret not getting a picture of... it was Conan's car after our college friends got done with it. That was the most polite wedding-car-destruction ever implemented-- soap instead of shaving cream, and the cans were safety pinned neatly to the license plate in such a way that we could get rid of them quite easily. It wasn't the courtesy that left me dying with laughter, though-- it was the content. Across the windshield, in HUGE letters...

"NO GEMSTONE TONIGHT!"

I almost wish I were joking. After my Valentine's day gift to Conan was two tickets for the Dhu Gillywhack, though... I suppose I deserve whatever I get over it. I don't think I'll forget the little happy picture of Gir (Invader Zim, anyone?) on the driver's side window anytime soon, either, or the "BSFFA loves you!" (BSFFA being the Beloit Science Fiction and Fantasy Association-- to which all of my college friends present at the wedding belonged.)

So, that's where I've been and what I've been doing. With my new job, I probably won't be around as much as I could wish I would be, but I'll try to keep a better handle on the website, at least. (Just to wrap things around back to where this discussion started.)

And I really love this last picture. And I really love the man standing with me in it. And I'm very happy.

An excessively romantic picture with a swan in the background.