Two people walked into the church; two walked out. We’ve got two sets of tastes, two sets of habits, and what seems an appropriate level of codependency for the duration we’ve been together.

Tonight, for the second year running, we went to Simon Pearce for an anniversary dinner and sat out on the terrace overlooking the dam. We talked about our relationship, watched a spider build her web behind my head, and were surprised to find a hot air balloon doing a touch-and-go in the river directly outside the terrace. As the burner roared to lift the balloon away, they passed easily within 10 feet of us, and joked about placing a dinner order.

A good meal, a cool evening, serendipity, and someone to sing Fountains of Wayne songs with in the car on the way home; this I could stand to do for many more years than just two. Here’s to many, many more.

I believe Kate’s family’s friend Lydia took this picture of our dance’s finale. Just re-found the print while cleaning the kitchen, and figured I’d scan it while it was in my hands. (Maybe it’ll motivate us to actually put together our wedding album one of these months…)

The book of love is long and boring / No one can lift the damn thing

It’s full of charts and facts and figures / and instructions for dancing

but I / I love it when you read to me and you / you can read me anything

The book of love has music in it / In fact that’s where music comes from

Some of it is just transcendental / Some of it is just really dumb but I

I love it when you sing to me and you / you can sing me anything

The book of love is long and boring / and written very long ago

It’s full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes / and things we’re all

too young to know but I / I love it when you give me things and you

you ought to give me wedding rings I / I love it when you give me things

and you / you ought to give me wedding rings

Thank god for our friends and family. This whole effort would have fallen to pieces weeks ago without’em.

• Cleaned, straightened, rearranged the living room furniture so we could practice dancing
• Practiced dancing to Our Song and freaked ourselves right out by going all deer-in-headlights midway through. The first dance is where I’m focussing my anxiety, apparently. Over the last couple of days, I’ve noticed I can give myself a little cold adrenaline jolt any time I want to, just by visualizing stepping onto the dance floor in front of everyone. On the upside, we’ve got some days left to get more comfortable with dancing together; even if we totally flub things up on the day of, we’ll be in front of the most supportive crowd we can think of, by definition.
• Went for softserve with Kate to “Ice Cream Fore-U” (it’s right near a mini-golf range, har har).
• Took an initial tilt at designing the program for the wedding itself. Driving home from soft serve last night, Kate mentioned that we’ll probably need to leave copies of driving directions in people’s hotel rooms. I said that I’d take the directions I put on the web page and format them to a single sheet of paper. Kate paused for a beat. “What?”, I said.

  “Well,” she said, “I really don’t want to make more work for you, and I know that whenever you do graphic design, it, well, it comes out really well! But you take a while doing it, because you’re a little perfectionist about it.”

  I laughed out loud — finally, there’s something I’m sufficiently nitpicky about to draw comment! (For those who haven’t seen: Kate’s writing is beautiful and perfect. If she makes a mistake writing something and she has the option, she’ll throw it out immediately and start over. This is why things she writes look great, and things I write look like a bear chewed on a fountain pen and then sneezed on them.)

• Begun the slow purging of leftovers from the fridge. We’re gonna need fridge space for wedding leftovers, cake supplies, etc.
• Tracked down where to get 150 lbs of ice (Beverage King!) and who can pick it up (the bartenders!).

We met with our caterers over lunch today. The folks taking care of the lawn were finally able to come today and mow. The very long grass is now cut, though there’s still the question of raking (or mowing?) up the hay to be dealt with. Tonight we’ll child-proof some rooms and practice dancing more. I’m mostly keeping abreast of the various phone calls to various vendors, and trying to keep my attention on work during the days this week.

Wedding preparations are ramping up — no major catastrophes, just a lot of
little details now coming due. I bought Kate and I each a little
pocket-sized notebook (Moleskines,
because I’m a gigantic dork and a sucker for marketing prose around writing
tools … but to be fair, they’re really nicely made) to have one place to
jot down the lists and sudden thoughts of things we need to chase down before
… two weeks from Saturday. So far the notebook is proving
invaluable, much more than my Palm has been in years. Freeform diagrams,
lists, addresses… all these things the Palm promises, and yet, entering
text into it is just that little bit more difficult than just writing the
damn things out longhand. It’s a critical little bit, apparently, since I
haven’t used my Palm for to-do lists in over a year.

So I’m makings lists. Working things out with the caterers. Figuring out
the rental order. Fretting over whether we’ve got enough wine. Working
weird hours. Fiddling around with how we’ll lay things out under the tent
(moderately easy) and on top of the curved top of the hill (slightly more
difficult).

Things I’m doing to keep my sanity up:

• Outdoors work. I rototilled three beds in the garden last weekend, and
  it was immensely satisfying. Had to put fresh gas in the tiller, and then it
  was just a matter of wrestling it around and trying not to let it lunge out
  of my hands when it hit clumps and rocks. Weeded a little, ordered a messa
  gardening things.

• More outdoors work. Last couple of days I’ve gone down to help
  Lafayette put fertilizer around the blueberry bushes for a couple of hours.
  It’s not strenuous, just pouring 2 oz of ammonium sulfate in half a ring
  around a bush while Lafayette pours a mirror image half-ring on the other
  side. This morning I went down from 7-9, and about halfway through the time,
  we both just stopped talking and walked and poured in our own private
  reverie. (This is not uncommon among older Quakers, and Lafayette’s among
  the oldest Quakers I know.)

• Reading books. I’ve gotten myself into such a Halo2 habit that I hadn’t
  finished a book in a while. Weaned back a bit and finished The
  Wizard Knight, which is Gene Wolfe’s reinterpreting of Faerie. Good
  stuff, lyrical and somewhat enigmatic as I read it, which has been my
  experience with all the books by Wolfe I’ve read. But I finish them pleased
  to have read them. Light,
  by M. John Harrison, another oddly poetic enigma. Good, too, but very
  different. And now, on my uncle’s recommendation, I’ve started The
  Accidental Connoisseur, which looks promising.

• Cooking. I made a strawberry rhubarb pie for Memorial Day’s get together, and another for a dinner John had for the four of us and 6 neighbors. Making the crusts was the most awkward part (it’s always hard making good crusts in the summer) but the dinner was fabulous, and I felt really good cooking. Grilled some tilapia with Kate last night and improv’d some braised baby bok choy, which was Just Great. Had a funny kind of “Chefs do that, right?” moment doing some flashy rhubarb chopping with Kate’s wickedly sharp chefs’ knife on Sunday last.
• Taking Care of Things. Got the hot tub running again (it helps to actually find the right circuit breaker to turn on, sigh), got my bike tires inflated and ready, tracked down something Carlos had peed on, took my knives in to get re-edged… small victories.

So it’s a hot evening after a long day. Kate’s working a 24, and I’m so sick
of being at my computer that I’m going to go away, play a little Halo, and
then return before bed to make the official list of namecards for my dad to
calligraph.

Even in the midst of getting as many of the details corraled together as we
can, I believe we’re still having fun. Our only real regret is that we won’t
be able to have the lengthy conversations we’d like to have with everyone
who’s travelling up for the weekend… frustrating. But we’ll make the best
of it.

I didn’t particularly want to come down to Boston this week — the band didn’t get together, and it was a short week at work — though I managed to get still more stuff at Paper Source. Dangerous store, since it’s very easy to justify buying things “because we’ll use them later, even after the wedding.” Paper for programs. A Xyron adhesive machine for adhering Thing A to Thing B. Rubber stamps. Embossing powder. (Which sounds like a Harry Potter plot device.)

Now it’s Friday afternoon, and the office is about to let out early. I’m going to stick around and get some work done in the quiet, since the traffic heading north to NH is going to blow no matter when I leave. At least I’ll get something accomplished.

Add to that some urgency around changing our application server software at work (a project which I’m taking point on right now) and my (perhaps foolishly) agreeing to do a few hours of off-hours moonlighting for a friend who needs two systems set up and locked down, and it’s a recipe for me to spin frantically between the multiple tasks I’ve got going and to not really get good traction on any of them. I need to stop, make a few lists, and work through them methodically, and instead I find myself stress-eating (apples and almond butter — thanks, The Cleanse!) and craving the mindless (and decision-less) solace of staying up late playing with the new maps on Halo2. (which are, by the by, excellent.)

Because being sleep-deprived makes me that much better at dealing with stress, natch.

That said, Kate and I went and had lunch at the Norwich Inn yesterday in order to ask their brewer, Tim, if we could get some beer from them for the wedding. He said it wouldn’t be a problem, and was generally so friendly and fun about it that we left lunch feeling great about checking something off the list. (also, their beers are Just Great.)