ANNIVERSARY Countdown (Count-Up?)

Today is Friday, March 7th, 2014. We were married 986 days ago, on June 25th, 2011.


Monday, May 30, 2011

Return of the Rain Man

Nora and I are both committed to qualitative research, to the kind of storytelling that takes you behind the facts to the larger meanings and implications.  But I've been cursed with the ability to operate a spreadsheet...

At the moment, we have received either card-based or verbal acceptance of our wedding invitations from 116 individuals (this places me exactly 30 shy of my bet from March 5th, with about a month to go).  There are rumors of others, but if you haven't either a) sent your card or b) talked to one of us directly in the past three weeks, you are not yet on the list, and we'll be calling.  We have declines, again either card-based or verbal, from 39 others.

Total heard from--155.  116 accepts from 155 responses = 74.83% approval rating, better than almost any public official.

Of the 116, 56 (48.27%) are from Middletown Springs, Tinmouth, Danby, or other immediately adjacent communities.  This represents about three percent of the total population of the immediate area.

Another thirty (25.86%) are from metro Boston, and eighteen (15.52%) from metro New York, six from one building alone (about two percent of that building's inhabitants).  The remaining twelve are from or near Berkeley, Kenosha, Tampa, Reading, Providence.

The assembled will be 48.3% male and 51.7% female, roughly the same as the national population as a whole.  It appears that there will be seven kids, ranging in age from about 6 to 17, four boys and three girls.  (Grade school 3, middle school 2, high school 2.)  Another four or five couples are using the weekend as an excuse to escape their children...

At the moment, the prize for the greatest distance traveled will go to Neoma Lavalle and Ben Bachelder, 2,978 miles (Berkeley CA); given that they lived for two years in Antarctica and that Ben has hitchhiked on all seven continents, a trip across the US is a little weekend getaway for them.  But there is a chance that they will be surpassed by a traveler from 7,217 miles away, if Sudeshna can make it from New Delhi.  The award for least distance traveled to the ceremony will be held by Emmett and Kerstin Francois, at roughly 120 feet; the award for least distance traveled to the reception will be Jeannette Marcy, at about 220 feet.

There are at minimum five highly accomplished piano players, so there'll be a piano present at the reception (a sixth pianist unfortunately won't be able to join us).  I know of at least seven talented spinners and knitters, though undoubtedly there are several others I'm not aware of.  At the moment, there are a minimum of two highly qualified pool players, and a LOAD of people whose cooking I would gladly sit down to at any moment.  Twenty-two work for colleges, eight are primarily farmers or ranchers, six are builders or woodworkers, one is a corporate pilot, and another teaches architecture to grade-school kids.  We've got a police crime analyst, a CEO of a major non-profit, a theater producer, a nightclub singer, more than a few librarians, and a shaman.

Most importantly, there are 116 (100%) friends.  And we can't wait to see you all here.

P.S. from the other half of the duo: I'd estimate that of the 116 confirmed coming to the wedding, approximately 83.4% have weighed in on the dress.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

More Wedding Traditions

We had a fun talk today after commencement with our friend Agnes, who has been a professional corporate event planner for many years.  We were sharing our plans for the wedding, and she reminded us of several wedding traditions that we might want to observe (none of which we knew).
  1. The Groom's Silver.  During the wedding, the groom should have on his person somewhere a piece of silver.  Not something chrome-like, but the real element silver.  A dime would do.  This ensures that the couple will have a rich life—not necessarily lucrative, but rich in friends and family and ideas and activity.  (However, upon further research, I see that there's a Scots custom of the groom placing a silver sixpence in one shoe to assure wealth and financial security.)
  2. One-Time Aisle.  At the wedding rehearsal, the bride MUST NOT walk down the aisle.  The thinking is that she should only make that trip once in her life.  She can go down the side aisle, but cannot replicate the same journey she'll take during the wedding.
  3. Left and Right Elbow.  In every other social circumstance, a man should offer a lady his right elbow for support.  (Who knew?)  But at a wedding, given the history of marriages bringing together feuding clans, the father or brother escorting the new bride down the aisle must have her on his left elbow, since he might need his right hand to draw his sword in defense.
  4. Groom Right, Bride Left.  As the officiant faces the couple, the groom should be at his right hand, and the bride at his left hand.  This marks the last time in their relationship that the groom will be right. 
  5. You May Now Kiss the Bride.  Because in about three minutes, everybody and her aunt will be kissing the bride, so the groom at least gets to have the first pass.
  6. Congratulations and Best Wishes.  (I already knew this one.)  After the wedding has completed, you offer Congratulations to the groom and Best Wishes to the bride.  If you congratulate the bride, that implies that she worked hard for a good outcome, which in reality must be considered to be her right.  You congratulate the groom, because he's a lucky SOB to have hooked up with the bride, and you wish the bride Best Wishes because... well... she's gonna need them.
And the superstitions on the wedding dress...

Married in White, you have chosen right,
Married in Grey, you will go far away,
Married in Black, you will wish yourself back,
Married in Red, you will wish yourself dead,
Married in Green, ashamed to be seen,
Married in Blue, you will always be true,
Married in Pearl, you will live in a whirl,
Married in Yellow, ashamed of your fellow,
Married in Brown, you will live in the town,
Married in Pink, your spirit will sink.

(Or, given the site we directed you to a couple of days back...
Married in Camo, you'd better bring ammo.
Married in Purple, your life will be hurtful.
Married in Orange, you're doomed because nothing rhymes with orange.

And a shout-out to Shelley from My Fair Wedding back three months ago—
With bridesmaids in Zebra, she must be a diva.)

Commencement

The Saturday of Memorial Day weekend has always been the date of the BAC graduation.  This year, we have the largest number of graduates of any year in the college's—about 140, give or take a last-minute breakdown.  Nora gets to speak for a couple of minutes as she congratulates her students, the new graduates of Interior Design.  She's on the couch in the other room, writing her remarks as I write this.

There's a common trope in commencement speeches in which a speaker will remind the assembled that the word "commencement" means beginnings, not endings.  But as Nora's own term as head of the ID school comes to a close on Tuesday, I'm thinking seriously about commencement.  What will she launch now that this is concluding?  I have a thought that it'll look a little different than her work of recent years past; I feel a new direction.

In exactly four weeks, give or take a couple of hours, Nora and I and all of you will have our own hillside commencement, the official launch of us.  Unofficially, of course, we've been an "us" for several years, but this is a different "us," a new direction as well.

I'm reminded of the Kenyon College commencement speech by David Foster Wallace, posthumously published as a short book, This Is Water.
Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.  The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.  This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.  But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.  The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other peple and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.  That is real freedom.  That is being taught how to think.  The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race—the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
Nora has just finished and read to me her own, briefer, remarks for today.  I'll put them up here later.  But we all have, indeed, some infinite thing that deserves our attention, our awareness, our discipline, our effort, and our care.  And that is what we should commence to do.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

"Just how I see you..."

So I know you have all been waiting for the shoe to drop - crystal, I suppose for my Prince Charming... and at last it has.  We should have expected it now that I at last have THE engagement ring. Yes, that's right... I have found THE  dress for the wedding...But you don't really think I am just going to let you see it so easily do you? You know I am going to play with you a little right?

Scene 1:
So I was at work yesterday and everyone is a little giddy with exhaustion and well... it IS the workplace you have all been hearing us talk about for the past decade or two right? So you know that part already... Anyway I was chatting with one of my colleagues and telling him that a friend had sent me a picture of THE dress... And then I told him about it.  Now you will need to understand... he has been married to his husband for 6 years after knowing him for 17 years. He has spiked hair and the most amazing twinkle in his eyes. He is smart and engaging and has the wit to roll with a variety of punches meted out on the job. "Men have it easier" he said. "You buy a pair of pants that fit and a jacket that matches. We both bought black suits when we got married. And white shirts. The only decision was the color of the tie. It's harder for women." We talked about a strong woman friend of his who has been sucked into the same morass....She wound up wearing a beautiful Armani suit," he said.

"What do you WANT to wear," he asked?  Such a smart guy. So naive if he thinks I can get away with that.... When we got back to the office, I showed him the dress on the computer. It had come in an email message from a friend.

He gasped, paused and said, "you know when I first met you, that's JUST how I saw you."  OK so remember that....

Scene 2:
I was in the office talking with another friend today and showing off the ring. I started telling him the dress story....

"It's not just the dress I said... It's giving up control to other people... When the personal shopper brought the third load of abysmal dresses, my mother said  'just try it on... they've tried so hard.'  And the personal shopper said, 'you need to expand your view.' And so I tried on the dresses that didn't expand my view...giving up control to someone I'd never met before, to make THEM feel better, even though it made ME feel bad. That's the wedding industry. Designed to make you lose control." 

So that's the story I told our friend today...

"Why don't you wear some of your artistic clothing," he asked. "A shawl," he said and started making draping motions around his body.

"I see you in something yellow," another colleague at the next desk said. "Or violet. Yes, a shawl. Like that wrap with the holes that you wear."

"Mom still wants me to wear white," I said...

"Why does she want you to wear white?" he asked. I think I shrugged my shoulders.

"How about Klan robes then?" he said.

There are SOME people I am going to miss when I leave the BAC!

So I have stalled long enough....Here's the dress... It's not white, but it may be just the thing! AND remember that my first colleague said, "you know when I first met you, that's JUST how I saw you."
http://camoformal.com/index.php/wedding/bridal-gowns/3066-vivien-leigh-pickup-tulle-ball-gown.html

(The bow is extra!)

And here's what Herb will be wearing:
http://camoformal.com/index.php/guys-camo/men-s-blazer.html

Such a fashion plate! 

And you? What are you wearing to the wedding?  They make the gown in snowy camo as well!

Good thing we're honest...

Last night after work, we went down to Charley's Bar & Grille and took a booth in the basement bar, where it's pretty quiet.  Once our drinks came, I gave Nora the moose, and the ring.  She liked both.

We had our dinner, and our waiter came by to clear dishes and ask if we wanted to see a dessert menu.  "Look," Nora said, waving the back of her hand at the waiter.  "Look what he just gave me."

"Wow!"  He looked at me admiringly.  "Did you do that here, just now?"

"Well, I proposed last summer," I said, "but I just gave her the ring tonight."

And all of a sudden we had free champagne and a comped dessert.  (I did the appropriate thing, of course, and tipped him on what would have been the full amount of the bill.)

So now, Nora's thinking she's just going to take all of our friends one at a time to lunch and to dinner (this being Massachusetts, it doesn't matter which gender the friends are), and at some point, she'll wave her hand under the server's nose and say, "Look... look what s/he just gave me."  Free food at every restaurant in Boston.  Eventually, we'd have to move to another city to keep the scam going...

Who knew that an engagement ring would lead to a life of petty crime?

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Road Trip

As I've mentioned, I travel a fair bit for my work and my professional organization.  Nora and I have an "agreement" that every time I go somewhere, I bring back a tourist trinket, usually from the airport.  So far, these things have included:
  • an Arnold Schwartzenegger "Governator" shot glass from Sacramento
  • a pink-heart refrigerator magnet that says "Chicago Princess"
  • a snow-globe with the White House in it
  • a bar of transparent purple lavender soap cut into the shape of the state of Utah
  • and last week from Baltimore, a plastic coin purse with a Maryland crab on one side, and the legend "Pinching Pennies"
There are more than a dozen of these things so far.  And today, I took a quick drive up to Portland Maine, and returned with two items.  Here's one:
Everybody needs a moose, right?



And here's the other:

The engagement ring I designed in partnership with Edie Armstrong of Folia Gallery has returned.  It's rose gold (an alloy of gold and copper, a beautiful pinkish gold), and bears the diamond that my great grandfather gave his new wife in 1892.  It's not as nice a photo as those of the wedding rings, but we'll fix that.

Nora's in class until 8:30 tonight, and has no idea what this ring looks like.  I'll give it to her at dinner tonight... I'm betting she'll like it.

Note from after dinner... she does.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Substitute Post

I wrote a post last night, after a long and difficult day, that Nora and I both decided shouldn't go out into the world just yet.  So instead, here's a picture of a puppy.



























Well, okay, that's not a puppy, that was yesterday at work.

But Nora's received the great news that her banked vacation days allow her to have the entire month of June off!  A little turbocharger for the wedding planning (Take heart, Wanda!  We'll be ready for the 25th for sure.), and a well-deserved conclusion to her job contract. 

I have some time banked away too, so I'll be fully up in Vermont starting on June 11th.  Simon and Ed will be delighted to have two full weeks of watching chipmunks and not having to ride for hours in the $#&^%$^%$!**$%#^$*!! CAR.  Simon and Ed both look just like that picture when we tell them we're going in the car.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Mistaken Identities

I'll start with two stories.  That shouldn't surprise anyone who knows me.

One.  About three weeks ago, Nora and I were in New York, and managed on a Friday night to get the immediate family together for a dinner at Blue Hill, Estelle's favorite restaurant in the whole world.  She knows everyone there, they all know her, and she's been welcomed as a part of their family.  So Estelle and Nora and Nora's brother Ellis and Ellis' wife Joanna and I were all there at a table.  Estelle was beaming, and called one of the other waiters over to introduce everyone.  "These are my children," she said, gesturing around the table.  "This is my daughter Nora, and this is my son Ellis, and these are their wives."  I've claimed throughout this entire process that I'm more the bride than Nora, so it was good to get objective corroboration.

Two.  This afternoon, we had a wonderful day celebrating the birthday of Betti Jaquay, and making some mileage on the wedding ceremony with her husband Nelson, our officiant.  [Note to Wanda—See?  We ARE making progress on the ceremony.  Get off our backs.]  Betti told me that when Nora and I were first seeing one another, long before very many people in Middletown Springs had met me, Nora was happily explaining who I was, what I did, how she was beginning to fall for my cat Ed.  She probably went on... she does that when she's happy.  After she left, Nelson and Betti were trying to puzzle out the names.  "Is Herb the cat, and Ed is the boyfriend?  Or is Herb the person?  I don't remember.  They're both people names..."

At this moment, we've got about 85 or so people whom we know for sure will be at the wedding, and I predicted two months ago that we'd finalize at 146.  That's a LOT of people to meet over the course of one afternoon, and I fully expect to see lots of people leaning over and having private conversations in the other's ear.  "That one... Herb's brother, the one we talked to a minute ago.  What's his name?  Phil?  Will?  I know his other brother is Barry..."  (It's Bill and Jerry, by the way.) 

We don't really want to go the way of name tags. 

HELLO!  My Name Is _________________________.  
I'm related to the 
_____Bride
_____Groom
in the following humorous way:
_____________________________

Nah.

We could hand out scavenger-card sheets, and give a prize to the person who got the most signatures of other guests over the evening.

We could give everyone RFID cards so that when they went over to get a beer or walked up to see us, an LCD screen would light up over the bar with their photograph, name and hometown.

We could give everyone color-coded badges:
  • Red for blood relative of the bride
  • Blue for blood relative of the groom
  • Orange for long-time friend of the bride
  • Green for long-time friend of the groom
  • White for people we only know together
  • Black for people who snuck in and don't know anybody.
In the end, we've decided to go low-tech, and just give people a lot of opportunities to meet and talk with one another, a pretty 19th-Century solution.

On Friday 6/24, we'll be having a paper-plate, bring-a-bag-of-chips, BYOB picnic at our house from 4 to 10.  Drop in whenever, stay as long as you want.  The grille will be going.  If you're from out of town and don't know anybody, this will give you a chance to meet some folks to hang out with the next day.  It'll also give US a more relaxed opportunity to be with many of you, because the next day's gonna be kind of nuts.

On Saturday 6/25, there's going to be a wedding.  Just in case you'd forgotten.  And there's no bride's side or groom's side to the seating.  There'll be some milling around prior to the ceremony, and a prosecco toast afterward, and some pre- and post- music by our friend Elizabeth.

Later on Saturday, there'll be a reception down at the Town Green, from 5:30 until well after sundown (and being this close to the solstice, sundown will be pretty late at this northern latitude).  There'll be assigned seating at first but plenty of opportunity to re-shuffle, and a couple of places to play and listen to music.

And on Sunday afternoon 6/26, the Middletown Springs Historical Society (which owns the building housing part of our reception) will host its annual Strawberry Festival.  Dozens of gallons of ice cream, dozens of flats of strawberries, a couple of hundred biscuits for shortcake, fresh whipped cream, fresh lemonade.  It's a real summer institution here.

So by Sunday evening, you'll have had several old-school opportunities to learn people's names.  (The RFID video monitor thing does sound pretty cool, though.  I'll have to look into that.) 

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Our Way

One of the very best things about my time spent at Berkeley was getting the opportunity to meet Paul Groth, a terrific scholar of the everyday American landscape.   He really showed me what intellectual life looked like, why it was exciting, and helped me see that I could still be interested in architecture without being interested in "design."

And one of the best things about meeting Paul was that he introduced me to the work of one of his own favorite writers, Joan Didion.  I've now read pretty much everything she's published—fiction, non-fiction, and a lot of her reviews of others' work too.  But right now, one of her essays in particular stands in my memory: Marrying Absurd, originally published in 1967 in the Saturday Evening Post.  In it, she describes the Las Vegas wedding industry, unsure from her own economically and socially privileged position what to make of it. 
But Las Vegas seems to offer something other than "convenience"; it is merchandising "niceness," the facsimile of proper ritual, to children who do not know how else to find it, how to make the arrangements, how to do it "right."
I'm writing this from the Gramercy Mansion in horsey suburban Baltimore, about to be invaded by the swells coming to see the Preakness this Saturday.  The Gramercy does a lot of weddings; it's a lovely B&B that caters to families who know how to do it "right."

And yet... there's a fountain in the courtyard outside our retreat room, and in that fountain are two rubber ducks.  A bride duck, wearing a floral veil and a white aprony dress, and a groom duck in top hat, vest and bow tie.  It's cute, but its purchase also contributed another $15 to the wedding industry.  You go into a Michaels or an A. C. Moore crafts store, and there's a whole aisle of wedding preparations—silk flower petals for the little girls to scatter, cake toppers with the bride dragging the groom away by the collar, everything in ivory or pastel or plasticized "gold."  All there for families who want to do it "right" but who can't afford the concierge and the Gramercy Mansion staff to help them with it.

I've never been able to do things "right."  The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once said that every good anthropologist he'd ever met had felt like an outcast growing up, and thus had learned to look at culture rather than simply live it.  I've always wanted to do things because I thought they were the right thing to do, not because they were "right."

I'm glad that Nora and I are coming to this wedding planning as adults.  We both have a strong sense of what we want: how to celebrate our community, how to bring our supporters and friends together in a way that's about them as well as about us.  We haven't felt any pressure to use the "right" calligrapher and order the "right" kind of cake and have the "right" kind of music and adhere to the "right" ceremony.  We're doing what feels right, appropriate, celebratory.  We're making the preparations themselves into ways to be united, ways to explore our relationship, ways to thank all of you for your years of love and friendship.

There's a lot to do.  Some days it feels like too much to do.  But nobody else is making us do it.  Nobody else is insisting that things be "nice."  We're giving ourselves, and each other, and all of our friends, a collective gift.  And that feels... well, it feels right.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

A Tasting Menu

As you know, H is in Baltimore and I am in Medford. And while he is right about the value of "together" I am glad he is not here to hear my hacking and sneezing. I am sick. It's a garden variety cold but it has taken up residence in my head throat and chest, and my eyes are dripping as well. My voice sounds like that of a bull frog in heat. (And no, I don't really know what that sounds like, but that's what I imagine.)

Anyway, I have lots to do for work, am guilty about what remains incomplete with the end of the contract approaching, but I am incapable of concentrating.... so what should I do? Post to the blog!

I staved off the rheums for a trip on Saturday to one of our cake bakers - yes there are three - for a cake tasting. It was an interesting day. I recommend it to all of you - whether or not you are getting married. Just plan on buying a cake -- for the Day-after-Tuesday holiday or the Sacred-Third-Minute-After-Lunch Festival held in Croatia. 

We drove through Wallingford, passing its main street  and proceeding to the East. Drove through Green Mountain Forest to the railroad tracks where we took a right and a left. Drove about a mile on a gravel road into countryside. We were greeted by a bantam chicken recovering in a dog kennel after the rooster tried to kill her (he's now dead), an old shepherd-like dog, and  "Marie-France" our baker. From Belgium, trained in taxes and accounting, she arrived to find she needed a new career as her training wasn't recognized here... And like many women, she decided to opt for something that would allow her to make a living at home so she could raise her three kids without paying more than she earns in child care.

The house is a combination of Belgian antiques with game-carved panels on the sideboard and leaded glass, and an IKEA cabinet in the hall and cabinets in the kitchen. The double width kitchen counter is a slab of granite from Home Depot and the sink is deep, and shaped like a blunted apostrophe on its side. She ushered us into the dining room where Linda, Ursula and I sat paging through a thick binder with photos of cakes she has made, each named for its patron, and as we paged through photo after photo of lovely cakes with candy flowers and real flowers and tiny buttons in the icing and basket-weave piping, we eventually settled on the 4 we liked best. That was followed with a tasting of 4 mini-loaves of cake: vanilla, almond, chocolate and lemon, and a platter of possible mousses and butter creams: espresso, maple, vanilla butter cream, chocolate ganache, lemon curd, raspberry mousse, strawberry mousse, and some strawberry puree. All is sourced locally and made by Marie-France.  We sliced thin pieces of the cakes and put a variety of  butter creams and mousses on them and generally indulged ourselves in flavors that actually made it through this nasty virus to my palate. She described her process which starts on Wednesday for a Saturday delivery, making as many as three cakes at a time. Each cake is severed into thinner layers, and refrigerated and then recomposed with the fillings the next day and then iced and then....so on and so on... so each layer of hte cake has several layers inside. Makes accounting seem tame!

We chose favorites, chatted some more and then left filled with good tastes and laughter and another window into someone's work that only rarely gets acknowledged. Herb and Mom will make the final decisions, and you will get to see the final creation in June. For now, it is a nice memory as I rest, hacking, on the couch.

Oh and one other note.. there are two other bakers with stories to tell! One is in New York and one in Boston... This will be a well traveled dessert course!

Roadside Art

We've referred several times to the road you'll be taking up to the ceremony at Kerstin and Emmett's home.  Many Springs Drive is a graded dirt road (currently not very well graded, but that will be dealt with shortly), with some very steep sections (like 20% steep).  If you want to have the view, you got to do the climb.

It runs through hay fields and past some farming buildings, and as with many farms, there are a large number of "retired" vehicles and equipment along the way.  So we've been thinking about the various forms of distraction and misdirection we might employ.  And another one just occurred to me recently—the Burma Shave signs.  For those of you who are under 70, there was a shaving cream company called Burma Shave whose advertising ploy was to post poems on sequential signs down the highway, so that you'd have the poem revealed to you over the space of a minute or so.  And I'm thinking that Burma Shave signs might be just the thing for coming uphill and going downhill.

(It's important that they're different going up and coming down.  We did a tour a couple of years ago to the new WGBH television studios, and they had a corrugated siding on the building.  On the way in, you could see one face of the corrugation, which had on it printed text from Edward R. Murrow about the importance of good television for social growth.  On the way out, you could see the other face of the corrugation, which had the lyrics to the Sesame Street song.)

So here's some thoughts.

GOING UPWARD

As you climb
To the wedding site
Make sure that ditch
Stays on your right

COMING DOWNWARD

Herb and Nora
Now are wed
Celebration
Soon widespread

—or—


GOING UPWARD

There's a wedding
up this slope
If you can't make it
We'll elope

COMING DOWNWARD

The deed is done
The couple's tied
Now's a party —
Mom presides

Now your turn.  We'll think of some kind of prize for the best poems, and we'll use our two favorites on Many Springs Drive on June 25th.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Apart

I'm in Baltimore, working with a friend to lead a writing workshop for eleven faculty members from Stevenson University.  Nora's spent the weekend up in Vermont, and now is back in Medford.  I'll be home on Thursday night.

For people who care so much for each other, we spend an awful lot of time apart.  For years, before she started working at the BAC, Nora would come down to Medford for a weekend or a week once a month.  She had her fuel line stolen from her old Jeep outside the house once... And I would get up to Middletown Springs maybe every other weekend.  It was a pretty miserable time.

Now, for the last eight months, Nora's been working at the BAC, so we spend the majority of our days and nights together rather than separated.  We typically go together to Vermont, come back together to Medford, drive together to and from work.

I like together.

But Nora's been away on Friday and Saturday, and I'll be away on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, returning late Thursday evening.  I'll be busy, I'm staying in a wonderful B&B, I'm traveling with a good friend whom I don't get to see nearly often enough, I'll even make a little consulting fee.  All good.  But not as good as together.

Friday, May 13, 2011

POSTCARDS!!

You know how you plan and think and get ready for something, but then something happens that makes the whole affair somehow feel real?  Well, for me, I had another one of those moments when I got home from work yesterday and found three identical postcards in the mailbox, each of which had the names of people confirming that they would be with us at the wedding.  And then today, nine more.  Amazing.  It's, like, Hey, this RSVP stuff really works.  And People really are coming to our wedding.

Prior to the cards, there was a sense of unreality to it.  First off, June was a long way off.  Not so much now, but when I woke up on New Year's Eve morning and said to Nora, "How about June 11?", it seemed like a REALLY long way off.  And when we ultimately settled on June 25th, it was even further off.  Second, we talk to lots of people who are excited about the wedding, and it's just become a common topic of conversation.  And third, the planning has been so ongoing and so dense that it's become a logistical task, which I do for a living.

But now, we have postcards with people's own handwriting that says they're coming to our wedding.  That's pretty cool, and the stack of postcards that arrive from away has a materiality to it that gets lost when I'm looking at a spreadsheet and calculating how many bottles of cider we need.

Y'all are coming to our wedding.  That really feels big to me right now.  Thanks.  (There's a list down the side of who's said yes on the cards so far—have a look and see who you recognize.)

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Calgon, Take Me Away!!

There's a lot of people who demean the 1970s.  But that was my era.  Elton John, nylon scenery shirts, Jimmy Carter and the Killer Rabbit, Muskegon Catholic Central Class of '76... ahh, good memories.  And one of the things that people don't give the '70s enough credit for is the excellence of the advertising.  It was still causal, like the old patent medicine ads from the 1880s — "Use this, and you'll feel great!" — but with hip music and feathered haircuts.


I was brought back to this reverie a couple of days ago when Nora used the tagline to a famous 1970s commercial in reference to our workplace.  So here's the commercial in question.  (Our students probably think that Calgon is the planet where Buzz Lightyear came from.  If you recognized the commercial from the post's header, consider yourself officially old.)

Nora will be finished with her BAC responsibilities on June 9th, less than a month from today.  It's been great going to work with her every morning, driving through Boston traffic while she's knitting, talking with her about what the day will bring or about our plans for the weekend.  Driving home is often less pleasant, not because the traffic is worse or because it's too dark to knit, but because we're both physically tightened up.  I used to think that being "uptight" or "all wound up" were figures of speech.  Now I know they're literal.  We got home last night at 11:00, and both immediately turned on our computers.  We didn't really need to do any more work, or to check our personal e-mail accounts; we were just too tired to do anything else.  (Other stupid phrases from my youth—"too cold to snow," "too tired to sleep"—have also been borne out through my years in Boston.)

Bubble bath doesn't really do much for me, but if Calgon has those magical powers, maybe I should buy a box. 

Saturday, May 7, 2011

The Checklist, Take 4

We've just received our May 7th report from the bridal consulting firm Sinder Ellis Bahl, LLP

January

  1. Finish engagement announcements to those who don't already know
  2. Set date and location
  3. Develop invite list
  4. Write wedding budget
  5. Choose wedding colors
  6. Choose bridesmaid and best man
Auditor's report for January:  the couple has belatedly begun work on the ceremony.  While not completed, progress has been made — the Sinder Ellis Bahl CrisisGuide™rating has been reduced from DIRE to TENUOUS. 
February
  1. Officiant for wedding
  2. Host for reception
  3. Select and order wedding rings
  4. Create gift registries
Auditor's report for February:  Item #3, the wedding rings, has also been augmented by the finalized design of the engagement ring.   Although the engagement ring is traditionally completed prior to the wedding rings, the Auditor is reassured to see that they all exist, regardless of order. 
Item #4 has become a major stumbling block.  The CrisisGuide™rating remains at DIRE, and will be elevated to CALAMITOUS if not resolved by May 15th.
March
  1. Professional photographer
  2. Select and book music for reception
  3. Design ceremony and vows
Auditor's report for March:  As noted, Item #3 is now TENUOUS.  Item #1, however, has now been elevated to our highest CrisisGuide™rating, IMPENDING DISASTER.
 April
  1. Shop for wedding dress and accessories
  2. Create and mail wedding invitations
  3. Place order for Cypress Grove "cheesecake"
  4. Flowers for the reception
  5. Reserve tent/canopy for reception
  6. Reserve tables/chairs for reception
  7. Place order for wedding cake
  8. Place order for drinks
  9. Get marriage license
  10. Choose and buy thank-you cards
Auditor's report for April:  Items #2, 4, 5, 6, 7 are complete.  Items #3, 8 and 10 can be completed by May 15th.  Item #9 requires both parties to be present on a weekday in the Middletown Springs (VT) Town Clerk's Office, which seems unlikely during May.  Sinder Ellis Bahl LLP accepts no responsibility for the state of Item #1, which has been classified at IMPENDING DISASTER for more than two months.
May

  1. Wedding favors for guests
  2. Plan rehearsal dinner and guest list
  3. Buy new suit
  4. Buy gifts for bridesmaid, best man, mother of the bride
  5. Write and print wedding programs
  6. Send wedding announcement to Middletown Springs Magnet, Rutland Herald, New York Times.
Auditor's report for May:  Item #3 completed and hidden away from bride's prying eyes.  However, shirt and accessories not yet acquired. Other May tasks easily accomplished during the remainder of the month, unless delayed by other IMPENDING DISASTER items. 
Overall Status
Auditor recommends that both parties take an immediate leave of absence from their places of employment in order to complete the remaining wedding tasks in a timely fashion.
Report signed May 7th, 2011
Sincerely,
Wanda F. Thelmecket
Senior Auditor, Sinder Ellis Bahl LLP

How to seal 100 envelopes

I love going on factory tours.  Watching raw materials get sorted, processed, packaged, and assembled for delivery is a remarkable experience.  Beer bottles going through the Pabst line, filled at 20 bottles per second; redwood logs, twenty feet long and five feet across, being peeled of bark by high-pressure water jets.  It's all very 19th-century technology, a series of gears and chains and cams and levers that make magical things happen.

And that kind of technology is required to do things at the scale we live now.  We consume 183.9 million bottles of beer a day in the US, and 131.5 million board feet of lumber (Rain Man moment there); you're not going to get to those kinds of numbers in backyard industries.

Our wedding is somewhat smaller scale than the work of Pacific Lumber, but there's still quite a lot to do.  For instance, here's what it takes to send 108 wedding invitations:
  • A Macintosh computer with PrintShop software and a 20" pro monitor
  • A dozen or so hours to lay out the pages of text and graphics
  • Three people to review the text
  • Three different printers to try to align the front and back sides of the card
  • A trip to two crafts stores to buy seven different colors of ribbon
  • A return to one of the crafts stores to buy three more spools of the ribbon we decided on
  • Three boxes of custom paper
  • One pack of transparent labels
  • A trip to New York to buy three (!!) test envelopes
  • Two friends to buy 100 of the envelopes we selected
  • Another trip to New York to pick up the envelopes (okay, so there was another reason for the two New York trips...)
  • An evening with Herb and Nora tying 100 packs of cards with ribbon
  • A trip to the post office to get 100 envelope stamps and 100 postcard stamps
  • Printing a set of color tests for the address labels
  • Choosing a color, printing four sheets of address labels and additional sheets of return address labels
  • An evening with Herb:
    • putting be-ribboned invitations into envelopes (while watching two episodes of American Chopper, in which the crew designs and assembles a custom motorcycle for GoDaddy.com)
    • putting address labels onto envelopes (while watching a biography of 1960s and '70s NASCAR driver David Pearson on the Speed channel)
    • putting return address labels onto 35 envelopes, and hand-addressing the returns for the rest (we didn't have enough labels) (while watching an excellent movie, The Notorious Bettie Page)
    • using a sponge to moisten the glue flaps and seal the envelopes (while watching the last hour of Iron Man, in which yet another violation of the core villain rule—don't gloat while the superhero is still alive—once again caused the villain's downfall)
  • A trip to the Medford Post Office to mail the finished invitations, and to buy four international postcard stamps and four international one-ounce stamps.
That last one's not done yet.  Ask me in an hour.

Seems like there ought to be a machine for all that.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Wait! Wait! Pull Over!

So we're driving to work this morning, and turn off Beacon Street onto Gloucester and the last few blocks to the office.  (Side note: why is Gloucester pronounced Glosster, and Worcester pronounced Wooster, but Dorchester pronounced DoorChester?  And why is Woburn Woobun, or Peabody Pibbidy, or Billerica BillRicka?  I mean, America is spelled similarly to Billerica, and nobody's singing God Bless AmRicka at hockey games...)  And just after we turned, we went past someone working in the tiny garden in front of their brownstone, and saw these ENORMOUS red and purple and orange flowers.  They weren't sunflowers, but the heads were as big around as manhole covers.  "Look at those!  What are those great flowers?"

"Do you want me to go around the block?"

"Yes, let's go back."  So I go do a kind of figure-eight around four one-way streets to get back there, and we pull to the curb and get out of the car.  Turns out they're huge fake flowers, kind of like mutant dahlias, with stems about three feet long and thick as garden hose.  The gardener was wiring them onto the porch railing.  Nora asked where he got them, and he didn't know, so he went into the house and returned with the owner.  She got them at a local floral supply, available only as wholesale objects for other business owners.  But now we're thinking about getting a hundred or so of them and lining the road up to the lawn where we'll have the ceremony.  Better to look at giant mutant flowers than at all the rusted-out Plymouth Reliants.

Monday, May 2, 2011

For the want of a nail...

There's a statistical model for project management that's called the Critical Path Method, in which all of the sequential relationships for a project are laid out (you have to finish the structural work before you call in the plumbers and painters, to take a simple example) and you calculate the most efficient possible route through the various tradespeople and subcontractors.  I was at a conference several years ago in which the story was told of a big Minnesota building contractor who had hired an Indian mathematician specifically to do critical path calculations.  So for one particularly large job, the mathematician worked for several days and decided that the job would take, at minimum, 23 months.  The contractor sighed, and said, "I hate the critical path method.  It takes all the HOPE out of construction..."

A lot of jobs fall apart because some tiny element of the work, something that everyone takes for granted, never gets done.  "Oh, I thought you were going to buy the caulk..."  In this case, we wrote the text for the invitations five weeks ago.  Mom reviewed the text three weeks ago, and suggested small changes, which I made.  Nora and I changed the font color two weeks ago, bought matching ribbon, and did test prints.  We made modifications, and took them to the printer, and bought stamps, and got the finished cards back about ten days ago.

But we don't have envelopes.

We've both been running full out at work, with the end of the semester and the looming accreditation reports and the out-of-town trips and the two job searches for which we each have to attend lots of candidate lunches and job talks.  We finally got to a stationery store two days ago, in New York, in the midst of a dozen other things we were doing (like, for instance, continuing to shop for wedding clothes).  We bought a sample envelope, but didn't have the chance to get to another store to check another group of possibilities.  Our friends Grazyna and Howard went to that store on Sunday while we were choosing flavors of wedding cake and then driving back to Boston... They could have sent that sample to us today in FedEx, which would have cost as much as the hundred envelopes all together, but instead we decided that I'll look at the two samples, ours and theirs, when I go back down to New York again on Wednesday (I'm spending ten hours in transit and an overnight hotel stay for a one-hour meeting), and we'll buy the ones we want and I'll bring them back home on Thursday. 

Envelopes.  We've lost two weeks to the schedule because we don't have envelopes, and spent nine person-hours on a $35 choice.  Perhaps we need a mathematician.

And there are a hundred of these things.  Even though we have a wedding planner handling logistics like the food and the tent and the chairs and the dishes and all that, there are still innumerable little things like the reception dinner and the choosing of wine and the next cake testing and the construction of the engagement ring and the photographer and the guestbook and on and on and on.  It's kind of funny, really, when you think about it from some degree of emotional distance that I can't always muster.  Will and Kate had a royal staff of 400 conducting their event, and they still had an unpleasant child in all of their wedding pictures.  (A friend of ours said, "they've found a troll to be their ring bearer..."  The kid does kind of look like a small Shrek...)

In the end, there's always Vicki's variety store across the street from the town green.  If we don't have a guest book, I can go over there and buy a spiral notebook and a BIC pen.  We can get ice and beer and Doritos and Ben & Jerry's and M&Ms and have a party even if nothing else happens.  [Editor's note: I have ALWAYS said that I won't throw a dinner party unless there's a pizza place to bail me out if the dinner burns. Mach's Pizza is only 20 minutes away from the wedding venue. Admittedly, that's a one-way trip, but the pizza is pretty good (organic local and sustainable ingredients on a thin wheat crust)]

[Editor's note #2: Nan said, "Nora! If anything goes wrong, this is Middletown! We'll take care of it."]

And somewhere around 6:00 on June 25th, Nora and I will be married.  Y'all might have to eat with your fingers at the reception, but we'll be married.  And nobody will care about anything else.

[Editor's note #3: HOPE? Remember Vaclav Havel... It's the certainty that this makes sense.]