What Happened the Day Before the Wedding

So for those of you who didn’t go to Hawaii (or for those of you who did go and have forgotten about it already), I’ll start with the adventures before the wedding. I’ll spare you the little details of a bride going crazy (those stories are a dime a dozen anyway), but I will tell you that I was one of those neurotic, overplanning brides (for those of you who know me, that shouldn’t come as a shock at all), and I had even put together a database complete with a schedule of who is going to do what. The master list, printed out as a report, was about 28 pages, and I also had a secondary list that separated out the tasks by person, so each person only got about 1-2 pages.

Of course, since as my friend Grant put it to me, “Weddings are a series of catastrophes strung together,” the first catastrophe started when my in-laws decided not to go by the schedule. Now, they don’t know me very well, so I can kind of see how they would think this isn’t such a big deal. But it was, and it got me hopping mad on the day of my wedding rehearsal.

We all arrived, according to schedule, at the front of Waimea Falls Park at 11:15 AM, and it was pouring rain. Our wedding coordinator suggested we rehearse in the Butterfly Pavilion, our plan B in case of rain. I said, “Great, let’s go. Is everybody here?” We quickly realized that Ray’s parents weren’t there, and we then spent the next half hour trying to find them (calling the bungalows, trying to reach someone else at the bungalows), all of which was very hard because there’s not very much cell service at Waimea Falls.

Finally, when I’m about to say, “Okay, you know what? Let’s just do it without them,” one of the women working the front desk pipes up that she saw an elderly couple come in at about 10:30 and make their way to the Upper Meadow.

I then make the executive decision that we’re all going to go to the Butterfly Pavilion while Ray and the wedding coordinator get in the truck and drive to the Upper Meadow to get Ray’s parents. Of course, not five minutes have passed when who should come ambling down the hill in the rain? RAY’S PARENTS.

Oy. I could have torn my hair out. I should have figured that of all the people to not follow the schedule, it would be Ray’s parents, because A) they don’t realize how anal I actually am about schedules, and B) they always show up early when they’re not supposed to.

But all’s well that ends well. Ray returned with the wedding coordinator, we started the rehearsal (an hour late), and ran through everything without incident.

We then went back to the bungalows for our rehearsal BBQ (Ray didn’t want to have a rehearsal dinner; instead he thought just throwing some burgers on the grill would be sufficient).

I’m back!

Just wanted to let all o’ y’all know out in the blogosphere that I’m back from Hawaii and the wedding went just beautifully. I’ll write more about it, but I thought I’d just let you know to expect lots of pictures!

Parting Shots

Tomorrow Ray and I are off to Hawaii to visit my mom and decide where we want to get married next year. I’m very excited, although it’s 8:45 PM and I still haven’t really started packing. I figure I’ll stay up late tonight to get my body used to the 6 hour time difference between here and Hawaii. Oy.

I’ll most likely not have any or very limited internet access while I’m away, and although I’ll take lots of pictures and have plenty to say when I get back, I thought I’d leave you all out there with some pictures of stuff right here in NJ.

First, Ray and I went to a diner the other night, and the placemats were covered with ads, as is the norm for many fine dining establishments such as this. While we were waiting for our greasy waiter to serve us, I amused myself by laughing at all the ads. This one in particular had me chuckling.

In case the photo is too blurry, the ad says “Specailizing in Honda’s and Acura’s for over 25 years.” I’ll be over here, grinning and watching you all cringe at the spelling and grammatical errors. I have already cringed, so now I can enjoy you doing the same.

In other news, I have more cute pictures of my cats. Well, okay, this time I got a picture Scratchy, who likes to hide under his chair (you saw his feet earlier). Whenever I try to get him to go outside and play, he rolls around and shows me how cute he is. He likes to convince me that if he’s this cute right now, he’ll be cute all the time, and therefore I should just keep him indoors all day long.

I’m not sure why, but he also looks like he’s glaring at me, as if to say, “Don’t take pictures of me unless you’ve talked to my agent!”

The Quality of an Inn

On Sunday night, we went to the Funky Formal, an annual end-of-season event for the merchants and cast up at the PA Ren Faire. It was being held at a different hotel this time, due to a change in organizers. I don’t think anybody really cared where it was, as long as there was music and alcohol, but those of us who spent the night at the hotel cared a little.

The ironically named Quality Inn left much to be desired in the way of hospitality. Our room was difficult to find because the rooms were outside (”Nobody told me this was a motel,” complained Ray) and the light in front of our room was out. When we entered the room, we figured the entire breaker was gone because the light switch wasn’t working, and we had to stumble about in the dark for a lamp, any lamp, that would turn on.

When we finally had light in our room, I wasn’t horrified at our surroundings, but Ray was upset that we had no in-room fridge for his drinks. The shower had mold on the ceiling, and it looked like someone had recently absconded with the hook on the back of the door. When we were ready to go to bed, we heard the people next door having a huge fight, and the walls were so thin, I thought of mediating their discussion through the wall. All in all, we came to the conclusion that just because it’s called the Quality Inn doesn’t tell you what kind of quality inn.

The ballroom was quite nice, though; much better than the other place. It’s as if the owners spent all their money on the meeting rooms and didn’t have enough money for the actual bedrooms.

Stay tuned for adventures at the Funky Formal.

More CA Remembrances

As I sift through all the pictures (and video) I took while I was out there, I thought this one would be the best to show on this site. Because we just couldn’t wait until the wedding and BBQ to hang out with each other, some of the Lizard People went to Japantown for some noodles and bad service. After dinner, we wandered around and had oodles of fun in the Japanese photo booths trying to figure out how to work the machine by deciphering the pictographs. We all agreed that for $5, the entertainment value was really great.

Airline Stories

So the trip to California was so much more than I had hoped it would be. Not only did Shirley get married without a hitch, but I managed to squeeze time to visit my brother as well as seeing the old high school crew (a.k.a. The Lizard People).

The flight out to CA was fairly uneventful. There was a 20-minute stopover in Las Vegas, where those of us who were continuing on to Oakland were allowed to get off the plane, stretch our legs, etc., before it took off again. I took advantage of the opportunity to use a real bathroom and ambled around the terminal a bit. Of course, in Las Vegas, they have slot machines in the airport; why would they not? I briefly thought about trying one out, but then had visions of feverishly feeding quarters into the machine as my plane took off, leaving me stranded, so I just got back on the plane. Two minutes later, a gentleman in my same situation also returned to the plane, crowing about how he just won $200 at the slot machines. Figures.

Even though I was in California specifically for the wedding, I was able to spend a couple days with Mikey, which is, as always, such a pleasure. It’s pretty neat how I’ve gone from seeing him once every two or three years to once every two or three months. Again, let me tell the world how glad I am that he’s going to NYU, and that I’ll see him even more often!

I also was very lucky to be able to see the Bride and Groom a lot more than most of my friends, since I got to sing in the wedding. The three of us had dinner the night after I arrived, and then I saw them every day after that: at the rehearsal, at the wedding, and at the post-wedding BBQ the next day.

I stayed at the house of my best friend from middle school (yes, I keep in touch with many people from my past…I think I may be a rarity that way) who got married several years ago and who now has a two-year-old daughter. I was so busy running around meeting my brother, the Lizard People, and dealing with wedding stuff that it was a good thing I stayed with her…otherwise I wouldn’t have had any time to spend with her, and that would have been a shame.

The trip back to Philadelphia proved itself to be more eventful than the trip there, and not in a good way. It started with a security line at Oakland airport that seemed worse than a line for a ride at Disneyland: the line kept moving, but it went around the baggage area, folded in on itself, went outside and back inside, and the TSA woman at the end of the line announced that it would be a 35-minute wait as I entered the queue. Good thing I got there early. I managed to make it on the plane without much hassle, and I sat on an aisle seat next to a nice woman and her son. Both her son and I were reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, so she struck up a small conversation with me. Unfortunately about ten minutes into the flight, her teenage daughter, who had been sitting across the aisle from us, started getting sick and wanted to sit next to her mom. I’m a nice person…many would say TOO nice…so I traded seats with her.

Too late, I realized why this girl was getting sick. She and her brother had been sitting across the aisle, she in the middle and he at the window, and her brother was the fartiest little ten-year-old boy I think I’ve ever met. Besides the fact that I traded an aisle seat for a middle seat, I also seemed to have inherited the spot next to a kid with more gas than Saudi Arabia. It smelled like a combination of rotting eggs, day-old milk, with a slight hint of diarrhea for a good five and a half hours. Believe me, I was counting the minutes until our plane was scheduled to land…only it didn’t land on schedule.

Yes, due to thunderstorms in the Philly area, the Philadelphia airport CLOSED while my plane was in the air. We circled around for a while until we got low on fuel, so we had to land in Pittsburgh to refuel and wait for a go from the tower in Philly. I was not amused. Not only had I been squashed next to Smelly the Fart Monster, but Southwest doesn’t serve meals like normal airlines; they just serve snacks, so my diet for that day had consisted of a bagel I had eaten before getting on the plane, two Oreos, a bag of peanuts, a breakfast bar, and two Graham crackers. And it was dinner time by now. They did let us get off the plane in Pittsburgh to get something to eat while they refueled, but we ended up waiting around for about an hour and a half before the tower let us get back in the air. 12 hours after I left my friend’s house in San Francisco, I finally made it back home. It’s been quite a day, and with that, I think it’s time for bed.

Solidarity, baby

Last night I went to a union meeting. Ray told me to bring a baseball bat. I said, “It’s not that bad a part of Philly.” He said, “No, I mean, to protect yourself from the union thugs.”

“It’s not the steelworkers’ union, silly. It’s just a bunch of artists,” I pointed out. He said, “So?” Point taken. Unfortunately I didn’t have a baseball bat to bring.

Actually, that was the first real union meeting I’ve ever been to, and it’s about time, since I’ve belonged to two different unions for four years now. I’m always invited to meetings in Philly with the other union I belong to, but I’m never able to make it, and really I don’t do a lot of work with that union, so I don’t think I’d have much to contribute. But maybe this time I can actually make a difference. Or maybe I’m being a little naive. Either way, I got roped into one of the subcommittees. At least I have the time to commit to them.

I’m all excited for my big trip to Vermont this weekend. One of my dear friends is getting married, and I suppose I’ll have to give a report to y’all when I get back. I won’t have too much time to write, though, since I’ll be on a plane two days later to sunny CA for my brother’s graduation! I’ll be clocking in more miles in than the Travelocity gnome. I guess I’d better do my laundry before I leave.

Episode XXX: Revenge of the Pith

Hello, all you wild and zany people I call my friends! And welcome, to those of you who are seeing this blog for the first time. Almost a year has passed since my last missive, and I’m sure many of you have wondered what in the world has happened to me since then. Where has SuperMaren’s adventures taken her? Rome? Paris? Taiwan? Or, the most exotic place in all the world: Philadelphia?

Yes, Philadelphia has been at the center of my adventures these days. I made a brief trip to Chicago for a friend’s wedding, and because that was an adventure all by itself, I thought I’d write about it in a separate document. You can download that here and read it at your leisure.

One of the reasons I’ve been so remiss in relaying my adventures is that I really wasn’t comfortable with the “blogger” format (i.e., reading backwards in time, etc.) and when I started working with blogger.com they had just started, and their interface was funny, and I didn’t like any of their templates. I tried to use the template from my website, but all that caused was confusion, because I really just don’t have the HTML chops to make it look the way I wanted it to look. My cousin Mike tried to help me (thanks Mike!) but I kind of gave up and started writing again through my copy of NetObjects Fusion, which was clunky, but easier than the blogger interface…and besides, it had the templates on there that I liked.

Why am I telling you this? Because in writing this missive, I’ve come to realize that over the past year I’ve had so many adventures I can’t truly write about them without the blogger format, and now that blogger.com has come up with a better interface and some pretty templates, I feel more comfortable writing this way. So I’ve written my adventures through compilations of emails I’ve sent to some of you over the past year and published them at the time when they happened (kind of like rewriting history, I guess), and if you want to read them, you’re going to have to browse through the archives. Yes, it’s the interactive version. You can pick and choose what you want to read about. Have fun, but remember that each entry is placed in reverse chronological order; that is, the most recent posts are on top.

So feel free to comment, critique, and even rant (although if you rant too much you might as well start your own blog) in the “comments” section down below, and we’ll see what happens!

DC Trip

My trip to DC was so much fun! Even though I got stuck in horrendous traffic on the way down to DC, I arrived hale and hearty and ready to play with Shoiley and Geoff. We went to the Spy Museum on the first day and took a trolley tour the second day. It was really nice to just take a vacation and be a tourist. While I was there, I had lunch with E., and he told me all about his first months at law school.

I also spent the evening with E & J, who both know the Muse and had to hear the whole story of The Gig from me. We had a great time, and I’m sorry I don’t live closer to them, because we stayed up until the wee hours of the morning talking about life and politics and stuff.

So all in all it was a pleasant trip. I think I like DC better now, as a tourist, than I did when I lived there. And I actually liked DC a lot when I lived there, so that says a lot about DC’s tourism department.