The return
Hello everyone! I’m back! I hope you didn’t miss me too much.
First, I promise I will get pictures to you all. When I get to the Hong Kong part of the trip, you’ll understand why that’s not exactly possible right now. But I’m not going to get ahead of myself.
The days before the trip to L.A. were very busy for me. Skyprincess had left a bunch of little last minute things for me to do, and I was just running out of time. I can honestly say I wasn’t procrastinating, I just couldn’t get to them all in time or didn’t know about them until the last minute.
The last week I spent a long time getting the house ready for us to not be there. That meant unpacking all the boxes from our move and culling what I could. We had a half of the garage stacked high with broken cardboard boxes. That’s right! Broken boxes and they still stacked almost to the ceiling! I can’t believe how much packing materials we had! I think I’m responsible for half the deforestation of the rain forest just by this one move. It was insane.
I only had the night before my flight to get the reception music made. We had asked our guests to supply 3 songs that we added to the wedding mix and loaded it to my iPod mini. We really didn’t have a huge response, so I tried my best to think of a wide range of music that was decent. It was so hard not to have an all 80s mix. I did very well, I think!
All told, I had just shy of 7 hours of music on the iPod. I know, you think that’s not much. But I started from scratch and I didn’t just select the music from the iStore. I bought a membership in a very nice streaming music jukebox and then bought a piece of software that recorded streaming music as MP3s. The problem is that I had to start and stop each recording, then name and save them as MP3s. I started at 5:30pm and didn’t finish until 6am. It was a very long night. Then I had to run to catch an 8am flight to L.A.
When I got to L.A., we were in a non-stop run. Skyprincess had arrived the day before and had hit the ground running. We bought cases of wine and put our wedding labels on them to add to our gift baskets for everyone’s rooms. 2 bottles of wine, some cheese and crackers, bottles of water, candy bars, pringles, candles, and mints. We put all this in the basket and wrapped it up with plastic tied with a ribbon. It was very nice.
I will have to admit, I never got the hang of putting labels on wine bottles without wrinkling the labels.
For the most part, everything came together. We had a couple of minor near misses. First, the cleaner didn’t get the wedding dress cleaned when they promised and we had to get a friend to pick it up the Saturday morning. We expected it to be done Friday morning. At least they didn’t lose it.
They also didn’t have the right shoes for the men in the right size. I personally don’t like square-toed shoes, but they round toed shoes weren’t the right size for some of the men. So we switched to square toed. It’s not what I wanted, but who is going to look at our feet? It’s not like we were wearing Crocs.
The biggest potential problem that worked out fine was that they didn’t have our suites we booked. They hotel had changed names and when they did, they switched computer systems. They lost our suite reservations from the prior name and were only going to give us regular rooms. We had intended on using the rooms as staging areas and this was going to cause major problems. They solved it by giving us 2 attached rooms. This worked better, I think. We could have hair being done in one room and makeup in the other.
Here is where tradition got in the way.
We didn’t get the reception building until the morning of the wedding. That meant all the decorations had to be put up that morning. Since Skyprincess didn’t want me to see her until she walked down the hall, I was not able to help with the preparations. That also meant I was roomless. Yes, she kicked me out the door and told me to find some corner to sleep in! The heartless woman!!! (just kidding). Luckily, my groomsman David rented a room at another hotel, and I bunked with him. He ended up with a suite, and I just used the pull out sofa bed that night.
The Long Beach crowd took us all for the famous Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles joint for lunch on Saturday. We were told it tastes much better than it sounds. That for some reason, it just works. I wasn’t impressed. But most everyone else loved it. I guess it’s a taste thing.
David didn’t like it too much and he started getting sick afterwards. Poor thing.
After lunch, we got back to work running errands. Then the Coterie group (that’s a whole ‘nother post) got together to see the Pirates Dinner Adventure. If you’ve heard of the restaurant “Camelot” where it’s basically dinner theatre, it’s the same thing but with a Pirate theme. It was hooky, cheesy, and the kids loved it. David was really getting into it and we just had a big laugh that he was enjoying it so much. It was a lot of fun, I have to admit. Some of the kids came dressed as pirates! They had such fun! All the kids were invited down to play British red coats to fight the pirates at the end. We all decided this would have been such a great place to go if we were 25 years younger.
We returned back to the hotel so I could grab some clothes for the night and then went to bunk with David. He wasn’t feeling very well by now and we decided to just get some sleep. It had been a long day.
We didn’t need to be anywhere until 12:30 the next morning. We got up and decided to find some breakfast. David wasn’t feeling any better and tried to hide it well. We found a Mexican restaurant open and went for some orange juice, eggs, and sausage. David was eating when he suddenly cupped his hand and up came everything. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Poor thing, I felt so bad for him. He felt so embarrassed, which he shouldn’t have. Stupid chicken and waffles!
Luckily, he felt so much better after that. Amazing how hurling 2 days worth of food can make you feel so much better. Just the body purging the toxins from the system. What amazes me is how quiet he was. Me, I’m a noisy person when I get sick. If my windows are open, you can hear it 2 blocks away. And no way can I cup my hands and discreetly get it only on my plate (can you believe not a drop off the plate??!) Mine is projectile. Watch out!
We went back to the room, and David took a shower and we left for the hotel. I was shown into her Uncle’s room to dress, since they were still working on make-up. They ran 15 minutes late, and I was worrying we’d get to the chapel too late. We only had it 2 hours and had pictures to take before and after. Luckily, we hired a tremendously talented woman and it went smooth as silk. The only problem is that it turned out hotter than we expected. Most of our guests had arrived and we pretty much just let them find their seats and not be ushered down.
Finally, the girls finished their pictures and I was given the coast is clear to get back into the backroom for my entry. The bride’s party had left to circle around the back.
Oh! Before I forget.
Skyprincess had invited her friend Carl to attend the wedding and he agreed to also do the hair. Carl is this guy who runs a very trendy and successful hair salon in the Dallas area. Its one of those places where you either get on a 4 to 5 month waiting list or you have to know ‘someone’ to get in. This guy is extremely talented and makes a killing.
Anyway… I had to run up to the girl’s room to retrieve the ‘blue book’. It had all the wedding plans, etc in it. Skyprincess had forgotten it when she made the dash to the limo. No problem! I just ran up real quick to grab it.
As I was leaving the room Carl shouted from the other room, “Someone looks gorgeous today!” Not thinking, I shout back “thanks!” I hit the door about 5 seconds later and realized that he wasn’t talking about me, but Skyprincess. So I paused, thought to myself… ‘self, how do you pull your foot out of your mouth now?’ and shouted back ‘oh! You mean Skyprincess! I knew that already!’ and gave a disarming chuckle. Luckily I had way too much on my mind to dwell on the idiot that I must have seemed like. Haha!
Back to the wedding.
The bride’s party has left and we are now in the back room. The vicar keeps looking at me and asking if I’m nervous. I’m not in the least and I think that surprises him. It surprises everyone, it seemed. Neither Skyprincess nor I had any reservations about that day or nervous in any way. So he went through what to expect and tried to give some pointers. Like don’t lock your knees, to keep at least one of them bent. David reaffirmed this by saying that’s what they taught you in the military. If you lock your knees, you are more likely to pass out. I put this bit of trivia in the back of my mind and kept waiting for the bells to start ringing.
Finally, all was ready and we started our walk out. I went to my mark and planted my right foot where they told me to and waited for the processional. Skyprincess was already at the end of the path grinning like a chesser cat and waving. I smiled back, but since everyone was looking forward I couldn’t very well start waving back. The music started playing and her party started coming down. As she walked, she was being a bit silly and started doing the princess wave to everyone. When she got down to me, she grabbed me and kissed me before we took out places. To my right, I could hear my wedding party say “you aren’t suppose to do that”, “no, you aren’t”. It wasn’t planned. Oh well….
The ceremony was nice. We did the recitation of our vows, the lighting of the unity candles (we forgot to blow out the candles), and handed roses to our mothers. The only hitch was the rings.
Okay, I think this happens in a lot of weddings.
Skyprincess had left both her rings to be put on. The engagement and the wedding band. I only wanted to deal with the wedding band. One ring is enough to worry about. Anyway, I fumbled with them for a bit because I wasn’t sure which one went on first. And also when you put one on, it makes it harder to put the next one on. So I finally gave up on the last one and just pushed it up and made Skyprincess twist it onto her hand. I wasn't going to stand there and jam this ring up her finger and scrap all the skin off her knuckles. Nuh uh, not me!
My ring went on much easier. It’s now how much I don’t notice it there. I never wore any form of jewelry before this, not even a watch.
The ceremony was over and we went out to one of my all time favorite songs, Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a wonderful world’.
Then 30 minutes of pictures and away we went to get ready for the reception.
We really had a nice reception. We didn’t want one like most people, where you just rented a hall and had everyone sit at a table and pray someone got out and danced. We wanted to get both families involved and talking. We rented building with a nice lawn. Plenty of room inside to eat and then set up lawn games to play outside. Badminton (though no one played this). Croquet, botchy ball, and horseshoes. I was afraid we wouldn’t get anyone outside to play, but we got a huge response. The one thing we didn’t expect is that people drank far less than Skyprincess expected. We had enough booze for 200-300 people. We only had 40-50 at the reception. So much went to waste. We had 5 unused cases of wine we gave away. Plus all the fifths of alcohol. Our bartender made out like a bandit in the end. We just told everyone after it was over, to grab what you want. We couldn’t take it with us, and since I have an alcohol allergy, it wouldn’t do me any good even if we could.
After the reception finally wound down, we spent the next 2 to 3 hours cleaning up and packing Curt’s and Stephen’s cars. They were full and we still had stuff to carry. So I ran and grabbed the rental and we loaded it up. Curt offered to store the wedding stuff and ship it back to us when we got home. Also, he would return all the tuxes on Monday.
I followed Curt in the rental and he took a route I’ve never taken. Obviously, he wasn’t use to it himself, since he had to turn around once. I thought that was it, but then we got into a turning lane before you cross the bridge and he decides he needs to go over the bridge. So I follow him and nearly broadside this car beside me. I clearly cut him off and almost caused an ugly accident since it was very late at night and the streets were very crowded with traffic.
The car I cut off started honking his horn and tail gating me with his brights. Then he rushed along side of me and tried to run me into the side of the bridge. I braked and he then started jamming on his brakes to get me to rear end him. The odd thing is that I was completely placid and calm. Not once did I have any tingling of panic over what was happening. I just gave the guy his 30 seconds to vent his road rage and he finally went away. I continued to follow Curt and we unloaded the car and I returned back to the hotel. That ended the adventure for the evening. More to come! Next stop, Beijing!
Mizike
First, I promise I will get pictures to you all. When I get to the Hong Kong part of the trip, you’ll understand why that’s not exactly possible right now. But I’m not going to get ahead of myself.
The days before the trip to L.A. were very busy for me. Skyprincess had left a bunch of little last minute things for me to do, and I was just running out of time. I can honestly say I wasn’t procrastinating, I just couldn’t get to them all in time or didn’t know about them until the last minute.
The last week I spent a long time getting the house ready for us to not be there. That meant unpacking all the boxes from our move and culling what I could. We had a half of the garage stacked high with broken cardboard boxes. That’s right! Broken boxes and they still stacked almost to the ceiling! I can’t believe how much packing materials we had! I think I’m responsible for half the deforestation of the rain forest just by this one move. It was insane.
I only had the night before my flight to get the reception music made. We had asked our guests to supply 3 songs that we added to the wedding mix and loaded it to my iPod mini. We really didn’t have a huge response, so I tried my best to think of a wide range of music that was decent. It was so hard not to have an all 80s mix. I did very well, I think!
All told, I had just shy of 7 hours of music on the iPod. I know, you think that’s not much. But I started from scratch and I didn’t just select the music from the iStore. I bought a membership in a very nice streaming music jukebox and then bought a piece of software that recorded streaming music as MP3s. The problem is that I had to start and stop each recording, then name and save them as MP3s. I started at 5:30pm and didn’t finish until 6am. It was a very long night. Then I had to run to catch an 8am flight to L.A.
When I got to L.A., we were in a non-stop run. Skyprincess had arrived the day before and had hit the ground running. We bought cases of wine and put our wedding labels on them to add to our gift baskets for everyone’s rooms. 2 bottles of wine, some cheese and crackers, bottles of water, candy bars, pringles, candles, and mints. We put all this in the basket and wrapped it up with plastic tied with a ribbon. It was very nice.
I will have to admit, I never got the hang of putting labels on wine bottles without wrinkling the labels.
For the most part, everything came together. We had a couple of minor near misses. First, the cleaner didn’t get the wedding dress cleaned when they promised and we had to get a friend to pick it up the Saturday morning. We expected it to be done Friday morning. At least they didn’t lose it.
They also didn’t have the right shoes for the men in the right size. I personally don’t like square-toed shoes, but they round toed shoes weren’t the right size for some of the men. So we switched to square toed. It’s not what I wanted, but who is going to look at our feet? It’s not like we were wearing Crocs.
The biggest potential problem that worked out fine was that they didn’t have our suites we booked. They hotel had changed names and when they did, they switched computer systems. They lost our suite reservations from the prior name and were only going to give us regular rooms. We had intended on using the rooms as staging areas and this was going to cause major problems. They solved it by giving us 2 attached rooms. This worked better, I think. We could have hair being done in one room and makeup in the other.
Here is where tradition got in the way.
We didn’t get the reception building until the morning of the wedding. That meant all the decorations had to be put up that morning. Since Skyprincess didn’t want me to see her until she walked down the hall, I was not able to help with the preparations. That also meant I was roomless. Yes, she kicked me out the door and told me to find some corner to sleep in! The heartless woman!!! (just kidding). Luckily, my groomsman David rented a room at another hotel, and I bunked with him. He ended up with a suite, and I just used the pull out sofa bed that night.
The Long Beach crowd took us all for the famous Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles joint for lunch on Saturday. We were told it tastes much better than it sounds. That for some reason, it just works. I wasn’t impressed. But most everyone else loved it. I guess it’s a taste thing.
David didn’t like it too much and he started getting sick afterwards. Poor thing.
After lunch, we got back to work running errands. Then the Coterie group (that’s a whole ‘nother post) got together to see the Pirates Dinner Adventure. If you’ve heard of the restaurant “Camelot” where it’s basically dinner theatre, it’s the same thing but with a Pirate theme. It was hooky, cheesy, and the kids loved it. David was really getting into it and we just had a big laugh that he was enjoying it so much. It was a lot of fun, I have to admit. Some of the kids came dressed as pirates! They had such fun! All the kids were invited down to play British red coats to fight the pirates at the end. We all decided this would have been such a great place to go if we were 25 years younger.
We returned back to the hotel so I could grab some clothes for the night and then went to bunk with David. He wasn’t feeling very well by now and we decided to just get some sleep. It had been a long day.
We didn’t need to be anywhere until 12:30 the next morning. We got up and decided to find some breakfast. David wasn’t feeling any better and tried to hide it well. We found a Mexican restaurant open and went for some orange juice, eggs, and sausage. David was eating when he suddenly cupped his hand and up came everything. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Poor thing, I felt so bad for him. He felt so embarrassed, which he shouldn’t have. Stupid chicken and waffles!
Luckily, he felt so much better after that. Amazing how hurling 2 days worth of food can make you feel so much better. Just the body purging the toxins from the system. What amazes me is how quiet he was. Me, I’m a noisy person when I get sick. If my windows are open, you can hear it 2 blocks away. And no way can I cup my hands and discreetly get it only on my plate (can you believe not a drop off the plate??!) Mine is projectile. Watch out!
We went back to the room, and David took a shower and we left for the hotel. I was shown into her Uncle’s room to dress, since they were still working on make-up. They ran 15 minutes late, and I was worrying we’d get to the chapel too late. We only had it 2 hours and had pictures to take before and after. Luckily, we hired a tremendously talented woman and it went smooth as silk. The only problem is that it turned out hotter than we expected. Most of our guests had arrived and we pretty much just let them find their seats and not be ushered down.
Finally, the girls finished their pictures and I was given the coast is clear to get back into the backroom for my entry. The bride’s party had left to circle around the back.
Oh! Before I forget.
Skyprincess had invited her friend Carl to attend the wedding and he agreed to also do the hair. Carl is this guy who runs a very trendy and successful hair salon in the Dallas area. Its one of those places where you either get on a 4 to 5 month waiting list or you have to know ‘someone’ to get in. This guy is extremely talented and makes a killing.
Anyway… I had to run up to the girl’s room to retrieve the ‘blue book’. It had all the wedding plans, etc in it. Skyprincess had forgotten it when she made the dash to the limo. No problem! I just ran up real quick to grab it.
As I was leaving the room Carl shouted from the other room, “Someone looks gorgeous today!” Not thinking, I shout back “thanks!” I hit the door about 5 seconds later and realized that he wasn’t talking about me, but Skyprincess. So I paused, thought to myself… ‘self, how do you pull your foot out of your mouth now?’ and shouted back ‘oh! You mean Skyprincess! I knew that already!’ and gave a disarming chuckle. Luckily I had way too much on my mind to dwell on the idiot that I must have seemed like. Haha!
Back to the wedding.
The bride’s party has left and we are now in the back room. The vicar keeps looking at me and asking if I’m nervous. I’m not in the least and I think that surprises him. It surprises everyone, it seemed. Neither Skyprincess nor I had any reservations about that day or nervous in any way. So he went through what to expect and tried to give some pointers. Like don’t lock your knees, to keep at least one of them bent. David reaffirmed this by saying that’s what they taught you in the military. If you lock your knees, you are more likely to pass out. I put this bit of trivia in the back of my mind and kept waiting for the bells to start ringing.
Finally, all was ready and we started our walk out. I went to my mark and planted my right foot where they told me to and waited for the processional. Skyprincess was already at the end of the path grinning like a chesser cat and waving. I smiled back, but since everyone was looking forward I couldn’t very well start waving back. The music started playing and her party started coming down. As she walked, she was being a bit silly and started doing the princess wave to everyone. When she got down to me, she grabbed me and kissed me before we took out places. To my right, I could hear my wedding party say “you aren’t suppose to do that”, “no, you aren’t”. It wasn’t planned. Oh well….
The ceremony was nice. We did the recitation of our vows, the lighting of the unity candles (we forgot to blow out the candles), and handed roses to our mothers. The only hitch was the rings.
Okay, I think this happens in a lot of weddings.
Skyprincess had left both her rings to be put on. The engagement and the wedding band. I only wanted to deal with the wedding band. One ring is enough to worry about. Anyway, I fumbled with them for a bit because I wasn’t sure which one went on first. And also when you put one on, it makes it harder to put the next one on. So I finally gave up on the last one and just pushed it up and made Skyprincess twist it onto her hand. I wasn't going to stand there and jam this ring up her finger and scrap all the skin off her knuckles. Nuh uh, not me!
My ring went on much easier. It’s now how much I don’t notice it there. I never wore any form of jewelry before this, not even a watch.
The ceremony was over and we went out to one of my all time favorite songs, Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a wonderful world’.
Then 30 minutes of pictures and away we went to get ready for the reception.
We really had a nice reception. We didn’t want one like most people, where you just rented a hall and had everyone sit at a table and pray someone got out and danced. We wanted to get both families involved and talking. We rented building with a nice lawn. Plenty of room inside to eat and then set up lawn games to play outside. Badminton (though no one played this). Croquet, botchy ball, and horseshoes. I was afraid we wouldn’t get anyone outside to play, but we got a huge response. The one thing we didn’t expect is that people drank far less than Skyprincess expected. We had enough booze for 200-300 people. We only had 40-50 at the reception. So much went to waste. We had 5 unused cases of wine we gave away. Plus all the fifths of alcohol. Our bartender made out like a bandit in the end. We just told everyone after it was over, to grab what you want. We couldn’t take it with us, and since I have an alcohol allergy, it wouldn’t do me any good even if we could.
After the reception finally wound down, we spent the next 2 to 3 hours cleaning up and packing Curt’s and Stephen’s cars. They were full and we still had stuff to carry. So I ran and grabbed the rental and we loaded it up. Curt offered to store the wedding stuff and ship it back to us when we got home. Also, he would return all the tuxes on Monday.
I followed Curt in the rental and he took a route I’ve never taken. Obviously, he wasn’t use to it himself, since he had to turn around once. I thought that was it, but then we got into a turning lane before you cross the bridge and he decides he needs to go over the bridge. So I follow him and nearly broadside this car beside me. I clearly cut him off and almost caused an ugly accident since it was very late at night and the streets were very crowded with traffic.
The car I cut off started honking his horn and tail gating me with his brights. Then he rushed along side of me and tried to run me into the side of the bridge. I braked and he then started jamming on his brakes to get me to rear end him. The odd thing is that I was completely placid and calm. Not once did I have any tingling of panic over what was happening. I just gave the guy his 30 seconds to vent his road rage and he finally went away. I continued to follow Curt and we unloaded the car and I returned back to the hotel. That ended the adventure for the evening. More to come! Next stop, Beijing!
Mizike
posted by Mizike at 1:55 PM
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