missed you too, JaCk! Glad you're back in business.

Welcome back to the party JaCK!

Welcome back Jack!! And congrats on getting the move done and over! We have missed you too

Thanks, guys! Good to be back. I hope I can participate more again, now.

We hope so too

All work and no GDF makes Jack a dull boy. Welcome back!

Welcome back Jack, how did the wedding go?

Hey Jack, welcome back.

Welcome Back!

Hi Jack and congratulations!

Thanks, everyone.

The wedding went, but unfortunately not according to plan. I'll elaborate in a bit.

Sweet, we like elaboration. Stop elaborate and listen, Jack is back with a brand new edition (his wife).

Mynock- your skills are like ice and you chill me out.

Hey Jack- congrats. Marriage is like the peace corp. - The toughest job you'll ever love!

Now on to the elaboration.

We planned for an Art Nouveau themed wedding. Everything was going pretty well with that up until the last couple of days before and during the wedding day. Due to delegation mishaps, miscommunication and downright negligence on the part of some, our vision never got the chance to be fully realized. One of the greatest features to the wedding, I feel, was going to be the program that I had been designing. It had to be edited somewhat the night before the wedding, but it was going to be okay and everything was still going to go according to plan... until some disastrous printer problems came up, and finally an irreversible paper jam. I guess that's fate. I was crushed. I felt like my last great contribution to the wedding planning, and one of the most noteworthy projects, had been taken away from me. This was to be what was really going to tie everything together to be understood as Nouveau. But now, no one will ever know how everything was supposed to look.

We also had a last-minute failure with our music selection. We had to redo it with a slapped together playlist that wasn't ideally what we'd wanted. Not a great big deal, in my mind, but just one more thing to add to the list. When you spend so much time in careful planning, it really hurts.

The wedding ceremony had to be delayed by about an hour because Mark's (Anna's dad) van finally got run into the ground and crapped out, once and for all. He was caring supplies for the reception dinner. We'd all been waiting for that car to die, and it finally did. But what a day to do it.

Even the wedding cake wasn't up to the standard we'd understood it was going to be. We'd already had a test cake from the chef that was making it for us. The test cake was, in fact, delicious and it didn't look too bad. But the wedding cake, on the other hand, tasted like a sponge with chocolate icing. And goodness, it was ugly as sin. Our hors d'oeuvres order was also screwed up -- the person we delegated to handle that and place the order for us (with guidelines we sent along), got overridden to some degree by my Mom who went along with the person we sent. Mom wasn't supposed to have anything at all to do with that.

Taking second place to the programs, I believe, was the photographer we'd hired. This is the aforementioned negligence I referred to. She arrived an hour late, thought she was early and had some manner of failure with her camera, putting simply that it was "broken". A friend of Anna's and mine had brought her camera (a newly professional photographer and a secondary photographer for our wedding), so she allowed our hired photographer to borrow it. We have seen our photographer's portfolio and she did an excellent job on our engagement photos before all this, but somehow she messed up big time on the wedding. This woman is a photography professor who teaches to this day. She's supposed to know the equipment. But that aside, with the borrowed camera, she was supposed to shoot about 200 good photos (in at least the technical sense, correctly taken photos), and take in all about 800 shots. She shot 200 something. I'll go ahead and tell you that only about 30 - 40 of them are any good at all. (I'll share the better ones with you, later.) Furthermore, she failed to get some key pictures (i.e., shots of my side of the family, shots with my best man, etc.) that she was contracted to do. She was so apologetic about the camera failure when she arrived that, upon borrowing Lauren's camera (our friend), she offered to shoot the series for free. Although, a little later, she said she'd been too hasty and said she'd appreciate just a little money. Fair enough, for gas money. No problem with that. However, she shows her butt later by taking Mark (Anna's dad) aside and asking for $800 out of the $900 something she was supposed to get if she actually did what she was supposed to do. She implied to him that the $800 was half the full amount. Mark wrote the check for $800 and she cashed the check that very night in a grocery store before leaving town. She knew she did wrong, and what an unprofessional thing to do!

That pretty much sums up our gripe with the wedding. There were some good things that came of it, though. Everyone attending seemed to enjoy themselves very much, we got a lot of compliments on it. But most of the people in attendance didn't get us anything, so go figure. I'm not mad about that, but it's understood in good etiquette to at least get *something* for the married couple, and usually equivalent to at least a $50 value.