clog

Here is a message I wrote after the first week of our Honeymoon:

It wasn’t until almost 11pm that things were finally done the night of the Wedding, and Trish and I ended up having some time to chill. Afterwards we hung out with our friends Cari, Al, and Marc, and Tricia’s sister Tracy. That wrapped up around 2am and we spent the next two hours getting things ready for our Honeymoon. At 4:30am it was off to the airport. The day after my wedding was one of the most tiring days of my life. Not only did I have no sleep from the previous night, I had very little during the previous two weeks and Trish and I were both fighting off Upper Respiratory Infections. Trish was on the trailing end, but I felt worse and worse the whole way out. It finally peaked on Monday night (day after flying out) and Tuesday when I had a fever in the 101-102 range for a good 24 hours. That finally fought it off though, and I’ve been getting steadily better since then. Fortunately it didn’t take that much time out of our Honeymoon. We stayed the first two nights at the extraordinary Hotel Vintage in downtown Portland. Room service delivered some of the best Pizza we’ve ever had. It was really Phenomenal. We took the opportunity to walk around Portland and hit some of our fav spots. I even took some time to shop at one of my favorite rekkid stores (Trish went along with it since I had gone with her during her shopping spree). In fact, shopping is most of how we spent the first week out here… well other than eating and drinking at the countless awesome restaurants. There’s a lot of cool stuff that you just can’t find in Indiana. We met up with my good friend and former Intel Mentor, Rob on Thursday night. We went out for Martini’s and Rob treated us to what’s probably the best meal we’ve ever had. We went to one of my local fav nightspots on Friday night, but were very disappointed with the changes. After wondering around in the cold for a few minutes, we decided to head back to the hotel (now the Garden Inn in Lake Oswego (just outside of Ptown). We once again met up with Rob on Saturday, this time we went to the Rogue brewery in Portland. The beer there is amazing. The bride was warn out on Sunday night and still disappointed with our experience on Friday. Since she wanted to mostly just “chill”, I went out on my own to check out Sunday’s at Dante’s. It was fun, and I’m glad I went.. although I left early so I could get back before my bedtime ;). All-in-all, it was a fun and relaxing first week. - 10/9/06

Tricia and I are busy on our Honeymoon and net access has been sparce, but I’ll try and update the posts as I have time. There are also 100s of photos to upload, but I have not been able to find a place with the bandwidth to upload all of them… so they’ll have to wait a bit. -chrisp

Well the wedding is done and the bills (mostly) paid. For the most part, I was very happy with how it turned out. Thanks so much to all that showed up and helped us make it happen!

For many of us, the wedding really started the day before. Trish and I started that day by driving Nishka to the “Lucky Dog Retreat” for her two week stay. It was very difficult to leave her, but the place came recommended and it looked like it would provide her with a good amount of interaction (Nishka needs a lot..). After getting all of the Bridesmaids and Groomsmen in order, we had to wait about an hour for all of the rehearsal party to show up. We did a high-speed rehearsal and then went to Acapulco Joe’s for dinner. It was great as always.

There was so much drama surrounding the wedding that it was very difficult to have it at all. Although some of the drama continued throughout the wedding, it was fairly well contained. Of course I didn’t get through it without a “DER” moment in the limelight. We were both really happy that the weather cleared up and we had sunny skies for the ceremony. We would have still had fun regardless, but I think losing the opportunity to have it outside and in the gardens would have really bummed us out (especially the Bride). Alan (Top Speed) put on an amazing performance. It’s too bad that only a fraction of the wedding party saw it, but oh well. I had fun with my own set, although it was quite a bit different than I planned due to the dwindling crowd. Rather than play the entire set, I just covered the Bride’s favs while I had the chance. Since I put a full mix together, I think I’ll record it once I get back and post it.

Unfortunately, there is no recording of the wedding night mixes since my recorder went MIA - along with my laptop’s power supply - which was thankfully found. The Canterbury provided some truly awesome food and the service was top notch. We did have some trouble with the front desk, but other than that they were really top notch as a reception location. The Zoo on the other hand, was very difficult to work with. While they did their job, I can’t say that they did anything more than the bare minimum. The Bridal party showed up about an hour late and the zoo representative was extremely rushed to get us in and out. We still had the grounds for a few hours, but they assumed we would be out sooner (turns out we did still get out on time).

The Bride was obviously not happy at all with the party being so late, and the zoo representative presented an attitude that made things worse. Fortunately, a crisis was avoided and the only side-effect was that people had to wonder the gardens for awhile beforehand. Since it’s such a nice place, it seemed to keep everyone entertained. Given all of the problems we had going into the wedding, I’ll take that one problem as a Godsend.