What Brings Us Together Today

For those of you who may have missed it, I did eventually post earlier this week.  

I'd like to start by commenting something up:  In a previous post I mentioned My Betrothed and I seeing some off the wall wedding accouterments at a big box craft store.  More recently, in her own post on the subject, the Bride 2 Be asserted that we weren't even there to look at wedding stuff.  I can attest to that.  We came in looking for something for a different project altogether, and some force pulled me inexplicably towards the wedding section in the center of the store.  What was that force?  Fate?  Gravity?  Destiny?  My Betrothed grabbing my hand and dragging me along?  I guess we'll never know!

Next, I'd like to give an update on wedding plans!  We have (drumroll) booked a photographer (almost).  Pending pesky little things like actually signing the contract, and actually sending in the deposit, we've got one all signed up.  Best yet, this individual has expressed a willingness to be flexible if irrigation rears its ugly head (rawr).

The third item on the agenda today is Marriage.  Not mine specifically, but the actual concept.  It seems that two capitol cities have recently passed laws recognizing same-sex marriage.  Washington, DC, and Mexico City, Mexico.  Despite warnings from politicians in American and Canada (link probably NSFW, info on Canada at the end of the article), the very fabric of our society does not yet seem to be torn assunder.  It may surprise some that I have not had the urge to abandon my betrothed and go find a nice young man (perhaps a doctor?) to settledown with instead.  The fact that I could move to DC or Mexico City (Mexico City!!!) and marry such a male doctor does not seem to be affecting me.  I suppose that must be because I am safely ensconced within a state where such activity is not permitted.  Perhaps "not permitted" is too "soft core" a description.  Let me be clear:  Arizona already had a law against gay marriage, but in 2008 the voting public chose to amend the constitution to ban it even harder.  However, there may be some sweet, sweet release soon for my home state.  Nearby California also has a gay marriage ban that was backed by voters.  It's currently being challenged in federal court.  We'll see how that comes out.  I can think of at least one California lawmaker who might want to see the ban removed.  Apparently Roy Ashburn's attempts to stop gay rights have all been his way of playing coy.  He was recently arrested for DUI after leaving a gay night club.  Maybe he finally found a cause he could get behind?  I think it will all be okay in the end. 

Here's to envisioning a day when any two consenting adults can have their love legally recognized.

~G2B






 

Chicken soup etc.

I apologize for missing posts recently. My Betrothed had to save my butt two Fridays ago, and I go and miss last Friday's post anyway! I can't claim I was sick. I can explain that My Betrothed, who lives 6 hours away, was sick. This isn't really a very good excuse, since I should have had Friday's post ready to go by Thursday night, and I didn't actually head South to look after her until Friday night. But I really, really did have something I was going to post Saturday, and that got put aside while I endeavored to cure the common cold.

I brought her soup. Canned "No-Chicken Noodle" soup, as well as free-range organic chicken broth with lots of veggies. And I brought her tea. But what she really wanted was homemade manicotti.

So I made her manicotti. With vegetarian imitation ground beef (she's not a vegetarian but she often eats like one), spinach, and lots of cheese. Here it is as I served it to her:



And here it is a few minutes later:



She's feeling much better.

I'll post what should have been last Friday's post this Friday. You can think of this post as this Friday's post, posted early on a Wednesday. Confused? Me, too.

~G2B

Guest Post: Here Comes the Bride

Groom 2 Be's Note: Have you ever noticed that when opportunity knocks there is often a lot more to do than simply opening the door? I have been busy and rather stressed this week. My Betrothed has offered to blog in my place. I am in her debt. Without further ado: Here Comes the Bride!

Hello loyal Impending Groom readers! I hope you don’t mind the quick fill-in, but I’ll be feeding you the funny this week. At least this is a better notice than those little pieces of paper you get in the playbills at plays when they bring in a pinch hitter. You know… I think this is how John (Jen’s husband) got his start on Cakewrecks. Is there a future coffee-table-book deal and US promotional trip in my future?

Sorry. Weddings. That’s what y’all are here for. And that’s what’s been missing, right? What’s all this about nephews and beer cozies? We weren’t even at the store to look for wedding stuff, those crazy things just called out to us! “Come see the Crazy!” It’s amazing how stores are designed specifically to draw me over to the crazy. But I digress. There is one good reason, and a million not so good ones, that Wedding is not getting closer. And that, my dear friends, is irrigation.

Now, the last time I started to tell this story I asked my companions if they knew what irrigation is. They nodded assent. They, in fact, did not understand the true omnipotence of irrigation in the Valley of the Sun. Irrigation, gentle reader, is the life blood of said valley. If I may wax loquacious and pedantic (hey—I studied for the GRE and I am darn well going to get use out of all that time and effort!!) on this topic, I will tell you of the past. There were prehistoric peoples living in that Valley, and they had irrigation canals which sustained agriculture. When Easterners got out here for the dry air to cure their ailments, they thought: ‘hey—some of those nice plants could really settle this desert-wasteland. Let’s bring some of those out here! Now we just need water…’ And so they co-opted and aggrandized those canals and put in grass. Lots and lots of grass. The location of my impending nuptials relies on irrigation for its lush setting. Relies. On. It. So dependent, in fact, that when one savvy soul suggested not signing up for the allotment of irrigation on the date I desire, my come-back was quick and painful: the overflow pipe is on same said lush setting. Even if we don’t take the flood of water that irrigation entails, we are thwarted. And if someone else on the block doesn’t? Doomed.

One little date is all I ask for, and one little date is all that’s been denied. But wait… dates? How does irrigation befuddle the choice of a wedding date you ask? The lovely people at SRP (and they are wonderful, I am *not* being sarcastic), don’t and can’t publish dates until right before that torrent of life giving liquid surges towards your subdivision. So, hopefully, you now understand why you do not have a save the date. And why two other couples who got engaged after us, are getting married before.

A parting thought for you, as I leave: imagine some very, very happy children. They are playing in muddy, probably vector infested water. They are making chocolate milk with the mud and later turn to mud pies. Oh! And there’s a fish that’s come up through the canal system. Their parents let them keep it as a pet. They have no idea the future vexation irrigation will cause.

Oversharing

If you celebrated Valentine's Day (or anti-Valentine's Day, or Arizona's Statehood Day) I hope you had an excellent February 14th. And if you live in the US, I hope you had a stupendous three-day President's Weekend. And if you don't do any of that, I hope you still had a great weekend last weekend.

I'm aware I've been a bit lax over the last couple of weeks. I want to tell you that this week is the week I get back up to standards here at Impending Groom. I want to tell you that, but...

I do actually have a few things to share with you all this week. I have a bad habit of oversharing with telemarketers, especially those canvasing for charity. This gets me into some funny situations and silly conversations. My guilt kicks in, and I never feel right simply telling someone "sorry, not today," especially if it's a cause that I support. A while back I got such a call, this one from Amnesty International. I felt compelled to tell him how, while I love the work Amnesty does, I was saving up for a wedding. I figured that everyone knows weddings tend to be expensive. I should have just kept my mouth shut. This guy understood about the costs... so he started giving me advice.

Apparently he'd gotten married a couple years ago himself. He proceeded to tell me all about the great deal he got on a catered venue in Las Vegas where, he assured me, he had a real wedding, complete with guests and reception and everything. He told me about his bride's family, and his family, and the music, and the food.

Everyone's a back-seat wedding planner! I thanked him for his advice. But I don't intend to suggest we move the wedding to Vegas.

One last story. I was going to hold this one back, just in case I was feeling uninspired next week. But recently one of my readers accused me of "going soft". So here's a brief installment in my ongoing critique of the WIC. My Betrothed and I spent part of this V-Day weekend shopping for wedding stuff at a big chain crafts store. There was all the usual stuff, most of which we neither wanted nor needed, and some of which we wanted but couldn't justify the expense of. And then there's stuff that just made us scratch our heads. Like this:


So...

Uh...

First off, these are wedding-themed beer cozies. Very, very classy, I'm sure.
But second, and perhaps more importantly, these were the only two they had. There was no "I'm the Groom, That's Why" or "I'm the Mother of the Bride, That's Why" or "I'm the Flower Girl, That's Why" cozies. Only the Bride gets a specific cozy. The Groom has to share one. Now, this is not to say that I don't think My Betrothed deserves her own cozy. If she desires a beverage in an aluminum can on the day of the ceremony, or at the reception, then I deem it proper that said beverage should be kept at a proper temperature by whatever means necessary, even if that means happens to be bright pink. My point is that I should get one, too. I realize that the stereotype is that the Bride is the one guzzling cheap beer out of a can in the middle of the ceremony, but... wait... that's not right.

Not pictured: White hat with rhinestones that reads "Bride." No black hat for the Groom.

~G2B

The trick is to get back on...

Before I get into anything else, I want to congratulate a reader and frequent commenter on this blog, Wrayvin. Last weekend her boyfriend of over a year and a half proposed! They've only just started planning, but Wrayvin tells me they've picked a date, which is one thing My Betrothed and I have not done. Congratulations, you two! Keep us updated!

Second order of business: Many have pointed out that I did not post last week. There was no sinister reason for this, no illness in the family, no lottery ticket, nothing big happened last Thursday night to prevent me from posting Friday morning. It just didn't happen. It's a break in my resolution, but I figure that as long as I can get an extra post in some time in February I'll be good. Obviously the Link Mondays experiment broke me. Or I just didn't have any creative juices flowing last week. Either way.

Okay with all that out of the way, I better make up some time with a big, long, gushing post about...

Crud.

~G2B

PS: Happy Valentine's Day, to those who practice.

Happy Birthday

I promised a blog post, but I'm not in the mood to blog.

You see, blogging is an inherently self-centered activity, and right now is not the time for me to be self-centered. I'm not feeling particularly funny right now, either. So if you've come here looking for cummerbund jokes, I'm going to disappoint you. You see, at not quite 4:30pm yesterday a 7 pound, 5 ounce Baby Boy came into this world. My Impending Nephew was born healthy and (one imagines) happy. His parents (who have settled on a name other than Joaquin) are thrilled. My Betrothed was lucky enough to be in town when it happened, I wasn't. But I did get a bit of an adrenaline high from talking to her about it, texting her about it, and thinking about it.

So this post is dedicated to that baby boy. If, some day in the far flung future, you are sifting through old internet sites on your Apple iGlasses, you may come across this post. If the anonymity doesn't throw you off, I want you to know that this is your post. It went up the day after you were born, and it's meant to be about you. Even if your Uncle to Be had a hard time removing himself from the spotlight in this inherently self-centered activity.

Many things happened the week you were born. In fact, just the day before you were born, President Barack Obama gave his first State of the Union Address, and Apple Computer announced a product called the iPad. On the day you were born, the top music album (does music still come in albums when you're reading this?) in the US was a collection of songs recorded to benefit the survivors of an horribly destructive earth quake in Haiti.

2010, the year you were born, has been a bitter-sweet year up til now. Good things have happened, and bad things have happened. So far, though, the best thing that has happened to me this year was when your father sent me a picture of your mother holding you in her arms.

And that's it for this week's post. For those who missed it, I did an extra post on Monday, and I'll probably do another extra post this coming Monday. Cummerbund jokes will resume next Friday at the latest.

Happy Birthday, Nephew.

~G2B

Link Mondays: A New Tradition (?) (Or: Why I should change my name to Jennifer if I want to be a wedding blogger)

Maybe I'm getting a bit over-ambitious. So far, this year, I've kept up with my resolution to post once a week. I don't know if bumping that up to twice a week is necessarily wise, given my past tendencies to burn out on projects like this relatively quickly. (See November and December, 2009)

But I also don't feel like a post made entirely of links to other sites should count as a "post" for purposes of the aforementioned resolution.

So I'm posting this on a Monday rather than the usual Friday, and hoping to start a new tradition of posting lots of links to things on Mondays. Today I'll be linking to several blogs that I have found amusing, useful, intriguing, or captivating during my tenure as Groom to Be.

First up is a site My Betrothed and I have been following since well before I started this blog, Cake Wrecks! Five days a week (sometimes more) Jen Yates and/or her husband John post one or more professionally decorated cakes that just really make you stop and go "WTF?!" in the truest since of the acronym. On Sundays they post a "Sunday Sweets" feature, which is all about cakes that have gone right. It's not strictly a wedding related site, but they do have many choice wedding cake wrecks and sweets. Also, groom's cakes, a tradition I don't entirely understand. They have a book for sale, as well as some other stuff. This Sunday Jen's post was all about Mario Wedding Cakes! Since both My Betrothed and I are big Nintendo fans, we really enjoyed this one.

Next comes a wedding specific site, Green Wedding Shoes. The author of this site, also named Jen, is a creative director, graphic designer, and stylist. She describes herself as a recent newlywed, and her blog is just pretty! (I'm losing guy cred here, aren't I?) Don't get me wrong, there is text on the site, and she's a lovely writer but when I'm browsing her blog I mostly just stare and stare at the pictures. If you're planning a wedding, and need to peruse for inspiration, you could do much worse than scrolling through a few of Jen's blog posts. She seems to prefer funky and/or natural wedding concepts, which I like. She's got several posts on green weddings, Do it Yourself ideas, and backyard weddings, all of which I'm still exploring. She also posts a lot about vendors that are local to her. And right now, until the 31st of the month, she's doing a giveaway for a free "Dream Love Shoot" for an engaged or married couple. She also has a ton of links that I'm still working my way through. For instance:

I just learned about the blog Earth Friendly Weddings while putting together this very post! Apparently it's the "official blog" of Earthly Affair, an eco-friendly wedding invitation site. The blog itself, though, is not limited to advertising the company's invites. Instead, there's information on buying organic food, some eco-conscious jewelry, and pictures of pretty wedding cakes. Which, I think, brings me full circle. Wait, not quite there yet. Turns out the blogger for Earth Friendly Weddings is named... Jen. Are these all the same person or something?

As I'm still new to the blogging thing, please feel free to let me know if this type of link-dumping is boring, useful, or both. See you Friday!