Wedding Party! 23 April 2011. ~mike and joy. to the index page |
||
Party photos! If I am in the photo, I didn't take the picture; if I know who did, the credit is in the caption. Thanks everyone for helping take photos! | ||
It all started two years ago when I began designing Joy's engagement ring. Then we planned our wedding at San Francisco City Hall, a nice short ceremony in a spectacular setting with our immediate family attending, followed by a ride across town in a vintage streetcar to lunch on the sunny waterfront by the Bay Bridge. Joy and I went out to dinner and spent the night in a boutique hotel. Without the pressure of a large event, it was a wonderful experience that we enjoyed very much. See our wedding photos.
Next, party planning began: where could we gather a hundred people and procure all our favorite foods and drinks? It would have to be in a town where guests might enjoy staying, and we wanted a mixed indoor-outdoor space. It had to be large enough for the crowd yet not so large that it would feel empty if fewer people came, or later after some left. I wanted a wood-fired pizza truck, and Joy wanted an egg hunt. It was going to be on Easter weekend, as it turned out. We bought board games and rented a pool table. Our venue in Kenwood, in wine country north of San Francisco, fit perfectly. It had the looks and the location but not the people we needed. Arrangements were forgotten, plans overlooked, and we had to engineer every detail on party day. I really wish we could have had more time to visit with our guests, but of course when one hosts a hundred people even through five hour long event there is not time to have conversations with them all. The food was delicious, the setting ideal, and though the weather threatened to rain all week it turned out perfectly with a dry warm afternoon of hazy sunshine followed by light drizzle coming along right at dusk, bringing the remaining guests together in our cozy games room where the party found new energy. We could have stayed there until late at night. What fun! What an insane amount of work! Planning a big event like this is something I do not plan to repeat until our children get married! In the meantime, we will do smaller parties where we need not entrust ordering of cookies to someone else. There were supposed to be snickerdoodles! It was in the contract! What good times we had, without the anxiety of a ceremony and with all our attention applied to visiting with guests, now one combined group of friends and family. It went by in such a blur that my memories of the day are more from photographs than first-hand experience. Steve and I went back up to Kenwood on Monday morning and managed to fit all the furniture in one precarious truckload, even though it took two trips to deliver. What's more, we had several cases of beer in the truck too. At the party the bar ran out of Chimay and almost ran out of Anchor Steam, but there were a great many extras of the other beers. Fortunately, we had fifty-seven extra limes to go in all the extra ice-cold Coronas (limes got double bought, by us and the bartenders)! After returning the 620 pound load of furniture we set out on an adventure involving chalupas, more pizza, wine, ice cream, a search for the cows that yielded said tasty ice cream, then a search for the Pacific Ocean (successful!), an encounter with a car commercial film crew and (separately) with a herd of elk, and sunset by the sea, all the while caring for our haul of beer which diminished slightly in size by the time the sun had set and the elk had run off when Mike emerged from some shrubbery wearing his mountain-lion-colored fleece pullover. |
||
to the index page |