We had our first tragedy this weekend. One of our ferrets, Loki, got a bad flu and succumbed to it within 24 hours. RIP Loki… Mommy, Daddy, and your brothers and sister will miss you desperately.

So it took four months and a looming “Pampered Chef” party, but we finally got all the wedding gifts and wedding stuff put away, preserved, or disposed of, as necessary. Who knew that would be as much work as actually planning a wedding?

Now it’s time to start planning our Spring/equinox/St Paddy’s/beach party. I wonder how long it will take to clean that up……..

Well, we’ve just had our first christmas together as a married couple. I’ve got to say, it’s really almost identical to christmas as a non-married couple, except now all the family gifts have both our names on them. Still, we had a great holiday together, and look forward to a great coming year.

To all our friends and family, the Hartley clan (Sabrina, Blaise, Moose, Willow, Loki, and Gremlin) wishes everyone a wonderful holiday season, and a most excellent New Year!

The photographer has updated her website with hundreds more pictures from the wedding. And we mean literally hundreds! You can check them out at the link below:

   

Sabrina has begun her name-change odyssey. The paperwork is officially filed with the social security administration and the DMV, after untold hours of line-standing and hoop-jumping. Two down, only 75,000 more administrations, memberships and bills to go!

So things are finally back to normal! Sorta.

Our dog Moose is mostly over the self-inflicted injuries he got trying to escape the kennel while we were on our mini-moon. The doofus decided he could jump over a 6.5 foot gate, and succeeded only in slicing up his front paws. We still have another week of antibiotics to give him, but the wounds seem healthily repaired.

We’re back to dancing again, and the general grind of day-to-day seems to have resumed. Other than the fact that our house still looks a little like a Mayan king dumped his temple into it, all’s back to normal.

We keep asking each other “Do you feel any different?” So far, the answer’s been “nope.” But last night something stood out. For the very first time, I found myself in a situation where I had to introduce “My wife Sabrina”. THAT was a startling moment! We both kind of blinked at each other for a few seconds, as it sank in…

So, since Sabrina’s a teacher, we couldn’t take a full-length honeymoon right after the wedding. We’re planning a Jamaica trip next summer, but in the meantime, we needed to take at least a few days just for us after the wedding, to de-stress and wind down. To that end, we decided we needed to go somewhere drivable, to eliminate the stress of air-travel, and luxurious, so we would feel pampered and special.

Enter Fern Lodge, an ultra-luxury log-cabin/B&B deep in the Adirondacks. Just 75 minutes’ drive from home, it was the perfect balance of close and inaccessible. We left at 3PM on Sunday, and by 5 PM, we were checked in and lounging in front of a cedar fire with glasses of Argentinian chardonnay in hand.

Our suite, the Birch Room, was a wonder of rustic style and space-age luxury. Under log rafters, and mixed in with furniture that was birch even to the lampshades, were a remote-controlled see-through fireplace, a glorious emperor-sized bed, and a private jacuzzi. In the 150-square-foot bathroom, his and hers sinks stood next to a steam-bath shower with four shower heads and multiple steam cycles. Our private balcony looked out on a large tranquil lake framed by autumn forests and backdropped by the Adirondacks.

We spent four days almost completely alone in the off-season Adirondacks, wandering from Lake Placid to Lake George, antiquing, and kayaking on what was effectively our private lake. We gave ourselves multiple spa-treatments in our suite, and ate continental cuisine at an inexplicable five-star restaurant in the middle of nowhere (duck bisque, anyone?). We de-stressed, in the most extreme way possible!

I thought it would take weeks to see our wedding pictures (there were thousands), but apparently the photographer is starting to post them as they get processed! When we have all of them, we’ll be posting our favorites here, but in the meantime, you can browse the first 50 or so from the link below:

   

So it turns out that you can have a great wedding, where all goes as planned, and all your contractors perform admirably, and still be taken to the cleaners!  While we were dancing and celebrating our first few hours as husband and wife, the gutter-slime of the world was making us their prey.

On Sunday afternoon, I got a call from a state trooper, informing me that a handful of the gift/card envelopes our guests had brought for our wedding had turned up in a local resident’s roadside mailbox.  Several still had checks in them, while the rest only had tattered cards.  We don’t have all the details yet, but it seems a pair of local heroin addicts stopped in while the lobby was empty, nabbed a handful of envelopes, and ran off with the proceeds, abandoning the non-convertible remains in some poor woman’s mailbox, where she found them in the morning.

There have been arrests, but the police are still looking for evidence to solidify the case, and are not optimistic we will get anything back, but we’re still keeping our hopes up.  On the bright side, our initial count shows that they couldn’t have grabbed more than ten, and we got four back, two with their contents intact, so at least they weren’t very good thieves!

OK, so here’s how it went.  On Saturday, October 31st, 2009, we had our wedding, and nobody got hurt!

Sabrina and the bridesmaids spent the entire day until 3 PM on primp-patrol, while Blaise and self-appointed godsend Angela took care of incidentals like taking dogs to the kennel, Printing various signs and cards, and generally not going insane.

Everyone showed up at the Crooked Lake House at 3PM, just prior to the onset of an orgy of picture-taking and various other last minute details.  The ceremony began at 5:30, and outside of a minor musical faux-pas (the wrong song played for the processional for about ten seconds), was uneventful as planned, and was by all accounts beautiful and mercifully short!  By 5:50 PM, we were husband and wife, and everyone left the ceremony to the strains of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” (aka the song that accidentally started instead of Vivaldi at the beginning of the ceremony.  Talk about surprised guests!).

It was all easy-going from there, a blur of food, drink, music, dancing, more food, more drink, more music and dancing, etc.  The Doc Scanlon Trio rocked the house, mixed with pre-recorded “wedding style” music on the breaks.  Cake was cut (and nose-smeared despite a previous solemn oath to the contrary!  There WILL be retribution…), bouquets were thrown, and toasts were drunk (drank? drinked?).

The first dance received rave reviews:

• “Best first dance tonight!” – Groom’s Drunk Work Friend
• “Hey, you actually know how to dance!” – Bride’s Cousin
• “That was just grea… Hey, where’s my scotch?” – Groom’s Father
• “What the heck was that?” – Bride’s Other Cousin
• “Best first dance ever!” – Numerous glorious, wonderful friends and family, all of whom we love very, very much…

[Addendum]

Our friend Olivia actually managed to capture our first dance with the video feature on her camera.  Thank you Olivia!

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