Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

This has been a particularly dry week in terms of posting, but I do have some good stuff coming, including photos from Thursday's excursion to the Botanical Garden just before it started snowing. But I wanted to do a quick update to mention two things.

First, we had to change our wedding date. I'm pretty sure it's not going to change again, and we have the venue reserved for us on our new date. Here's how it all went down.

1. My mom called me last night and said first thing, "Your sister called me and wanted to know if you're sure you have the club reserved."
"Yes, I'm sure," I told her.
"Well, she was concerned, and was also wondering if you realized the date you picked was Easter."
FUCK! I said to myself, Easter? That early? Who ever heard of Easter being that early? and then said, "No, Mom, we didn't know. We only looked at academic calendars and the wee tiny calendar in the back of this year's to see the 2008 dates, and holidays weren't marked."
"Your sister was wondering if the club does any sort of Easter celebrations, like an Easter egg hunt."
"I'll have to call and ask." While very few of our guests would have a problem attending a wedding on Easter, I knew the club thing was going to be an issue.
2. I called Oldest friend. "Does the club do anything for Easter?" I asked her. "Yeah, they do a brunch and an Easter egg hunt," she told me. "Why?" "Oh, no reason," I said. "Except did you know that the date you asked your parents to reserve for us was Easter Sunday?" "You're kidding," she said. "The event scheduler person should have been on top of that. Let me make some calls."
3. I stressed. Hulk stressed. Visiting Friend made sympathetic noises, since she knew a little bit of what we'd gone through to pick our original date.
4. We talked. Hulk decided that he could just arrange ahead of time to take the week after his spring break off, since we'd have to get married on Saturday at the end of the break rather than (as we'd hoped) the Sunday at the beginning.
4. Oldest Friend called back. "Nope, she totally screwed up. Easter weekend is totally taken up by club events, so nobody can use it for anything. But, it's as of yet unreserved for the weekend before, the weekend after, the entire month of April and the middle two weekends of May." "March 29," I told her. "It's the Saturday after Easter. We wants it."

And so it is ours, and so it goes. It never occurred to me that Easter might be that early, and none of the calendars we'd looked at showed holidays, so we didn't even consider. And the event scheduler at our venue dropped the ball as well. So at least we know now, rather than in a few months when one or the other realized and we would have been way more screwed. Though we may have to pay a bit more for catering (it being on a Saturday rather than a Sunday), it's still March (off season), the venue costs the same, and it might have been hard to find vendors willing to work on Easter. Write it in stone, people, we're getting hitched March 29, 2008.

And the second thing? Well, the second thing is that this evening, I asked Hulk to marry me and he said yes, and I gave HIM a ring that *I* picked. It looks like this, except without the cheesy engraving:

He'll wear it until the wedding, and then switch to a wedding band. I think the occasion calls for celebration, so we're going out have someone else cook for us, and we might even go wild and have a tasty adult beverage we haven't made ourselves. Crazy.