Kiwi and Cream

I have a nice coffee mug that marks the season, and a pretty sign above the coffee shop door. My thoughts drift between wedding planning and classroom planning (neither of which will ever be completely finished) and I have trouble settling on one story to put to paper.

Luckily, I don’t stare at a blank page for a living.

I am getting married in the summer. I am getting married to a girl who was stalking this website since before I knew her. She makes me happy just to be in the same room, just knowing that she’s there to take my side when I need it, or to be my opposition under the same circumstances.

Basically, she’s pretty great. The most great.

Luckily, the wedding I’m thinking about planning is the same one she has been thinking about planning (and the same one her mother, my mother, her friends, and my sisters have been thinking about planning). We are doing all these things that I never knew where important - assembling a list of people who should be there that day, picking colours, finding locations, reworking the list again and again … all the things that must have happened at every other wedding that’s ever happened, and all things that are as new to me as kiwi.

(Apparently it’s a colour)

Ever other wedding I’ve ever been to is starting to make a whole lot more sense. Dinker, a friend from high school, said to me while we were getting ready for his wedding that someone had told him that ...

“you’ll never look at another wedding the same way again”

 I had started that conversation with something super insightful like... 

“So, there was a lot of planning went into this party?” 

Well done, twenty-four year old me. Well done.

Of course, that wedding was amazing, as have been all the other weddings I’ve attended, as will the future weddings that I’ll (hopefully) attend. They all are … sorry, most are. I heard about one wedding from around home where the groom was given a black-eye on the special night. I don’t know the specifics, but I assume it wasn’t on the programme.

So there’s a goal to have … no black eyes. That’s a measurable accomplishment, too. At the end of the night, as long as the ratio of grooms to black eyes is less that 1:1 it’ll be cause for celebration. 

It’s something we can put on the invitations.

o   attending, with bells on

o   attending, with gloves dropped 

o   not attending; heard about the bells; will jersey him at the bachelor party

For Dawn Marie,

We saw snow. I had been a long time since we’d seen snow outside of Canada, and certainly not over Christmas. We visited my niece (and her parents, but they weren’t the reason we went) in Calgary last spring and we saw snow then … but we haven’t seen it during winter break for three years.

I went nuts. Completely bonkers.

I had been cooped up in the apartment for what seemed like an eternity, and seeing the ground covered with white fuzz was enough to get me running from window to window taking in as much as I could. I had put on my coat and mitts before I finished convincing my roommate that we should be out there making a snowman.

But it’s cold out there, she said.

Yesbuttheressnowandwecanbeoutthereinit, I said to the door of the elevator as I was on my way down.

We didn’t get to make a snowman, all I could muster was a fistful of snow - had I made one it would have looked like a mothball man. We thought about snow angels, but we knew what the ground looked like before the snow covered it; there was a good chance that our angels would be brown. In the end we took a nice brisk walk and threw some snowballs at each other (well, I threw them at Jacq).

The snow was gone again in a few hours. I don’t imagine we’ll get snow again around here, but if there is I’ll make more of an effort to collect enough snow for even a little, action figured sized snowman.

We’re told that the Great Wall gets snow in February. Perhaps I’ll make a snow angel then. My mother-in-law-to-be will have to pack her warm things.