Sunday 02 February 2003
First Wedding Anniversary !!!
We were married on Saturday 02 February 2002 (is 02/02/02 a cool date or what? and totally accidental - we wanted the first Saturday in February and that was it), at Belfast City Hall with a late-lunch reception at a really great hotel in Carrickfergus, a town a little way up the Antrim Coast Road. I had a great day; I felt relaxed and happy, I loved my dress, I hadn't had a single Bridezilla moment, I'd organised the whole deal and it went off without a hitch. And I was probably the least stressed of the entire wedding party and family - my parents and brothers had come over for The Event, and so had The President Elect, to be my Best Woman. What a great bunch. Oh and the bride wasn't late - but the bride's brothers were; they'd somehow managed to forget being given security passes for parking within City Hall and spent 20 minutes going around and around Donegal Square and surrounds trying to find parking. On a Saturday morning. The Deputy Registrar was in a lather, the bride's father was catatonic with panic and the Best Woman was seriously pissed off. The bride, however, laughed and laughed and laughed.
The ceremony was quick; entrance music was Jeremiah Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary, with Handel's Dixit Dominus during the signing of the register, and Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 to see us out. Somewhere in there Abel read John Donne's The Good Morrow which we'd chosen for our reading; a beautiful poem marred only by sledgehammers and piledrivers going hell-for-leather outside. After that, the photos (which turned out beautifully in spite of the fact that we're both pathologically camera-shy) and then a slow comfy drive in the back of a limo, avec champagne, to the reception venue (and no I'm not going to reveal what we got up to so hush).
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FROM THIS MOMENT ON (Cole Porter; performed by Ella Fitzgerald)
From this moment on,
You for me dear
Only two for tea dear,
From this moment on.
From this happy day,
No more blue songs,
Only whoop dee doo songs,
From this moment on.
For you've got the love I need so much,
Got the skin I love to touch,
Got the arms to hold me tight,
Got the sweet lips to kiss me goodnight.
From this moment on,
You and I, babe,
We'll be ridin' high, babe.
Every care is gone,
From this moment on.
∞∞∞∞∞
So here we are, our First Wedding Anniversary. It doesn't seem like a whole year, despite all the various traumas and stresses and just plain bureaucratic shite (that's a story for another day). Maybe all new-marrieds feel that way, but this last year has been fun and wonderful and has gone damn fast.
Anyways ... see that entry from 15 January? Well, we're still ill. Thus our First Wedding Anniversary; we’d planned to have a posh romantic dinner out and see a movie or show, but Tuxedo was running to the loo for some reason or other every 20 minutes and I was zonked on codeine and muscle relaxants, exhausted from a day spent packing books and CDs (which doesn't sound like much, but when you have approximately 1000 books and an equal number of CDs and have to unload and disassemble several miles of shelving ... ). So we ended up with Chinese takeaway and plotzed around on our respective computers (I watched some Buffy Season Five DVDs). Hopefully next weekend will be more favourable for celebratory activities...
For our Official Anniversary Present, we had our wedding bands engraved, just with our names and the date - 02/02/02 - around the inside. They look really lovely and effective, in a fairly simple but pretty script - no elvish or anything like that (although our rings are 18 ct rose gold and in design look uncannily like The One Ring although they were designed over 18 months before the release of The Fellowship of the Ring). Tuxedo's is easy enough to read but because my ring size is so teensy (size J on a puffy day) the script had to be relatively teensy to fit. I could barely read it with the jeweller's magnifying whatsit!
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Well the Clan back in Perth joined the Great Aussie Bushfires of 2003 during the Australia Day weekend (26 January). While the fires in Canberra and Sydney were well reported and documented, Western Australia was on fire from top to bottom. There were over 100 fires around the metropolitan area alone, with many properties destroyed. A couple I know, and their two wee kids, huddled in the backyard watching their home burn to the ground n a matter of minutes. Anyways. There were raging bushfire/s around Lancelin where the family farm is situated (started by an arsonist apparently) and one blaze swept through our place, southwest to north, jumping the road and firebreaks, destroying a helluva lot of fencing, all the electricity poles down and out, water pipes burst and melted, a lot of scrub burnt ... Pretty bad. Fortunately it missed the shearing shed/drafting pens which would have been a complete disaster. Luckily our shearer was in the area and moved all the sheepies to the (safe) eastern paddocks which was damn fine of him. The big concrete water tank was emptied out by the helicopters in their (successful) efforts to stop the fire getting to the township, so the farm was without water, fencing or electricity (the fencing is electrified plus the lines to the shearing shed etc). So Dad’s been up just about every day working on getting the water back on, fixing pipes, getting the tank re-filled ... The fencing will have to be replaced and rewired by contractors though, major bummer. Mind you we were lucky because the place north of us was pretty much decimated, losing something like 23 kms of fencing on the coast side. Still, all very exciting and the Norn Irish contingent is most impressed that they know someone who had a really-truly-Aussie bushfire!