Laurel and I are getting married, again.  “But Matt, aren’t you are already married?!”  Yes, yes we are and no I am not taking a second wife – I looked into that, but I sort of let it go when Laurel started making sawing gestures while looking manically at my lower abdominal region.

The story is that we had planed a fairly extravagant affair for the summer of 2007.  We had accepted a job in Germany and had planned to come back to The States for the wedding that next summer.  German residence laws squished that plan as Laurel could only stay in Germany for three months at a time with a six-month gap in between if we weren’t hitched.  After weighing our options, we went to a courthouse in SoCal to make our relationship official in the eyes of the extremely uptight German Government and then spent a weekend in a B&B.  Not the most romantic wedding tales you have ever heard, I know.

We are now back and settled and both of us felt that we would like to acknowledge such a huge event in our lives properly.  We have rented heavily wooded parcel of land for a weekend this summer and will have an outdoor ceremony (I swear it will be simple and not California-kooky) and will spend the evening in a 1930s ballroom on the property cozying up to 2-3 kegs of GREAT beer, a yummy spread of food, a dozen or so pies, cake and enough wine to make Bacchus want to come and join the festivities.  It is always a pain in the ass to attend someone’s do and have to get a pricey hotel room and rent a loud polyester outfit.  So… to make things as easy as possible for our guests, we have rented enough cabins to sleep the entire wedding party in for both Friday and Saturday night.  I swear that I will not make any of my buddies rent a pink tux, wear short-short lederhosen, kilts, nor do I expect any of them be on their best behavior – As long as no one does anything to make my hot little wife cry – then what happens in the trees stays in the trees.

To lure my elusive buddies out of their high mountain caves, I have floated the rumor that Mt. Rainer is 40 miles south, there is great sport/trad climbing in Leavenworth, some killer Alpine routes with glaciers on the Olympic peninsula, great fishing, whale watching, Canada to the north, etc, etc, etc.  It would make a fine kick-off weekend to the annual summer climbing, beer drinking, rafting, cycling, suffer-fest that we all partake in.

Now, if some of our friends can’t make it, we TOTALLY understand and it is not like I will pour wax into small molds and make dolls that look remarkable like each of those who choose not to attend.  It would be crazy to think that I have snippets of their cloths and cuttings of hair to paste on these completely theoretical dolls.  And know that I would never heat up any pins and probe their wax parts IF for some reason they decided to miss our wedding.  No, I wouldn’t even think of such…