Feeling: relieved
Listening to: some sort of indie-coffee-house-emo/screamo whatever
Reading/Watching: e-mails

Yes, I am posting while on my honeymoon. We are in a little coffeehouse that has wi-fi, so I dragged the craptop in here to check e-mail and basically make sure the world hasn't ended while we've been gone. But I thought I'd take a moment to tell everyone about the Big Day.

The day went as smoothly as can be expected.

People were very skilled at hiding complications from me, so that I wouldn't freak out, but apparently 12 of the boutonnieres and corsages were put in a fridge that was turned too cold, and the flowers froze, ruining them. My cousin, the florist, had to drive to various flower shops to buy more tulips and roses, make them the morning of the wedding, and rush them to the church to pin on people by 3:00.

I'm now very glad that when she asked me, "is everything the way you wanted? Do I need to go back and change anything?" I always said, "nah, it's fine." If I had demanded that she re-do the bouquet or order different shades of tulips, she might have just had a nervous breakdown. I applaud her for not letting me know how very, very freaked out she was.

I always talk about how, in my days as a wedding singer, I have noticed that there are the Five Things that always have to go wrong at a wedding. No matter how much of the day you try to control, there will be those Five Things that just don't go well. If I dig around in my memory, I can probably come up with the five things, but I don't want to. By and large, everything just continued to bump along well. It was amazing (and surprising).

But what a day. I love that dress, and I never wanted to take it off. That is, until I had been wearing it for nine hours, and the strapless bra was digging into my ribs deep enough to go coal-mining (it was lined with hard plastic "boning" that left welts by the end of the day). My slippers came off within the first 30 minutes of the reception, and by the end of the five hours of dancing (and yes, Newly Skinny-ish Katie danced about 95% of the time), my pantyhose, the soles of my feet, and then the insides of my slippers when I put them back on to go home, were completely black. Mon coeur says I buffed the floor.

And as for him? My... husband. Not the strongest leader in the dancing world, but it was still heaven. In every picture people took, I have a disgustingly infatuated look on my face, because the entire night felt like "finally, finally, finally." Our sixty years have begun.

Then, after a lengthy goodbye, and driving up and down the interstate for a little while in the rented getaway car (which was, of course, hidden from the groomsmen, but still wound up covered in TP and shoe polish decorations), mon coeur and I dropped the convertible off at my parents' hotel and left for our honeymoon in his nice, sensible little Hyundai.

Then, I wet the bed.

Let me explain. My parents gave us a gift basket of champagne, chocolates, and pistachio nuts. Quite a lovely idea. But they left it in the backseat of a car all day, in Texas-April heat. It cooled down as the night came, but the two bottles of champagne still rattled their way all over town in the backseat.

Once in the honeymoon suite, mon coeur and I discovered that the chocolate was complete liquid. Even once it had cooled, it never got cold enough to set properly. The pistachio nuts were fine, but we hadn't eaten much at the wedding, dinner was five hours past, and we were hungry. I was no longer in my wedding gown, I was wearing something... else, and was not fit to wander the halls, so I made my husband go in search of some vending machines or something, and I decided to open a bottle of champagne, so we'd at least have something to drink.

I'd seen champagne spray out of the bottle in movies, but assumed you had to shake it like hell. I didn't realize it did that at room temperature, and I also conveniently forgot how long we drove it around in the backseat of a car.

So, I took the foil off, and I took the wire cage-thing off, and thought "hmm, if the cork didn't come flying out, it must be fine." So I pushed the cork up with my thumb.

And the volcano of bubbly sprayed all over my arms, and onto the gloriously large bed with its cute little blue quilt. I said something very graceful like "wooooshit" and aimed it over the hardwood floor until it stopped. Then, sheepish, I sopped up what I could off the bed, peeled back the quilt and top sheet to dry, and mon coeur returned with Little Debbie cakes and crackers to find his new bride mopping the floor in her scanties.

We managed to rescue the evening from complete ridiculousness, and drank the remaining two-thirds of the champagne from proper glasses, munching on crackers until the chocolate (which we put on ice, along with the bubbly) firmed up and we could eat it.

It was a fun night. And I'm actually really glad to have funny stories to tell future brides. Rule #1: Make your husband open the champagne. Pretend your manicured nails can't do it properly.

I let him open it the next night, and even though there was no geyser-o-bubbly that time, he still flinched and freaked out at the noise it made (he was worried the cork might have broken something). Quite funny.

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