The Wedding
Well.
Hi again everyone. It’s been awhile.
I think I have a bit of catching up to do. Where to start…
I guess that whole wedding thing would be good. I wish I had had the time to blog about this a little closer to when it happened, but life got set at ludicrous speed ever since that fateful week…
I should mention being married is awesome and Mariam is great for having helped me survive the last month and a half.
Anyway, the wedding week. Insanity.
Monday: Picked up my suit (no, I did not wear a tux during out morning wedding and that’s the right thing to do).
Tuesday: Moving day. I spent the morning filling up boxes with my mom at the old apartment and dropping them off at the new one. Drove up to the homestead that evening to finish packing and get ready for the flight.
Wednesday: Flew out of Milwaukee early in the morning to get us into SLC early afternoon.
sausage egg and cheese biscuit regret.
Weather was unimpressive to say the least.
in Utah. and once again the weather sucks.
Mariam still was not done with finals, so I just had a second to say hi to her before she went into the testing center. Got in a bit of relaxing before I gave Mariam a ride up to Draper so she could go to her friend’s bridal shower. Obviously wanted to spend more time with her but I figured I would be with her plenty soon enough. We had actually hoped to have Mariam all packed and shipped by Wednesday, but that obviously didn’t happen, something I ended up regretting.
Thursday:
I think my fingerprints are burned off from the lye in the oven cleaner I was using. Stupid BYU cleaning checks.
Thursday morning was filled with cleaning up Mariam’s apartment and buying the Mariam’s wedding dress. Yes, this was a sad story: Mariam had sent her measurements to her mom so she could wear her mom’s wedding dress. Well, something went wrong and the dress was too small all around. So we had to buy a new dress two days before the wedding. I was forced to stand outside the store with my eyes clothes while Mariam and my mom made the final decision then I was brought just to swipe my credit card (a shadow of my future married life perhaps??). Anyway, thankfully it worked out and she looked beautiful anyway. That afternoon was mom’s graduation extravaganza, which was good for her (amazingly the ceremony only last around and hour and a half). That evening Mariam’s parents and brother landed in SLC around midnight, so Mariam and I drove up to meet them and make sure their rental car worked out alright. Which of course it didn’t (apparently you can get debit cards in Mexico without your name on it, which of course won’t work for renting a car). So after a few frantic phone calls and some stress, we decided to just stick with the original plan of having them stay up in SLC and having us just be their transportation. In the end it worked out fine but during the 2 am drive back to Provo all alone after an already crazy week, things seemed to be falling apart.
Friday: Only a few short hours later it was time to drive back up to SLC to pick up Mariam and her family and then to go down to the Draper Temple for Mariam’s endowments (I will never really understand why she had to choose that temple…). We almost got stuck in traffic making us miss our appointment but with the help of Google Maps and some quick maneuvering, we found the backroads that got us there on time. The ceremony was great with all of our family there and afterwards we pigged out at Chuck-O-Rama (my dad’s idea). Friday afternoon turned into crunch time for getting Mariam packed and moved out, which was quite stressful and tiring. I was completely dead by 8 pm and collapsed immediately into bed when I got to the hotel room.
I’m tired.
Saturday: The 8 hours of sleep felt closer to 1 given how dead I was still feeling Saturday morning, but I wasn’t going to let that get me down.
Way too crazy and stressful of a week leading up to today. Thankfully she is worth it.
Of course the wedding needed one last obstacle, so the Joseph Smith Memorial Building’s parking garage was closed due to a car slamming into the entrance doors over night. A few phone calls took care of that situation then I just kind of stood back while people started filtering in for the breakfast. Mariam was late, but we all forgave her.
Here is a picture I snapped of her during breakfast.
The whole thing was just kind of surreal and I kind of felt like I was floating along as we talked with friends and family, ate, etc.
Finally it came time for us to walk over to the SLC temple. While Mariam changed they left me in a small room with some chairs and a pitcher of water. Quite a nerve wracking 15 minutes of pacing around and trying to beat cotton mouth. She finally came in and she was beautiful and things just floated on smoothly from there. We had a bilingual sealer perform the ceremony which was really nice for Mariam’s family. The whole cliche thing of not hearing anything that was being said and just feeling really happy looking across the alter at each other was pretty much spot on.
I had this set to autopost while we were in the temple.
It was short and sweet and after a round of hugs it was off to get changed again for pictures. Of course Mariam took a lot longer than me, so once again I had another long, nerve wracking wait. Thankfully a nice older temple worker sat down and talked to me about how he used to do programming for physics simulations back in the 80s before they had math libraries or floating point chips, etc. A nice diversion to keep me sane.
Pictures were fun. Here is a small collection that I hope to expand in the near future once I get a few more of the pictures: link.
Finally it was all over; all of our friends and family were gone and we were left just saying goodbye to our parents. My uncle Jeff and aunt Kristine (both speak Spanish) were awesome helping out and being tour guides for Mariam’s parents for the rest of the day which let Mariam have one less thing to worry about. We said our goodbyes and that was that. I was glad to finally be done and to just have a little bit of time to breathe and enjoy my wife before the next bit of craziness began.