Anniversary party of the century

Sorry for the lack of blog action around here lately – things have been pretty busy, what with moving the blog to a new location and throwing a party to celebrate our wedding – the two colossal undertakings of last week.

As some of you may remember, just over a year ago – 08.07.06 to be precise – EPI and I got married on the sly. We’d already announced to our family and friends that we were planning to tie the knot [after ten years together], but hadn’t yet set a date – the only thing we had down for sure was that we were going to visit Canada in the summer, and had decided that we wanted to have that trip as a kind of honeymoon. The only problem was that having a ceremony before then was out of the question because we were unable to get our four daughters together in one place – the lovely Barbie was spending six months in Florence and wasn’t due back until after our departure. So gradually the idea hatched that maybe we should just elope – since we couldn’t have them all there, we’d have none.

Yet eloping presented another difficulty, since getting married at Toronto City Hall required us to have two witnesses. This was a bit of a conundrum. EPI suggested we should just get a taxi and ask the cab driver to come in and be a witness, and on the way grab someone else that happened to be passing by. I thought that was an okay idea, but the risk factor was too high; if we had trouble shanghaiing people, our fifteen minutes of chapel time might be up and we’d have to continue living in sin indefinitely. In the end I decided I’d let my cousin Signy [the closest thing I have to a sister] in on the plan, because she knew people in Toronto. Sure enough, she got on the case and within no time had produced two superexcellent witnesses, the lovely Jeff and Rhiannon, who as it happened were also in the midst of planning their own [mega-]wedding.

At any rate, it was a beautiful ceremony, if a little Vegas-like – our ‘walking down the isle’ consisted of marching along a narrow hallway that looked like it led to the toilets. Afterwards Rhiannon and Jeff took us to a rooftop café on the 52nd floor of the ManuLife building in Toronto and from there EPI and I went and had our own little celebration on the rooftop of the building where we were staying, with the lights of the skyscrapers twinkling all around us. Trés romantique.

Our nearest and dearest were a little bit taken aback when they heard the news, but soon got used to the idea and were delighted. We had planned to throw a party on returning home but, you know how it is, life kind of got in the way, and as the weeks passed, people sort of gave up on waiting and started showing up with presents that we graciously, albeit a little sheepishly, accepted.

But! this past weekend we finally got around to it, figuring that the first anniversary of our wedding made a perfect date – well, except the fact that it was on a Sunday, so we had to start on Saturday [07.07.07 – the Wedding Day of the Century] and party at least until midnight. We invited around 50 of our closest family and friends, started at 6 pm with champagne, moved on to a buffet dinner with wine, and finally a superdelicious wedding cake plus liquors. It went off beautifully and without a hitch, if I do say so myself, and when everyone was well watered and fed we cleared the living room and danced. I still have blisters on the soles of my feet. Honest.

BUT SURELY YOU CAME HERE NOT FOR THE TEDIUM OF MY LIFE, BUT THE WEATHER
The seemingly endless sunny-gorgeous weather spell we had last week finally came to an end, thank God – you have no idea how stressful it is finding time to go to the pool each day to sunbathe. It clouded over this past weekend and has been more or less overcast since, with temps of around 12-14°C. Right now 12°C [54F] and the sun came up at 3:23 am, will go down at 11:40 pm. Sigh. Days getting markedly shorter already.