Ellen & Lee Get Married

On October 24th Ellen and Lee got married in the Jardin du Luxembourg in front of the Medici Fountain. (I had to Google it too.) They were giddy and giggly and felt a little silly, and then they were stuffed into a car and driven all over town for photos. I tried to pare them down, really I did! But there are just so many great ones.
When it was all over, they went back to their Air Bn'B where Ellen put on her comfy clothes and Lee went out and got them a Dominoes Pizza from down the street. They were awfully hungry. That night they celebrated with a big, french meal and just a few days later, Lee would overdose on espresso shots and spend a day in a Spanish hospital.
Truly a timeless love story.

Oyster Roasts And Assistant Mom

A couple of engineering and architecture firms decided to host oyster roasts in the same week and the lovable employees of Brett's work place were invited to each of them so on the coldest week we've  had yet, we had to go stand outside and mingle. Brett has fun co-workers, most of which have a minimum of four children so there were lots of small people running amuck and other tiny people strapped to larger people's torsos. Also there was cheesy chili and some meaty, lush oysters. The most notable part I assure you was that Brett and I won the company corn-hole tournament for the second year in a row. So.
Here we are with our canvas bag winnings. The winners used to get cash so these are forced smiles.

Here we are with the top losers. That's Alex and Jessie flanking Brett and me, and on the left there is the Bossman and his wife. They're awfully nice. I worry about appearing overly happy and simple when I gather with a collection of bright minds like these but they do a great job of remembering the details of my colorful, fanciful existence and you just don't expect that from people that make sure buildings and roads don't collapse. Please take note of Brett's clothes. We dubbed him Khaki-Man.

Brett has a collection of bosses due to that ranking hierarchy that offices have but his direct boss, Chris, has become one of his great pals and they go off together on their lunch break to shoot guns at the firing range and admire the products for sale at Home Depot. Sometimes I meet them for lunch and I can hardly contain my laughter. I hear Chris stories when Brett comes home from work and then when I come around, Chris tries to pretend to be professional and watching him withhold his laughter makes me struggle with mine and we wind up alway beaming at each other and never saying anything. 

At the next night's oyster roast, a very cold occasion, there must have been 200 engineers and architects from around town and only 2 folks from Brett's office showed up. We didn't know anyone there and were uninterested in mingling. So we signed in, slurped down a few oysters, and then went out for tacos. 

Pippa made up for lost cuddle time. Grace punished us with her indifference.

Here is a photo of Ellen at the office.

And here's a photo of Mom hard at work for Lux N' U.

On this day we couldn't set the tables because the rental guys hadn't finished unloading them yet. So there she is chatting away with them, keeping everyone from getting anything done.

That's what's going on around here.

Roof Top Fugitives Of Some Kind

Back in June, on a balmy, bright evening, Brett went over to Erik's house for Guys Night. I stayed home, excited to curl up with Pippa and a good movie. Whilst I ate my supper, an alert came through on my phone that a Wanted Fugitive was loose on Folly Beach, last seen scampering through the marsh grass towards James Island. I read the article with intrigue and learned that they had closed the roads to Folly, were searching cars, and had started a marsh-wide manhunt. At the time, the articles didn't list the crimes of the fugitive. They just stated that he was possibly armed and was considered dangerous. "Perfect!" I said to no one, because I was home alone on the one night there's a fugitive.
The night carried on. Brett whooped it up at Erik's house while I kept one eye on my rom-com and the other on the news update. Folly Beach Search Complete, Fugitive believed to be on James Island, etc.

I went to bed about 11:00, surprised that Brett wasn't home yet. He get's sleepy by 9:00. I left a few lights on for the Big Guy and drifted off to slumberland. At midnight I woke up and Brett wasn't home. "The fugitive!" I thought immediately, but I wasn't awake enough to think reasonably so I audibly moaned in agony before falling asleep again. In my unconscious mind, Brett had been caught in the crosshairs of the whole thing. Erik's house isn't far from a dark, seedy street. Definitely the street I would go to if I was on the run. Brett had been taken or stabbed. I was certain.
At 12:30 Brett came home without any flesh wounds and quietly slipped into bed and turned off the lights.
"Brett, there's a fugitive." I mumbled.
"What?"
"He's here on James Island. They can't find him."
"That's ok." Brett responded calmly. He could read through my sleepy remarks to see that I was actually quite concerned.
"I thought he stabbed you."
"Why?"
"He's dangerous and headed right towards us."
I only remember part of this exchange as I was mostly asleep. Brett and I drifted off and at 1:00am we heard the strangest, loud sound that immediately frightened all four of us. Grace and Pippa let out short, huffy grunts, their heads high, ears standing tall. The sound was right outside our bedroom window. It fired off again. The girls cocked their heads. Brett and I held our breath and listened.
"What is that?" one of us whispered.
The sound could best be described at hooting monkeys. Which is quite out of place on James Island so I became certain that the fugitive was sitting on our roof, calling to his friends in their secret monkey language to come pick him up.
I suggested this to Brett and he wasn't so convinced.
"It's probably just a monkey."
"We don't have monkeys. Why would there be a monkey?" I whispered back to him.
"An owl, then." Neither of us had ever heard this sound before.
"So I've lived in this house more than a year and happen to hear a "monkey" call for the first time on the same night that there is a fugitive on the loose?"
I saw Brett consider the odds of such things.
The howling roof top fugitive let out his call again and down the street we heard his friends respond with the same collection of gurgles.
"They're closing in on us. Do you have a gun?"
"Lu, I think it's all ok." Brett got up and peered through the front door window. "I don't see anything."
"Well of course not. He's on the roof!"
I appreciate Brett for being level-headed when my imagination gets the best of me, so I felt both relief and real fear when he began to prepare a method of home defense.
"I really don't think it's the fugitive." he said.

I fell back asleep telling Brett how scared I was and the blasting cackle woke us up again an hour later. We drifted from slumber to fear all night long and finally, when morning came we both got up and said, "Woah. That was awful." We were sleepy all day.

In the coming weeks we would tell many people about the strange sound we heard that night. Everyone had a suggestion. Birds, fighting cats, bad teenagers. We couldn't quite mimic the sound. We gave up our curiosity and two months later we would wake up one night to the same ordeal. This go-round I felt confident that it wasn't the fugitive, though they never did find him. It was much easier to decide that it was a critter of some kind but was no less easy to sleep through. The next morning we mimicked the sound to each other as best we could and then spread word through town about our rooftop squatter.
Some friends of ours suggested coyotes and Brett readily accepted this theory after listening to their sounds on Youtube and reading an article about the excessive coyote population in North America. Henceforth, we have suggested coyotes anytime we delight crowds with the tale of that strange night. Since all of this, the coyote monkeys have sat upon our rooftop many times to torment us while we sleep. If the howling doesn't wake us up, Grace and Pip defending their home will.

Last weekend, we were hanging out with our friends, Alex and Jessie, who have these great neighbors that we sometimes see and the neighbors we're quite happy to see us that day.
Turns out they had visited a Bird of Prey museum, met a Barred Owl, and thought of us. The husband, Casey, mimicked the call he learned at the museum while the wife, Emily, stood with a happy, expectant expression on her face and her hands open, ready to receive our rejoices. We laughed at Casey and Emily, mostly because we imagined them thinking of us on their adventure day and saying, "You know, Alex and Jessie's friends. The tall guy with the dark, hairy wife? That heard the monkey on their roof?"
We looked up Barred Owls on Youtube and were delighted, relived, and embarrassed to find out that that's exactly what we've been hearing and it sounds so owl-like when you're watching an owl do it. I'm convinced that our Barred Owl has a speech impediment because he's much more loud and shrill and scary than the videos would have you believe.

Happy Idiots

A Stream of Consciousness

Several times each week I think of things I want to tell you about on my blog space. When I sit to do the blogging I can't remember anything that has happened to me in the last month or so. What's that about? Do you think it's a weird thing to be conscious for most of the hours of each day but looking back you have no recollection of what kind of person you were for the whole year that you were nineteen? Was I good at talking to people back then? Was I awkward or graceful? Did people think I'd grow up to be alright or was I disconcerting?
I recently found a correspondence I had with another girl in high school - riotous letters we exchanged, and had you asked me about that girl, I'd have said we never really talked. I don't remember befriend and exchanging letters with her. What was I thinking about back then?

So to combat the memory loss, I take a look through the pictures on my phone, as they act as a digital journal of my days... except that most days I don't leave the house so the majority of my journal entries are pictures of Pippa. And that's because she follows me everywhere and then does cute, funny things and I think I must take a photo of it or I won't remember that it happened, like the rest of my life so far. Remember that time Pippa sat like this?

Or when I got ahold of her back legs and she just slumped over and a accepted it. 

Maybe I need one more picture of Brett telling Pippa a story. They look so sweet together.

But then I gather all of these pictures and realize that no one has any real interest in looking at Pippa in different positions. I, of course, can't understand why. But you do. 

The truth has already been stated. I don't leave the house much, so any news I've gathered has come to me through phone calls that were possibly initiated just to make sure that I'm still alive. 

Mom calls and keeps me updated about Bob things and Aunt Georgia's recently acquired collection of bruises and broken bits. Dad calls to offer his delivery services and ask questions about office things and if we'd like to come over for dinner. 

Ellen calls daily, less to check on me and more to be entertained because she does all of the office work too fast and then has hours to kill. I've been fully updated on her and Lee's big adventure through Europe and will share the wedding photos when we get them back and Ellen accepts that pregnant people are a little puffier than non-pregnant people and that the pictures are beautiful and special and in a few more weeks when she's a real whopper, she'll probably think she looks great in  those photos. 

I will share this photo though. 

This is Lee in a hospital in Barcelona. He got some awful food poisoning and spent the last four days of their trip laying around just like this. That breaks my little heart. 

From Brett I get in-person updates about life outside of our home and he tells me all about work things and what he's been reading while he's supposed to do work things and then we have meaty discussions about all of those intellectual things he's been reading and before we know it, we've got to do the dishes and get to bed and start the whole thing over again. 

In ten years I'll look back and wonder what I did the whole year that I was twenty-nine. Do you think that in that time I'll gain a new quality that will seem so natural that I can't imagine having lived life without it and then I'll wonder what I was like at twenty-nine? Did I do this thing yet? How did I function without it? How was I perceived?

In actual news, Brett has to wait until late December to find out if he passed his big test. He said the morning portion of the test was frighteningly easy but the afternoon portion was much less suspicious and gave him reason to smother out the confidence from the first part of the day. For a few days after the test he was still mulling over the questions that stumped him and texting them to his boss so they could "nerd-out" about it together. I'd like the record to show that I read one of the questions and selected the right answer without doing any math and instead, just using common sense and I've been impressed with myself since. Brett reveled in my intelligence, chuckled at himself and then went quiet. I'm still not sure what to make of it. 

A Wedding Week

Any week of mine that ends with a wedding Friday, Saturday or Sunday is a wedding week. These weeks start on Wednesday. Well, they start on Sunday like everyone else's week but the physical labor starts Wednesday. Monday and Tuesday are for sorting out what little bits and pieces you need for the wedding, answering emails, making a timeline for the wedding day, and when your sister is out of town, working 9-5 at your Dad's property management office. At this office, you get yelled at and chastised for things you didn't do by people that have never met you. Usually, you're being scolded for another person's inability to control their life. And they don't believe you when you sympathize. 

On Wednesday morning, you wander into your flower workshop and fill big plastic buckets with water and scoops of flower food. Ideally, you clean the shop ahead of time but if you didn't, now is the time to sweep up old leaves and put away lingering vases and lanterns. Then you drive all the way to North Charleston to your wonderful floral wholesalers who like you in particular because you never scold them when you have no ability to control your life. And sometimes you bring them cupcakes because you see other florists be very mean to them when flowers don't come in just right. The wholesalers also mistook you for a comedian early on in your courtship so they expect to be entertained when you come in and the cupcakes help distract them from this. Because your flowers probably didn't come in just right, you'll spend a few minutes rummaging around in the coolers looking for a good substitute for your missing blooms. Then you pack things up, say your goodbyes, and drive those blooms back to your workshop. 

It's afternoon by now and you want lunch but those flowers haven't been in water for weeks so you work alongside your hunger pangs and unpack each bloom, giving it's stem a fresh cut and popping off thorns, leaves, and headless stalks. This always takes more time than you think it will and by the end you just throw things into buckets and vow to come back later to process them. You will only half of the time. 

If you're really feeling motivated, you may even go ahead and pull flowers into the groups they'll be working with. The bridal bouquet gets the biggest and most perfect blooms, so you'll refer back to the recipe you created a few weeks ago when you worked out which flowers to order, and you'll collect all the ingredients for the bridal bouquet and put them together in a bucket. Then you do that again with the bridesmaids bouquets, boutonnieres, centerpieces, cake flowers, cocktail hour arrangements, etc. This is a good job to do because it shows you what you have leftover. Roses come in bunches of 25 so even if you just need 6, you have to buy the whole bunch. Once you pull and sort your blooms, you can use the extra 19 elsewhere or as a backup, because inevitably some rose's heads will fall off before the wedding day. 

On Thursday, you start making arrangements. You can start Wednesday if you need to but it's best to let those dehydrated, jet-lagged flowers have a good night's drink. If you haven't yet, you pull all the best blooms for the bridal bouquet, set those aside, and start building your centerpieces. This involves floral foam or chicken wire and lots of waterproof tape. You've got to make a solid foundation for your blooms or else they'll turn on you on the wedding day. Sometimes you start with your base greenery and sometimes you start with the biggest flowers and work your way down to the smallest ones and then fill in with greens. It depends on the "style" of arrangement you're making. This will take 10-25 minutes. Then you fill that little vase up with clean, cold water and repeat that process 6-14 times depending on table count and contractual agreement. But be careful not to make each centerpiece look exactly like the last one. They're supposed to look natural and not like you put the exact number of each bloom into each one in the exact same place. Maybe throw in one of your extra roses in case someone catches onto your recipe. That'll throw them off.

This will usually take all day. You'll listen to music and podcasts while you work and sometimes you'll laugh out loud and it will echo and then you remember that you're alone. If it's hot out, and you have the air on in the shop, your dogs will whine to come in and cool down. One of them will threaten to eat your flowers while the other drinks the chemical water from the buckets. Then they whine to go out again and at least 30 minutes of your day is spent letting them in and out because the whining clashes with the podcast. If you have any particularly obnoxious decorative items to make, you do that on this day as well. Big n' tall arrangements, garlands, flower crowns, etc. It's best to start these early so that you'll have time for troubleshooting or a total overhaul if things go awry.

On Friday you're a bit uninterested in spending another day in solitary confinement but it's bouquet day and those are the most fun to make. First you must survey yesterday's work because some flowers will spontaneously die overnight or shrivel up because their stem wasn't fully submerged or maybe the whole bucket is empty because the flowers gulped up everything and have been waiting for a refill all night. Some flowers, like dahlias and ranunculus, will spontaneously combust. Now is the time to redo any of yesterday's disasters.
Bouquet day means that you will do everything with one hand because the other will be holding an in-progress bouquet and it's all quite precariously gathered so you can't put it down or relocate your fingers once you've gotten them to hold a flower just right. Usually lots of things will happen when you're holding a bouquet. Your phone will ring, the dogs will want in, your neighbor invites himself into your yard and sashays through the garage to come find you. This usually startles you and then makes you mad. Most often, you'll realize that you didn't get all of the leaves and stubs off of a flower when you were processing things back on Wednesday and you have to do this using the one good hand and a clamp made from your elbow and your ribcage. Once that stem is clean, you can slide it into place in the bouquet. When you get things how you want them, you wrap that bad boy with floral tape and put it back into water so that it won't explode. Then you do the same for the bridesmaids. These are less exciting to make because all of the particularly lush blooms went into the bridal bouquet and you have to make 8 or 9 of these and they do need to be relatively identical or else they can start to look too much like the bridal bouquet or more grandiose than the others, etc. If you have more than 5 bridesmaids, I'm annoyed by you. It's quite difficult to keep all of these the same size.

Later that day you must begin to consider how you will pack everything into your cars and what other items you need. Most weddings require about 50 candles and cylinders of various sizes, so now is the time to pull those and make sure they are clean and that the candles don't look too much like you've used them for the last 6 weddings. Consider whether or not you will need any ladders, cable ties, wires, nails, draping, and other hard goods for installations. On Friday night you will fall asleep to this packing list.

Saturday morning is the worst part of the whole deal. You need to wake up early to make boutonnieres and corsages. You can't make those ahead of time because they won't be in water ever again. So while you wake up and scamper straight out to the garage, your husband always makes you some breakfast and sometimes packs you a lunch because he knows that you will be much too busy on this day to worry about feeding yourself. Boutonnieres take about 5-7 minuets each and they're the worst because in addition to the 12 bro's the Groom has named as groomsmen, lots of Dad's and grandpas and officiants, and nephews, and people of note get them so you usually have to make 20 in a hurry. Wrist corsages for the mothers are my least favorite thing to make. I hate everything about them and would gladly never make one again. When this is finished, you need to change out the water in the bouquet vases because that water always goes brown overnight and you can't hand in dirty water with the bouquets. The bouquets must also be wrapped in ribbon at this time so you've got to get scissors and pins and try to be slow and precise even though you're in a hurry.

When it's time to load up the cars, you remember to go put on a professional, black outfit. Then you make your husband stop what he's doing and pull the cars around back and start loading in the heavy candle boxes. He happily obliges but sometimes you find him elsewhere digging a hole or inspecting the roof and you wonder what it's like in his brain.
About 10 minutes before take off, your sweet mama arrives to help load the cars, but you've done that already and she is relieved. Your husband hands you a lunch box and a water bottle and you go survey the flower-shop and your mental packing list. With much relief and nervous energy, you hop into your car and set off for the venue. Mom drives carefully behind you. She does not like to drive the car that has been packed with the clinking glassware.
In some awful cases, you have to deliver the bouquets to where the girls are getting ready, and the boutonnieres to where the guys are getting ready and only then can you go to the venue to set up. Mom will follow you into the different houses just to see what's going on in there.

At the venue you take everything out of the cars again. Sometimes there is no convenient place to park the car when you unload and you get yelled at by venue staff. The heavy candle boxes get put into a corner for now and the buckets of loose flowers and the precariously packed arrangements come inside and get lined up along a back wall, away from the band's equipment and caterer's crates and the lighting guy's ladders. Mom usually looses focus here and wanders off to survey the scene. You use this time to work out an order of operations. Sometimes the rental companies have not delivered the tables yet so you have to stand around and wait for them or find something else to do. Installations like arbors, floral chandeliers, and wrapping tent poles with greenery can be done at this time. This is usually hot work because the arbors are always out in the sun and the wedding is still hours from now and you know that your flowers will wilt long before the first guest arrives. Sometimes you water-tube things, but sometime that isn't practical. You'll spend some time affixing greenery and flowers to welcome signs and picture frames. This is never easy because signs don't have hooks and things for flowers. You consider glueing things in place. 

It is now lunchtime and Mom has lost interest. You are both hungry and Mom's standards are lower than yours. She suggests that we're basically done and should go have lunch. You tell her we just have to set the tables and drape the mantle with garland and then we can go. Once the tables have their linens, we set the centerpieces and candles out in an attractive fashion. While Mom chooses the best candles, you drape the mantle with garland and dot it with loose blooms. These will also shrivel before the photographer arrives. Mom begins packing the car but you didn't tell her about the few other things you sill need to do so you try to do those secretly and quickly. Inevitably, a caterer or photographer wants loose blooms to scatter about for various reasons so you have to go back to the car and scrounge up some things for them. These are the dregs of society (the flowers I mean). They didn't make the cut for bouquets or arrangements. They have discolorations or missing petals and that's all you have to hand to the photographer. You are mildly embarrassed. Mom is in the car with the AC on. You do a final walk-through, touch up a few things, and then you make a mad dash out of that place before the planner finds something for you to do. 

You take Mom to a late lunch. She always orders unsweet tea. When you get home, you're very tired but you need to get the leftover things out of your car because a few times you didn't and your car took on a musky, earthy aroma. (You like the smell but everyone else thinks its gross.) Usually you will shower and nap and then your happy husband will tell you that he signed us up to go to someone's dinner party. Now you must find an outfit you can convert back into work clothes and your back is a little sore.

At the dinner party, you compulsively check your phone to see if the planner has called with a disaster and also to not loose track of time. The wedding ends at 11:00 and you have to be there to clean up and collect your candles and vases and take down the arbor. You like to get there before the newlyweds make their exit so that you can swoop in immediately and corral your things to one corner. Guests tend to take vases and candles home with them. On a few occasions you have opened car doors and taken your things out of stranger's backseats. It's easy. You distract them with a pretty flower and make the switch when they reach out for that fluffy bloom. They are usually drunk. 

Your husband does not like to wait for the official end time and will sometimes sneak in the back of a space and begin collecting. Your are torn between encouraging and scolding him. 

When the bright lights turn on, the wedding is over and it's a manic dash to clean. Caterers strip tables, lighting guys drop chandeliers and the band wheels equipment briskly through the halls. You must stay out of the way while also holding your ground. You carefully pack things while your husband carries things out to your car. You jockeyed for a good parking place with the other vendors before teardown began. Even though you've told him not to at every teardown for the last three years, your husband likes to carry as many glass things to the car at once. He does this partially out of athletic curiosity and partially out of stubbornness. As the florist, you are held responsible if there is any greenery or flower bits strewn about the venue so you must go around and pick up leaves and petals or risk being blacklisted. Your husband is ready to go but he packed the car so fast that you didn't get to take inventory so you do a few walk-throughs checking for rogue vases and candles. You finally climb into the car and breathe a sigh of relief. 

"Fooled 'em again" we say. 

On Sunday, you have to clean the flowershop because the dirty water and twiggy stumps will start to smell. You want nothing to do with the flowershop on this day and this becomes a laborious task. 

Last week, I had a Saturday and a Sunday wedding. These two bouquets are from these two celebrations. We got back from the Sunday wedding at 10:30 and I fell straight to sleep. 

A double wedding weekend is a whole different beast.