The wedding I mentioned in my last entry came and went. S and I were in attendance, and it was great. The entire trip was great. All the anxiety I felt about leaving the kids instantly melted when the plane touched down in Palm Springs. It was out of sight, out of mind, to be honest. Of course, we checked in on them from time to time, but I didn't worry about them once. My sister-in-law assured me that she had everything under control, and I took her at her word. I mean, it was only five days. And the kids probably would have extended it a bit longer if they could have. Auntie is much more lenient with the screen time and junk food than are the parents.
I went into the trip with the mindset that I was ready to do as much or as little as need be. I figured S would have some girl things to do -- makeup and hair and whatnot -- and she also might get tasked with some last minute logistical issues, being a close friend of the bride, so I might get left on my own or asked to help with said tasks. I was ready to go either way, and I got a mix of each.
Thursday night and Friday morning were the work shifts. E (the bride) wanted to print out a little Polaroid picture of every guest with their table number and dinner order, and then put them in little stands, and then that would be how people would know the seating arrangement. It's a very cool idea, giving people little mementos of the evening (most the pictures were of fun times with E and/or her husband; mine was from when we met up in Tacoma), but it's a lot of work and something that should be done a week and a half, not a day and a half, before the actual wedding. But there was some issue getting the right printer -- one that is compatible with a certain iPhone photo app -- so it got put off to the last moment. And so it got pushed onto E's (and S's) good friend M, and since M was staying in an Airbnb with us, that meant it also got pushed onto us. We put in a good, I'll say, seven hours on it, but we got it done.
It was kinda fun, actually. Well, not fun but satisfying. We had our system down. S and M were doing the hard work, labeling and printing the photos in the app and then sending them to the printer. I was retrieving them, affixing the food sticker (cow, fish, or carrot*), quality-checking them, and sorting them into envelops. In the struggle to get the right printer, we ended up with two printers, and that turned out to be a godsend, as we wouldn't have finished with just one. The main issue is that the battery would run down after a few prints, and it used more juice than the power cable could provide, so even keeping it plugged in all the time didn't work. We would have to print a few, wait a few minutes, print a few more, wait a few more minutes, and so on. Being that there were 170 photos, you can see why it took so long.
*S accidentally put me down for vegetarian, and I was super disappointed, until I realized that I could put any sticker I wanted on my photo, so I put on a beef sticker. I was some sort of brisket, and it was delicious.
The only "mistake" we made is that we organized them by table, but we should have put them in alphabetical order. At the reception, all the photos were put in little stands and placed on a big table at the front of the venue. So, when a guest would come in, they would find their picture and know what dinner table they were at, and then they would put the photo by their dinner plate so the servers knew what meal to serve. But since the photos were organized on the big table by dinner table, guests didn't know where to look for their picture, because they didn't know what dinner table they were at (because that was the entire point of the photos in the first place). If instead the photos would have been sorted on the big table alphabetically, it would have been perfect. But I put that on the wedding planner, not on us. We didn't know the exact system, and we didn't set up the photos on the big table. We printed them up and handed them over. It's out of our hands after that.
Oh geez, it's 10:30 pm already on a work night (Halloween, and my sister's birthday, as it were), and I've only made it through like a fifth of the trip. I'm gonna have to go lightning round for the rest of it.
- The wedding and reception were wonderful. E is first generation Mexican-American, and her husband was born and raised in Iran, so it was an interesting mix of cultures. They had two ceremonies -- one traditional Catholic and one Persian.
- There was more dancing at the reception than at any wedding reception I've ever attended, including my own wedding, and we had a lot of dancing at my wedding. It was super fun, but I couldn't keep up. Also, if I'm being totally honest, I didn't love the music. I wanted more jams, and there were some (a good dose of Michael Jackson), but it was mostly Latino music (one side of the aisle would mob the floor) or Persian music (the other side of the aisle would mob the floor). Basically, I wanted more music I knew, which is a lot to ask, being that of the 170 people who attended the wedding, I was probably, like, 150th in importance.
- After the wedding, S wanted fries, so we went to In-N-Out burger at 12:30 in the morning, and I got a burger and a milkshake. Neither one was that great, to be honest, but it was still fun.
- On the flight home, I watch a movie called Snack Shack, which I found absolutely delightful. I was expecting a straightforward goofy teen comedy (a la Booksmart, one of my favorites), but it was a bit more heartfelt than that. I'm a sucker for teen stories set in the '90s (Derry Girls) because that's when I was teenager, and I'm a sucker for movies in which young dudes call each other pussies and bitches, but love and stand up for one another when the chips are down (Stand By Me), and Snack Shack falls into the intersection of the sets of such movies, so it's no wonder I liked it.
- I also watched the documentary Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond. It was weird but worth a watch.
- Some pics of the greater La Quinta/Indian Wells/Coachella/Palm Springs area, and then I'm out.
Until next time...