I'm getting married. We're not rich, and I need solid ideas for containing costs. It looks like I have to take out a loan as it is.
I met Chelsea Rose Dasso on March 1st of 2007. I was the IT Director for a clothing chain that had a store in the Bellevue Square Mall, and I stopped in at a mall store called Teavana to buy a teapot and some cups that looked like they'd go well with my coffee table. It should have taken ten minutes, but I made it take almost two hours so I could talk to the cute clerk. I juggled CD's from the rack, and browsed through the whole store, got her talking about music, and spent $220 so her commission would be worth the time.
I came back the following Sunday and asked her out in front of about two dozen people. (That's how I know she doesn't like scenes.) She gave me an e-mail address; it was wrong, but I can't take a hint, so I went back to the store. She was talking with a co-worker when I walked in, why-hasn't-he-emailed, I-must-have-come-off-like-some-stupid-desperate-kid, and the other guy saw me first. On hearing the words, my face changed -- and then he realized who I must be, so his face changed... and Chelsea turned around with her Customer Face already on, and said "Hi! How are you?"
"Well, I think this e-mail address isn't right -- I tried it about 16 ways in case of typos and nothing routed." She said something about her handwriting that flew right by, and wrote her address down again with a phone number. (Ah -- different typo, an edge case I didn't test.) I said thank you and I'd contact her tonight, and then I went home and sent an e-mail. When that actually succeeded, I looked her up. MySpace, Facebook, Live, everything I could think of. Doesn't everyone?
She cosplayed Illuminati Kozi (very, very well) at SakuraCon the previous summer, but was asked to leave because her costume violated decency rules, giggity. She wasn't the 25 I thought; she was 18. (I was 29.) This was a deal-breaker, as far as I was concerned, but Taenia and Maathi pointed out that as long as I thought she was 25 based on how she acted and carried herself, maybe I was being narrow-minded. Okay, fine. First date. I got a speeding ticket on the way there, and still wasn't late. Still, when she got off work, all that was open was Denny's. Eggs Benedict and movie conversation ran until almost dawn. Turned out she held that full-time job while managing a full-time courseload at Seattle Central Community College, and lived alone on Capitol Hill in Seattle in a culture where none of her peers could handle the rent with less than two roommates. As my father put it after meeting her, "she's damn old for 18."
That was March 4 of 2007.
A few months later, we were walking someplace and I had a copy of Neutron Star in my bag, when she asked what a neutron star is.
"Well, a star of the right size -- bigger than ours, but less than five times as big -- gets done becoming a red giant and throwing its mass away in nova shells, what's left collapses into a mass so dense that the 99% nothing between atoms closes to contact and the result is so heavy that a teaspoonful weighs billions of tons."
...
"...plus the weight of the spoon."
I just stared. I could think of nothing.
Chelsea, driving home a few weeks later: "That star is super bright. Which one is it?"
"Honey, that's not a star, that's Venus."
"...ssssssslut."
I kept us on the road, but I'm not sure how.
She loves the zoo. She's never happier than at the zoo. June 27, 2011, I took her to the best zoo in the country, in San Diego. She had become a dog groomer and trainer, and so the hyena and wild dog exhibits were her favorite. I loved the panther and the baby hippo, and the eagle that caught an illicit rabbit in its enclosure was worth a laugh (they're not deliberately fed live prey). But she doesn't like scenes!
So there's a cable car that stretches across the park. If you take it, you can see the whole place, but only the people in the car can see you. I put the ring in her lap and confessed that the bag I'd been hiding through TSA didn't have her birthday present in it. She sounded painfully disappointed as she looked down... "Oh.....! OH."
"Marry me?"
"Okay."
I remember dinner that night because the restaurant staff were getting high just standing next to us, but little else.
But Jesus! Wedding vendors want aaaaall the money! I'm talking to some lenders just to make the event happen at all, but how do you people manage to get married without being indentured for 20 years??
The venue is $6.2k. The cake, a friend is making, but that's worse because she's charging "whatever you want to bless our family with", and she has a new baby, and I can't see her costs. Chelsea's mother (who is white hot at 50
) is making the dresses, bride and bridesmaids, and I can't see her costs either, but she won't starve either way. (The cake woman might.) I have yet to finalize anything with a caterer, but the alcohol looks formidable -- I'm heading to Oregon, the Land of No Sales Tax And Way Lower Alcohol Taxes, to drop roughly $1k on hooch. The caterer has to serve that for insurance reasons. How does one cut corners on this stuff?
It was so tacky it was a blast!