Baldur

Rhode Island is heavily Roman Catholic. It had been assumed that a Gay Marriage Bill could never pass.
It was a huge surprise to say the least.
Our Bishop very publically changed his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican after the Democrat-sponsored Bill was passed. (If anything this made him a bit irrelevant.)
So much for separation of Church and State

Indeed the Hawaiian Senate has passed their version of the Bill, the Governor has said he will sign it

Baldur

I think it is no secret here that Baldur is all but computer illiterate. This is the case despite the fact that I have had an online presence since 1995, corresponding exactly from when I first met Robert.
Were it not for Robert I severely doubt that even at this late date I would never have even seen the Internet.
All that being said Baldur needed to print out a handful of invitations.

They were first composed offline on a scratch pad and then painstaking typed with my left index finger in an attractive font.
My intentions were a matte finished flat card with black lettering, no extraneous RSVP enclosure envelopes.
If the guest didn't promptly RSVP I would hunt them down. Period.

Robert then offered to print the invitations himself.

Dear Lord, when I came home that afternoon I nearly had a stroke.
He printed them on glossy folded cardstock and got artistic with stock images of clumps of wildflowers and fluttering butterflies.
My font was gone and the color of the text became deep red

NO NO NO NO

He also changed the spacing between lines and none of it made any sense anymore:

Mr Baldur Bear and


Mr Robert Soon-to-be-Bear
Request your presence
at their nuptials
on Saturday

October 26th, 2013 at the Intimate
Restaurant 14 Drury

Lane, Primrose


RI at noon

etc etc

Baldur

EEEK, rarely has Baldur needed a drink so badly.
He insisted that wedding invitations were always printed on a folded card.
Whereas I am not a strict traditionalist, and this in itself wasn't a horrible thing, the butterrflies, wildflowers, red font and spacing needed to go.

They were all reprinted to my specs, whew!.

Baldur

butterrflies - r = butterflies

Baldur

Well almost to my specs.
The glossy paper remained but was no longer folded
The font was returned but the spacing only slightly improved.
Each time I printed a sample something moved. There were obviously gremlins in the printer.
The wildflowers and butterflies were permanently banished.

Baldur

The clothes

Baldur immediately knew he wanted a ruffled-front pink tuxedo shirt for the wedding. Some of the discussion on this was bantered about here on Radio Baldur a couple months ago.
Finding such a shirt was proving rather difficult. They have not been fashionable in 40 years (and their fashion status was dubious even then).
Finally the shirt was found on a website called Brightcoloredtuxedos.com.
They had everything imaginable in men's formalwear in dyed to match bright colors.
In addition to the shirt I could have gotten a pink tuxedo, cummerbund, pocket square, bow tie, suspenders, socks, shoes, top hat and cane. Heavens.
All this was also available in powder blue, shamrock, scarlet, yellow, pumpkin and duck hunter camo!

The shirt was ordered.
Baldur is plus sized. The shirt needed to be both XXL and Tall sized. They did sell XXL. The problem being that the shirtsleeves would probably be too short.
I made a pre-emptive visit to Tevya, the gentleman who reworks the vintage clothing I buy at thrift shops. When asked about the possibility of altering them when the shirt arrived. Tevya said 'Not to worry we do something'.
OK problem hypothetically solved.....
until the shirt arrived.

The sleeves were fine, the torso of the shirt however just didn't fit.
It was a good 1.5" too narrow and didn't come close to buttoning.
I brought the shirt to Tevya.
'This I cannot fix, you need to lose weight, either that or take a pair of scissors and cut the shirt up the back.'

Baldur went on a crash diet with barely a month to go.
Breakfasts were either an eggwhite fritatta with vegetables or a measured cup of oatmeal, cooked without sweetener.
Mid day snacks were a piece of fruit and a tablespoon of peanut butter.
Suppers were either a huge tossed salad or a mass of steamed vegetables (mainly cruciferous).
I drank only water, but lots of it.
I lost 25 pounds and wore the shirt!

Robert had a plain pink dress shirt in his closet.
We each had an array of black and grey trousers and jackets, we would come up with our wedding day apparel from those.

We wanted to wear bow ties. There are a couple of seamstresses in Maine that custom make them, we'd previously ordered ties from both of these women.
After searching their websites we each chose a pink and grey patterned silk fabric and Robert ordered the ties.

Baldur

The Cake

There are lots and lots of wedding cake ideas on the Internet. In working out the details on this bit of baked puffery Baldur came his closest to morphing into Bridezilla.

My original concept was a simple single tiered cake, with icing roses.
Since we were definitely not a traditional couple I wanted the cake to be pink
Two of my good friends, Ben & Jerry, suggested I ask a certain local baker to make it. He is a mutual friend and is quite renowned. His cakes have appeared in Martha Stewart's wedding guides. He is the best that there is here in Southern New England. But frankly, he was out of my price range.

I told them I would like to find a local baker to make me a simple cake.

A week passes and Ben & Jerry say they would like to provide the cake for the wedding. I had to assume that they were going to contract the above mentioned baker.
Perhaps he owed them a favor, in any case I agreed.

'Now remember most of all that I have guests who are severely allergic to nuts, and who also can't eat cherries. Even almond extract needs to be avoided. They could die.' I explained.

They said they understood.

Ben said he saw a great cake topper online...it was two brown bears wearing top hats hugging each other. I replied with 'No hugging animorphic creatures please.'
Then Ben said he thought a rainbow cake would be real cool. I also said no to rainbows, adding caveats for no glitter, no mirror balls, no feather boas, no transvestite brides. Baldur just is a little too serious.

Baldur sat both Ben And Jerry down and told them what he wanted.:
A pink cake, with red jelly between the layers , frosted in pale pink buttercream, with pink icing roses.
The pink was to be pastel, not whore's thong pink. The roses however could be a variety of pink shades, I was also not averse to silver dragees.
They said they understood.
They asked me if I wanted it covered in fondant. I said 'No fondant just buttercream please.'

A couple days go by and Ben calls again. He said he saw a really great cake, covered in fondant decorated to look like a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window design, As wonderful as that sounded I kept with the original plan saying:
'Just the pink cake with roses please.

Baldur

The RSVP calls were coming in.
The only missing guest was going to be Kat, my godchild. She could attend the ceremony but had to race off immediately afterwards.
Kat plays in her High School marching band, and was required to play at a football game that day. There are no excused absences, each event is graded.
She is an honor student with no absences on her record.
I had forgotten how much High School sucked.

Baldur

Robert and I went to the Town Hall and got our marriage license.
This was really happening
It went really well with no surprises.

I got home and decided to call Reverend Remi and asked if we could add the 'Jumping Over the Broom' tradition to the ceremony.
She loved the idea. Remi wrote an extra bit into the service, Baldur went looking for an appropriate broom.

In the end I took the very medieval looking handcrafted short broom that hangs on a hook under the mantel here at Boughbreak and wired a few flowers onto it.
Very easy.

Our jumping over the broom was a nice addition and it caused lots of discussion afterwards. About 3/4 of the guests had never heard of it before.

Baldur

We found our rings on Etsy.com.
Baldur wanted Rose Gold, Robert wanted a rather wide plain band.
We needed to meet both of these demands and find rings that could be had in size 15 for me and size 10 for him.
A gentleman on Etsy makes plated tungsten carbide rings and was happy to make them in a Rose Gold finish.
We ordered them, they arrived, mine was too large.
We sent mine back, and got a size 14.5 instead.
It fits

Baldur

Flowers

Baldur wanted to have boutonnieres for Robert and himself.
I contracted a local florist to make them.
A small slightly opened pink rose for each of us combined with a pale grey Dusty Miller leaf.
I really wanted to make the centerpiece myself incorporating the same colours.
I used a low Chinese bowl filled with Oasis floral arranging foam.
Into this was inserted lots of sprigs of Dusty Miller from my garden. These leaves are pale grey and feel like velvet.
At the market I purchased a bunch of miniature palest pink carnations and had the market florist pull out his best medium pink barely opened tea roses. Together with the pale grey these were lovely and rather modern.
Modern tea roses have almost no scent, so Baldur added sprigs of Old Rose scented geranium to the arrangement.. oh the trickery!

Baldur

Baldur asked his adult son and daughter to act as witnesses for the ceremony, and to officially sign the wedding license.
There would be no Best Man, Maid of honor, Ushers, Bridesmaids, Flowergirls, Ringbearers, Choirs of Angels or trained sea lions.

Nonetheless someone needed to toast the happy couple at the beginning of the reception. I called my son in California.
He, my lovely Daughter in Law and my Grandson Kanye were flying in for the wedding. Nile was happy to give the toast and set about composing a brief speech.
Baldur had never heard his son speak publically.. this could be interesting.

InTheOcean

Sea lions?

Baldur

I asked my daughter, Miss Noelle, to come by and help make wedding favours.
She was very excited about the wedding and wanted to have more of a part in it.
First Baldur needed to come up with a project design and gather the materials.

Michael's craft stores sell neat little corked clear glass bottles that look antique. I would need 20 to be on the safe side. These were $1.19 (USD) each. Of course none of the stores had more than a few. It took 5 trips to different Michael's to secure enough.

I wanted to fill the bottles with colour-coordinated Jelly Beans.
Our local gourmet candy store sells Jelly Belly beans for $8.99/lb by individual colour. (Remember I need to avoid tree nut and cherry flavours) so I chose a mixture of 10% French Vanilla (off white), 10% Dr. Pepper (deepest brownish red), 20% Strawberry Jelly (deep solid pink), 20% Strawberry Daiquiri (medium mottled pink) and 40% Strawberry Shortcake (light mottled pink).
I bought a 1 lb bag in these proportions to figure out how much I would need to fill 20 bottles. The answer was 8 pounds, and absolutely no nibbling if I were to fill them.
Then I bought a spool of brass wire and ordered 2 varieties (20 each) of small antique brass heart jewelry findings off of the Etsy site.
Baldur loves Etsy.
We would cut a 6" length of brass wire, attach a different small brass heart to each end and wrap this around the neck of each bottle.
There would also need to be a label for each.
Baldur got to mess with fonts and the printer again.
I wanted something in Latin to pay tribute to the Roman Catholic Church that was not sanctioning the ceremony, so I went online and translated 'in joyous union' into Latin.
I followed it with our names and the date:

'exultans in unione'
Robert *******
Baldur Bear
October 26, 2013

Very nice, now I needed fancy paper.
I went to Michael's hoping for a pink on pale pink mini patterned scrapbook type paper of medium weight. The best scenario would be a William Morris all over mini medieval floral. No such luck,
They had an opaque white mini leafy pattern on translucent white vellum and a medium pink woven texture card stock.
Baldur printed the info on the vellum and layered it over the pink cardstock, so each favour would have stacked labels.
Very odd but sexy.

Baldur

What I admit never occurred to me was the fact that Miss Noelle inherited none of the Martha Stewart gene.
We never laughed so much, she never swore so much. We threaded labels and brass hearts onto wire, crimped the ends, tried to wrap each bottle in an identical manner.
She was grateful there were only 20 favours to make. This project took hours and a good quantity of Butterscotch Schnappes to complete.
They were indeed lovely.

Baldur

#10946
painstaking + ly = painstakingly

InTheOcean

Robert should get a TD..

Baldur

Robert puts up with an awful lot living with Baldur. He should be sainted.

Baldur

With the calendar advancing the race was on
Baldur and Robert needed to babyproof Boughbreak and get the guestroom in order. My California family, starring baby Kanye, was staying with us for a week
There are lots of fragile and fascinating objects here, anything that sat lower than 5' from the floor needed to be unbreakable or packed away.
We got those plastic electric outlet guards, used sturdy zip-ties to lock and cabinet doors that we could. That measure alone secured the under the sink toxic chemicals, the Waterford crystal, the pysanky eggs, the smaller pieces of arts and crafts pottery and the liquor decanters.
I relocated 1/3 of the furniture from the guestroom into the downstairs family room. All the cords on the windowblinds were secured at the top of the fixtures. I half-emptied the closet for their use.

We scrubbed, sanitized, polished, waxed ... we vaccumed up dust bunnies.

I figured I would sleep for a week once they left.

Baldur

and - d +y = any