domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

A year ago, Nick and I got married.

Story that some of you have not heard:

The night before we got married, we were hanging out in the hotel and hungry, and we took it into our heads to go hit a diner and get some breakfast (at ten at night, like you do). The internet gave us several promising choices, and we picked on that sounded decent and easy to locate, and we headed off.

We parked in a parking lot about two blocks away from the diner, a parking lot that was clearly associated with some college. As we were getting out of our car, an aging hippie walking his dog was cutting through the lot, and we called over to ask him if he thought it was okay for us to park there for a while. He seemed to feel that this was okay, and then noticed our license plates.

Apparently, he had once been to this really amazing Dead concert in Ohio, and he looooved Ohio.

“Where’re you going?” he asked us.

“Oh,” we said, “we’re just going to this diner over on the corner here, just getting something to eat.”

He looked at us like we’d lost our minds. “No, no, man, that’s not where you want to go,” he said. “You want to go to Mel’s, over on Bloor.”

Well, okay. The internet had suggested this other place, but hey, real live person will often outweigh internet for us. (This, as it turns out, is almost always a mistake.)

“Yeah?” we said. “How do we get there?”

“You just start going like–go down this street, here, and then turn left, and go for a while and there’s Bloor. Turn right and go a few more blocks. You can’t miss it.”

In the future, possibly we would be wise to remember that taking directions from a stoned aging hippie who you meet in a parking lot in the middle of the night is not actually the best course of action, but hey, what the hell, he said that it was good, and we had time, and…

So we set off and start walking. We’re just sort of chatting and admiring the houses when it strikes us that we’ve been walking for quite a long time. We figure that we’ll just go to the next major intersection, and if that’s not it, we’ll turn around and head back to our first option.

At the next major intersection, we were forced to admit that the hippie’s directions were shit. But oh! We had our trusty phones with us, which meant that we had the wonders of Google right at our fingertips.

We located the address of Mel’s, punched it into Google Maps, and stared at the directions that presented themselves: Travel three miles in the direction from which we’d just come.

Sane people, which is to say “people who are not us”, maybe would have admitted defeat at this point. But if we just headed back three miles and then turned left and walked a mile and a half and then turned right and walked another mile or two, we’d be there! Because there is something wrong with us, this sounded like an okay plan, and so we started walking.

About an hour and a half later, we’d made it to Mel’s, where we had mediocre pancakes. We headed back towards our car and realized that we could catch the last train, effectively eliminating two miles of our rather lengthy walk, so we only had to walk the half-mile to the train station and the remaining half-mile to our car.

Interesting aside: this was not the first time in our relationship that we somehow managed to turn a planned mile-long walk into an accidental ten-mile hike. I suspect that it will not be the last, either.

The next morning we got up and started to dress for the wedding. I was good to go, and went to put on my shoes, only to find that they were excruciating. The sandals that I’d worn the night before had rubbed the tops of my feet raw, right where my cute little strappy sandals came together in a knot. Ouch.

So for the wedding itself, I ended up barefoot. Afterwards, I went to put on the Crocs that I’d worn to the courthouse, and realized that somehow, I’d managed to leave the hotel, drive downtown, walk from the garage to the courthouse, and take off my shoes–all without realizing that I was wearing one of my Crocs (size M, navy blue) and one of Nick’s (size L, black). Nothing but class around here, I tell you.

In a moderately amusing turn, a friend of ours recently sent us a link to this post about inspirational civil ceremonies on WeddingBee, which has two of our wedding pictures in it. They commented on my bare feet, and I’m rather charmed that people are viewing it as intentional. Somehow, that sounds better than admitting that we got lost the night before and I couldn’t wear my shoes.

So today we’ve been married for a year. It’s gone pretty well, I think. We’re curled up in our cosy bed in our lovely house, covered in our stupid kitties. It’s pretty good.