We did it!

Well, due to everything going on, I've been a bit slow in posting this... actually we just passed our 3 week wedding anniversary. I have to say that as we walked... er... kind of briskly... out of the church at the end of the ceremony (thanks to Aunt Georgette for this "action-shot"!) I was the happiest and most excited I think I've been in a very long time! Everything in the wedding went wonderfully. The ceremony was great. The priest who married us (Fr. Andrej) had a very warm character and was much more concerned with maintaining the feeling of the day than the formalities of the ceremony, which really helped to make everything feel extra special, rather than nerve-wracking. We were surrounded by close friends and family, and I don't think we could have had a better wedding. Thanks to everyone who could come!

As for details...


My day started pretty early in the morning with a trip to the farmers' market to pick up the flowers. I had decided long ago that I wanted lilies, and I wanted to make the bouquets myself. This actually turned out to be pretty fun. The lilies when we picked them up were mostly closed... which is good for shelf life I suppose, but not so pretty, and we wanted pretty that day. So, we had been told to put them in a bit of warm water and they should open up. Sure enough, we put them in a bucket of warm-ish water and you could almost watch them opening! It was truely amazing! So, my best friend and maid of honour came over to have breakfast and start the process of making the bouquets and later getting ourselves ready. This is a great picture of us at the hair-dresser. Love the aluminum-foil Mel!!!

I guess everyone hopes for a nice sunny wedding day. I tried not to get my hopes up, especially knowing how tempermental Nova Scotia weather can be, and also that it would do whatever it was going to do and it was well beyond my control. Well, it rained. It rained all day. It threatened to let up for a little while... but then it started raining again. Fortunately we had taken the forecast seriously and went out and bought a big black and white golf umbrella the day before. This most certainly came in handy and actually made a pretty nice accessory for photos (example, this one below from our official photographer Jule Malet-Veale)! This lovely umbrella also made it possible to follow our original plan of walking from the church to the reception. It was much less of a mass march up the hill than we'd hoped with a sunny day in our imaginations, but we had a blast. Still riding high from the ceremony, and that "We did it!" feeling, we walked out of the church, up Spring Garden Rd (one of the main downtown streets for those who don't know Halifax), up past the Folklore center and Port of Wines, and then up the hill to the grounds of R.A. Park. We had a few people stop and honk, and offer congratulations along the way, and our photographer played papparazzi with us, which was a hoot.



Of course it was after that things turned south a bit. As we were trying to get some pictures outside (in the rain) before going in to dinner, I noticed my Dad on a cell phone. This is not a normal occurance, and he didn't look particularly happy about whatever was going on, so I knew something was up. Fortunately, my first thought that someone was seriously ill was not so, but it turned out my Dad was on the phone with the police to report that the car had been broken into while we were in the church and my backpack with my laptop, iPod, other misc item, my handbag with my bank and credit cards and my overnight back had been stolen. My first thought of "oh no, not my laptop" came with a terrible sinking realization... i hadn't backed up. I didn't exactly take the news well, and our photo-session got cut short.

So, pretty much the first thing I got to do as a married woman was call and cancel my bank and credit cards. F-u-n. All the while trying to remember when exactly I had last backed up my data and analysis, and what I had done in between. While trying to deal with being on hold, and attempt to maintain? regain? some composure, my new husband asked if I wanted my Mom. Now, don't get me wrong, I love my Mom, and normally her presence would most certainly be requested if possible in such a situation, but I just thought "why do I need my Mom? I don't want you to leave"... I suddenly realized I had my husband, and that was all I needed. Then I came out of the office where I was using the phone and I had friends all waiting to console me too. So after my Mom scurried me off to the bathroom to compose myself some more, and literally powder my nose, I was ready to put it behind me (temporarily anyway) and try to enjoy the reception.

And the reception was great! I think it was better than we could have hoped. (Minus perhaps some carefully considered musical selections that were the reason for having the laptop with us in the first place.) The food was great, everyone seemed to be having a good time. The cake... oh the cake was beautiful... and tasted amazing... I could barely believe my eyes when I saw it. :) And the U-shaped table, despite it's big-ness, created a nice feeling of everyone sitting together. We had candles on the table rather than flowers, and they gave the whole room a nice warm glow. Unfortunately this thwarts most digital photographers... probably even our pro had some trouble with the lighting conditions... but it felt very elegant yet relaxed, and I was thrilled.



Probably one of the best things we did was serve the cake. It was a great way to get to talk to everyone, and we had lots of fun doing it. I think the expressions on our faces say it all. One thing that might be good to note however: chocolate cake + white dress = no, no. Eventually we gave up and I handed around napkins not pieces of cake... unfortunately Shawn got to experience the staining power of chocolate due to some early cake serving bumbles. Sorry!

At the very end of the reception, we made another attempt to get some pictures... at this point it was getting rather difficult as everyone was pretty tired. It seems my blinking reflex becomes more of a problem the more tired I get, and I kept slouching. Drats. Anyway, our photographer was great... and I think I'll make a separate blog post about that... so I think she managed to pull a few good ones out at the end anyway. Major kudos for that!

I guess too, Janya's piece of advice for me all along was probably the best thing anyone told me about planning a wedding, and it was true: "Just think: at the end of the day you'll be married"... and it's true, that was the best part. :)

While my Ukulele Gently Weeps...

Ok, seriously you must check this out. I never really gave the "uke" much credence as an instrument, and I think for most people it generally conjures up an image of a grade 4 class strumming away something vaguely recognizable with the kid in the back looking at the ceiling and totally missing his cue. But this guy has serious skill, and makes a ukulele sound as much a musical instrument as any other.

Check it out: Jake Shimabukuro plays "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

Edit: Thanks Jon for pointing this out. Totally wicked cool.

Arrrrgggghhhh... Apple you are pissing me off!!!!

So... for someone who keeps their whole life on her computer, losing your computer can be one of the most frustrating events ever. This is round two for me. My first laptop decided to crash'n'burn at a rather inconvenient time (as I was finishing grad courses and working on a programming project that needed to be written up in LaTeX). As it was dying I backed up what I could, and when I finally got my new computer I restored what I could. This time around I was actually even more careful. I now own a backup drive, yes a lovely 160GB external drive, I had an sync program installed, and I even used these items to perodically back up (not often enough, but none-the-less it did happen).

Great... but...

It turns out that making a copy of ones library isn't quite enough. No, no. Even though I have (in principle) all the data I should need to restore everything up to my last backup, it doesn't seem to actually work that way with important programs like iCal (where I keep track of my life) and Address Book (where I keep track of all the people in my life). AAAAARrrrrrggggg....

Ok, so after fighting with that for awhile and giving up, I decided to set out on a mission to properly back up these things, heaven forbid, this computer kicks the bucket. So, it turns out that there are indeed menu items which allow you to back up the databases of these two program. Thanks Apple! No, seriously, no sarcasm here, that's great. But, it's not really that convenient. When I back up I have one script I run and I walk away, go to bed, whatever. No user intervention necessary, because if I have to sit there and do something I'll keep telling myself I'll do it later.

So... I start searching...

I first looked for automator actions... for anyone familiar with apple these days they have probably heard-of, tried, and given up on automator several times... sounds cool, but it never seems capable of doing what you want. No luck there.. of course. So I tried just google-ing something like "Back up iCal". I got AppleScript stuff. Ok, well, I'm not familiar at all with AppleScript, but the work appeared to be done for me. So I copied and pasted and tried to run the script and I got an error. Huh. So, I walked back to the simpler version of the script and I got the same error. Huh. Seemed the problem was with a command called "click"... which seems like a pretty obvious choice to tell the computer to click on something, but maybe that wasn't quite right, so I started looking in AppleScript manuals...

4 hrs later...

Same error. Huh. I've since found instructions on the Apple website on how to click a menu item in an application, copied and pasted that, replaced all the relevant text, and lo-and-behold... same error. Huh.

All I want to do is freakin' back up my calendar and address book. Is that so much to ask????

Montreal Rudeness

So it's not just me!! Montreal really does lack courtesy! This Globe and Mail article on a study done by Reader's Digest ranks in the bottom half of large cities studied around the world, while Toronto ranks 3rd!

Although, other Canadian cities might well have ranked higher if they had been tested, Montreal fared in the bottom half after only 50 per cent of those tested offered a helping hand.

Granted it's not a terribly scientific study (groups of reporters were sent out to do a series of 3 tests, 20 times), at least now I know there is actually some difference, and I'm not just paranoid, or biased against Montreal... now if only something could be done to change it!?

About time for an update...

Ok, well, so much has happened in the last three weeks, it's going to take me awhile to get it all posted up here. As a preview for posts to come here's a run down in chronological order:

• go home to Halifax to prepare for wedding
  
• Sat. June 3, get married
  
• Sat. June 3, have laptop, ipod, and a long list of other items stolen from car
  
• Sun. June 4, gift opening (thanks everyone!!)
  
• Mon. June 5, call pawn shops and look in garbage cans and in bushes for my stuff... without success, and fly back to Montreal without Veronica and Skip (my 12" G4 Powerbook and iPod mini)
  
• Tues-Fri, deal with aftermath of theft and try to get read to go to Paris
  
• June 9-18, forget about everything else and enjoy honeymoon in Paris!
  
• June 18, bad, looooong flight back... merci, Air France
  
• yesterday, go to computer store... lay out many $$, to come home with "Clothilde" my new... fast! but kinda big laptop
  

So... I will get to posting as I can (especially now that I have a computer again). I'll even try to stick up a few pictures! But for now... I need to get some work done.