Not too full

Today is the 12th anniversary of the day that Greg and I married. Last night, I arranged for one of our exceedingly rare babysitter visits and we went out to dinner to commemorate and celebrate and all that.

We ate at a relatively new restaurant in Madison called Samba. It's one of those Brazilian meat restaurants. The kind where there's an amazing salad bar and then you turn over a disk (or in this case, hourglass type of thing) from red to green and men with large skewers of meat keep coming to your table and slicing off pieces and chunks for you until you turn your hourglass back to red. They had 8 different meats on the menu last night.

Barbecued chicken, flank steak, duck, lamb, tenderloin, sirloin steak, and so on. Greg and I joked during our meal that we should bring Dan and Kerry to try it if they come and visit again (bad joke, sorry Kerry--she's a vegetarian and I imagine that anyone who wasn't a dedicated meat eater would have been literally sickened by the skewers of meat walking around). But if you're a carnivore--mmmm, it was really good. And then they had these little rolls that tasted like Yorkshire puddings--it was quite an event, actually.

So 12 years ago today at this time (11:15 a.m.), I was at the beauty salon with my bridesmaids, getting our hair done.

At 12:15 or so, I was arriving at the church to get dressed for photos. A friend got sub sandwiches and no one ate them.

At 2:00? 3:00? (oh my god, I can't remember what time!) we got married.

At 5:00, we arrived at our reception and had a little popcorn from the popcorn machine. This was hours before my Uncle Jim, who had been doing a wonderful job helping us out by running the popcorn machine, got a little distracted by the amount of beer he'd drunk and forgot a bunch of popcorn and it smoked up the hall a little--not too bad.

At midnight, our feet sore from all the dancing we had done, we left the hall and discovered that our "friends" (I use the term lightly, at this point) had filled the interior of our car with those little circles you get when you 3-hole punch paper and the exterior of our car with written congratulations. We didn't have time to clean the interior before we left on our honeymoon, so we still had those little circles blowing around more than a week later. And more than six months later, I was still finding them when I vacuumed out my car.

It was a wonderful day and so many wonderful things have happened since. I love you, Gregory. Happy Anniversary!