Run, Lola, Run!!

Home from Hawaii and now on to the wedding plans!! A ton of emotions are floating inside of me..... meeting my father for the first time still has my head spinning but I know I have to concentrate on our wedding time is short!

We started with the guest lists.......OMG, what a nightmare! I sat at my computer compiling my list while Dan sat at the dining room table working on his.......once when I had first moved over here he told me when I mentioned that we needed more chairs around the table in the driveway, "why Lola? I only have five friends!!" My list shot from one to over a hundred immediately!! I went upstairs to check on him and oh my goodness.......his was nearing eighty very quickly!! I reminded him that he needed to cut on his list afterall he had told me that he only had five friends!!! lol But we ended up mailing out over one hundred and fifty invitations!! You know when people sit on a list you just don't equate them to "bodies"!!!

First on the agenda was our rings.......so back to the jewelry store we trotted!! I am so not comfortable in there!! Kinda sad though, the jeweler is retiring and next Saturday will be the last day that jewelry store in the Village will be open! It was not quite so traumatic this trip though and I easily picked out the ring I wanted. One chore down .......only about fifty to go!! The guest list had gotten a little out of hand so that meant upping the amount of tables and chairs we needed. DONE!........

While at the rental shop I asked about tablecloths.......OMG they charge $29.95 each!! Nope that was not gonna work!! So the ebay queen put on her crown and got busy!! I found on ebay brand new white tablecloths for $70 a case!! (12 to a case) That sounded more reasonable so I ordered them! Later I realized I needed seven more so I went to ebay again and noticed that they were coming from Santa Maria so I just emailed the woman! I was able to pick them up from her in Nipomo which is about half way to Santa Maria and she charged me $7.00 a piece! SCORE!

The back yard!! Oh goodness what the hell were we gonna do with that......my solution was to call in a landscaper......but Dans solution actually worked out great! He hired the plumbers son who is in college to come on the weekends to help him and together they did one hell of a job.......but with trees like ours the leaves make a continuing mess so when the Nicacio family arrived on Wednesday before the wedding on Saturday.....Joe and Manny kept on top of it the rest of the week!! Even one of our neighbors came by the day before and asked Dan if he needed anything........knowing he had a truck, Dan asked him if he could take twenty-eight bags of yard waste to the dump and while Dan was in the house getting money for the dump....Brandon loaded the bags and was gone!! Great neighbors we have here!! The Radkes next door let us run an extension cord over the fence to light up half of the trees in the back yard! Amazing, just amazing!

Hillary, Sonja, Elizabeth and I cooked for three days!! I did my cake top and two hundred cupcakes........each one adorned with an edible white pearl.....Dan built me the cake stand to hold it all......!! The girls made salads and meats and pilaff.......it was just all amazing!! On Thursday before the wedding we had to leave them all here and drive to San Francisco to pick up my father, his wife and two of my sisters that were coming from Hawaii for the wedding!  They arrived with these huge boxes and even though we had rented a van to pick them up in.....I was afraid it would not all fit!! But barely we made it!! My father brought hawaiian food which we had that night when we returned from SF......another box he brought had five hundred little vanda orchids to decorate the tables and fresh leis for the wedding party!

It all came together on Saturday and the guests started to arrive (luckily we live on a cul de sac that has a city park at the end of the block so the guests were able to park there!  It was a most amazing day!! My third marriage could have easily been my first! I was so in love with this man who just makes my every wish come true!! Our hawaiian wedding came off with very few hitches........lmao!!  It was beautiful and as Val sang the Hawaiian Wedding song, my father walked me out to Dan, under a tree with him,  our officiant Holly (one of my coworkers who had become ordained).....my baby angel provided us with glorious weather and all was good on the Central Coast!! We had a sand ceremony and Dan got his sand from Pismo and my father brought my sand from Hawaii with him! And there was champagne and all was wonderful!!

As I starred at Dan during the ceremony the words to the Hawaiian wedding song seemed so appropriate........."This is the moment........of sweet aloha........I will love you longer than forever....."