Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Friday: The Preparations Reach a Crescendo

Friday morning bright and early, we were up and off on our day. Sara and I were to go pick flowers to be used in the wedding bouquets and table arrangements, while Dan and the rest of the crew were to supervise the placement of the tent, put the last of the equipment and aesthetically disapproved materials in the garage or behind a tarp or whatever, set up tables, and so on.







So we picked flowers. We stopped in town and picked out some small "thanks for coming" gifts for the flower girl, the nephews waiting patiently on the west coast, and a few others. I got to gorge myself on fried clams at the Fishnet, which was a truly fabulous experience. We delivered the flowers back to the house, and I quickly threw together some pasta and fresh tomatoes for all the crew running around who had clearly not recently enjoyed anything near so nice as fried clams. We went after grocery supplies for dinner. Dan and I popped down to the church to borrow some more tables. And then we joined in with the effort of running around some more.

The minister got there by late afternoon to run the wedding party through our paces. We figured out where we should stand so that everyone could see us, and put blue tape X's on the lawn to mark each spot. And we figured out we'd better trim one of the branches of the tree, rather than depending on Dan to duck consistently throughout the wedding.

Dan rigged a lobster pot over a burner made from a barrel, rebar, and a propane tank set-up. (To be precise, he rigged two, since the burner melted one of the lengths of rebar the first time around and caused the lobster pot to tip dangerously.) Don picked a bunch of corn from the garden, I put together some baked sweet onions, and Sara's mom showed up with some truly fabulous blueberry cake. We all sat back, and life was good.

We were eating "shedder" lobsters, which are a bit more loose in their shell and tend to be a bit more juicy. This can make for messy eating, and the process of snapping one critter open a stream of juice arced across the table and up into the air, with a little bit landing on Dad's glasses. Jeff pointed out that this was "why he wears a cap with a bill" - which had us all laughing.


And so we ate a little more, and drank a little more, and Dan played some music for us on his concertina, and it was a good night.

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