Wednesday – Normal day, worked and stuff, was feeling a bit achy

Thursday – SICK! A slight fever and a flu-thing kept me up most of Wednesday night and I stayed home from work. Headache was too bad to do more than to email Michael to tell him I was staying home, call my boss, sleep and zone out in front of the TV.

Friday – Feeling crappy in the morning but went to work because I didn’t have a fever. Noonish I was feeling better, by the time I came home I was just feeling tired. Had dinner and relaxed with Michael until we got a call from Constance and David asking if we wanted to go out to Ortinos Northside. We got there around 7:45 and the parking lot was packed, turns out they were having a Troegs Mad Elf tasting – 2004, 2005 and 2006 Mad Elf on tap. We waited about a half hour for a table, where it came out that we’d actually met Constance before, at and housewarming party – we didn’t remember each other, but it came up in conversation that we knew them and knew and the last time we’d seen him was at the party. We enjoyed the Mad Elf night, they didn’t do samplers so we were forced to order a full glass of each Elf ale. While all good, the 2004 won at our table for the best, it ages very well. Around midnight we called it a night and headed home.

Saturday – It was a beautiful day out, in the low 70s, sunny. We decided to take the opportunity to get some seasonal work done outside. We got all the icicle lights hung around the house, which was not a small task, Michael spent some time climbing on the roof. Later in the afternoon I went out to run some errands (which included picking up a couple Red Gouramis for the fishtank!) and Michael cleaned out the gutters. In the evening we enjoyed a couple beers and watched the first DVD of Arrested Development (which neither of us had seen, but had heard so many good things about) and then a horrible SciFi movie called H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (I was in the mood for horrible scifi).

Sunday – The weather took a turn for the worse, it was pretty gloomy out today! But that was fine, I spent the morning backing up onto CD a lot of photos I had sitting around on my desktop, going back a few years. I then backed up all the stuff on the Debian side of my harddrive (a whole 5 gigs) and decided to install Xubuntu – but that’s a story for another post. This evening the plan is to chill out by the fireplace with our laptops, a beer and a pot roast dinner which has been cooking in the crock pot all day and smelling delicious!

What a nice weekend.

1. The pool was closed at the gym today “Due to a power outage on Sunday.” Boo!

2. After a lousy night sleep last night due to post wood-piling soreness, I think the trip to the gym this morning helped work out some of those sore spots. Yay!

3. Is anyone who reads this going to Philcon this year? I’m going with Nita, but I don’t want to be stuck to her side all weekend and it’d be fun to meet up with some people at the con.

4. I voted.

5. I updated fish.bevilacqua.us now that we have a camera that can actually take good pictures of the fast-moving fishies.

One of the best ideas Michael had for “wedding stuff” was making a Wedding Celebration Ale. I made printed the labels.

It was the first all grain batch, and I believe it was his first one with Belgian ale yeast. In preliminary tastings, Michael said it came out a bit sweet. We handed out the beer at our wedding, with the beerstill needing a week of fermenting, we were pretty confident that it came out well.

Yeah, pretty confident.

So we tried the beer this week. Wow! It’s good! Still pretty light (needs better gravity), but the taste was good! It wasn’t as home-brewy as some of the previous batches had been, I think the all grain bit is really the key, even if it’s so much more work.

Speaking of food, my boss got me the sweetest gift for my wedding (we received a lot of cool/amazing gifts for our wedding, but this isn’t a “look at the loot we scored!” post, I just needed to share the penguins!):

They’re made with Belgian Chocolate and inside each hollow penguin (they came as a pair) there were little chocolate penguins. It’s very good chocolate. Mmmm chocolate penguins.

Friday I went with a co-worker to get a manicure during lunch. I hadn’t been to Breathe Nail Spa in Lansdale since January (just haven’t wanted to devote the time to it, I was doing my nails myself), and they surprised me with their continued dedication to taking time when they do your nails AND they added the nice bonus of a short hot rock massage while your nails are drying. It was a nice treat, the work week felt so long, it’s so hard coming back from such a fantastic vacation.

Saturday was mostly spent cleaning up leaves in our yard. We were expecting a delivery of 2 cords of firewood (which is a lot of wood) and were planning on spending most of the afternoon stacking it, but when the contractor delivering it showed up he only had a quarter of a cord. Apparently they had a lot of deliveries, one of their trucks broke down, and they were backed up, they promised to deliver the rest on Sunday morning. At least we had firewood for a relaxing Saturday night. After the leaves were cleaned up neither of us felt like cooking, and we headed out to Victory for some pizza and beer. We also picked up the Victory Brewing Experience DVD and a Golden Monkey shirt (for me!).

So Sunday morning we got some more wood delivered, and had a significant amount put away by 11 when the contractor showed up again to drop off more – he even gave us slightly more than 2 cords because it took so long. I’m very pleased with the quality of the wood this time, the last place we got wood from wasn’t nearly as high quality. We finally had all cords piled up around 3 this afternoon.

I’m tired :) But we’re now relaxing in front of the fireplace, it’s so nice.

We got the CD of photos back last night and I spent time after I got home from work and this morning putting together a website about the whole ceremony:

The Wedding of Elizabeth & Michael

The pictures came out beautifully, I’m really impressed.

I haven’t really talked much about the day, I guess I was letting it all soak in. Now is a good time.

First off, thanks to everyone for all the well-wishes, it really means a lot to come back as a married couple to such great friends!

Saturday morning Michael and Bob left early. I went to the bakery to pick up the carrot cake – which was just a plain carrot cake, no nuts or designs, just basic nice frosting job. Then I swung by the florist in Hennings to pick up my half dozen yellow roses, which looked very nice. Mike and Nita showed up around 11 and we headed out to Maryland.

The drive out there was fun, I enjoy spending time with the two of them. And Nita has a GPS that she brought along to show us our route, while it didn’t do very well in Maryland (“Hahaha we’re not even on a road!”), it was a really great little thing for in PA. I was drooling over it for the whole ride… a Christmas present this year perhaps?

We arrived at The Castle at 4PM, greeted by several people who had already arrived. Tony and Judi (caretakers of The Castle) set out some wine, cheese and crackers for our arrival – what a treat! It was some good wine too.

Around 5:30 we packed everyone (except Juliana, who was a bit lost and said she’d meet us at the restaurant) into 3 cars and headed out to the Savage River Lodge for dinner.

The Savage River Lodge was all that I remembered it to be, delicious with a fantastic wine selection! We ordered a couple bottles of wine and enjoyed our meal. The she-crab bisque that I had was amazing, and the sesame crusted scallops I had for an entree were very good. I wish I’d had room for dessert, a few people got some nice looking treats.

After dinner we went back to The Castle and opened some wedding gifts that people had brought while drinking some wine. Oh and Nita totally beat my ass in chess. I should play chess more often so I don’t lose so horribly next time ;D

I didn’t sleep the greatest that night, but the bed sure was comfortable!

In the morning we enjoyed a fantastic breakfast put together by Tony – a fruit and cream pastry, heart-shaped pancakes. I didn’t have any trouble eating all of it, it was good! But the hostess laughed and explained that they have a hard time getting most brides to eat anything, let alone eat everything like I did. Hah! I really wasn’t nervous about the wedding. Neither of us were really nervous, which seemed to surprise everyone, including ourselves. I think we were so comfortable with The Castle, having stayed their twice in the past, and so comfortable with the ceremony itself and each other that it all felt natural.

And the rest is history.

You mean it all went perfectly? More perfectly than I could imagine! OK, there were a couple little hangups (like not planning the cake thing afterwards – we need a cake plate! We need a knife! Oops no one has anything to drink!) but any event runs into such tiny problems that don’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

I wasn’t much for buying into the whole “It’s the best day of your life” thing, and didn’t psyche myself out about it. But it absolutely was one of the best days of my life, looking at the pictures makes me so happy! What a day!

“Don’t take this the wrong way… but you look really good in a witch hat” – a co-worker.

I dressed up as a witch this year and came into work. Another woman in the office has a monster mask, but accounting is not so easy when vision is obstructed by such a thing, she only wore it for a little while this morning.

I love Halloween. We don’t actually have any plans for tonight though, and with because we came back from the honeymoon late Saturday and were busy all Sunday we didn’t get a chance to go to any of the local parties. Bummer.

We never did get around to carving our pumpkins this year either, which makes this the first year since Michael and I have spent halloween together that we haven’t carved pumpkins. I figure getting married and going on a honeymoon is a fine excuse though, we’ll get back into the tradition next year.

This morning I stopped at the new Starbucks in Lansdale. It’s a nice one, on my way to work, and has a very easy parkinglot to get in and out of – oh this is going to be dangerous! Mmmm white chocolate mocha.

The other new thing in the area that I’m excited about is a new L.L. Bean retail store! Nita told me about this a couple weeks ago, it’s only 45 minutes from home! I love L.L. Bean and buy a majority of my clothes there, saving up a few hundred bucks every time we head up to Maine to do some shopping. Hopefully I can make it to the new store within the next couple weeks.

Last night I made a couple calls to family. I’ve been in touch with my father’s side of the family over the past year or so, but really had fallen out of touch with my mother’s side. No particular reason really, we just haven’t had time to connect. I called my grandparent’s first to let them know I had gotten married, they were very happy for us (they LOVE Michael). I then gave my aunt Elaine a call, who I’d lived with a few times in Philadelphia and Rochester, it is unfortunate that we don’t get to talk more often, but each time we do we pick up from where we left off, it’s so nice. I also tried to call my mother but she wasn’t around, I haven’t spoken to her since before the wedding.

The wedding… Since I’m married now I’m starting to work through the paperwork to get my name legally changed, which is an interesting task. I’ll also need to get working on getting myself on Google as Elizabeth Bevilacqua rather than Elizabeth Krumbach ;)

Oh and I’m catching up with blogs. I haven’t had time/want to really be online in about 2 weeks, so I have quite the backlog.

With a lot of help from Michael and bash(1), I was able to get about 200 select images from the honeymoon, and the journal entries for each day, online.

Including…

Go here for the rest: Our Honeymoon in Sedona, Arizona

Wedding pictures will be posted as soon as I have them.

A much more detailed post with lots of pictures will certainly follow, but I just wanted to say that we are married (I’m Elizabeth Bevilacqua now!) and we’re now home from our honeymoon.

The wedding went perfectly, the photos are with our photographer, hopefully we’ll have those by the end of the week. I downloaded all the honeymoon in Sedona photos (over 400 of them!) to my computer this morning and have spent a couple hours sorting through them. I’m currently putting together a website for them, but here’s a teaser.

Everyone at work has been asking if I’m nervous/stressed out/freaking out yet. It’s amazing how answering this question 40 times in a day will actually make you become nervous/stressed/freaking even if you weren’t already.

I spent one day this week wrapped up in freaking out-ness with women in the office because they wanted to talk about nail polish and shoes all afternoon, but I finally got my head back. I bought some pretty nail polish on my own and am sticking to the barefoot at wedding plan, if it really is too cold I’ll have my black Birkenstocks, they will look fine. I told everyone in the office I don’t want to talk about shoes anymore.

So I feel great about the wedding, I’m excited and things are coming together nicely. Michael and I have completed pretty much all the things on my list of things to do before the wedding.

• Reservations for dinner at the Savage River Lodge on Saturday placed for 11 people
• Ordered small carrot cake to have after the ceremony from Dutch Oven Bakery and will pick it up Saturday morning before going to MD
• Haircut
• Carpool out to MD arranged (thanks for being a driver !)
• Wrote programs for guests (still need to get them all printed)
• Printed beer bottle labels for celebration ale
• Confirmed number of guests with castle owners so everyone gets breakfast
• Finalized all details of the ceremony with our Reverend
• Confirmed that Nita’s dress came in (phew!)
• Decided upon a hairstyle – very simple normal me with a jewel-studded barrette

We decided to drop Caligula off at Michael’s mothers on Friday rather than waiting to do it right before our honeymoon – one less thing to do Sunday night. I am getting out of work a little early tomorrow to get my nails done and head to the mall for a cake topper (it was just decided by Nita and myself this weekend that we’d have a cake at the ceremony). We’ll need to pack too, which will be a chore since there are a lot of delicate items we’re bringing along for the ceremony.

This is going to be great.

Gosh, it’s Wednesday already! I never got around to posting what I ended up doing on Sunday.

During my bachelorette party on Saturday Nita asked if any of us wanted to go to the PA Renaissance Faire on Sunday. I thought I wouldn’t feel up to going (after all, I didn’t get home until after 1AM Sunday morning). But when I got out of bed around 10 Sunday morning I felt like going. I let Michael know (and asked if he wanted to go, but is bachelor party went a bit later than mine and he wanted to get beer bottling and some house cleaning done (!))

So I put on a long plaid skirt and met Nita at her house around noon.

The drive out wasn’t bad, and it was a beautiful day to go. First thing we did when we got there was to grab some food, Ren Faire food is so yummy.

Early in the day we walked past the elephant ride. I’d never ridden and elephant before, and regretted not doing it at the last Ren Faire I was at, so I just had to this time.

Waiting in line for the elephant ride

But Nita didn’t want to ride with me and the minimum was two riders. So another woman in line (whose friends didn’t want to ride with her either) ended up riding with me.

Riding the elephant! Too bad the sun was in the wrong part of the sky to get a good picture

We went to several jewelry vendors, idly shopping for shiny things for me to wear on my wedding day. I ended up with a squirrel necklace that I’m 90% sure I’ll wear at the wedding. Nita ended up buying both of us some pretty metal hair wrap things.

Boy at metal shop putting wrap in Nita’s hair

A shop I picked up some incense and lavender at

Neat looking dead people

Later in the day called to let us know he was on his way down. We had hoped he’d get there in time for the falconer, but he just missed it. We didn’t though! It’s always fun to watch falconers (especially now that I’m less afraid of birds), and this one was no exception.

Falconer’s hawk flying through hoops

Falconer’s falcon flying around the arena – this one flew closely over the audience a few times in the show, a very amazing bird

At 6:30 we attended the joust. It wasn’t a normal joust, since they’re doing the Halloween theme thing, but I think that made it even more interesting!

French Knight at joust

Fire at joust – this was pretty fun! The demon knight in the show came in with this whole fire thing. Shortly after he arrived I put away my camera and said “I don’t want to take pictures -I want to watch!”

The joust ended around 7 and we went over to St. George’s Baby Dragon Orphanage to pick up the “baby dragons” that Nita bought, I took a picture of one of them.

Baby dragon!

The Faire was wrapping up by then, the official close time is 8PM but it was dark out and all the shops started closing right after the final joust.

On the way home we stopped at the Waffle House (which I’d never been to before)

I’ll have to go again next year (and perhaps drag Michael along).

I had a great time at my bachelorette party on Saturday. It was all a surprise to me, I had no idea what they had planned.

Nita and came by my house around 4PM to pick me up. From there we went to Coyote Crossing in Conshohocken where we met Rae for a delicious Mexican dinner.

First we had the nachos, House Made Tortilla Chips, Queso Oxaca, Queso Chihuahua, Queso Cotija, Black Bean Puree, Guacamole, Sour Cream, Pico de Gallo, Queso Fresco and Cilantro. Very good!

And for the entree I had the Pollo Enchiladas and Smoked Tomatillo Salsa, pictured below, which was a really good enchilada – perhaps the best I’ve ever had.

Nita and I also got Margaritas, which were very high in rum. Nita got a bit tipsy (she doesn’t drink much) but I was OK (I guess I do drink much).

After dinner we went to see the King of Prussia Players do a performance of Dracula: The Musical?. It was a comedy musical, and a lot of fun! Nita and I are now considering seeing more plays/musicals in the near future – with the cost of a movie ticket at close to $10 now going to a $15 live theater production seems like a great deal.

After the play Rae decided to head home while Nita, and I went out to Kildare’s Pub in King of Prussia for a couple beers and some appetizers. I was impressed with their beer list, it wasn’t long, but it had some great stuff on it. We ended up ordering a couple Lindemans lambics, some chicken fingers and some cheese dip. We “drunk dialed” ‘s LJ from here, but in all honesty we weren’t drunk, we were just being silly :P

They finally dropped me off at home around 1:30AM.

Thanks for coming ladies! I had a blast.