I haven't had time to do much in the past month and a half, and blogging tends to be towards the bottom of my priority list of late, behind more immediate concerns. Heather and I are getting married in two weeks and we just moved into a new place, so we've spent most of our time preparing to execute both as painlessly as possible. If I sound less than enthusiastic, it's an honest malaise, but I'm sure the happy day will be as happy as it's supposed to be. We're both looking at it as more of a 10 year anniversary than a wedding.

In the meantime, busyness. Ironing out the final tedious details is often the worst part of managing events like these, though admittedly easier since my first "career" (a tenuous designation) was in "hospitality" (quoted for the lols), preparing in one way or another for large parties like these. The experience makes things a little easier and having friends still in the industry willing to help is such a blessing.

Aside from Sam Adams brewing the beer, just about everything else for the wedding will be cooked or created by us and our  friends and family, and everyone has been really happy to throw in and help out. For the first time in three years I'll be stepping into a professional kitchen with an exec chef friend of mine and preparing the one of the main entrées while my mother and aunt finish off some old family recipes for homemade meatballs in sauce (gravy for those Philly Italians out there), porketta and piles of Italian cookies.

We insisted on making everything ourselves. It's not a control thing; it's an aversion to the bloated industry of fantasy that people get wrapped up in. Heather and I met working in a catering kitchen in Maryland, a fairly major supplier of cakes and food for the area. The level of particularity and entitlement that's evoked in the process of planning a wedding is appalling. The establishment and its employees become sponges for the sopping mess of bratty, indignant demands and the eye-rolling manifestations of unresolved family issues, foot-stomping deservedness and furious, finger-pointing scorn when things do not match perfectly with the mind's eye.

It's fascinating, really, these social receptacles for all our crap, and even more brilliant that people have found ways to make ungodly amounts of money from it. Hospitality profits, armchair psychologists profit, Facebook profits. Perhaps that's the true genius of social media platforms, crowd-sourcing catharsis, providing an environment where someone can all-caps cry about how unfair life is and be satisfied with a thread of validating colon-parenthesis faces.

Just wanted to say that we're still around and when things calm down a bit, we'll be posting a bit more often.