11 Years and a Day

Yesterday was our 11th anniversary.  For the math challenged, that means we were married on 9/9/99.  No, that wasn’t a happy accident.  After we got engaged (on Christmas Day 1997), we had a lot of discussion about the “right” day to pick for our wedding.  Most people pick a season or month and the actual day depends on availability of the venues for the wedding and reception.  Since we never intended to have more than a handful of people at our wedding, it made more sense to pick a date that would be meaningful.  I knew a couple that had married on 8/8/88 and I always thought that was a cool idea.  So we decided on 9/9/99.  It turned out to be a Thursday.

Finding a place was a little tricky.  I wanted a nice restaurant with a private space that would allow smoking in order to accommodate my dad.  This would not be possible today, but back then there were still smoking areas in restaurants.  Not too many of them were keen on allowing cigars, however.  We selected Nikki’s Cafe and Bar, which sadly closed some years later.  Nikki was a character and I was a little worried when 3 months after first talking to her, she still hadn’t charged the deposit to my credit card.

Total attendance for our wedding was 25, including the priest and his wife.  I had a moment of panic at the start when my mom failed to show up on time.  Turns out she was halfway downtown when she realized that she had left my bouquet and Tim’s boutonniere in her refrigerator.  She did all of the flowers for the wedding, including a spray for the top of the Wuollet’s cake.  I bought the smallest two tier wedding cake they made and it was still way too much.

It really was a beautiful wedding.  I have a secret theory that the happiness and success of a marriage has an inverse relationship to the size and cost of the wedding.  Short of eloping, which I had seriously considered, we had about the most cost effective wedding possible.  Unfortunately, I was so busy making sure we took photos with everyone there, I neglected to get a photo of just Tim and me together.  So our official wedding photo required a bit of Photoshop magic.

So what did we do for our anniversary?  We ordered a pizza, opened one of the nice bottles of wine from our trip to Watkin’s Glen and watched two Blu-ray movies on our new player.  It really doesn’t get any better than that.