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June 25, 2006

Mr. and Mrs. Edward David Engelking II

Well, the wedding has come and gone. Amanda and I officially exchanged our wedding vows on Saturday, June 17, 2006 at roughly 7:30PM. The event itself was unspectacular, but the fact that Amanda and I are now "official" makes everything that we went through up till that point worthwhile. Here' s a breakdown of the events for Friday and Saturday of last week:

1. The Rehearsal and Dinner
Amanda and I arrived in Frankfort in the middle of the afternoon that Friday. I had worked that day till around 12PM and came home to pack our stuff for our mini-honeymoon and overnight stay in Frankfort. When we arrived in town, we headed immediately for the church, where I dropped off Amanda before heading to my mom and father's home to drop off all of our stuff.

Eventually, everyone in the wedding party arrived as expected, some on time and some late. We managed to get everything started at the church a little after 6PM and had two good dry runs. David Blankenship, who performed the wedding service for us, provided great feedback and offered sound advice moving forward.

After everything was said and done at the church, we all packed up and headed to the rehearsal dinner at Office Pub and Deli. It was an unremarkable meal that really should have been done by Amanda's and my mother, as I'm sure that they could've put something together that would've just blown the meal that we received out of the water.

After the meal, Amanda and her portion of the wedding party went their own way and me and my guys headed out to Applebees. At this point, we just wanted something to snack on and sit around to shoot the shit so that we could waste some time. After staying for an hour or two, the party broke up and we all headed back to our respective places to crash. Steven and I headed back to my mom and father's home and I was out within 15 minutes of hitting the bedroom while everyone else hung outside next to the pool being loud and drinking a lot.

2. The wedding day
I knew that there was going to be a lot of down time before the wedding, and I had planned it out accordingly. That morning, Suzanne had planned to have a big breakfast at the church. She made good use of the materials that were available and cooked up a breakfast that would keep us all going throughout the day.

After breakfast, Steven and I took off to do some of the things that I had planned for the day:

A) Visit Sammie's grave site.
B) Visit Cheryl's grave site.
C) Hit Wal-Mart to pick up some necessities.
D) Any other misc things that I wanted to do.

A: Our trip to Frankfort cemetery was an exercise in frustration for me. I didn't bother to tell Mike that we were heading to the cemetery because I wanted to keep the trip a private thing. I hadn't payed my respects to Sammie since the funeral several years back, and I was feeling really bad about it. The funeral itself was a wet, nasty day and I didn't remember much about the location other than it was towards the back of the cemetery near the left side fence. Steven and I spent about an hour and a half looking for the grave but left empty handed. We did, however, find the tombstone of an old classmate of mine that had died several years back. He had a nice tombstone and the area where we was buried was very well kept.

B: Cheryl's grave was much easier to find, as I've been there several times over the past 10 years since her death. While we were there, we were looking at the grave stones that were around the general area and found that there were a lot of people our age that had died young. Talk about making you feel mortal...

C: Our trip to Wal-Mart was sweet and simple. We needed to purchase some black socks to ensure that everyone would have them for their tuxes. Additionally, there were a few other items that I wanted to pick up for the sake of doing so. We spent about an hour in Wal-Mart, just looking around, and then headed out to do other things.

D: Steven and I had a lot of time on our hands, so we found ourselves driving around the city and thinking about the things that we used to do when we were younger. After all, Steven and I met in Frankfort when he and his parents lived at Ravencrest. We went and toured the Ravencrest Apts, drove down back roads and found dead animals on the road, went through historic areas of the city and noted how little things have changed (with the exception of the new library) and so on and so forth.

3. The wedding
I told people to start arriving at the church around 5PM so that everything would be ready by 5:30PM. We needed to start getting ready early so that we could start with our photos. Matthew, our photographer, setup everything and we all began to take pictures on the steps of the podium. During this time, I also setup the camera that pop gave us as a wedding present so that we could record the ceremony. Kyle also brought his HD camera and set it up across the other side of the church so that we could have two different perspectives.

Around 7PM, people began showing up for the wedding itself. We hadn't quite finished taking pictures at this point, but we were getting pretty close to finishing up. We had to make some judgement calls at this point regarding which pictures were to be taken, so we were rushing like crazy to get them all done in some sort of civilized manner. After the last picture was taken, we split everyone up and my groomsmen, best man, mother and Mike headed to the choir room to count down the time to the beginning of the wedding.

Before I knew it, it was time.

There's not really much that I remember about the wedding itself. It was a very very short ordeal, which I was thankful for. The suit wasn't too uncomfortable, but the shoes that I had on were killing me. The one thing that I kept telling myself was "don't lock your legs, don't lock your legs" so that I wouldn't pass out in front of God, friends and family.

Amanda finally came out, and she was stunning. I can't really begin to describe the event, but when I saw her coming up the isle, I had to look away for a moment so that I could re-collect myself. Had I not, I'm sure that I would've started bawling like a big baby. We said our vows and headed out of the church, only to come back in so that we could excuse everyone from their seats and allow them to head downstairs for cake and punch.

4. The reception
I really felt stretched thin by the time the reception was going. I felt like there were too many people (even though Amanda didn't agree), and it was very difficult to give everyone enough attention that they deserved. At one point, mom grabbed me so that we could talk privately outside for a bit. During this talk, I missed my dad leaving so I wasn't able to tell him goodbye and thank him for coming.

I did have one really nice surprise during the course of the evening. An old friend, the son of David Blankenship, Andrew, showed up for the wedding. Andrew and his brother, John, were good friends of mine growing up while at Ravencrest and then to the Elkhorn neighborhood afterwards. I hadn't seen either of them in many years, so to see Andrew at my wedding was a very nice treat. I introduced him to Amanda and I was able to meet his wife, Robin.

There were a lot of friends and family members present at the reception, including Steven's mother, Michelle. I love this woman terribly, but haven't had an opportunity to see her in several years. That's one of the things about getting older, I guess, is that you don't have the opportunities to do things that you could do when you were younger. When Steven was still living at home, I had a good reason to head out to Paris, KY to see them all. These days, with Steven living in Cincinnati, I don't have nearly as many reasons to head to the Martz house ... not to mention that Michelle and Steve work really odd hours.

5. The aftermath
After everyone left, Amanda and I needed to come back to Louisville so that we could pack up all of our luggage to head down south on our vacation. But before we left Frankfort, we stopped in to Applebee's once again and had a very nice dinner with Kyle. We haven't had a real opportunity to have a meal with Kyle in a while as well, so it was nice to be able to sit with a good friend after our wedding and talk about absolutely nothing important. It was the first real down time that we had all day, and it felt really good to just sit and talk for a while.

When we got home that night, we were pretty exhausted, but managed to get in all of the gifts that were given to us at the wedding. We were delighted at the assortment of things that were given to us by our friends and family, and even amazed at the quality of items given. We honestly weren't expecting any high dollar items from anyone, but what we received just stunned us. It's nice to know that we have friends and family members that think highly enough of us to give so generously to a couple "officially" starting their lives together.

After getting over the generosity of the items given to us, we headed to bed in preparation for our trip down south the next morning.

~out...

Posted by ed at 06:24 PM | Comments (1)