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April 2007

How can this not be intended as a guilt trip?

I received an email from my mother, volunteering what she wants for her birthday.

She doesn’t want presents; she wants to my brother and myself to be sure to remember our grandmother and aunts and uncles on the major holidays, because they’ve done so much for us. To quote: “They expect it. I do not any longer. Funny…when they have been skipped once or twice you decide it is better to not have any expectations…then no disappointments.”

Ouch.

I hate Mandrina’s home town

Everyone sodding knows everyone. It’s a fairly populous area, but the place comes across as if everyone went to the same schools with the same people for years. Tara or Mandrina will give voice to how it’s a sucking vortex, and nobody escapes.

I hate it for entirely different reasons. I still have yet to be treated as an individual when I was there.

Case in point (and cause for today’s rant): I hired someone Mandrina approved of to take the wedding pictures. It’s been over a month, and I haven’t heard anything about them. So I asked. She’s an artist-type, I thought the photographer may have still been cleaning them up.

I got a response this morning — she had dropped the pictures off with Mandrina’s MOTHER. Why? Because she was in the neighborhood. Who paid for the photographs? Who arranged for the photography at all?

Not Mandrina’s mother.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Mandrina’s mother. This small town “everyone knows everyone” thing is annoying the heck out of me, because I don’t know everyone, so I’m just treated as an accessory.

We should have been the first ones to see the pictures after the photographer, and to pick and choose who sees what. This small-town mentality has ruined that option.

It will be a long time before I want to go back there again.

March 11, 2007 is a date that will live in

Something or other.

I was going to write a long-winded, lengthy post, but given that I don’t have time for that, I’ll post the great news, then move on to the less important items that are clogging up what little brainspace I have.

On March 11, 2007, Mandrina and I were married in Pensacola, Florida.

Pictures will follow. I didn’t take any, I was busy getting married.