If you are wondering why there hasn't been a blog in two weeks, Kimberly and I got married on April 9th and the week of the wedding was a long and brutal week for the two of us.

Somewhere along the line Kimberly and I got the great idea to hold the rehearsal diner at our house for the wedding party and 100 or so out-of-town guests (and turn the house into a meeting place for out-of-towners to gather throughout the weekend). I’m pretty sure it was originally conceived as a money saving idea…

It wasn’t.

To pull off the rehearsal party, I naturally had a long list of home remodeling projects from hell which went down to the wire (the last project got checked off the list on Friday morning, hours before the rehearsal). In fact, my last blog entries on the weekend of April 1-3 were sanity breaks from dry walling our kitchen ceiling- which had to be unexpectedly gutted and raised because a new butler pantry was two inches too tall to fit in our 1970’s dropped ceiling kitchen. This was one of those “simple 2-3 hour jobs” that escalated into a crew of construction workers taking up camp in our home for a couple of weeks to repair some old structural damage from years ago which was uncovered once the drywall of the old ceiling was removed. Thankfully we rated as an “emergency” in the eyes of our contractors who pulled off of other jobs in order to help get the project(s) done in time for the wedding. However, after April 3rd I didn’t get enough sleep until after the wedding to write a coherent blog entry (or even check e-mail for that matter). Somehow I survived on 3 hours of sleep a night for an entire week. (Thanks TempurPedic!)

As I entered the weekend before the wedding with a home covered in debris, dirt and dust, with a trashed-out kitchen, exposed electrical wire hanging from rafters in two rooms, two of the three bathrooms out of commission, several unfinished landscaping projects, and no interior doors on our main level (yeah, those were being replaced too), I was thanking God that Kimberly had shipped out of town for a bachelorette party. Thanking God, that is, until Kimberly came home Monday night from the bachelorette party bedridden with the mother of all flu’s.

The bride barely made it down the isle. The more she worried about being sick, the sicker she got. Suffice it to say, she wasn’t in a bloggin’ mood either. Thankfully, a grandfather, uncle, and college friend are all three doctors, so she was well medicated with scripts being written on the fly the day of the wedding. We also had an array of friends, coworkers, and family who came out of the woodwork to help finalize details that were starting to fall through the cracks- like the Prudential Alliance “After Hours” Party to fold wedding programs, or the bridesmaid who was planting flowers until 10 pm the night before the first guests arrived in town. I could go on for pages, but suffice it to say there are a bunch of people in our lives who are awesome.

Our house was finished, kitchen and all, just in the knick of time (it really looked great). The rehearsal dinner went off without a hitch, and for the most part so did our wedding. The truly funny side to this story is that within hours of the last guests leaving Sunday afternoon, and hours before we were to leave on our honeymoon, the water heater, second refrigerator, and the air conditioner all three “simultaneously” died. It was as if the house was trying to hang on until after the parties were over and then let go a big sign of relief.

R.I.P. old friends.

(Fortunately we were registered at Home Depot, so we have a lot of Home Depot Gift Certificates!)

As I'm writing this, we've just returned home from our honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The other reason why there hasn’t been a blog in two weeks is our hotel in Mexico didn't have the wireless internet access we were promised. Instead they had two old desktop computers which we could rent 30 minutes of time on for 50 pesos. Had they not had a Spanish keyboard with no conceivable way to make a "@" sign, it wouldn’t have been so bad. The challenge of using a Spanish operating system and software (without actually knowing Spanish) was actually kind of fun (although not fun enough to spend 100’s of pesos to write a blog entry, sorry). It was probably a blessing that there wasn’t internet (or cell phone) access on the honeymoon because it gave Kimberly a chance to get well (and me a chance to get sick with her flu!)

Anyway, Kimberly just stumbled up to bed after trying to sort through dozens of voice messages and 150+ e-mails. After a night of work, I’m down to 93 unread messages in my inbox. If you’ve sent either of us an e-mail over the past two weeks, and we haven’t responded, rest assured we’ll be working to get to your message this week. Give us time.

Finally, I should also point out, Kimberly Shallenberger is now a whole lot easier to type and spell (it’s now Kimberly Cameron). As she said the day of the wedding, “gaining a husband isn’t as important as loosing six letters in my name.” It’s the little things that make you feel the love you know!

Sid