ACK! i'm back

Oh what an adventure I've had. Oh what trials and tribulations, joys and gut-wrenching sorrows.

First, I weighed myself this morning --rather reluctantly, I might add -- and I'm at 235. PHEW. Only one point eight pounds gained whilst I was off in the wilds of B.C. getting my ring on, er, I mean, getting married.

The secret? Chalk it up to the centuries-old P-Cubed Diet: Puke, Poo and Pause (for rest).

Yes, mere days prior (four to be exact) to the nuptials I became violently ill with what turned out to be a virus that was sweeping through mid-eastern Montana and Wyoming--it was so bad that health officials closed the visiting hours at Billings Memorial because too many people were already sick and they couldn't risk a greater outbreak. Let me tell you, whatever this was, it was NOT PRETTY. No doubt it would pose a significant health threat to the elderly and infants--one loses so much water so quickly that any immuno-compromised individual would be totally dehydrated within an hour. All sense of time is lost. I don't know why this happens, but it does. I spent hour long stints in the bathroom and felt like I'd been hovering above the toilet bowl for a mere five minutes. A four hour "nap" was, according to my body, just the beginning of a 14 hour long slumber occasionally punctuated by yet another rousing rendition of Mud Butt.*

Dear S., my wife-to-be, tended to me like a nursemaid. She is incredibly good at taking care of my whiny ass when I'm sick and, much like my mother was, pays little mind to contracting the nastiness because she's too concerned with my well-being. On Thursday morning, dear S. and I set out for Nelson, and S. got us there mere hours before she too succumbed to the hell that is PCubed. She spent all of Friday in bed. That's right, the whole day before her wedding was spent shuffling between guest room and bathroom, bucket in hand. I was, of course, dispatched to get the marriage license and flowers. Now, whose brilliant idea was it to send a nauseous woman into a floral shop? Suffice it to say, I ended up in the backseat of a minivan smoking a bowl of famous BC herb in an effort to calm my stomach whilst my comrades-in-marital-arms grabbed some coffee. I watched as pounding rain smeared the coffeeshop sign's letters, and thought of S. back at the guest house, sleeping away this nastiness. When my friends emerged with their coffees, they were welcomed by a plume of kind smoke and a little-less-barfy but completely blubbering bride-to-be. We sat there for a long while then, talking about what it meant to be married, how expectations can ruin an otherwise perfectly blissful day, how marijuana is the medicine of the Goddess.

Suffice it to say, S. rose to the occasion and I recovered and we were happily married in a quaint little chapel-turned-community center in Balfour, British Columbia, on June 3, 2006. We were pronounced "truly married and partners for life". The weather was unbelieveably perfect, the location sublime, and those in attendance helped us pull off something that, alone and sick, we could not have done ourselves. And to top it off, as we paddled out onto Kootenay Lake right after the ceremony (S. in her taffeta and I in my Sir Gawain gown), Daisy Mai Pickles jumped in and swam after us. Note: Daisy had never been swimming before. She'd expressed so little interest in the water that we thought all hope of her being a lake dog was lost. But we were wrong. Her celebratory swim was the best wedding gift ever.

I have many more stories to tell and pictures to share, but for now, here's a few, including one of me driving home (ah yes skanky driving hair)--I like this one because you can see my hand (with my new ring) and, well, this is pretty much how I look when I'm driving through Montana--intense, searching, & totally struck.