Of Weddings and Honeymoons

Well, it's been a week since Theresa and I have returned from Oz. For three weeks, in the words of a Robert Earl Keen song, we told the world to wait while we celebrated our honeymoon. What a time we had. There's so much to recount. And to be honest, each day, we were so tired there was almost no time to write in our journals, so what I recount will be mostly retrospective. But I think it shall still be interesting.

However, in the interest of giving some reasonably present tense recounting, I shall tell you how the homecoming has been. Certainly, a good deal of stuff to get caught up on work. Nevertheless, we have had time to tie up post wedding tasks and embark on this "marriage" thing. Our photographer has sent us the hundreds of proofs from the wedding. They're really wonderful. T and I have to select the forty odd photos that we'll stick in our wedding album. It's hard to pick -- ultimately, we're answering the question: "how would I like to remember the day?" Most memories we craft passively, so it's a bit unusual to make explicit decisions about them.

Theresa has also done a remarkable job at staying on top of the Thank You notes. She sent out notes for all the presents we received prior to the wedding. Today, we took care of almost all the other ones. She's been using Excel to rather effectively keep track of who we invited, their address, what they got us, whether we thanked them, etc. So I think that's finally wrapped up. Thank goodness I married an organizer!

We had plenty to eat at the Cheng household between homecoming weekend and Mother's Day. Yesterday, we managed to get in a wonderful warm weather Saturday -- 25 mile bike ride, trail run, and backyard BBQ. Summer's upon us, sort of.

Well, more later. But,there's been some clamoring for honeymoon stories and pictures. I've finally downloaded all of them, but it will take some time to assemble and post-process. So, as a teaser, here's a picture of us at the Twelve Apostles off the Great Ocean Road on the southern coast of Victoria. We woke up early Sunday morning in Melbourne at the youth hostel to grey, rainy skies. As it would be a bummer to see the picturesque coast in the rain, we had to decide whether to postpone the trip for a day and just day-trip down to Phillip's Island or chance it that the rain would pass. But as you know, we're subscribers to OptimisticWeather.com so westward ho!, it was. And sure enough, Mother Nature complied (it was our honeymoon, after all). Right before sunset, the sky opened up with blue patches and big, billowy clouds.