Weddingbee

For today’s post, I am stepping back and letting Mr. Hummingbird narrate his morning’s happenings. Take it away, Mr. Hum!

Mr. Hummingbird here, with the story about my wedding morning. Oh, it was a fun one.

The night before was a quiet night, hanging out with my brother and our videographer Alex. We smoked cigars, drank beer and played Boom Blox on the Wii until my dad came down and told us to go to bed around 3:30. I passed out quickly, and woke up fresh and excited the next morning, ready for what I knew would be a great day. After all, why be stressed? We’d worked on this wedding for a year, so what could go wrong?

No one else was up, so I climbed in the car and drove off to Milton. I grabbed myself a coffee at Starbucks and headed over to our two flower shops to pick up our orders. There were no issues getting the bouquets, so that was a good start. I then headed to the wholesale flower shop to pick up ten dozen roses for our tables. They came in two large water filled buckets that I thought I had wedged into the back seat of the car, until one of them tipped over as I pulled out of the parking lot. Before I could do anything poured water all over the back of the car, causing me to exclaim…

Okay, I’m going to stop us here for a second. In the interest of keeping it clean while still fully expressing my frustration, I’m going to use a couple stand-in words for the remainder of this post. Heck, let’s make them wedding-themed.

“SHOWER!” I yelled as the back floor of the car flooded. I spun around in my seat and managed to haul the bucket upright, turning back to the wheel just in time to see myself driving straight towards the median.

“FAVOR!” I screamed as I yanked on the wheel, almost tipping the flowers over again. I drove home very carefully after this, with as few turns as possible.

The flowers that almost spelled my doom.

Once I arrived home and unloaded the flowers that had attempted to kill me, I rounded up my brother and Alex to help me begin setting up the tent. It had rained that morning, and the night before, and indeed most of the previous week, so when we went out to the tent, we discovered that the entire lawn was still pretty wet. Even under the tent.

“Son of a BOUQUET! Why the FAVOR is it wet under the FAVORING tent! This thing’s been up for three days!”

But I managed to convince myself that this would all dry up as the sun (even though it was overcast) would dry out the ground (which was nicely shaded by the tent). You think this is some serious denial, just wait.

As the three of us began setting up chairs and tables and laying out the linens, we noticed that our tromping through the watery lawn was causing it to turn into mud. And this was just three of us walking through the tent. What was going to happen when we had 70 odd guests stomping around? I leaned over a table and began trying to breathe, while Alex tried to reassure me by saying “Well, it’s not that muddy, no one’s going to notice.” He would then counteract his reassurances by yelling “Holy crap, look how muddy it is here! Did you see how muddy it is over there too!” Bless him, he’d then go back to “No one’s going to notice though, don’t worry.” Surprisingly, this didn’t help me calm down at all.

Apparently, he actually called his fiancée Kim (who was with Ms. Hum at the time) and held the phone up to his foot so she could hear how muddy it was. He quite wisely did this where I couldn’t see him.

In an attempt to salvage the situation, I asked my dad if he thought the shop-vac might be able to suck up some of the mud and dry out the lawn under the tent. Thinking back on it now, there’s no way this would have any effect. One shop-vac cannot lower the entire water level of several acres of yard that are essentially in the middle of a swamp. But, in order to keep my head from exploding, my dad indulged me, and we took the shop-vac to one of the worst mud puddles. I convinced myself it was working, even as more water and mud seeped in to replace that which we’d just sucked up. Then, just to make it more fun, my dad removed the hose from the puddle, spraying mud at Alex. He quickly redirected the hose, which then sucked up one of the table linens, essentially coating the corner of it in a nice layer of mud.

With the tables and chairs now laid out in our mud tent, it was time to start setting up the centerpieces. I hauled out the flowers and begin dividing them up into the vases. At this point, Alex and Nick were outside of the tent (possibly placing that call to Kim I mentioned earlier) when they heard me screaming: “FAVOR! FAVOR FAVOR FAVOR!”

Thinking that something must be really really wrong for me to screaming so violently, they rushed into the tent, ready to face whatever Lovecraftian-monstrosity had no doubt risen from the mud.

What is it?” they yelled.
“TWO OF THE FAVORING FLOWERHEADS FELL OFF THE FAVORING FLOWERS!!”

Everything is kind of a red haze for me at this point, but I’m fairly sure they laughed at me. “So?” said my brother.

“Well, there’s not going to be the same number of FAVORING flowers at each of the FAVORING tables!”

My brother later recounting my reaction to the flower heads falling off through interpretive dance.

Will Mr. Hummingbird’s situation improve?  Stay tuned for the next installment of “The Weddening!”

• Cake, Revisited
• Admitting Defeat