July 9, 2010 - Our Wedding

Kirk and I finally tied the knot on July 9,2010.  It was a simple yet beautiful ceremony.   You all know that we had planned on getting married on July 20th, so...what happened?

Well, lets see...what didn't happen!  Our original plan was to marry in Greece.  We had the perfect plan.  All fell through when we found out that it was just a play wedding and not the real thing.  In order to actually marry there we would have had to jump through too many obstacles.  About that time, the company Kirk works for was slow, so he decided to come to Dubai a month earlier than planned.  It was all working to our favor and the plan changed to marry in Dubai and then honeymoon in Greece as well as a week in Dubai.

Just after Kirk arrived, we found that it would be even harder to marry in Dubai then Greece.  Since Kirk had been divorced, they wanted us to wait a minimum of 8 weeks to get the divorce approved and then our upcoming wedding approved.  Then, we both had to JOIN a church.  The law in Dubai is that you cannot "shack up" without serious punishment and jail time.  So, Kirk went and stayed in a hotel.  At that point, things were getting too complicated to get married outside the US.  So our next plan was to fly to New York and marry there.  Simple, easy and fun. 

Things were already bad for me with my job, so Greece was put on the back burner since we were not sure where we would end up in a month or two.  That month or two turned in to a week - Only a week after Kirks arrival, we were back on a plane heading to Houston.  Now both of us were unemployed.  Not a good thing to start our lives together.  However, we were just so happy to be with and have each other it really did not seem that bad.

We had already paid the travel agent our down payment for Greece and could not reclaim it.  Our wedding and honeymoon was still on, but now on a major budget.  The idea was to find a place that we could just use the down payment and nothing else.  Our next idea took us to PA since Kirks family is there and they wanted to throw us a party.  And of course they all wanted to meet me.  The problem was, we could not figure out a way to use our down payment for that other than the plane tickets.  And it would not have been much of a honeymoon for us.

Then my sister thought of going on a cruise.  That was the perfect idea!  We started looking around and found one that left out of Houston/Galveston. 

New obstacle - our travel agent does not do cruises.  Discouraged, we decided to bring a little happiness and went down to get our marriage license.  We were really excited about it.  The license was good for 30 day with a three day waiting period.  They gave us a list of Justice of the Peace to choose from.  All but one seemed too far away. 

By now I was getting discouraged.  Our beautiful Greek wedding was turning in to a fly by at the court house - most likely in jeans.  I made Kirk promise me a regular wedding when we get back on our feet in a year.

I called the Justice of the Peace and she had an opening that Friday.  Since we did not know what direction our lives would turn by next week we had to take it.  To our delight, she does her ceremonies at a little garden in League City.  The thought of a quaint garden wedding thrilled us since we did not have to hammer down the isle of the court house.  I decided to wear one of the two wedding dresses I picked out.  The one that was for the evening dinner was perfect for the event.  We called a few friends to come join us.  The day was almost perfect - it was too hot and a few of our friends were already pretty "toasty" (from the alcohol, not the sun). 

Below are some pictures for you - we married at 6:00 in the evening in the 7th month on the 9th day in 10th year of 2000.  Pretty cool!  All we are missing is the 8! - of course that is just me being a dork!

Now it is off to Roatan, Honduras for our honeymoon!