I got up early on the wedding day around six thirty. I had been playing with the music downloads from Yahoo! Unlimited down to my media PC and was trying to get some key staples for dancing like Baby Got Back and Milkshake in case we were able to pull off the dancing side of things. I also was simultaneously working on the photo slideshow by arranging the pictures into a more logical order for chronology.

I kept clicking on and off at the Weather.com web site to review the strange predictions for Bedford. According to the forecast it was a 20% chance of rain for the whole day but hour by hour there were supposed to be 60% chance of showers every hour until a mysterious clearing between 3 and 6 AM. So when Jeff, our justice of the peace, called on the phone to check with us on any potential edits to the ceremony I told him that we might have to push the ceremony back a bit to catch the rays of sunshine since we preferred the outdoor setting. He told us that he had to leave at 3PM to make his next appointment so we realized that we were going to have to go with whatever nature dealt us in the cosmic rain or sunshine shuffle. Sarah considered praying for good weather and I told her that she should be responsible for that since I don’t believe in God.

At around 9 we began to gear-up for the wedding in Brookline. I called my dad to let him know that I had a sudden vision of guacamole from Whole Foods for the wedding and since Sarah and I aren’t near a Whole Foods that he might have a better shot at getting it. I had made arrangements with Zaftigs for a deli platter for 20 to be ready for us that would be ready at 9:30 AM. At first we had been thinking that it would make sense to get the deli platter first and then return to load the car but since we were wide awake we got to loading the car with the various things we needed to take in the car. The contents included the Media PC from the living room, a giant 19” monitor (not a flat screen), the old Dell Latitude laptop, a mouse, a keyboard, a camera battery charger, a set of computer speakers, a tripod that didn’t have the top to it, a card table, an overnight bag for the bed and breakfast stay, a recently printed copy of the ceremony, a tuxedo, and my recently dry cleaned suit in case my tuxedo either didn’t fit or spontaneously combusted.

We had recently taken a bunch of boxes and removed the peanuts from them and taken them apart so I couldn’t find a box suitable to carry the small stuff. I tried to reconstruct one of the boxes but there was only scotch tape to hold it together so I figured I would just be careful with it. As I went to place the components into the box and rushing I knocked a Medieval Manor glass over that had survived many purges of glassware and it shattered on the floor after cracking on the lower lip of the coffee table. I yelled Mazeltov and kept gathering goods to stuff into the car.

By the time we got to Zaftigs at exactly 9:30 AM the deli platters were tricky to cram into the mix. The Zaftigs platter was more types of food than I had intended to get. I probably should have just gotten deli meats because it came with cole slaw and potato salad in a huge bowl. Sarah was worried that my mad quest to add more Jewish food would offend her mother and it had been somewhat subconscious. I had asked my dad to pick-up a bunch of bagels with lox and cream cheese and to grab a lot of deserts and pastries from the local bakery the day before.

Throughout the ride to Bedford passing through sunny patches and deep rainy patches the contents of the back of the PT Cruiser needed to be carefully monitored to not fall through the edge from where the seats folded down allowed items to fall into. So I was driving slowly through the country roads in Bedford. We arrived finally around 10:15 expecting to see a bunch of folks soon to run through the rehearsal of the ceremony around 11AM but in general it was a quiet day in Bedford where not much was going on.

Sarah’s dad was carting the rented folding chairs into the yard to a back corner where the ceremony could point. He did this by attaching his gardening cart to the back of his John Deere mower with a full stack of chairs held on the back of the cart. Since I wasn’t dressed yet I helped to move the chairs from the cart along with him to make some rows starting in the back. We quickly realized that we were going to be wrong about the chair arrangement no matter what we did so we just kept unloading the chairs. Eventually Sarah came over to help us and we built our own little rounded seating system with an aisle down the middle with the chuppah that Matthew had built as the stage in the center that we used to orient the chairs to.

I also was responsible for Canon in D and Dance Me to the End of Love to play in the background during procession and recessional walks. To do this I had placed both of these onto my laptop and was planning on hooking-up the laptop to the speakers. Matthew, Sarah’s brother, retrieved a power strip for me that he hooked through a window. He was exhausted at having worked on a new bathroom all week and having MIT finals. Upon setting-up the laptop I learned that the laptop wasn’t that happy with playing the Dance Me version I had loaded because it had some form of protection on it that prevented it from playing. I hadn’t anticipated this and I started cursing myself for not having picked-up an iPod shuttle when we were at Costco buying liquor. But someone had mentioned that they were getting Sarah and iPod for the wedding so I had been reluctant to get a second one. The laptop was better designed for playing the slide show so I decided to make the switch to the full set-up with the media station PC, full 19” monitor, mouse, and keyboard in a station behind the aisle of chairs. Matthew helped with it and we covered it with some plastic to keep the monitor from rusting from the rain. The music played a bit but it had been choppy all night on that machine when I was loading it with music. How does an MP3 skip? But at least it played the right version of the songs.

I then went inside to set-up the slide show but now I needed a monitor to connect to the laptop. Matthew was moving back into Bedford for the summer and hadn’t set-up his computer and he had a great Dell wide screen flat panel monitor that I could set-up in the living room with the laptop. But as soon as I set it up I realized that it didn’t work very well with regards to staying live and the screen was stretching pictures to make them look very unappealing. At that point my dad had entered with my mom and Rosie. Lisa and Dave had arrived and were in the yard worried about the effects of the rain on the amplifiers they had brought since if either broke or even a microphone broke they would be out a thousand bucks. My dad wanted to fix my mom’s memory card with the laptop so I set it up for him to play with the memory card but that didn’t fix it.

When Jeff, the JIP, came he arrived at 11 instead of 10:30 and didn’t arrive with his partner as he had suggested before. He wanted to know if we wanted the two hundred pound trellis behind the chuppah. I thought it was worth a shot so we dragged it over. We could hear children playing the yard behind us after having heard what sounded like a leaf blower having made noise all morning. My dad walked over to ask them if they could do something to keep things quiet during the wedding but the reality was that the neighbors had planned a birthday party for a group of four year olds where they had rented a Spiderman trampoline.

I had asked Sarah ask Nick and Christina to bring their wireless router to see if it could give us a network to download a fix for the music onto the laptop but that wasn’t something I could focus on since the time was ticking towards the time for the rehearsal run through. Lisa and Dave were looking for a screw driver which I asked as a relay for Nick to bring and by the time he brought it they said they didn’t need it. Then the trellis fake flowers weren’t lined-up correctly so Jeff asked for a staple gun. I asked Nick to find one of these for me which he did but by the time we got back with it Jeff had fixed the trellis himself somehow without the staple gun.

With things stabilized with a stage it was time to rehearse. I couldn’t rehearse and fix the slide show so Nick worked on the slide show with some vague instructions while I started to corral the crew for the rehearsal with Sarah. We did OK trying to get the crew together to rehearse but were unable to get Matthew because he was taking a shower and we kept looking for Falkoff who had decided to take a nap in his car and was nowhere to be found until I saw his profile in his Volvo. The herding cats then led to the who is in charge problem as we went to line-up for a practice of the processional. Lisa and Dave were still working on the sound set-up. We decided to make some changes to the ceremony as printed including placing Matthew on the start button for Canon in D and the processional. This meant Nick was to take his place. Jeff, who was being a little anal about marking everything on his chart of the procession slowly took out a pen to mark the various aspects of where people would stand and then proceeded to call me David a few times as he talked. During the rehearsal we realized it was already past 1:15 and we were running out of time but that didn’t stop Jeff from trying to read long paragraphs very quickly (as if that would have helped him) or my dad from stating that a light bulb would make a loud popping noise. I snapped at my dad that now was not the time to debate the physical results of a light bulb vs. a wine glass. After that we ran quickly through the procedure again while guests began to arrive and key guests in the know were instructed to ferry them into the house instead of the backyard lest they get confused that they were late and missing the actual ceremony. The whole time as we practiced the entrance, ceremony, and exit, Robert was following us with his camera to either take practice photos or to plan the shots he would take.

So Sarah and I went upstairs to get dressed and Sarah was already miffed because she wasn’t going to have enough time to become beautiful in her dress. I went to put my tuxedo on and realized that I have great difficulty placing a cumberbund and bow-tie on even when they both include simple latches. Robert tried to capture this for posterity as the wedding photographer. At this point we also needed to get flowers placed on us and there were some friends of the Carvey’s with the flowers. I got mine pinned onto my lapel and was ready to go downstairs. On the way I asked someone whether drinks were already being served since I could see a hungry and thirsty crowd gathering downstairs. I was told that it was my option to drink so I figured I could forgo the drink if nobody else would have one. I then was put in charge of locating Falkoff so that he could get his official flower as the best man but he was once again nowhere to be found. So I kept bumping into guests to quickly greet them and then ask them if they had seen Falkoff anywhere. One woman figured out who Falkoff was when told that he was Zoe’s husband and they got him pinned.

As I wandered about it was already about twenty minutes past two so I could feel the time flying by with Jeff needing to leave at 3PM. We couldn’t start until Sarah was ready since a wedding doesn’t start without the bride. I looked around downstairs for Molly and Yuval and found Ami and Ilana instead. Ami had said they wouldn’t be able to make it for the ceremony and I suddenly worried that folks had come all the way from California and wouldn’t be there to make the wedding. It made me remember how Ami and Ilana had missed a part of Yuval and Molly’s wedding because they drove down to Connecticut too late.

I was trying to figure out where I was supposed to see Sarah since I apparently wasn’t supposed to see her until a certain point but we all needed to process together. Assorted in the know Carvey family helpers gathered the guests into their chairs and we gathered behind the back deck in our little phalanx attack procession formation. Sarah finally came down looking beautiful in her wedding dress through the back patio door. I asked her if she had the rings and she had forgotten them upstairs. So someone went to get the rings for her and Christina held onto them by placing them on her fingers. There was a rush to do this since Lisa and Dave started playing as soon as Sarah was sighted in the doorway and we didn’t want to leave a lot of time in the middle.

The music queued fine by Matthew and since I was first-up with my parents I took a good look at Matthew as we passed by. Canon in D didn’t do too well with the Media PC by skipping. I learned this Tuesday, two days after the wedding, after I took a look at it that the media PC was infected with a spyware worm that was probably causing all of the performance trouble. Headline: Hacker screws-up backyard wedding. Sarah was calm once she had walked down with her parents and her father offered her properly. Things went silent for a moment and we could hear a very loud cardinal enjoying the break in the rain to call for mates and the children giggling and laughing as they bounced on Spiderman. A plane flew overhead and low coming from Hanscomb airfield that we credited ourselves as having hired to do a flyby. I did a duck and cover in the chuppah to protect myself and Sarah from the plane.

The wedding ceremony itself was lighter than expected. It was hard not to be silly with all of the serious stuff going on. Mom read three pieces of poetry and Bruce Nickerson read a passage from the Song of Songs. Jeff seemed more nervous than anyone else on stage and had trouble reading the ceremony as he rushed through reading it. Lisa and Dave sang a customized version of Wherever You Go with the lyrics changed based on Sarah and me. Sarah and I sounded like the cone heads during the part where we had to speak together. At one point during the vows I sounded like Darth Vader claiming all of hers would be mine or something like that.

Finally the ceremony drew to a close as we were announced as Mr and Mrs. Daniel and Sarah Housman and we tried to go out slowly to Dance me to the End of Love but it was very jumpy music and we were excited to be married so we did a little dancing in the aisle on the way out. That lasted until the music crackled out because the media PC wasn’t very healthy and Matthew quickly drew the song to a close.

We then were greeted with the long receiving line which seemed to take about an hour. It was nice to see and meet everyone in the line but I could see people wandering about with glasses of champagne slowly fizzing. I was worrying that we wouldn’t get to see Ami and Ilana but they cut into line to say hello.

After the receiving line Falkoff gave his toast. I remember that he was happy to not have me interrupt him and that we would probably debate what he said for quite some time. He also thought that Sarah was the perfect woman for me since I am such an optimist, exemplified by a tennis game at 5:30 AM on a summer morning when Falkoff told me to meet him first thing in the morning for tennis. What Sarah had to combine with this was that she had chosen to get married outside in May. Falkoff’s toast was well received and then folks started to wander off to the bar and eat the food.

Sarah and I got a chance to mingle with guests but we were quickly separated and wandered about saying hello to everyone present. People knew where to go, where to be, how to have fun, and we just hung around with them. Sarah’s feet were cold from having stood in the wet grass as were many of the guests. Kate had invented in her mind a tool to place on the bottom of a stiletto heel to prevent them from sinking into mud during receptions in May.

The following are the pictures from the wedding on Sunday from my pocket Canon powershot camera. If you happen to have pictures from the wedding in digital format please drop me a line via email so that I can archive the large format electronic version. We can easily do a transfer via FTP, copying files, CDs, or telepathy (well telepathy is harder) .
View more pictures of the early part of the wedding


View more pictures of Jewish dancing and chair lifting


View more pictures of the wedding winding down

The following is some key info in FAQ format if you are going to the Wedding of Dan and Sarah this weekend.

Question: When is the wedding?
The wedding officially begins at 2PM on Sunday May 22nd.

Question: When should I arrive?
Arrive between 1:30 and 2:00PM

Question: Where is the wedding?
26 Sweeney Ridge Road, Bedford Mass. This is Sarah's parents' home.

Question: How do I get there?
If you are driving ... which is really the only way to go ...

From the city:
Rt 9 West to 95N.
Take the exit 31B exit which should be labelled 4/225.
Turn SLIGHT RIGHT onto SHAWSHEEN RD. 0.6 miles
Turn SLIGHT LEFT onto PAGE RD. <0.1>Question: What should I wear?
Wear something somewhat formal that will look good in an outdoor or indoor setting. Men - suits, women - nice dress.

Question: What do I do if I get lost?
Call Dan at 617.216.9921 or call the Carvey's 781.275.0866

Question: Is there food?
Yes there will be light fare, stuff you can eat standing-up and a heavy bar. If you are a big eater you should eat before. If you are a big drinker then make sure you have a ride home.

Question: Did you register for anything and where?
Yes we registered at Pottery Barn and at Amazon.com

Question: Should I get you something before the wedding?
Take your time. We may add things to the registry after the wedding. It hasn't been our top priority. We also are quite happy to apply gift certificates to larger items since we don't have a great need for too many little items?

Question: Is Sarah pregnant?
Yes.

Question: Should we get baby gifts?
We are not ready yet for a full onslaught of baby stuff. It is Jewish tradition to not have lots of baby stuff in the house until after the baby is in the house.

Question: Is it a boy or a girl?
We don't know yet.

Question: What will you name your new child?
We are not naming it until it is three years old so please do not ask us this or we will get ornery.

Question: Are there cool pictures of when you are kids?
Yes. They are actually already online. Take a look...

Before : Images of both Sarah and my parents before either of us were born

Baby and toddler: A melange of pictures of the youngest years for Sarah and myself including the first fully nude picture of me available.

Teen: Teen years for Sarah and me

SarahSanta: A collection of pictures of just Sarah and Santa

Twenty: General pics from after Sarah and I were old enough to drink beer

Pregnancy test : Images from the initial reactions to the pregnancy test that came-up positive in February

Question: Should I take pictures?
Yes, but you will need your own camera. We would like the pictures when you are done so please send them in digital format to Dan either after the wedding or let him borrow your memory card to copy them onto a local disk to save you the trouble of sending them through the Internet.

So at 10PM in Montreal we set out on our maiden voyage of the dirty old men club to seek trouble in whatever form we could identify it. Included in the docket for the evening were standard bachelor party plans including at a minimum naked women and excessive consumption of alcohol.

We figured we would warm-up our trouble making skills on the Brahmin beautiful people of Montreal by hitting the top nightlife locations. The first stop on our tour was the hippest dance club in Montreal called W. Since Falkoff’s wife Zoe was friends with the bouncer from their health club we figured that we would have no problem getting past their bluff of a full guest list. The bouncer was very nice about why he couldn’t let us in so we went for our Vegas special charm – money. “OK, How much do you want?” asked Robert but the guest list was a glass ceiling to our crowd? The bouncer wished us good luck on our bachelor party evening and we pressed on for a door that would be open to us. Kilimnik may have had the wrong shoes but we will never know.

So a few minutes later we found ourselves playing quarters at Peel pub. Peel pub is best known in Montreal for being the college pub that was shut down for having recycled beer. It is the type of place that we were highly impressed with when we took the AEPi fraternity up to Montreal to see the film festival after rush because it had the same college atmosphere and mini-dance floor as Boston’s own Cask and Flagon. Playing quarters reminded me of the time that Scorzelli got drunk for the first time and we put hundreds of chinks into his mother’s kitchen table as we banged quarters into it. As we realized that chugging beers wasn’t going to get us drunk enough Kilimnik called out for tequila shots to get us rolling even faster and then the waitress poured a shot in my mouth. Once the last quarter hit the last beer we were back on our way.

After having been to strip clubs in more than one state and country I like to compare the differences between them. Jeremy is more of an expert than I am. My best experience at a strip club was in Toronto at the Brass Rail. Philip had taken me there and hadn’t told me what it was. So I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived to find Philip sitting with his C-cup implant Asian girlfriend and her friend from Texas who was up for the weekend for a threesome that he had selected a stripper for me and rushed me into the back room for a lap dance. While at the Brass Rail we were all quite certain that we saw Keefer Sutherland relaxing with a crowd of movie folks in the front row. We didn’t bother the movie stars but the strippers kept coming one after the other in an endless stream to tempt us to have a lap dance with them. This was the great thing about Toronto – the ratio of strippers to people going to a strip club was very high so you could sit and chat with the strippers who knew they were going to work for it. Among the other great things about the Brass Rail when I was there was that a lap dance for one song was $10 Canadian. Since the exchange rate was great this was only about $7 American and a steal compared to Boston’s main low budget strip club, The Glass Slipper, where buying a $300 miniature bottle of champagne for a girl gets you the same lap dance that you get in Toronto for $7. Toronto was like going to a waterslide park where the entrance fee is $5 and there are no lines for the slides. So Montreal was selected as a good place to go for a bachelor party because like Toronto it was also in Canada.

Now among the great moments at strip clubs in my past was a time in New York on 42nd street. I was there with Jeremy and I had been sold on the whole lap dance thing by a brunette wearing a police officer spandex swimsuit with short sleeves. She plunked down on my lap went into her routine. I had placed my phone into vibrate mode before entering to a potential faux-pas but I hadn’t thought about the problem that a vibrating cell phone while a stripper is dancing on your lap could also be a problem. About two minutes into the dance the phone started to vibrate in my pocket. Every few minutes the phone went back to vibrate so after I cut the dance short I used the callerID to figure out who had called me. It was about one in the morning and the many calls were all from my parents’ house in Newton. Since they had called so often I got the feeling of dread that something had gone wrong and they needed desperately to get in touch with me. So I called back to have my father answer anxiously. He let me know that he had gotten a very strange phone call from my phone earlier in the evening that sounded like there was some sort of a struggle but the sound had been muffled. So my parents were calling to find out what had happened. So the lesson learned was that you should probably avoid leaving your phone on at all during an involved lap dance because cell phones enjoy playing pranks on you like automatically dialing your parents when someone is sitting on your lap.

So at the bachelor party we hit our first strip club. The club was not like the Brass Rail and we had to demystify the etiquette and rules for Montreal strip clubs. Apparently they have more demand than in Toronto which explains the larger number of clubs but the clubs are divided into two categories – contact (like club supercontact) and clubs like the one which we were at (club supernocontact). This causes all sorts of problems including the hotter girls being at the no contact clubs and the less interesting ones appearing in the no contact clubs. So we instead were entertained by a francophone man who was chubby and wearing glasses that had been convinced by his friends who had paid to embarrass him on stage. As he danced on stage three strippers collectively undressed him until he was completely naked naked. The strippers then whipped him with his own belt and then brought out black permanent markers and wrote on his back with the markers in French. Throughout this process the MC was barking out complex sets of commands also spoken in French. My big fear as I watched this was less that my friends would place me in an equally embarrassing scenario but that because my French isn’t that good if I were in the same situation I would be unable to understand the complex commands while being beaten and marked on stage. So Kilimnik and I got together in a corner for a “private dance”, not to be confused with a lap dance, with an Asian stripper who was on day three of her stripping carreer and had braces on both her top and bottom sets of teeth. We didn’t spend much time actually being entertained by her stripping but instead DK used the opportunity to do extensive research into stripper rules and the lay of the land in Montreal for finding full contact clubs and beyond.

Among the other research that was being done in the background I overheard someone saying - “Do I look like a prostitute to you?”. I actually passed the asian girl again while walking outside on Monday near Rue St. Arthur as she ducked into a clothing store but I decided that we didn’t have enough in common to re-aquaint myself outside of our meeting place.

We went onwards to club number two where I was left alone with a stripper doing a personal table dance. Dismissed after three or four songs. I suspected more research activity was underway.

The results of the research was that the strip clubs in Montreal aren’t that great and we were going to relax a bit and go to a dance club bar to have some fun dancing. We moved to a club that looked like it was rocking inside with a big dance floor and a big bar. I flirted with the coat check girls who mainly just wanted my coat. Once inside I spotted a gaggle of about six young women wearing glow jewelry. I approached them to see if any of them wanted to dance but a local idiot guy standing next to them gave a guardian comment – You are too old for these girls.” Falkoff rummaged-up a bachelorette party on the dance floor and I danced with the bride to be but we just didn’t click just because of our equivalent pending pre-marital status. Somehow we lost Robert inside and he disappeared. We waited around and speculated that he had gone home somewhere with some loose women but the more likely answer confirmed when we got home was that he had just gone back to the hotel to sleep.

Some drunk guy who attached himself to us and said we should hang out with him because he is staying in the nicest hotel in Quebec and girls love that. We had no interest and moved on. We saw some blood on the ground as we walked and the night was coming to a close but since we were drunk we tried a bunch of strip clubs that were all closed for the evening as we stammered back to the hotel. We made a pit stop at McDonalds for a drunken midnight burger and fries and landed back into the hotel for a good night’s sleep.

Having arrived in a city full of nubile French Canadian women all too happy to help some young American’s celebrate their bachelor party I chose to stick with Falkoff, Zoe, and Zoe’s parents to go to dinner in the burbs with Zoe’s parents friends. We went out together for Chinese food at a local suburban Chinese restaurant where I learned and then promptly forgot the word in Chinese for moose neck. I ate next to Henry, who had once applied for a job at ChannelWave with Ron years before. He had been studying in Colorado at a new age location and was convinced that brain energy could control the future of the earth. It might have been a language barrier but my understanding of his theory for the future of the world relating to this brain energy was that we can think the world to self-destruct in a psycho-kinetic fashion. I decided to translate it to mean that our brains are actually one of the more destructive forces when we chose to use them to do silly things like destroying non-renewable resources and building weapons that could kill people in numbers counted in the same order of people served at McDonalds or Carl Sagan descriptions of the stars in the universe. Henry was moving to the a remote location near a lake where he was going to repair machines.

Dinner was nice although the language of choice for immigrants from Taiwan switches between French and Mandarin. So I was dreaming of a future where I could look at someone and be able to see subtitles written in my visual frame under them as they spoke. After the fine Chinese meal we retired to the family’s home. At the home we tasted the wine that they had home brewed from the grapes in their backyard. Henry mentioned that the wine tasted like a $100 bottle of wine that he had once had. I concurred that there was true value to the home brew wine but that it tasted more to me like a $90 bottle than a $100 bottle. The family also had a very large white cat. I did enjoy staying at their home and taking photos with the family.

Falkoff dropped me off at our hotel room to sleep off the residue of the wine and the long ride from Boston. The idea was that in the morning we would begin a secret adventure that hadn’t been revealed to me as a bachelor after we grew our party from two to three with the arrival of Mr. Robert Frigault.

In the morning I watched Montreal television. My favorite show that I was watching while waiting for Falkoff to arrive was Inside the Actor’s Studio with the woman who starred in Chocolat and Blue. The best part of the show in Montreal was that the subtitles came ahead of the English speaking voices so I could test out my French on the sub-titles and then hear the English to see whether I was right or not. This seems to be a very helpful way to learn a foreign language although I also spent some time fantasizing, given that I have a child on the way, that I could alleviate the boredom I might find in watching children’s television programs like Sesame Street if I watched a French version of them and I would probably be learning much of the vocabulary even slower than my infant.

So once Robert appeared and Falkoff and I had swam in the pool on the roof we headed out on our expedition to the unknown physical activity. I was told to bring shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt and that wearing contacts was better than wearing glasses. Zoe had planned the event and was coming along and Asha had wanted to come but she had suffered a massive neck injury during a snowboard accident in the Alps preventing her from doing the mysterious activity. So we drove a hell of a long time into the suburban part of Montreal again and at a few points I felt like I might just be a victim of a mob hit waiting to be brought to a back alley to be shot. I also suspected either paintball or rock climbing but shorts seemed like it eliminated paint ball. The car pulled into the Rock Gym parking lot and we then proceeded to wander about until we had found the part of the facility responsible for trapeze school lessons.

Trapeze school is a very fun activity and doesn’t hurt until the following day when you are hung over and sore as hell from a tour of the local strip clubs and cheap bars of Montreal. The teachers at the school consist of a woman who is far stronger than I will ever be at the top where you jump helplessly over the net and a chubby man who controls your ropes at the bottom. The goal on the trapeze is to swing back and forth, then tuck your feet under the bar, swing upside down with your arms stretched to the ground, reach back to get the bar, then untuck your feet, then swing forwards backwards forwards into a front flip that lands you nicely into the net. It sounds quite easy and looks easy when the beer belly instructor shows you how to do it using a Barbie doll attached to a fake trapeze bar. I did this almost flawlessly on the first try and then could never get through the step of tucking my feet under the bar but it was fun to fly off the trapeze and I enjoyed the experience over all.

At lunch we went back into the city near Vieux Montreal where we went seeking the best brownie in Montreal at a bakery that is one of Zoe’s favorites. Although we got plenty of food for takeout the brownie we ordered never appeared. We walked the food out to the esplanade area near the river and the Cirque de Soleil tents and lay on the grass drinking our beers out of paper bags and talking about which super power each of us wanted to have if we could have any. I chose the ability to eat anything as my superpower. I could always be hungry, eat all the time, never get fat, and in difficult situations I could gnaw on the trunks of trees until they fell on villains. Robert wanted to be embarrassed man. He would turn red and make villains feel uncomfortable. Zoe wanted to be invisible. Falkoff just wanted to fly. We later grabbed both Asha and Kilimnik and asked them their preferred super powers and Asha wanted to be rich girl – where her super strength would be to have lots of money. Kilimnik, like Falkoff just wanted to be able to fly.

What I have noticed about people’s choice of superpowers is that they tend to show a lot about our insecurities. I think that I feel like I eat to much and am getting fat, Robert feels like his shyness inhibits him, Zoe worries that she blends into the background of life, Asha worries that money controls her destiny. I don’t know why Falkoff and Kilimnik both wanted to fly. Maybe they always feel a little trapped.

We had a giant bottle of “Le Fin Du Monde”, a Montreal based beer with us at our little picnic that none of us drank. It seemed like a good way to end bachelorhood but it is still full in the back of my car. On the way back to our car we were ambushed by a large parade full of protesters flanked on either end by police caravans yelling in French to allow them to continue to smoke pot. Someone from the parade must have stolen my brownie! The funny thing about a pot smoking parade is that pot smokers aren’t that motivated of a bunch and also tend to straggle so most of the people who should have appeared at the parade probably were still home thinking about whether to go or just smoke another bowl while the other half kept lagging behind the police car in the rear and then wandering off into some assorted wooded areas like trees planted in metal rings by the sidewalk to play their guitars and drums. One woman was wearing a pot adorned thong that hung out of her pants.

The French restaurants in Montreal often have BYOB policies so we set out to purchase two nice bottles of wine to drink with dinner. The price for the wine came out to $55.55. This wouldn’t be so much of note had we not been staying in room 505. This wouldn’t have been much of note had it not been 05/05/05 two days earlier. The man who sold us the three bottles of wine suggested that I play the lottery and select a lot of 5s. I withheld the urge. I decided to check on the Montreal lottery just now for Sunday. The winning number was: 06 26 28 30 33 34 49. No 5s at all!

At dinner we enjoyed some fine cuisine including an appetizer of foie gras. Since we figured that five people wouldn’t be able to eat more than four dishes we only ordered four dishes. The waitress arrived first with my empty plate and giggled at me as she said “bon appetit” and then proceeded to serve the other four people plates. The French food is actually prepared quite beautifully but once it reached my a la carte plate combining the four dishes it was significantly aesthetically challenged.

After dinner we took a quick hop over to have a beer in a microbrewery and to wait for the arrival of the devil, Mr. David Kilimnik. We met Dave back at the hotel and he told us that Hillary had given him the parting words: “Have fun disrespecting women”. Kilimnik was reminded that he had a lot of catching-up to do. So DK helped us to chug the last bottle of wine to catch-up. I reminded DK of when Dave Fiske had helped me to catch-up at Scorzelli’s bachelor party in Fargo and had given me a drink so potent that after I walked in the door to the hotel room, said hi, and chugged what appeared to be a standard margarita, I immediately dropped to the floor like I had been hit by a tranquilizer dart and stared at the ceiling for a few hours.

The weekend began as we rented a Hyundai XG-350 luxury sedan from the Marriot hotel by the Charles. We hadn’t planned on getting the Hyundai but they were out of the cheap economy cars that we planned on taking. Falkoff and I were driving-up together and we would add Robert and Kilimnik throughout the day on Saturday to journey en masse on Sunday and then drive Zoe back from Montreal on Monday afternoon.

Any drive to Montreal can be accelerated with a long argument about American politics and the issues around the invasion of Iraq as well as discussions about problems with the US health care system. Falkoff and I dueled and argued about the value of the war and the means by which it is being carried out. I think the discussion began because Vermont, the state we drive through to reach Canada, had debated pull their National Guard troops out of Iraq. Falkoff has traveled the route to Montreal and back many times and gave me the sage advice that if we kept the speedometer to 80 then the police wouldn’t pull us over for speeding. I couldn’t figure out how to set the cruise control so I was doing the speed manually. We had one close call where a cop pointed at me and gave me a slow down warning and I was certain that he was going to wave me over for a ticket like the other two cars he was charging for driving too fast. My heart skipped a few beats and I went seventy for twenty miles and then figured I was through the rough speed trap zones so I picked the pace back up.

When we were near Coventry, at the rest stop where we ate breakfast while trying to go to the last ever Phish concert that we never got to last fall, we stopped to pee, look at a babbling brook at the scenic overlook, and then Falkoff figured out how to work the cruise control. I set the cruise control to 81 figuring that it was close enough and I was surprised as I was climbing a hill how good the car was at keeping it’s velocity constant. At the bottom of the hill I met officer Clark Lombardi who asked me questions including whether I knew how fast I was going (81), why I was speeding (no reason), whether I was in the military (no), and why I was going to Montreal (to celebrate my last weekend as a bachelor). Officer Lombardi was likely a distant relative of the great coach Vince Lombardi and his many team oriented concepts ingrained in Clark led him to sit in his car and look menacingly at me until I turned away whenever I looked in the rear view mirror for ten seconds to see what was taking him so long. I figured I must have had some criminal record in Vermont or was at least confused for a wanted escaped convict. So I was relieved when I was handed a $132 fine for speeding at 81 MPH and told to pay it within a week or be eaten alive by Yaks.

We pressed on to meet our critical engagement with Zoe’s parents to go out to dinner with friends of the family in the suburbs. As I went into Zoe’s apartment I was given a customary bowl of hot tofu milk to greet us from our travels that I promptly drank and realized would have been better with sugar and then read my horoscope as an Ox for this year on the calendar on the wall: It read “Prospect of the year: Your nature to push yourself to try any chances. To avoid wasting of efforts, you need to be careful and think twice before moving to the next step.” Interesting advice from the Zodiac for a man with a pregnant fiancée.

Falkoff and I got up at the crack of dawn yesterday to play tennis at the cove. Actually it was only about seven o’clock in the morning but it felt very early after Sarah got home at midnight. Her baby sitting had gone late while the people she was babysitting for were held-up at the restaurant because the parents were friends with some Fox executive who knew the chef so the chef wanted them to stay longer. By the time Sarah got home she was fuming.

So the tennis game was a shambles for me. After playing squash off and on for the winter I couldn’t remember how to play tennis at all. I managed to get some skills back but I was ready to play a very small child in order to get my confidence back. Among the things that I was suffering from was a total failure of any backhand shots. If the ball was to the right of me I was better off calling it quits than swinging at it and then having to fetch it from whatever obtuse angle it flew off the racket. The only saving grace to the bad backhand which I doubt I will ever fix was that I was thinking about my future child and how the one gift I intend to give them is the knowledge that you should learn to hit a backhand early in your life. It is quite a relief to not have to worry as much about my faults. Instead I can just project them onto my future children as something to fix in the next generation. For now it works well since I don’t actually have any sentient children and I can think of them more like version 2.0 for me but at some point that will likely fail.

As the morning warmed-up a pair of tennis fanatics who awoke even later than we did set-up in the court next to us. They were much better and made me feel worse about how bad I was playing and my squandered dreams of winning at Wimbledon. One of the two was quite funny because he had a habit of chastising himself in full coach yelling while he played. So he would tell himself things in a sarcastic voice like “Nice Lexi – you worked hard for that last point and look what you did on that one”, “You have to move Lexi and run after the ball if you want to get those points”. He went on and on and I was amazed at how little his opponent paid to this bizarre self-coaching behavior.

After a set and ten games of losing to Falkoff I conveniently sprained my hamstring and felt enough pain to call it a day. This afternoon I leave for Montreal for the bachelor party ritual. In preparation I have been trying to learn Flash.

Worlds Worst Flash Animation:

I have rarely had anything stolen from me. One time Falkoff and I were mugged in Amsterdam. We were probably very easy to mug after having gone to an outdoor ATM while walking lost in the spider-web of streets and canals in an altered state of mind. My green Schwinn Mirada mountain bike was stolen out of the basement boiler room of 155 Bay State Road while I was in college. Recently a thief took some shelves that had been delivered by Pottery Barn to our doorstep before we had a chance to drag them up the stairs. I also cried one time when my apple was taken from me and then the neighbors kids played keep away with it until I was sufficiently upset and then exploded it by throwing it into a tree.

Yesterday morning I went down to the basement of 50 St. Paul Street to hop on my bike to go to the gym. I have two bikes that are both similar in the basement because they were bought as a pair including a lady’s bike and a men’s bike. The Lady’s bike is in disrepair due to lack of use and an unfortunate incident with a car including deflated tires, a cracked gear shifter, and a bent brake controller. Since it is dark in the basement and the two bikes look similar I hopped on the ladies bike and walked three feet to discover that not only was I on the wrong bike but that the bike that I intended to ride was mysteriously missing and most likely stolen.

The basement is a common area and I have had a bike stolen out of the common area before so the first thing that comes to my mind when my bicycle is stolen in the basement is here we go again. The dejected and miserable feeling that you get when someone steals your bike that you left unlocked in a basement next to a boiler is not a good one. The first time that it happened to me I was furious with the perpetrator and vowed to invent a new line of evil bicycle seats that would punish anyone stealing a bike or purchasing a stolen bike. Once activated, when the thief sat on the bike the bike would release a pin filled with a drug that would knock them unconscious for 48 hours and give them a really bad hangover. The brakes could be deactivated at high speeds to cause the thief to be unable to stop the bike when riding down a fast hill. So in short I was pissed the first time.

The dejected feeling when you have already had the same problem once before is one of shame and self-pity. So I was standing in the basement looking around at the other bikes on display with my blue helmet in hand thinking about how I was going to have to drive the five blocks to the gym from my new parking space.

My new parking space is great actually. I just started parking there as of Saturday night. The last space that I had that was a twelve minute walk required five street crossings and the space itself included an odd dance where the owner would park my car and two others into the space after midnight and move his old Volvo at six AM. If I got back too late then there would be no place to put the car. The driveway itself is a steep hill that is covered with branches that tend to leave key mark style scratches down the back of the PT Cruiser in the spring and a treacherous ice highway with snow banks on either side during the winter. The distance to the space had gotten so great that I had started to bike to it every morning when I went to move the car and then biked back every night when I parked.

The new space I got through the people who rent me the space that Sarah’s car is in. Sarah’s space is also a Brookline special with a big hill at the bottom and people who park their cars at all angles making it difficult to maneuver in and out of the space. The owners had friends moving into the big new condo complex that used to be Richie from the old parking lot’s families place and their friends didn’t have a car and didn’t know who to rent a space to. So Sarah and I lucked out with this new swank space behind the new swank condo complex.

So the first night that I was able to move the car into the new space was May 1st. That was Saturday night. Sarah and I had been stir crazy enough to go out to see a real movie and given that I love Douglas Adams books and the old BBC television series we went to watch the new adaptation of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. My personal opinion of the movie was that it was a mediocre rendition of the wit from Douglas Adams. It was like watching Catch-22 the movie. I know the story well enough to know that they inserted a love triangle that didn’t fit to make it more of a movie plot and that was more annoying than entertaining.

What we learned about going out that we already knew before is that it is much more expensive and complex to go out than it is to stay in. Going out with a car requires you to park somewhere and parking near the Boston Commons to go to the Lowes Theatre is difficult. After scanning for parking and getting caught in a disaster of traffic behind the theatre near where they are showing Phantom of the Opera, we finally doubled back to cache our car under the Commons in the lot. That lot was great because they only charged $10 and everyone else wanted $20 but it has the problem that after midnight all of the entry pods shut down except for a couple and they all look the same so you are playing a game of concentration to see which one you have tried to enter while running around the commons hoping that you don’t get mugged in the dark while you are looking for them by the people who the entry pods are supposed to lock out. Saturday night was a rainy night so that made the game even more fun.

So when we had completed watching the movie and gone through the pod game it was already past midnight which meant that I couldn’t park the car at the old space. This was mainly because it was past midnight and there would be a Volvo blocking the driveway not because I had successfully cancelled the parking for May. But the price for May will only be $90 because of the $30 parking ticket I incurred one night because I couldn’t get into the space at 11:30 pm and nobody had responded when I called and knocked to ask them to move the Volvo.

I used to have a 1987 Volvo 740 Turbo Intercooler station wagon that I would park at the bottom of a long driveway at 930 Mass Ave in the mid to late nineties. The turbo had long since stopped working and the air conditioner also didn’t operate at the time At one point during a snow storm I almost backed the car over myself while I was trapped with my leg stuck under the chain fence at the bottom of the hill after I tried to push it from behind with the engine running and the car in drive. But at least the commute to the space at 930 Mass Ave. The Volvo, which was about as much of a prize as my old mountain bike was kind of stolen once. It happened one night when I was working during an all-nighter on a prototype demo for Shiva, who became our second real ChannelWave client and eventually became Intel as a client after an acquisition. I had decided that in order to finish the demo I was going to need either sleep or coffee. I opted for coffee so I went down the street two blocks to the local 7/11 and bought a nice big hot coffee. I then walked back on Mass Ave., passing a few dangerous looking night folks and became alert as the caffeine in the coffee kicked-in. I then proceeded to knock out a pretty good demo.

The next morning I was a bit groggy but in the afternoon I had to drive out to 3Com for a meeting because they were our first ChannelWave customer. When I went down the driveway I noticed that my 740 Turbo Intercooler Volvo station wagon was missing and had most likely been stolen. So I told everyone in the building that my car had been stolen and they all recommended that I go immediately to the police station. I decided that was the right recourse since it might be recoverable. I didn’t have a lo-jack on the old beast and it might be recoverable because someone had taken a slow joy ride in it or tried to pull parts from it. So I walked towards the police station.

The police station in Cambridge is in Central square and 930 Mass Ave is halfway between Harvard and Central. The walk to the police station includes a walk past the 7/11. So while I was sleep deprived and gurgling with angry thoughts of the vengeance I would take on the Volvo thieves I passed by the post office and directly in front of 7/11 my Volvo was parked with about four parking tickets from throughout the day. So apparently I had driven to the 7/11 because I was so tired and then walked back once I had some coffee in me.

So when I was pacing and fuming in the basement yesterday morning I realized that the thing that had happened to me twice was not that my bicycle had been stolen but instead that I had once again put my mode of transportation in one location and not returned on it. In the switch-over from one parking space to the other on Saturday night I had biked over to the crazy parked-in parking space then spent my day with Sarah (actually I had golfed with Falkoff in the rain from 9AM to 3PM and then spent the rest of the day with Sarah). I had parked in the spiffy and swank new lot and left the bike far away.

So I left the basement with a glimmer of hope in my eye that the bicycle wasn’t stolen and walked the twelve minutes to the parking space. I breathed a deep sigh of relief as I unlocked the bike from the bush branches it was connected to in the yard near the parking space. I then biked to the gym and proceeded to elliptically run in place for 40 minutes before pushing some weights and then biking home again.

Big announcements need to be made sooner or later. In this case we chose later but later is now. Sarah and I are getting married on Sunday May 22nd. Sarah and I are also very excited to be having a baby together. The baby is expected to be born on October 31st 2005, Halloween. To simplify the math Sarah is now 13 weeks pregnant. At the moment she is out with her mother looking for a wedding dress. The wedding isn’t going to be a very large affair but it is proving complex enough for the month that we have allocated to plan and organize it. There are a lot of moving parts to weddings but even more moving parts in a developing fetus.

Things have been very condensed for us because we have been announcing everything in person to people where possible up until now since we wanted to let our families and closest friends know in person. This has been further complicated because Sarah was very sick with morning sickness that led to her getting a sinus infection that had her pretty much knocked out until last Monday.



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We had a romantic plan where Jeremy would arrive with appropriate rings in hand that I had selected and commissioned with him when we went down to New York to the jewelry district. Sarah and I would fly to a wedding of one of Sarah’s close friends in Los Angeles leaving at six AM on Saturday. We would then announce our plans to her friends at the wedding there. We were also going to have a more formal proposal somewhere on the trip at a romantic location by the ocean or in a spectacular natural setting.

Since Sarah was so sick and in a delicate state we cancelled the trip at the last minute to give her time to recover from the sinus infection and stop regurgitating everything she ate. When Jeremy arrived on Friday night we had already postponed the flight.

I kneeled in front of Sarah as she lay sick on the couch with the nicely polished ring that Jeremy hand delivered to me and asked her to marry me in the traditional begging fashion as is required. She wasn’t that surprised with the proposal since she knew that the rings were being delivered but she was very happy. She accepted the proposal and made a miraculous recovery over the course of the next 48 hours. In sickness and in health, eh? Who ever said that you needed to propose at a fancy meal with a beautiful view?

At that point we had actually announced to many people because we wanted to invite them to the wedding. So technically I should say that we had decided to get married earlier than the proposal when the pregnancy test came back positive. But even that would be too late in the story to make sense. We agreed to get married when Sarah stopped taking birth control in October if she were to get pregnant. Maybe when she moved in with me last summer we had already decided what our plans were going to be.

We had always said that if Sarah got pregnant then that would be when we would get married. We were both working hard and doing our allotted parts to get her pregnant so we didn’t have a punctuated proposal like some people have. We have been happy together but experienced enough in life to avoid signing documents and making big commitments until we had the real impetus to do so. This feels right to Sarah and me and a fitting way for us to jump headfirst into committing to a life together.

We are so excited and are happy that our families and friends are so supportive and share our excitement. We are both very anxious and hopeful to meet the little person growing inside of Sarah – a subject that dominates our thoughts and dreams lately.