03.29.06

and the killer wedding robot lumbers forward: i finally dropped off the first batch of our save the date cards. a clever friend tells me i'm supposed to send one to myself to see if/how they come through; i neglected to do this, so do let me know if you receive one, eh? i haven't trusted the post office with much since they killed my tadpoles in 1998 (grow a frog kits should NOT be available online).

one last addition to the photo set from our trip. if you were leaving our wedding in the super-secret back garden and heading for the pub (which is, in fact, exactly what we will encourage guests to do), you would see this:

03.23.06 [all holes filled]

that's more like it! many thanks to paul, kidchamp's de facto webmaster, for twirling the digital spaghetti that is this site. he even managed to save pensive girl, which means a lot - i was heartbroken when a similar breakdown ate my 'guy who got punched' art a few years ago.

so, then. back to the poop. the dirty dozen [part 2]:

005 101 in 1001: 065 (re)visit 221b baker street [completed 03.16.06]
in the mid '80s, my family was obsessed with jeremy brett as sherlock holmes in the mystery! series;* it was a gimme that we'd visit the sherlock holmes pub at 221b on our trip to london in '95. then (and when i visited again in '99) it was a restaurant / pub / museum for the series - we saw the holmes mannequin from the empty house upstairs, they had one of the corny phosphorescent dogs from the hound of the baskervilles behind the bar, it was awesome. our pilgrimage this time around was disappointing, as the pub was gone and the museum was locked up for the night. good thing "(re)visit" is fairly vague, innit?

006 101 in 1001: 012 write (publish) a mcsweeney's list [completed 03.15.06]
official word rolled in while we were in oxford last week:

At long last we have finalized the lineup for our forthcoming book Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists that is scheduled for publication through Vintage in September of this year, and I'm pleased to report that at least one of your lists has been chosen for this volume.

again, yay for vague wording: i was aiming for some action on the website, but this is listastic as well. it's even better, really, as i'll 1) be earning $25 for my efforts, 2) appear in mainstream print for the first (and probably last) time, and 3) get to use the phrase "mountain man dance moves" on my resume if the spirit moves me. as the moat girls would say, how good?!

007 snaps of the sherlock holmes trip, as well as several artful portraits of joe and my mom drinking, are up in an oxford / london photo set. it isn't quite as large as it might have been, as i had to save memory stick space for umpteen photos of the wedding ceremony and reception sites, but hey. how could photos of mom drinking be less than satisfying?

008 when we retrieved the cats from the vet's place on saturday, he mentioned that he'd done "two extractions" during chuck's dental work. fine, i thought, i'd actually expected it to be much worse - chuck's breath had been like an open grave for a month or two. we get the cat home, he yawns and smells of roses, and we see...one fang, because "two extractions" actually means "i pulled out three of your cat's fangs." poor chuck has one big tooth left, on the bottom, and looks like a (very very cute) gargoyle. that's normally the sort of thing you'd mention to a client when discharging their pet, right? i'm sure the teeth needed to go, but we...need a new vet.

*mystery!'s excellent opening sequence began my love affair with edward gorey; when my sister agreed to do the illo for our save the date cards, i asked her to take her cues from him. we like our weddings spooky.

03.20.06 [fire in the hole]

o, how i love the vicissitudes of domain registration. kidchamp a splode a few days ago; though i've forked over a big pile of cash to resuscitate it, it'll be a while before i comb through the shrapnel and find the server info i need to get back online. if this post is readable, of course, it's also superfluous; be that as it may, i miss/ed you, internets.

03.14.06 [uk]

a wedding scout operates with lightning speed and ruthless efficiency. we are seasoned wedding scouts: though it's but midmorning on the third day of our oxford planning mission, we've been through five pubs, two harvey's lunches, and three plates of ahmed's chips and cheese. we've also confirmed that the local stanford staffers don't remember (o happy day!) what we did to the house seven years ago, that oxford florists (like students on study-abroad programs) are lousy penpals and difficult to motivate, and that one should never, ever link to a cheap b&b from one's wedding website before checking to see if said b&b was, for example, nearly named The Worst Hotel in the UK. marriage nonsense aside, it's been wonderful to be back; oxford is just as we remembered it, though the students seem impossibly young. are the british simply baby-faced? this is what i tell myself.

03.08.06

friends, the wedding monster has eaten my soul and rendered me unable to update the 'champ. in lieu of detailed stories about my cats and lunches, please accept ziggy lives (the david bowie comic book).