I have always loved Halloween and decorating my yard and home for the holiday. Before my fiancé Roy met me, he really didn't care about Oct. 31. Now he is of the mindset that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Hence, we are getting married in October at the Haunted Shack in Morgan Park.
This isn't a formal invitation or anything like that. It's just that we both live in Montana and get the added challenge of planning a wedding that is taking place nearly 1,000 miles away. We rely on Northlanders to help with the local legwork. My friends Jen and Michele, along with my mom and "Auntie Jack," have been helping us to plan.
They called around to get prices and have done just about everything else we needed as well. With the wedding only a few months away, we decided to start participating in the planning activities. That means that we need to come back to Duluth to meet and greet people, make some decisions, and spend some money. That happens this week.
In preparation, Roy has been actively practicing his Minnesota accent. He watched the Renée Zellweger movie "New in Town" (in which a Florida consultant is sent to live in New Ulm), spoke to my mom and aunt on the phone, and listened to Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon." Ya, sure, you betcha.
He claims he wants to blend in with the locals. I convinced him that it was not necessary to sit in a sauna for several hours a day to get ready for the humidity everyone has warned him about. I think he was just trying to dodge my pointed questions about the wedding.
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Going through my list of things to get done in the week that we have for this trip, I begin to wonder how we will get it done.
We get to meet with the gal who is going to perform our ceremony. This will be a treat. We have been sending e-mails back and forth for a while now. She seems nice, and we look forward to meeting her in person. She sent us some ceremony samples to pick parts from. We will pick a little from this ceremony and a lot from that one and put them together to frame our wedding. A coffee meeting is planned. I hope she likes us. What if she doesn't? Will we have to have a friend ordained on the internet?
A trip to the courthouse is also in order. We want to get our marriage license while we are in town. It will be too hectic to do that in October.
What fun we had running around looking for our birth certificates: "Where are they? Where did you put them? Where could they be?"
We finally found them in the last place one would look -- who would have thought we would have put them in our safe?
Navigating our way through the courthouse and necessary paperwork should be an adventure.
Our cake baker is next on our list. Our baker graduated from East. I'm not holding that against her. Who doesn't like to eat cake that they didn't have to make themselves? She seems to be talented and, between her ideas and ours, we should be able to plan an interesting wedding cake.
Figuring out what kind of cake to have should cause a mini-fight.
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I have to insist that angel food cake is not an acceptable choice for a wedding cake. Men can be so dumb.
The one thing that I'm selfish and doing just for me is to go to the lake. I will get up at 5:30 a.m. to beat the tourist traffic down at Canal Park.
It will give me a chance to just watch the waves and think of nothing for a short while. Lake Superior always has a calming effect on me. If only I could put it in my pocket and take it home.
It's been a busy week getting ready to go back to Duluth, and now it is time to have some fun.
Duluth "expat" Bernie Nordman will be returning home this fall to get married. She can be reached via budgeteer@duluthbudgeteer.com .
