For Better, and for Less Better

I am certain that getting married has immediately made mine and joseph's lives instantly more interesting. I have never had a more eventful week full of things that didn't go quite right than this past week.

So, I can say with confidence, that being married is VERY exciting!

Here's the lowdown:

Three hours before our wedding, Livonia was hit with a massive storm that sent tornado sirens whirling. It was pretty exciting, considering not everyone gets tornadoes on his or her wedding day!

The night of the wedding, joseph and I checked into the Embassy Suites in Livonia to stay the night. We no sooner get into our room and I walk back toward the bathroom and the fire alarm starts going off. Still dressed in our wedding attire, we rush to open the door....and no one is outside their rooms. I call the front desk and they send the building engineer up to check it out; and he declares it a-OK. But not before telling us a 4-minute joke.
So later on--maybe about an hour or so--joseph and I are watching soccer (on a TV whose volume would not go below 22) and the fire alarm goes off again. joseph goes to check out the door, just in case it's real this time. It's not. So I called the front desk. They graciously gave us a new room.

Sooooo, still giggling about our unfortunate happenstance, we head back to my parents' house to pack up for our drive up north. We had intended on staying in a Holiday Inn in Petoskey for a night; and then some friends from church so generously let us stay in their cottage in Boyne City for a few nights! The drive up north went well and uneventful. We checked in to our Holiday Inn suite.

...and then we got the text....

Our friend, Katie, had been puppy-sitting our puppies and she'd been texting us pictures of our little guys just to say 'hi.' joseph had told her that we liked the updates, so we get an update that says something like ..."uh, where's your vacuum?" and it had a picture of the back office room that the puppies decided that they wanted to eat. Whoops! It was equally horrible and hilarious at the same time (note: MUCH less hilarious in person....SORRY Katie!).

Our stay at the hotel was a little less exciting than the fire-alarm stay at our first one. Especially since their "complimentary limo service" wasn't up and running that particular night. We ate at Wendy's.

So we get up to drive over to Boyne City to stay in the cottage. We're pretty excited because it's on a lake. And there's kayaks--neither of us had ever kayaked before, so it was appealing. There was a lot of wind off the lake, so our first day in town we were pretty cold walking around trying to find a bar that was playing the soccer game. We spend the rest of that day watching Transformers 2 (it took the rest of the day because it was so inappropriately long) and we're in the middle of Avatar: The Last Airbender Book 2: Earth so we watched several of those.

We knew we were going to Mackinac on Thursday, so we'd planned on kayaking Wednesday. It was about 65 degrees when we woke up; and headed to a high of 73. I didn't quite realize how dead-set on kayaking joseph was until he had his swim trunks on. I put on my suit and we headed down into the windy morning to grab our ships and walk down to the water. joseph was in the blue plastic kayak that you sit down inside; and I was in a green one that sits up above the water and is more of a foam material.
The water was much less cold than I'd expected; and while the waves were high, we were both having a lot of fun. We let the waves a current carry us for a while; and then we decided we'd better start paddling back. It was pretty tough going against the waves, but manageable. I'd finally gotten in the grove of things, and I yell back over my shoulder to joseph that I don't think it will be as hard as I thought. ....and he's not there. I do a double-take and see that he's tipped his kayak and is furiously struggling to drain it and trying to get back in. There's no way for it to drain, so it's sinking lower and lower in the lake and joseph is spitting through the waves that keep crashing in his face. I paddle over and ask him what I can do. He gives me his paddle. I start panicking and brainstorming possible solutions and ask him if he wants to paddle my kayak in and come back to help me. He doesn't answer; and I can see he's getting more and more frustrated and angry. I am getting more and more afraid, so I look around and see that we are about two or three hundred meters from some of the shore and I just start paddling as fast as I can. I realized that it wouldn't be of any help if we had two kayaks and couldn't get back in either.
I got up to the shore and pulled the boat and the oars up on the rocks to set so they wouldn't wash away. I jumped back in the water and started swimming out to jospeh. I hadn't realized how bad the waves were until I was swimming against them without the kayak. I finally get out to him and I took his kayak to give him a break so he could float/swim back into shore. I pulled the kayak in and we both (tired as anything else) cut our feet trying to get it out of the water onto the rocks on the shore.
So we're giggling a little bit about how we're glad we didn't drown on our honeymoon. And now we have a half mile to walk two kayaks and paddles back to the cottage. Let's just say that this part of being married was SO exciting, we both slept for the rest of the day.

Thursday, we woke up and packed up all of our things to leave the cottage and head out to Mackinac Island. I won't go into much detail here, but let's just say we didn't explore much because one of us got really sick. Sort of a bummer, but we got fudge and salt-water taffy so that's really all you need.

We stayed Thursday night at a hotel in Flint, MI because we have been waiting for the movie The Last Airbender to come out for EVER. So we wanted to see it! I'm not going to go into too much detail there, but if you know Flint; understand the truth in certain stereotypes; and put the two together....it made for another adventure!

Friday and Saturday we stayed at my parents' house. Pretty boring--I hardly expect the rest of the years of our marriage to compare with these "normal" days and nights.

Especially when our drive on Sunday happened!

So we are barely on the road--we're on I-69 heading out of Michigan and into Indiana. We're about 7 miles north of the Indiana border and Rasheed starts to feel like I'm driving over rumble strips--but I'm not. So we pull over to the side of the highway, and sure enough, we've got a hole in the side wall of our back driver's side tire. I called my insurance people and they call a towing company that will put us in contact with the closest available tow-truck (did I mention that it's July 4th?). So we get the call that someone is coming to get us; and that we have about an hour.
joseph and I, being so adventurously married, pull out a blanket and UNO and Phase-10 from the car and have ourselves a little road-side card-playing date. Joseph beat me in UNO, and in an amazing tenth phase comeback goes out before me on the last hand and beat me at Phase-10 also.

The tow truck shows up, and the guy hooks up Rasheed and we start driving back into town (we called a Wal-Mart Tire Center and they had what we needed). We start talking and he asks us what brought us from Oklahoma to Michigan. We told him that it was our wedding. He congratulated us; and told us that he actually wasn't from Michigan, but lived in LaGrange, Indiana (just over the Indiana border--where my mom is from). But his landlord was from Oklahoma and would call in March or April and talk about how it was golfing weather in Oklahoma. I'm listening (you know....small talk is something you just have to do when riding in the front middle of a truck with a stranger), and I say, "that's so funny! My grandparents live in Oklahoma and rent a house out in LaGrange!" To which he looks at me and says, "what's their name?"
Let's just say I called my grandpa later to let him know that Joe Pardo says hi, and that he and his wife are back together and doing great!

How funny! It pretty much made my whole entire day!

After about a 3 hour delay (all total), joseph and I get back on the road. We stop to eat just outside Indianapolis for dinner, and then by the time we're back driving through the city it's just getting dark. Making our exciting marriage even MORE exciting, we had a 360 view of choice fireworks going off in ALL directions! There were the official ones going off in the downtown; there were some up the river; lots coming from back and front yards; it was the greatest thing!

So we're back home in Oklahoma now; and unpacked and rested from our trip. It's good to be home. It's great to be married. And I am excited to see the rest of our marriage live up to the excitement of the first week!