Two down...

The wedding web page says there's 211 days left until the big day. My phone countdown says 211 days, 11 hours, and 17 minutes. Tonight Marisa and I completed our second official wedding event. The first was a small engagement dinner in Chicago. Tonight we had an engagement party in Bloomington with the Dollinger's and their local friends. An opportunity for some of the local people to catch up with Marisa and to meet me.

It was a lovely event at the Dollinger home, an after dinner with champagne for toasting and specially made deserts - kind of an audition for the wedding for the pastry chef. Very very rich chocolate mousse tarts, almond cookies with raspberries, and custard cups with pomegranate seeds, very nice.

Mostly this was people from the IU B-school and from the congregation. Everyone was very nice and happy for us. It was a no gift affair, but we still got a couple of nice presents. I guess we need to get the thank you note writing machine warmed up.

I wonder how many parties the wedding thing really turns out to be. So far we've had the two. We know about the wedding itself and the pre-nup dinner. I think there's a dinner the night before that here, there ought to be some kind of bachelor or bachelorette party or both. There's going to be at least one shower, in Chicago - that's down from what seemed to be a much larger list earlier. So what's that? A conservative 8 events? Could be more? This is going to be exhausting. Fun, but exhausting. Good thing I like all the people.