First off, yesterday, about a minute after I posted that brief entry, R called from the city to say that she'd been walking by Madison Square Garden and so a big screaming crowd around a limo, and looked up and saw on the marquee that Paul McCartney is there, and then he got out of the limo right in front of her and waved at the crowd. Ah, another lifetime goal realized by one of my children.So, the reunion. They started showing up a little after ten, which was the designated hour, because they were waiting in the parking lot for someone to tell them what to do, even though I had big signs that said "55" with arrows on all the doors and pointing to the place in the building we were meeting. Okay. There were maybe sixty of them, which is a big crowd. The man who was rude to me on the phone earlier this week never bothered to introduced himself, and the woman I've been emailing with for year said hello and then basically vanished. One man introduced himself to me and sheepishly admitted that he was the one who emailed me about the shoelaces, and apologized. The only mention of the Hubs' uncle was when the friend who kept bothering me about him asked simply that I send him regards from them all.
I pretty much just walked the building backwards, talking into a bullhorn, for an hour and half. They asked a whole lot of intelligent questions about the school, students, and programs, and were generally very nice. My highlight of the morning was in the planetarium -- we have a classroom-size planetarium in the school -- and I was explaining the background of it, etc., and one woman said she'd been a teacher in the system when they got the original grant to build it, in the early sixties, and that she was one of the teachers originally trained to operate it. I read her name badge. She was my fourth grade teacher.
I LOVED her! I always knew that she'd been a graduate of the school because she'd said so, but I never knew her maiden name so I'd never even found her in a yearbook. This was very cool. She was a wonderful, wonderful teacher; I thanked her and said that I was just another one of her students that she'd sent out to become a teacher, too.
So then I came home and the IBS started up -- boo, hiss -- and I took the world's most unproductive nap. Then I saw my ex-brother-in-law, which totally freaked me out and I can never tell my sister, and then started to get ready to go to the wedding. I had everything I needed but had never thought of any kind of hosiery, and we had to stop at CVS for knee-his and I put them on in the car.
It was an okay, ordinary wedding. I'm not sure what that means, but I guess I was spoiled for weddings for a while by Wonderful Niece's in June, because she made sure that every detail was perfect and that the place was totally elegant. Tonight's bride had decided on a jazz band and no corny dance songs played, which was lovely, but the wedding down the hall had booming bass and a loud, obnoxious DJ, so that kind of took over. During the ceremony, which was outdoors, the other wedding party was being photographed not far away, and they were really rude, talking and laughing. Not that they shouldn't have had the wedding they wanted, but the place was pretty much a wedding mill, and the management should have known better than to put the two groups so close together.
I've never met anyone the Hubs works with at this place before, and they were all very, very nice. Until the music got so loud that I couldn't hear anyone talk, I enjoyed sitting with them. Even after, I just kind of zoned out, which is what I do when I can't hear, just kind of look pleasant and let the sound wash over me. I don't have much choice to do anything else. But in general, the wedding was not the ordeal it could have been, going to something like that where you really don't know anyone.
Once I got home, the IBS quieted down, so I didn't take any more medication for that before I went to sleep. But I slept terribly, repeating the same stupid dream again and again. I woke up this morning, had a cup of coffee, and went back to bed, but I really couldn't get back to sleep.
