If you're a Seinfeld fan, you undoubtedly remember The Summer of George, the summer George Costanza thought would be the greatest three months of his life during which he would do nothing but play "frolf" (frisbee golf) while still getting paid. Of course in true Costanza fashion, George ended up falling on some stairs and getting paralyzed, if I recall correctly.
I have no snazzy parallel to make between George's summer and my summer; I just felt like mentioning frolf.
Still, although the last few months have been conspicuously devoid of frolf and paralysis, my summer was pretty eventful. Mostly for the first half I did a whole lot of nothing except some yard work, reading, and a possibly obsessive amount of Criminal Minds-watching. As you know, I then got chosen to be a Nielsen family, and I would have written a whole blog about how that experience went, but it turned out not to be as exciting as I'd anticipated. It's certainly not blog-worthy because in reality, it got tedious having to write down every single thing I watched. I suppose I could say that the whole process kind of made me reevaluate my life with some sort of epiphany about the need to cut back on my TV-watching, but--come on--this is me we're talking about.
Actually, though, I did cut back on my TV-watching shortly after the Nielsens, but that's only because I left the country and had to do some pretty monumental things like give up my iPhone, not watch the Olympics, read books on a Kindle instead of on actual paper, and prepare for my sister's wedding. Now before you start thinking, "Wow, she must have been in some third-world country living in a hut without access to phones and TV's," that's not true. Instead, I stayed in a very nice condo building, which I like to refer to as The Tower of Luxury, and later in a very fancy hotel, and the only reason I couldn't watch TV is that I was never around during the day because of all the wedding hoopla, and the reason I couldn't use my iPhone regularly is that Verizon is evil and wanted to charge me $25 per 100 MB of data, and I'm sorry, but while it might not have been The Summer of Leah, it was certainly not going to be The Summer of Verizon.
So anyway, yes, my sister got married, and the wedding was beautiful and fun and everything we had hoped it would be, but it's a miracle we made it to the wedding date without killing each other beforehand. I guess every wedding must be stressful to some extent, but it's especially stressful to try to plan from one country when the wedding is going to be in another country whose wedding traditions are a bit different from ours. Lots of things happened that either we (the obnoxious Americans) thought were weird or that they (the traditionalist Ecuadorians) thought were weird. To mention a few, my sister and brother-in-law chose not to get married in a church but in the club where we held the reception (weird to them), my brother-in-law's friends refused to be groomsmen (weird to us), there were adult bridesmaids (weird to them), a judge had to come to the ceremony and ask for drivers' licenses and voting documents and signatures from everyone in order to make everything legal because the officiant couldn't do it (weird to us), the bride/groom and bride/father and groom/mother didn't dance to a waltz but instead to a medley of Elvis, the Temptations, and Ben E. King (weird to them), and there was a 7-tier fake cake (just plain weird).
In the end, however, all the weirdness didn't matter. The wedding was one big fairy tale with ridiculously gorgeous flower arrangements, 6000 sweets (really 5998 because I ate two of them the night before) on tables adorned with lights in a room that looked like a crystal paradise, a band, a deejay, great food, etc, etc. And I know I'm biased, but my sister made a stunning bride. We were also fortunate to have had some great friends make the trek to South America to be there for the wedding, and we hope and think they were glad to have had that experience. We were certainly glad they were there.
Anyhoo, while this summer in particular seemed like it would last forever, it didn't. It's kind of like a 7-tier fake cake; you think it's one thing, but really it's styrofoam. And now it's back to reality, and I need to conclude this blog entry to go get ready for my first day back at work. Even though my sister is off celebrating her honeymoon on a cruise ship sailing down the Mediterranean and won't be able to read this blog until after she returns, I wish her and my new brother-in-law the best. I hope they're having the kind of vacation that eluded George Costanza all those years ago and that they're enjoying the last few weeks of The Summer of Alysa and Danilo.
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