And I wouldn't be surprised if she's the hotel manager's boyfriend's daughter.

She wasn't in the wall. She'd slipped back into her native tenth dimension for further instructions and training, as all cats do from time to time.

Except that evangelicals are a bunch of freaking heretics. Jesus would never party with the likes of them.

How the hell do you party all night without booze? I mean, my sister made the mistake of leaving the choice of alcohol up to her future FIL, who made us all drink white zinfandel, for God's sake, and the party pretty much ended at 10 PM. (Given the circumstances, we could really have used the hard stuff.)

Sigh... this is the ultimate result of UChicago's decades-long attempt to "diversify" the undergraduate student body—i. e. make the school more attractive to the unwashed masses of Chads and Trixies who would normally be down here puking their guts out all over Green Street in Champaign on weekends with Greek letters…

What can he say? He's a hands-on kind of guy.

Not enough hot middle-aged guys with beards. Oh, wait, maybe that's a symptom.

I'm used to losing flowers, because the squirrels chomp 'em. I' d rather a human took them and enjoyed them. But vegetables that you raised and looked forward to cooking in a special dish and sharing with friends... that's just appalling.

Aw, fuck. I would have cried, too. I'm so sorry that happened to you. A person's garden should be considered sacred ground.

Barca (and every Spanish city I've been to) has a huge problem with feral cats.

I was twenty-one and kind of spineless. As it happened, fortunately, this cousin's kids were used to her egocentric behavior and politely declined, all except the ones we would have invited anyway. They were kind enough to send wedding presents, but we come from the kind of family that feels obligated to do that in…

I wondered briefly if you attended our on-a-budget-but-nobody-cares wedding, because you described it exactly, but we didn't really have room for plus-ones, so it couldn't have been you. Also, while grad school dates were a major factor in our "confluence of schedules," the wedding was also scheduled right after…

I know people get tired of 1 Corinthians 13, but it's classic and it's eloquently universal (especially in a good translation like the NSRV or the less precise but more poetic KJV). So much so, in fact, that my atheist husband volunteered to read it at my sister's wedding. It's a subtle rebuke of all grandiose, …

If I recall correctly, our vows were identical. There's nothing in the standard Protestant wedding service that could be construed as patriarchal except for the part where the father gives away the bride - - and I've seen both sides do that now, and neither. The "have and hold" line simply says, "What's mine is…

I hope it was as much of a bargain for her. ☺

I thought it was supposed to represent the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem? (Which, I suppose, was a pretty crappy day.)

Hell, yes. If I'd thought of it as "my day," we'd have eloped. But our parents would have been disappointed. As it was, my younger sister had a meltdown because we refused to have the normal big tacky banquet hall reception we were apparently supposed to have, and my mother's wealthy Republican cousins, who…

I rather miss the line in the old Anglican vows that goes, "With my body, I thee worship." Kinda sexy, actually.

Yep. In fact, we have this thing called "premarital counseling" that most Christian couples go through with their pastor, IN PRIVATE, weeks before the wedding. (YMMV, though.) But that would deprive shadow wedding enthusiasts of another opportunity for exhibitionism.

I crush on men with beards who look kinda like my husband. My husband crushes on great British actresses old enough to have been knighted. I tease him mercilessly about his obsession with Diana Rigg, who is old enough to be his mother.