soosie's chivaree

chaia threw soosie a chivaree, aka anti-bridal shower, complete with jeopardy, pictionary, and a cute story about the happy couple filled with adverbs, adjectives, and nouns that we made up. we wore nametags with our names spelled backwards. lorinda's sounded like a drug name - adnoral, and viktoriya's, ayirotkiv, still managed to sound very, very russian. wendi's was the cutest, most pronounceable, and perhaps most eskimo-sounding: idnew. for my first round of pictionary, chaia, miss drawing extraordinaire, gave me "bridesmaid dress that doesn't fit"....touche, so i drew a tv, a wii, and a man on a balance board to try and elicit the word "fit" from the group.











who knew we would have two dark-haired russians in one room. the one above had some fun with my camera and looking through what she shot, crooked doesn't necessarily have to scream "look at me, i'm crooked":

bridal shower

i feel like i have about 2 month's worth of blogging to catch up on, so before i go ahead and post gads of honeymoon photos, i thought i'd go back to my bridal shower that my mom threw (see spunky lady in yellow, below). for someone that claimed she'd never played the game before, she was madame pictionary. she even guessed one answer before anything but four lines were drawn (father of the bride). we had a rousing game of bridal pictionary, with words thought up by the best man and the groom himself. we soon realized that there was a distinct difference between their words....a "dan word" was not only written on a skinny piece of paper, but it was inevitably something that was near impossible to draw...like.... "something blue." the maid of honor had to salvage the round by taking over and drawing a church "pew" in her "sounds-like" image.


we divided the group into team bride, team flower, and team cake. i am a self-admitted pictionary whiz...so team bride blew everyone out of the water.


i bought a new lens for someone to make use of at the wedding and i was testing it out for the first time that day, and it was amazing. all i can say is the lens makes light. this picture above looks phenomenal if you realize that there was absolutely no light being cast on her face. this lens empowers me to capture things that look better than they do to the naked eye, which is something i didn't think was possible raw out of the camera in my 14 years of taking photos. it's a 50mm and the f-stop goes all the way down to 1.4, which allows from some amazing low light photos (i am so anti-flash).

we had a fabulous lunch, including sushi and mini-meatballs; i ate happily away at the huge bowl of blueberries on the table. we then broke off into our pictionary teams to have a cake decorating competition. i had asked a few people to bring all the aprons they owned, and we were all able to show off cute digs.

team bride, consisting of my aunts and beautiful twin cousins:


team flower, featuring the maid of honor, the groom's sister, my home-ec-&-all-things-high-school-cohort/best friend, the groom's mom, and my very own mom:


team cake:



team cake was left with the most poorly made cake; i was responsible for baking all the cakes that morning and while the carrot and the vanilla were made in springform pans, something from my childhood came over me and i baked the chocolate cake in an angelfood pan (that was the only cake pan my mom owned when i was young). however, i also realized that the teams were very unfairly distributed - team cake boasted my high school classmate who won the home-ec award in addition to her natural martha-stewartness and craft-abilities, my mom's friend who bakes some seriously good eats for a hobby, and my other girlfriend with craft-abilities. the groom's cousin made for an excellent overseer.








team bride in action:





team flower playing with some whipping cream:

and special thanks to thanh (one of the crafty ones), for the fab melamine mixing bowls.


i got to slice into the cakes like it was my birthday, and while i was supposed to judge which one was best, we decided to leave it up to my dad and the groom who had been hiding out in the garage with meatballs-on-a-stick earlier.

freshly home from getting a marriage license at the local pharmacy (apparently it's a british columbian thing), my dad and the groom were faced with the task at hand. my dad is mr. diplomatic and couldn't call a winner, and while searching for the words to say, andrew piped up and dubbed team flower's, above, as "flecky," team cake's as "meringuey"....and then my dad, finally finding the words to say and perhaps inspired by andrew's wit, said that team bride's looked "like a giant hamburger." the groom ended up giving the flecky one a gold star because not only did it look flecky, but the flecks imparted crunchiness which he enjoyed.


i technically didn't have a hand in any of the decorating since i was snapping photos of everyone, but fun was had by all! afterward we played my favorite birthday game as a child where one present is wrapped up dozens of times and gets passed around the circle until the music stops, then that person opens one layer. the catch with the game now that i was in my twenties and getting married was that when the music stopped, the person had to share a story about me in addition to unwrapping a layer of giftwrap. there were some funny stories, some emotional stories, and one person that said that her first impression of me was that Minda had a "little goth girl." (in my defense i met her at a fancy piano concert and black was probably the only formal thing i owned). i got some fantastic gifts, including my beloved japanese crackle dishware, but perhaps the things i will treasure the most are the recipes that everyone gave. vanessa and i cut out recipe-card-sized scrapbook paper and mailed them out with the invitations. i excitedly dug up a copper recipe box i remember my mom never having used from her own wedding shower gift collection, but i think recipes were much smaller in 1983...

all in all, i've never been to such a fantastically fun dinner-party type event, and i'm honored that it was all for me. so a heartfelt thank you to my mom for being host to such a fabulous party.