The middle of the line

Ok, so I’ve been through another slack period as a blogger. Something about living life rather than writing about it, or more likely too lazy to put a few words through a keyboard.

One of the more significant things I did over the past six months was to get married. We’d been planning it for a while, getting the money together to go out to New Orleans to do it as an elopement. We asked a friend each to come with us, and stayed in a really cool house off Esplanade for a week. Hen/Stag was a night out around Bourbon Street, which would be totally crazy at peak times but in late May was just busy.

The wedding itself was cool – nice and relaxed at the French Quarter Wedding Chapel. It was only when having lunch afterwards that we let people know what we’d done – sending pics out. Luckily my folks were pretty cool about it (I think they’d have loved to do something similar when they got married). The next day, a Saturday, saw me and my mate Darren go off to drink and watch two footie games – the Champions League final in an Irish bar, and then to watch New Orleans Jesters play a fourth tier match against Knoxville Force – while Jas and Sonya went shopping. How quickly we became a stereotype!

We did have a party a couple of months later for family and friends, so people did get to see Jas in her dress (and me in a suit). Our first dance was Jump Around by House of Pain and we ended up with Fairytale of New York.

Over three months on, it’s still a bit weird to be married. We’ve been together for about 12 years, and lived together for all of that apart from two year-long periods when we had to long-distance it. So it’s not like we don’t know each other. The weird thing is that it doesn’t feel that different to be married. Remembering to say ‘wife’ instead of ‘girlfriend’ is getting easier, though.