This is what happened 9 years ago...

It was 9 years ago today that Richard and I got married. It's kind of funny, now that I think about it, how our marriage started. We were young, too young maybe? And in love, and we couldn't wait any longer to tie the knot- even though we already had a church reserved and a wedding date of June 10th picked out. My wedding dress was picked out as well, but wouldn't be altered for another 3 months at least. I don't really know what we were thinking, but on a whim, we decided one night (Feb. 10th, 2000 to be specific) that we would just go down to the court house the next day and have a judge marry us on our lunch break, then we would go back to work, and then spend the weekend looking for an apartment to rent, you know, so we could actually live together. Well, we did go to the court house on our lunch breaks, with 1 witness in tow, and found out there would be an hour wait and a $50 fee for the next judge to marry us. We decided to go for plan B and have a friend of ours marry us that night instead. So we made some phone calls, found a church that was available and went back to work. That night after I got off work, I made a mad dash to the store that had my dress reserved, and luckily found out that it would fit well enough for me to be able to wear it that night. Then I ran home and had my room mate, Kirsten, try to come up with some way to style my newly cut, very short hair. We couldn't come up with much, so she just put it up in 2 braids- kind of tacky, eh? I wasn't in the right mind set to safely drive, so Kirsten volunteered to drive me across town to the church. When we got there, I discovered that somebody had called all of our friends (luckily they did, because we forgot too! Woops!) and there was quite a crowd waiting for us. We still don't know who made all the phone calls for us, but we are eternally greatful for it!
So our friend that was going to marry us had one condition for us before he would acutally let us take our vows, and that was that 1 of us would have to call 1 of our parents to tell them what we were up to. I was too scared to call my parents, so Richard called his- and happily they were elated for us. I knew mine wouldn't be so thrilled, so we opted to tell them about a week after we got hitched, which is not one of the better decisions I've made in my life time (sorry about that mom and dad). Anywho, we went through with the ceremony and it was short but beautiful. We were surrounded by our friends and fortunately at least 1 family member, my husband's brother. We had a short, low key reception after that and then we were on our way to West Yellowstone for our Honeymoon (actually we stayed at a very nice hotel in Boise for the first night, thanks to arrangements made by my BIL). I won't go into details about our Honeymoon, because it's an entirely different story, but I will say that it involves strep throat, a blizzard, 4 tornadoes, a 5 hour long power outage, and nearly being fired from my job.

It's funny to look back on this now. This was remarkably out of character for me at the time, but now I think that it sums us up pretty well.