Leah's Wedding: Tent-building

Man, between computer issues and recovering from an exhausting week of Wedding Boot Camp, I am just now getting back to blogging. As you may have noticed, it has been ages since I've posted anything, and while I usually like to wait until I have all of my pics and post everything in chronological order, I'm going to have to pretend that I'm not totally neurotic and post pics as I get them. At the current rate, life is just passing by and I'm not blogging about it, and that's proving to be slightly more stressful than the thought of posting things out of order. Just slightly.

That said, it was an amazing week with the folks in Eldo. Timothy, Alex, Murphy, and I met up with Bill and Vicki somewhere in Mount Pleasant last Saturday, where B & V joined Alex, Murph, and I in the van and headed to Arkansas while Tim took Vicki's Murano back home to finish a week of work. Of course, I was heading to Eldo to work, as well, only instead of drafting motions for summary judgment, I was going to be draping a gymnasium with obscene amounts of fabric.

And I guess that's about as good a place as any to start picture-posting. Here's the skinny. Leah's wedding ceremony was to take place at the church, with a reception to follow at the gymnasium across the street. The gym wasn't appropriate for a wedding reception "as-is", at least not by Vicki Evans standards (nor mine), so we devised a plan to buy white fabric to drape the entire space and create a tent of sorts. After measuring and remeasuring and estimating and re-estimating, I said a little prayer, gave the thumbs-up to order 500 yards of 108" wide white broadcloth, and crossed my fingers that it would be enough.

And it was, thank tha Lord. I think we used about 450 yards out of five hundred, and guess what folks, that's a lot of fabric. The draping process was grueling, although we had a great team of helpers that were willing to let me boss them around. Bill was my right-hand man and spent most of the time tottering precariously atop a hydraulic lift. But volunteers came out of the woodwork to lend their helping hands, which certainly made things easier. Nonetheless, we worked into the night for three days to get it all done. The transformation was pretty amazing and totally worth the hard work, even if I do say so myself. The pictures hardly do it justice, so for those of you that weren't able to make it to the wedding, you'll just have to take my word for it.