I have heard of weddings that disallow children, but that is not my style. I grew up in expat communities where kids usually attended grown-up parties, and then raised my own daughter in Italy, where kids are expected to socialize with adults in a civilized manner. Many of our guests had children, and our own family includes Mitchell, Brendan’s ten-year-old son. So I made sure that our guests knew their children would be welcome and even, as far as we could manage, looked after.
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Pink Wedding: Bridal Mehndi
Although I would not be wearing Indian clothing for the wedding, I wanted to have really good bridal mehndi done. I get mehndi whenever I can (usually on trips to India) but had never gone so far as to have both hands and feet decorated – that’s usually reserved for brides. Now it was my turn.
The current tradition in India is for the bride to have a mehndi party for her female friends some days before the wedding (mehndi needs a few days for the color to set and deepen). There are many mehndi artists in the Bay Area, but the wedding date turned out to be a problem: August 17th was the weekend after Indian Independence Day, August 15th, and many of the artists were booked for other events.
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Pink Wedding: Planning
The Venue
We had planned all along to have our wedding at home. The house we have been renting since December 2018 was remodeled in the early 2000s by the recently-divorced owner of a high-end bath and kitchen outfitter. The remodel seems to have been intended to turn the place into a swinging bachelor pad. There’s a fabulous kitchen / open space for entertainment, another large room (shown as the “media room” on the house plans) added onto the back, and a big open backyard with… a tiki bar. I kid you not. Which is canopied to protect the large BBQ grill and non-working fridge, and also has a bar sink. The owner who remodeled had also put in a pool, but the current owner thought it was too close to the house foundations to be safe, and had it filled in years ago. So now there’s a wooden deck surrounded by smooth concrete, which leaves a nice big space to put a tent.
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My Garden Year: 2019
Update 2023: I stopped using Twitter a year ago and made my account private, so many of the images in this post will no longer show up. Here’s a gallery with all my garden photos from that year:
We moved into this (rented) home in December 2018. Did I mention that it has a garden? And even a greenhouse?!? Best of all, it was not already landscaped, nor did the landlord have anyone coming in regularly to take care of it – it’s all up to me, and I am thrilled. The garden has kept me very happily busy for much of the year (in addition to all the other things that normally keep me busy, plus a wedding).
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2019 in Review
January
After a very busy December 2018, traveling and then moving house, we spent the first weeks of January in a state of collapse. The California winter rain was heavier than usual so the weather was dank and depressing, but we had plenty to do indoors, unpacking and setting up our new home. I went to Seattle for an internal AWS marketing kick-off. Brendan worked on a new book. (Yes, I edited this one, too.)
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