Wind and rain be damned

The last of our reception guests is leaving today. It's been non-stop socializing at night with family and friends and working like a dog during the day since last Thursday. Someday soon I will be able to post more often than just twice a week. Perhaps in November. But ask me then.

The outdoor reception we held on Saturday to celebrate our wedding (which was in August in Hawaii) went well - better than I expected. It rained buckets that day (parts of Old Town Alexandria - where we were - flooded). But we held the party on the second floor stone terrace of a historic house/museum, which was protected with a tent with sideflaps. So we were quite cozy. Also, the floating candle centerpieces on the tables cast a lovely, flickering glow, the pan-Asian-influenced food was fabuloso, and the jazz band swung hard despite the wind and rain.

Also, the slideshow I made - of me and E. as babies to adults, and which also included wedding photos - was a big hit. A week before the reception, E. and I scanned about 200 photos. Then he was supposed to givethe photos to a professional, who would edit, caption and arrange the photos, as well as add music to them.

But at the last minute - literally 5 minutes before he was supposed to drop off the photos with the slideshow/video dude, E. said, "What the heck are we paying all this money to this guy for? We've already done some of the work! Let's do the whole thingourselves!"

Before I knew it, E. hopped into his car, drove to Best Buy, bought a DVD burner and slideshow/video software ... and gave them to me. Apparently, he seems to think I'm some sort of technology savant. Kind of like Rain Man, except with computers instead oftoothpicks and numbers.

Which is hilarious. I mean, hello?! Look at this blog, for example. Is this the plainest, most visually boring blog you've seen or what?!

After freaking out a little bit - I had so much to do before the reception - I buckled down to work. I've gotta admit - I love a challenge. I edited the photos down to 115, making sure I had a good assortment of family photos and pictures of E. and his Oxford friends, arranged them in chronological order, typed in captions, added several introductory slides and fade in/fade out features, searched high and low forsongs from my CD collection and on the Web, then cut and pasted portions of them to go with the pictures.

Simple, eh?! I realized midway through why people pay hundreds to thousands of dollars to a videographer to do this. It's a lot of work. Putting the show together took me awhile - perhaps not surprising since I had to teach myself how to use ProShow Gold slideshow/video software. It came without an instruction manual.

It was worth it, though. The guests seemed to enjoy the 8-minute show. Many laughed at the funny, dorky ones (e.g. me at 1 wearing a cone-shaped hat taller than I was, E. in drag for a university costume ball) and some cried at the photos of us getting married on the beach in Hawaii.

If you want to have a look, shoot me an e-mail, and I'll send you a link to the slideshow in the next day or so.