Dissolving Donna

AS I mentioned before, I got engaged on June 1. Donna freaked out (in a good way, thankfully) and promptly pulled out the dozen or so bridal magazines she’d been hiding.

Apparently, it’s a bit presumptuous to assume that the man who bought the ring is actually gonna marry you. Heh. Actually, I was kinda dragging it out for bit longer than originally intended, if only because she was being soooo nice to me. Not that she isn’t normally. Actually, she’s incredibly sweet, cool, sexy and, most importantly, nice to me. But, damnit if she wasn’t EXTRA cool to me... And, truth be told, I kinda liked it that way.

Actually, I had nothing to worry about. It’s been a bit more than a week since she’s agreed to marry my silly ass and still she’s being sweet. I think, though, something has broken in her cerebral cortex, never to return. She, my friends, is dissolving.

The day after the proposal, Donna stayed up for 40 straight hours looking at magazines (which are all COMPLETELY the same... it’s completely ridiculous), talking to her girlfriends, talking to cousins she probably didn’t know she was related to, calling shops and, generally, freaking out.

Apparently, the first thing people do when you tell them you’ve gotten engaged is: “Do you have a date set yet?” Good Lord. Of course not. But, the weirdest thing to me is the slow realization that this is not, on its face, a ridiculous question.

I’ve been doing wedding photography for a few years now, and it continually surprises me how differently people deal with weddings. Some people book me 18 months before the wedding. Some 18 hours beforehand (no joke).

Still, the fact that people seem to expect an answer scares me a little. Am I supposed to know when I’m getting married? Feh. No wonder people get married in Vegas.

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Monday, June 12, 2006

So, there’s this girl...

I became engaged on June 1, 2006.

It was a pretty amazing thing, in all sorts of ways. Donna and I have been dating for two-and-a-half years, and living together for the last year. I had already purchased the ring (at Robbins Brothers, no less...much less cheesy an experience than expected), and Donna knew it. Actually, Donna and I had gone together to Robbins Bros. I had debated internally for quite a while, actually, about whether Donna should get to pick out the ring (eliminating the surprise factor) or not.

But, deciding that she had to wear it on her finger, she probably ought be given a lot of say over how it looked, etc. And, frankly, like most guys, I have only the vaguest idea of what she would want anyhow. Why not go to the source?

Anyhow, she knew that I had the ring... She even knew where it was. I did try to hide that little factoid from her, but she knew. Hell, she knows where my keys, wallet and glasses are more often than I do. I wasn’t exactly surprised. So, I had to come up with some sort of proposal that would blow her mind.

So, here's what I did...

I created a photo montage, of sorts, using close-up shots of street sign letters, that spelled out "will you marry me." In the middle, I put a large question mark. Pretty clever, and it looks quite a bit like a ransom note. I matted and framed it, and got it packaged up for mailing.

The plan was to get a friend of mine, Jeff Miller, to mail the piece with the instructions "Do not open unless Dan is present." But when I went over to Jeff's house, a better plan emerged: his girlfriend, Meghan, was traveling to Iowa that weekend to visit her grandparents. Meghan took the framed photo package on the airplane, and then mailed it (via her grandfather, Herman Long) from Centerville, IA.

Confused the heck out of Donna. She called me yesterday to say there was a weird, flat package from Iowa on the front porch, and that Jeff had emailed her with a weird and desperate plea to not open it unless I was around.

"What the hell is this about," she asked.

"I have no idea," I replied. "Jeff told me something about it, but you know, Jeff is Jeff."

Indeed. Jeff is. I don't remember if you've met him, but he's a slightly oddball dude who, well, could make odd requests like this and have no one think anything was truly amiss.

Anyhow, when I got home, I took the ring out of its hiding place, and slipped it into my pocket. Donna struggled with the packaging (and, alas, the broken glass... but I had an extra... I have lots of frame glass these days) and, well, she got it pretty quickly.

A Pretty Wild Week

IN BETWEEN my last missive in this space, my computer went and had itself a stroke. Very, very bad. So, they claim that macs aren’t supposed to crash. Well, Steve Jobs, they do... A heck of a lot less often than the old OS 9 did, but still...

Basically, while I was in the process of pulling a few files from a friend’s iTunes, the computer just, well, froze. So did I. Ohgodohgodohgod.

Was this God, annoyed at my attempt at massive copyright violation? Bad luck? If it ‘twas divine punishment, I suspect I have now officially paid for my sins. If bad luck, well, what can you do about that?

It was, however, decidedly bad. The file that tells Apple how this lovely website is supposed to work: gone. My favorites list in iTunes: gone. My iPhoto directory: empty. That last gave me a bit of start, seeing as I had just finished a job. Fortunately, the files were still there. Unfortunately, the files were all corrupted.

Try as I might, there is no easy way to fix corrupted jpg files. Most of the solutions involve wholesale data recovery, which was not an option, really. The programs are fairly good, I suppose, though the ones I used tended to crash on me. I had to bite the bullet and reshoot the job. Thank God it was a portrait shoot. Can’t really reshoot a wedding, now can ya?

But I have definitely learned my lesson: I now have two backups for every shoot. I don’t delete anything off my memory card until both have been downloaded and verified. It takes longer, but I can only imagine what sort of hell I would catch if this happened at a wedding. Death, friends. Death.

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Saturday, June 17, 2006