Vegas baby, Vegas

Three years ago today I was in Vegas getting married. It rained. It also hailed and flash flooded. Some would call that a sign, I call it Worst Road Rage Ever. It was a series of mishaps from start to finish. Apart from the inclement weather, we also faced an overbookage nightmare in that the Nascar race was there that weekend and there were NO hotel rooms in the entire vicinity. Seriously. We managed to nab a place after several hours of searching, it was sub par to say the least. They had painted over the windows instead of putting up curtains, it was made of cinder block, and every single channel on the tv was blocked out (which we figured out by using a bobby pin to flip the channels since the thing had no buttons). I mean, why even have one? All four of us (Myself, Red Todd Kidd, The Single Letter, and Fuzzy Tail) had to stay in that one room since there were no others. Oh, actually I forgot the first mishap of all (before we even left San Diego): Red Todd Kidd's ring. I couldn't get one. He wanted white gold, he wears a 12. I went to every damn department store in town and nothing (they don't stock that size but if I oredered it it could be in on Monday). I hit two pawn shops, no luck. Finally, I went to this weird jewelry shop near my old apartment that leaves their Christmas lights up all year. They sell estate jewelry and I thought I might get lucky. They didn't have anything BUT they had just gotten a bunch of stuff at an estate sale and hadn't gone through it yet. I told them I was desperate and I'd help them look. Awesome as they were, they pulled out a cart of tubs of unsorted, bagged, jewelry and three of us sat down and started searching. They found one yellow gold size 12 which was as close as anyone has gotten to what I was looking for. The owner told me to buy the ring and to come in when we got back from Vegas and he'd have a white gold size 12 waiting for me, even swap (not quite even actually, he gave me free engraving so in his ring it says, "Vegas baby, Vegas 3-01-2003"). Which is exactly what I did. Then there was the wedding itself. We couldn't get an Elvis since the whole city was fabulously crowded with Nascar fans getting hitched. What we ended up with was a female minister who was from somewhere in the UK. I couldn't place her since her speech was so slurred because she was hammered. She actually started singing about rainbows in the middle of the vows. The four of us were trying really hard not to laugh since at that point we thought we might actually show people the tape of our wedding someday. In truth, I only bust the thing out for a good laugh at parties once everyone's had a few. Don't we all look lovely in that photo? You would not believe how bright it was in that place. Talk about your Land of the Midnight Sun. And it was WHITE. Consequently the photos are washed out. Badly. To top it off we look like some weird gothic/rockabilly something. It was a total coincidence that we were all in black. Hell, I wanted a red dress. The only dress I could get that fit on short notice was that black one. I'm actually wearing platform shoes that make me seven inches taller because the dress was WAY too long (it was still just grazing the floor). But we did managed to get married. We did have a lot of great laughs. We did garner strange looks from rednecks as we blared the country cover version of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" as we cruised through Vegas. And that freinds, is what really matters.