2008 Day One Hundred Sixty Three

It's too bad we are both had to work today on our anniversary. We have been together for 28 years. We lived together for 3 years before getting married. I don't really remember M asking me to marry him, it was always something understood between us that we would eventually do. We decided to get married in Reno. We stopped at a mall somewhere on our ride to Reno and picked up rings. Nothing fancy, we did not have much money back then. The night before we went to our favorite casinos and gambled and drank and had a really fun night. We toured several wedding chapels looking at all the celebrity photos on the walls.

In the morning he tossed me the phone book and said pick one. I thought I would call around and check prices. So I called the first one which was the AAAA Wedding Chapel (next to Circus Circus) and almost before I could hang up the phone there was a baby blue limo, that had seen its better days, waiting outside our motel room to whisk us off. They first drove to the chapel where we signed all the paperwork. They tried to sell us all the extras. We kept saying no (I wanted to save all the money we had for our honeymoon) From the chapel the crazy limo driver us down to the courthouse to get the license. To get to the clerk's office you have to walk by where they were letting out all the prisioners from the night before. We were dressed up, so they could figure what we were there for so the cat calls went on all the way down the hall. In the clerk's office there was this lady who must have been 80 years old. She truly had no personality and must have been doing the job for 60 of those years. After we had signed for the license then it was back in the limo and back to the cheesy chapel. Remember when I was saying most chapels have nice pictures of celebrities that have married there before, ours had a black and white picture of Don Ameche(the geezer from Cocoon).

Again they tried to upsell us all the add on's. Again we both kept saying no. Needless to say they were not happy with us. We walked into the chapel and we heard music playing. Michael had to say, Hey, is that costing us anything? We heard, Yeah $5.00 bucks... M turns and says Turn It Off. When we walked into the chapel, it was white, except for the blue and green waterfall wallpaper scene behind the altar. Out comes the Reverend Ramona. She was a big woman decked out in a purple and orange moo moo and Lucille Ball orange-red hair. All the colors clashed so bad.

She starts off the ceremony saying, "Some marriages are not mean't to last..." My brain turned off at that point. I'm sure she went on and had a point. But to this day I don't remember the whole vows, just that first one liner.

So here we are 25 years later, still together, still in love and still happy.