We got our marriage license yesterday. It turned out to be fairly simple. About the hardest part of it was finding the office. (For the record, it’s in the Cook County building at Clark and Randolph, but you enter at the Randolph Street entrance and go down the stairs immediately on the left.) We needed to get the license in order to get married. It’s valid from today for 60 days. ...

Product placement: we’ve been happy subscribers to the Angelic Organics CSA vegetable program. They have twelve week shares available, starting next week (August 9th). Update: as of yesterday, August 11th, all shares are sold out. If you’re in the Chicago and you’re interested, you can always subscribe for next year…

My mother had come to Chicago to help us address and stuff envelopes. The following day she helped me start a couple gift registries. Thank goodness, because the process is bizarre. First, there’s the cloyingly sentimental images and language used in the registry materials. Ugh. Second, once I had the scanner, I found it very hard not to get sucked into zapping the bar code of anything that looked even vaguely attractive and/or useful. Questions of “would we really use it?” or “do we have space to store it?” faded away when I had that capitalist ray gun clenched in my fist. Third, there was so much stuff that the number of decisions to be made became overwhelming. ...

Okay, so Amazon has given me what it calls a “plog”, where it tries to market things to me based on what I’ve bought before. One thing does catch my eye. One Plus One Is One I liked Badly Drawn Boy’s first album, so it’s not a bad idea to suggest it to me, but $37.99? Eh, no. However, over at amazon.de: One Plus One Is One Badly Drawn Boy;CD; EUR 14,99 ...

Finally, this afternoon Christian showed me the basics of how to post articles to our website. Not that I’ve been champing at the bit; it’s much easier to let him, the computer whiz, do it all, while I sit in a chair next to him and backseat drive, as it were. But I’ve been anxious to get wedding information up, and it’ll go more quickly if both of us work at it. (The section on “Gifts” was my first post.) Furthermore, I need to be able to post too, if this is to be our website! It’ll also impress my dad all to pieces if I start blogging. :) ...

… or at least we have paid the deposit. Susan had already done some research, so yesterday we chose rings at Peggie Robinson, a jeweler in Evanston. That was the easy part. The hard part was looking at invitations at different shops. Not only are the choices only numerous, any once choice entails chains of dependencies that need to be unknotted. It’s evident we’re somewhat outside the mainstream in wanting invitations that are simple, legible and smart but not pretentious. ...

Susan and I are slogging through the arrangements. The date is set: September 17th. That’s 44 days from today, according to my calculations. The venues for the ceremony and reception afterwards are set. I’m looking at arranging catering; Susan is looking at invitations. So far I’ve contacted J and L Catering and Food for Thought. Still need to get in touch with Va Pensiero and the charmingly named Froggy’s Catering. Surprise, surprise, it’s all looking expensive. It is easy to blow money on a wedding. We’re aiming to do something that is nice but not extravagant. There’s a budget that’s creeping upwards. Nevertheless I think the time pressure is harder than the money pressure.

I’m way behind on my NYRB but I caught an article on Easter Island. Many years ago I read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki; now we have a much better idea of what must have happened: an ecological catastrophe. Jared Diamond knows a thing or two about resources and how they affect human civilizations: he wrote Guns, Germs and Steel . His conclusion: Of the two new accounts of Easter Island’s message that Flenley and Bahn and Van Tilburg have now given us, which would I recommend to readers? Both books are so interesting but so dissimilar that those of us attracted to history, exploration, and exotic societies will enjoy reading both. Those interested in none of those things but looking for a florid Gothic novel can read Van Tilburg’s book and try to forget that it happens to be a true story. ...

Well, that wasn’t too hard… I’m delighted to be one of the lucky VC 200 who underwrote Dean’s new hosting venture. More to come on this site, but it’s a beautful June day and I have other things to attend to.