Anna and Dara get Canada-married, 3/2/2012

This being Part 2, and the biggest part by far, of my and solarbird‘s Grand Four Day Weekend of Marriage and Music!

Though that said, it was also actually one of the simplest days of the entire weekend. Here’s the thing, O Internets: if you’ve read Elfquest, you’ll know what I mean when I say that Dara and I got as close as you can get in real life to Recognition, and we went from 0 to lifemates in pretty much no time flat. For us, there’s no particular difference between that and being legally married. This entire affair therefore was a lot more about just reinforcing the legal status as far as Canada (and hopefully soon by extension, the state of Washington) was concerned, as opposed to any real change in status between us as far as we are concerned.

So I hope I won’t disappoint any of you all when I say that this was the most relaxed and groovy wedding ceremony ever! We didn’t dress up, and we didn’t exchange rings–though we probably would have done the latter if Dara didn’t have an issue with rings that keeps her from wearing them (she gets a mild claustrophobia reaction off of them).

Here’s how the whole thing went!

On Thursday the 1st, pretty much as soon as we arrived in Vancouver, Dara and I picked up a marriage license. Since we’re not Canadian citizens, we had to bring our passports and birth certificates, but that wasn’t any trouble, and neither was the fee to pay or the small amount of paperwork we had to fill out. The lady that issued us the license was very kind and warmly congratulated us. <3 So we hung onto that license for the rest of the day, dropping it off safely at gerimaple‘s house before setting out again for the show. At which, as I have already mentioned, the band dedicated a song to us AND we got champagne, which was eighty-nine kinds of awesome. We held onto the champagne for the wedding day too!

And the actual wedding day couldn’t have been simpler. Geri came with us to meet siestabear and maellenkleth for the ceremony, which took place at the condo where our marriage commissioner, a very kind lady named Johanna Hickey, lived. She met us all in the common room of said condo, which was a lovely sunroom-type room with a koi pond and fountain, and there she conducted a double civil ceremony for us! We had a few other ladies show up as well, including anna_copperowl, who kindly had brought along a cake!

siestabear and maellenkleth went first, and had rather longer vows than Dara and I did, since they were being a bit more formal about it. They exchanged some lovely shawls, too.

Then Dara and I went, and our vow was a lot briefer. It went like this:

“I, [name], state before the province of British Columbia and the nation of Canada that [name] is my beloved lifemate. We have stood at one another’s sides in sickness and in health, in want and in plenty. The bonds between us know no shape and no borders, only the truth of the commitment between us. In this, the twenty-fifth year of our lives together, I now reaffirm the pledge of this commitment.”

And aside from the brief legal statement and a few words said about marriage in general by Ms. Hickey, that was really the entirety of the ceremony! Very simple, very straightforward, but still really rather sweet. <3 Dara and I witnessed for siestabear and maellenkleth and vice versa, so we signed each other’s paperwork in witness capacity as well as our own in the obvious capacity. Ms. Hickey was very, very nice, though, and very warm in her congratulations. We quite happily hugged her all around.

Some pictures were taken, but I’m not going to post most of them because siestabear and maellenkleth are in them, and this is a public post! Dara’s got a pic of us up on her LJ, though, over here. And yeah, we weren’t fancy, but we were happy. And that is the important thing. <3 After that, there was cake! We all trooped around to a nearby coffeeshop, which kindly put up with us taking over several tables and distributing the cake between us. Dara and I made a point of buying hot beverages from the nice coffeeshop staffers, who were also all 'yay! married!' at us, and there were also bonus surprise little presents to us from siestabear and maellenkleth, which was a nice balance off against me having gotten us all a song by pretty Quebecois boys!

I mooched off the cafe’s wifi and saw a mail come in from Susan while we were there, who informed me that she and several others had raised a toast to us at dinner that night (she was a few time zones ahead of us, so the timing worked out). See all my previous commentary in the concert post re: Susan’s general awesomeness; this was more of same!

We couldn’t drink the champagne in a public place, though, so we had to hang onto that for a bit. And by ‘a bit’, I mean, ‘while we then went to kill time at Chapters’ (because, y’know, bookstore, duh) and then ‘while we all went out to tasty sushi dinner’. Geri found us a nice little place in downtown Vancouver, and while we were all a bit crowded at the small tables they put us at, the dinner was nonetheless very tasty!

Then, at last, most of us decamped back to maellenkleth and siestabear‘s hotel room, and there we broke out the champagne. On the way Dara got a little bit hypothermic, which was no fun, but on the other hand then I got to curl up with her under a blanket and drink very, very good champagne. Susan sent us the GOOD STUFF! We all raised glasses to Susan, and to Le Vent du Nord, and to OUR WIVES. And I kept calling Dara “ma jolie femme”, because I may have only about twenty or so reliable words of French, but those are some of them, and I will use them with pride. <3 And that's pretty much the day! After that, maellenkleth finally gave Dara and Geri and me all a lift back to Geri’s place, where we settled down for happy slumber. Simplest wedding day ever, and pretty damned awesome all around!