Our Wedding Music: Jess and Dhruv, Farrucas, and Glee!

Besides asking me to marry him and telling me that I couldn't have a poufy dress, Tim's first contribution to the wedding planning was that he really wanted Jess to sing and Dhruv to play guitar at the ceremony. We are completely blessed by our musically talented friends. Jess was way more on the ball than we were. She sent us lists of songs that she thought could work. Her favourite was Alexei Murdoch's Orange Sky, but we were planning on going with Christina Perri's A Thousand Years until I bought the new Sara Bareilles album, The Blessed Unrest. I instantly fell in love with the whole album, especially I Choose You. It was the perfect song to walk down the aisle to. Even better, it's beautifully suited to Jess's voice. 

Sara Bareilles singing I Choose You live

Tina's photo of Jess and Dhruv playing I Choose You at the wedding

We stumbled onto our musical act for the wine and cheese portion of the night. While we were down in Toronto with Tim's family for the Heart and Stroke Ride for Heart in May, we went out to eat at Sorento Mediterranean Cuisine and they had a mind-blowing Latin duo playing there called Farrucas. Literally, our minds were blown - we stayed extra-long just to listen to them. I don't know who initially suggested that it would be cool if they could play at the wedding, but Tim latched onto the idea immediately and went up to speak to them. We couldn't believe they were actually free for our wedding date and reasonably priced at $400 for an hour of play time. That amount included all of their travel from Markham to Cavan and all of their equipment and setup. We booked right away and then swore Chris, Wendy, and Dean all to secrecy. They were our little surprise for our guests.

Farrucas at the Markham Music Festival this summer

CFC Pix's photo of Chris and Elise dancing to Farrucas during the wine and cheese

We threw around a lot of suggestions for our first dance song, from country to Dave Matthews. Michael Buble's Close Your Eyes off of his new album was a frontrunner. Tim even wanted to make a mashup of Close Your Eyes and the song we did finally pick. We decided to go with the Glee cover of Fleetwood Mac's Songbird by Naya Rivera. I feel like this song is such a perfect representation of how I feel for Tim. 

The lyrics version of Naya Rivera singing Fleetwood Mac's Songbird

CFC Pix's photo of Tim and I during our first dance to Songbird

For my song with Dad, it had to be country or old rock and roll. Some of my strongest and most touching memories from when I was young are listening to Dad's old records. He has such a love for music and he's an amazing dancer. I remember asking him to dance with me when I was in high school, after we had learned the two-step as part of dance week in phys ed. I don't know what two-step I was doing versus what he thought the two-step was, but we were four left feet! Mom and him even met back at the community dances they used to hold in Arkona, where he used to burn up the floor. I seriously considered Ernie Ford's Eighteen Tons, which holds such a strong association to Dad for me, but it isn't a good dancing song. I finally settled on George Strait's I Cross My Heart. While some people may consider that this song is mainly about romantic love, I couldn't help but apply the sentiment in the lyrics to my relationship with Dad. Romantic love is not unconditional, no matter what people want. My Dad's love for me is. I know - I've tested it in so many ways over the years! There is no one in my life who would ever give up as much for me as Dad would be willing to. I'm listening to the song as I write this and tearing up. Dancing with him at my wedding to this song was such a perfect moment for me. Plus he looked so handsome!

The lyrics video of George Strait's I Cross My Heart

Dad and I dancing together - look at how tall he looks!

Tim made finding his song to dance to with his Mom much easier - he asked Wendy! I had a sneaking suspicion that she would pick one of her favourite songs, and she did. Wendy and Tim both thought of this song as it reminded them of each other and bonding over it years before.  They danced to Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's Somewhere Over The Rainbow (What a Wonderful World).

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow

Tim and Wendy dancing to Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Mini Honeymoon Pt. 1 - Old Ormsby Schoolhouse

After going canoeing last Monday at the Hastings Resort, we decided to do a bit of exploring around the area before dinner. We drove through Orsmby into Coe Hill, where basically nothing was open (not that there is too much there to begin with). We did see signs for a flea market store that was open on Clayton Cove Rd. Tim really loves antiquing and flea markets, so we drove out. It was a bit like a scene from a psychologically terrifying horror movie. It was at the lady's house. It was mostly glassware and ceramics - some of which were really nice. Tim admired their tankard collection while I was coveting a cobalt blue glass pitcher. However, the woman followed us around this small, crammed old house, giving us unwanted marriage advice, as well as advice on where we should have held our wedding. She kept pressing pamphlets on us, both for her own store and various stores around the area. When she started to give us duplicate copies, I told her I already had some, but she said that she wanted us to have them anyways so that we could give them out to our friends. We left without buying anything, mostly because I was so uncomfortable with the whole situation - otherwise I really would have bought some of the cobalt glassware. When we tried to get out, she had locked us in with her! Tim even commented on it and she responded back that it let her keep people longer so that she had someone to talk to . . . *crickets* So. Creepy.

She did, however, in her reams of suggestions, point out that the Old Ormsby Schoolhouse was a great place to have lunch close by. She even gave us a brochure for them. It caught Tim's interest and was right beside the Old Hastings Mercantile & Gallery, which Tim and I had seen on our way into Coe Hill and had wanted to check out anyways. We went to the Old Hastings Gallery first and I'm so glad we did! It was the most amazing little gift shop, full of great old candy and neat products. We were drawn in right away by the incredible wood sculptures out front. If I had had an extra $350 in my pocket, the heron out front would have been coming home with me! I did buy hard taffy and a maple syrup candle (getting ready for fall!). The owners, Lillian and Gary, were so helpful and sweet - Lillian even gave us a sweet little gift after we told her we had just gotten married. We also bought our first Christmas present of the season here and I'm SO excited for Dean and Wendy to open it! I feel like we need to go back, though - there were a few other things we saw here that would make excellent gifts.

Exterior of the Old Ormsby Schoolhouse, located just off of Highway 620 east of Ormsby on Old Hastings Rd

The Old Orsmby Schoolhouse was just as great of a find/creepy suggestion. It was PACKED when we went in. We actually got the last available table. Their slogan is "'Educated Dining' and Tea House" and it was a perfect place to have lunch. The owners, Ernie and Debbie Pattison, restored a century schoolhouse for their wedding reception and then turned it into the restaurant. The open layout really encourages conversation. Tim and I got to talking with two separate tables, one about cottage country in Ontario (they were from Pennsylvania) and the other about how teaching in Ontario has evolved over the last fifty years or so. It's such a friendly place! The decor is adorable, too - lots of antique things to look at. The food was delicious and exactly what we needed on a cold, wet day. Tim had the Swingin' Shepherd's Pie and I had the  Scottish Pasta - MacRowknee and Cheese. Both came with the tea room's amazing scones, piping hot and heavily scented with nutmeg. We also both chose to have the spinach salad with strawberries and almonds on the side. I don't know why I don't buy poppyseed dressing more often. That salad was so amazing - I finished it before I even touched my mac and cheese. We coerced ourselves into sharing a piece of carrot cake for dessert and it was easily big enough for two. I'll risk not being allowed back, but the carrot cake was just a little on the dry side. Lots of cream cheese icing more than made up for that, though. I would definitely go back and would love to try the high tea. It comes on a three-layered cake plate and has fruit, scones with preserves and fresh whipped cream, tea sandwiches, and desserts. Tea is also available with every meal and they had a good list. Tim should drink tea more often, given how he was moaning over his. I also liked that they had more than a couple varieties of green tea. 

The quaintly beautiful inside of the Old Ormsby Schoolhouse and Tea Room

Our Wedding Wine and Labels: ASPaperie

Dean and Wendy very generously offered to make the wine for our wedding. Extremely generously, considering they wound up making 180 bottles when we were only ever planning on 150 guests. Dean has been making wine for years at The Village Wine Shoppe in Bridgenorth. He made 90 bottles each of their pinot grigio and African pinotage.

Tina Beynen's photo of our wine bottles already opened and being enjoyed at the wedding!

Unfortunately, I had the hardest time picking wedding wine labels. None of the options that The Village Wine Shoppe offered appealed to me, and most of the popular sites online didn't seem to have anything simple enough to suit what I wanted. I just wanted chalkboard! Why is it that the simplest things are often the most expensive?

I finally turned to Etsy to find a seller that would just design and provide what I wanted. Andrea of ASPaperie out of Miami, Florida was amazing to work with during the design phase of the wine labels. Unfortunately once we had received them and I was confused about the lack of an actual chalkboard texture to the labels (it showed on her test proofs but then not at all on the actual labels), I e-mailed her and still haven't received a response. Not a huge deal, considering we did love the labels themselves, but for $2 a piece, I would have expected exactly what the proofs had shown. 

Our exact wine labels in this product ad from ASPaperie.

Wine label proof sent from ASPaperie prior to production.

The wine labels were beautiful quality. We did have some trouble getting them to affix to cold bottles, but once the bottles were a bit warmer they stuck perfectly. The Village Wine Shoppe provided the flat black wraps for the tops that matched so well. 

Mini Honeymoon Pt. 1 - Hastings Resort

As a bridal shower gift, my Mom bought Tim and I a two-night stay at the Hastings Resort outside of Coe Hill for the Sunday and Monday just after the wedding. She thought we'd need a little break away from everything after the chaos of the move and the wedding day and she was very right.

Main lodge photo from www.hastingsresort.com

Rosy skies at the Hastings Resort after a rainy day.

I believe Mom originally got the deal as part of a Wagjag promotion. The room was really nice, but very small. Just big enough for the bed, but it's not like we needed more space than that. The Sunday night I slept for twelve hours straight - all the sleep deprivation prior to the wedding catching up to me! Tim did not like that there wasn't coffee available in the rooms, or in the resort at all when we got up at 8:00 a.m. He had to go on a search to the restaurant to ask them to bring the coffee maker to the resort. It was just a small setback to the day.

Room photo courtesy of www.hastingsresort.com 

Steakhouse photo courtesy of www.hastingsresort.com

Meals there are all taken at the Steakhouse, which is not cheap. The food is really good, though, and our server for both dinners was really great. Our server's name was Erica-Lyn and she was really funny. I'd love to go back just to hang out with her. On Sunday night Tim and I both had steaks. Tim had the ribeye with mashed potatoes and a brandy mushroom cream for $32.95. He ordered rare, but it was closer to medium. I had the King of Hastings, which is a striploin with a pave potato for $30.95. I ordered medium-rare and my steak was almost perfectly done. The pave potato was yummy - a potato, very thinly sliced on a mandolin, then cooked like scalloped potatoes, but still in the shape of the original potato. Monday during the day we went out for lunch, but were back at the Steakhouse for a late dinner. We decided just to do appetizers so that we could have dessert, but almost didn't make it even then. We had the scallops and brie with vanilla cracker, pineapple jam and Sambuca glaze for $12.95. The vanilla cracker didn't make sense. There wasn't enough savoury to balance it out and it just came off dessert-like. It's too bad, because the rest of the components were all really good. We also had the chef's mussels for $11.95, which were just amazing. They were so tender and flavourful - but definitely ask for extra bread to sop up the broth! There wasn't any grit in any of our mussels. There were three that weren't opened, but I'd rather risk that than have overcooked mussels. Tim ordered the gravlax - cured salmon with herbed cream cheese, capers, red onion, and caviar on crostini for $12.95. I expected not to like it because I'm not a cured/smoked/preserved salmon fan, but it was really good, especially with the capers and shaved red onion. Erica-Lyn pushed us into the dessert we had originally wanted, even though I was close to needing to be rolled out of there. The portion on the drunken brownie with Kawartha Dairy ice cream is VERY generous for $7.50. I didn't really taste any of the kahlua, triple sec, or bourbon that was supposed to be in this dessert, but the brownie was fudgy and the caramel sauce was delicious. Even though we were told that the kitchen was having a few problems with service due to a broken oven, you could not tell in the food or in the dinner service. 

Gravlax photo courtesy of www.hastingsresort.com

Steakhouse interior photo courtesy of www.hastingsresort.com

Drinking part of our wedding gift from Mandy and Ryan!

We didn't have the best weather while we were there. It was mostly overcast and rainy. But we did get out in the canoe on Beaver Creek for a quickish paddle. Beaver Creek is really gorgeous. Meandering and very slow-moving, it's an easy paddle and looks to be great fishing for largemouth bass. Alas, we did not have any of our fishing gear with us, but I was thinking about Mom while we were out there! All in all, we had a very rejuvenating, relaxing stay, until the morning we were supposed to leave!

Paddling Beaver Creek.

Finally relaxing after wedding craziness!

Ahoy, mateys!

We had set our alarm for 6:00 a.m. so that we could drive back to Peterborough for 7:00, since both Tim and I worked Tuesday. Tim said that he was already lying awake when the industrial fire alarm went off at 2:30 a.m. We heard that a few of the other guests were lying awake at that time - maybe the guests that had asthma or more sensitive senses could already smell the smoke. Not me. I was dead to the world until the alarm went off. Even when it did, we didn't really panic - these alarms almost always are someone smoking in their room or something equally dumb. We got dressed, but then the alarm stopped. Since Tim was already dressed and awake (he's a bit of an insomniac to begin with, so this didn't bode well on him going back to sleep), I suggested he go downstairs just to check out what was going on. I stayed in our room with the door open to the hallway. Went on Facebook. Decided to clean up and pack a bit since we had to leave in a few hours anyway. Tim still wasn't back, so I poked my head out into the hallway. A guy we had met earlier in the day was also looking out and asked what I thought was going on. I told him that Tim had gone downstairs to check it out, so he decided to go down too. A few minutes later, the woman across the hall from me came out and said that all she could smell in her room was burning. Sure enough, her room and even the hallway were starting to just reek like burning sugar. She and her mother, in another room, packed up and left the resort. Tim STILL hadn't come back. 

Tim says that when he went downstairs, the first floor was beginning to fill with smoke. The reception attendant had turned off the audible fire alarm, but the system was still showing a fire on the first floor. Tim couldn't stay in the smoke because it was causing his eyes to burn and he couldn't stop coughing. The attendant opened the door to the laundry room and smoke just billowed out. The attendant ran in, found a smouldering bag of cleaning linens, and dragged it through the hallway and out the front door of the resort. Tim and the other guy who had gone downstairs dragged the bag farther away from the resort, still sending off tons of smoke. Something about them dragging it must have exposed it to enough fresh oxygen, because it burst into full flame. The attendant went back into the building and grabbed a bucket (not a fire extinguisher) and filled it up from the sink. He made several more trips this way before they decided that the river was a better option to stay away from what was obviously toxic smoke. They got the fire extinguished, and then Tim went through the hotel opening up all the windows and doors to air things out. Our side of the resort wasn't too bad, but the opposite side was just completely full of chemical smoke.

Tim finally came back into the room about a half hour after he had left - I still had no idea that there was an actual fire - reeking of smoke, tearing out of both eyes, and coughing like a lifelong smoker. He told me what had happened and we decided to leave. It's not like Tim would have been able to sleep in there anyways. While we finished packing up, two of the hotel attendants came around telling people it was perfectly safe for them to go back into their rooms - just to open their windows to air things out. Tim collared them (they were both pretty young and he was into concerned teacher mode) and said that that was chemical smoke and that no one should still be in the hotel. They just kind of shrugged. It was obvious they didn't really know what to do. We said that we'd like to check out and left.

Even the whole way home Tim was coughing and his eyes were so red. I can't believe what a mess it was - who turns off the fire alarm where there's a fire? What hotel doesn't have fire extinguishers handy? Why didn't they call the fire department immediately? How is it that they didn't evacuate the hotel when they knew it had been a chemical fire? Why were they storing chemical soaked rags like that to begin with? My friend Cory used to work for an industrial cleaning company - they should know not to mix cleaning chemicals! When we were talking to some of the senior science teachers at a Lakefield College function the Tuesday night, it was generally thought that the sweet-smelling gas put off from those cloths would have been arsenic or cyanide!

Crazy Rollwagen honeymoon! I hope our other trips aren't quite this exciting!

What friends say:

Awww, Kyle's dad Max just told me that Kyle told him (telephone game!) that our wedding was one of the best he's ever been to. Warm fuzzies!

Update: Kyle at the beginning of the night with his girlfriend Tash:

And then Kyle at the end of night with my cousin's Canadian Club:

Success!