Opinions of a Wolf

Hello my lovely readers!

You may have noticed things have been kind of quiet around here the last month or two.  That’s because I GOT MARRIED!!!

On September 26th I married my best friend, and our wedding was amaaaaazing!!!  It was more than I ever dared to hope for.

We had a small wedding at a girl’s summer camp in Massachusetts.  What mattered the most to us was that our wedding matched our personalities. Every time we had a choice, we just basically did what suited our personalities the best.  Phil’s shoes he found while we were thrift shopping one day the year before the wedding.  For me, I knew I wanted go-go boots, and I think yoga pants are the most comfortable thing, so going with that plus a mini-dress was practically a no-brainer.  Where our personalities really shined through though was our ceremony.

We each had one person stand up with us.  We walked to the fire ring at the camp (rather than “down the aisle”) together.  We each came around the corner of the dining hall, which had a beautiful wrap-around porch, and saw each other for the first time then walked down the steps to the fire ring holding hands while “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes played.  Our good friend officiated for us (this is legal in Massachusetts), and the ceremony opened with our maid of honor and best man playing drums and digeridoo.  We had a handfasting (since we are both of Irish descent) and a san san kudo ceremony (since my husband is baptized Shinto).  We wrote our own wedding vows and didn’t know each other’s ahead of time, and yet they matched up incredibly well.

I will write a few more posts about the wedding.  I’ll write one with more details about exactly how it went and how we planned it.  I also plan to write a post on wedding planning tips with all of the many things I learned about the horror that is wedding planning (on a budget–we threw our wedding for under $5,000).  I also plan to write a post about some of my favorite parts of the wedding, and the things that were the biggest hit the day of.

I will also write up a post about our incredible 2 week honeymoon we just got back from! We went to Mexico, Nashville, and the Smokey Mountains (where we motorcycled the Tail of the Dragon).

For right now, though, just know that I got to marry my best friend, and while wedding planning was terrible, the wedding itself was incredible, the honeymoon was awesome, and being married is amazing.  Also, my married name is Amanda Nevius, but I will still be publishing under my maiden name, which I now dub my pen name, Amanda McNeil.