My Big Fat Guangdong Wedding
Chapter 15. Looking Back. Wedding Memories.
And now it’s 4 years later. I’ve FINALLY not only gotten EscapedLunatic.com off the ground and have finished editing and adding photos to My Big Fat Guangdong Wedding – originally published at Raoul’s China Saloon as events happened back in 2011. Editing the text and adding the pics brings back so many wonderful (and a few not quite so wonderful 
) wedding memories.
I never knew a Chinese wedding could be so much work. If I hadn’t already been insane, getting married here would have easily done the trick. 
I know I left my mind laying around somewhere
I love to write, so the original blog at Raoul’s was fun and easy for me. Fixing most (I hope) of the typos and illustrating this with photos is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but was also a lot more work than I anticipated. For some sections, I already had all the photos I needed. I’ve got all the pics from the wedding photo sessions and quite a few from the wedding parties. Other items have had me both tearing apart the house as well as running all over town to get photos of places and items I didn’t take pics of back when this all happened. (Fringe Benefit: I’ve got 10 brand new Confetti Cannons ready to have fun with. 
) Then there’s the matter of cropping most of the pics and shrinking all them down to a fairly reasonable size (800 pixels wide in most cases). I’ve still got all the originals in case I’m ever tempted to redo this again with larger pics.
Here are a few updates on what’s been going on since the wedding:
My darling wife is just as beautiful and loving (and violent ) as ever.
My darling daughter keeps getting more beautiful by the day. 
I’m going to have to dig out the family sabres to threaten all the boys who are chasing her.
The Cantonese Twins are still two of the most wonderful and helpful friends in my life. Even so, I don’t think I’m going to assign any more spy missions to Twin #2.
About 2 years after the wedding, we took over the second floor of the house and moved into the master bedroom on that level. This leaves the third floor master bedroom for guests. Her parents sometimes visit for a week (or two, or three 
). Having them on a different floor makes it much easier to focus on my work.
When there are no guests, the 3rd floor kitchen is mine (Mine! ALL MINE!). I’ve got a bread machine (virtually unheard of in China), an oven (VERY rare in China), a microwave (still somewhat uncommon in China), and a refrigerator full of things to make western style foods. I don’t cook too often, but enjoy having the ability to do so when the mood strikes me. If I ever get caught up on EscapedLunatic.com, I’m planning a second blog about some of my cooking misadventures at BakingBad.com.
Homemade lasagna ready to be baked on the 3rd floor
The matching glass dining tables got split up. There’s one on the second floor and one on the 3rd floor.
Since my wife now works with me in telecommuter land, we bought a larger wooden dining table and have our laptops on it.
My efforts to reclaim the display shelves fully never succeeded. My lovely wife keeps adding assorted little items she picks up when we travel. The snack table was never replaced. My saltines and other snacks still occupy one of the shelves. Since the display shelves are still on the third floor, this at least makes me run up and down the stairs if I want a snack.
4 years later – my snacks are still kept on the display shelves
I’m still a member of MilliCharity’s Board of Directors. My wife and I keep adding to our group of sponsored children.
We’ve managed to have a first and second honeymoon (so far). Both were blogged at Raoul’s China Saloon. Now that I’ve completed the wedding blog, adding photo versions of those here (while also trying to keep up on current stuff) is next on my list.
When we got married, the TrustMart chain had already been bought by The Very Big Corporation of America Walmart. A year or so after the wedding, the TrustMart at Global Plaza in Dongguan was rebranded to Walmart.
Even with all the work, it was fun wading through all the wedding memories again. I’m hoping my lovely wife and I can make re-reading this part of our anniversary celebrations each year. I’m also hoping I can eventually talk her into translating some of this into Chinese. Somehow, I expect she’ll probably do a little of her own editing, since her family will then be able to read it.
P.S. I did it! I wanted this to be done before our 4th wedding anniversary, and I managed to complete it 10 days early.
September 2018 Update: I’ve moved all photos onto the EscapedLunatic.com site itself. I can’t trust PhotoBucket anymore after they tried to charge $400 per year to host photos for my blog. 
Every other image hosting site I checked (and I checked a lot of them) was either too expensive or had other issues. At least this also gave me a chance to go through the whole wedding blog again and fix a few more typos. Now onward to the rest of the website.