Drawing wedding dates out of a hat?

I’ve always been a bit of a procrastinator. I stayed up all night to finish papers in college because I waited until the last minute to start them. On the last day of each month you can usually find me in front of my work laptop finishing end-of-month reporting right up until the 11pm deadline because I waited until the last day to start it. So it should really come as no surprise that I also procrastinated on wedding planning.

By the Fall of 1996 Lee and I had been engaged for a year and still hadn’t even picked out a wedding date.

Fall is my favorite time of year. The leaves turn beautiful shades of red, orange and yellow. The temps go from sticky hot to cool, but not freezing cold. And there is typically no snow or ice storms yet. So I knew I wanted to get married in the Fall. And I decided that November would be a great month.

I figured, since I picked the month, Lee should pick the date. One night we were laying in bed and, out of the blue, I told him to pick a day. We didn’t have a calendar in front of us. In fact it was completely dark in the room. Nothing like totally randomly picking a date.

Lee said, “Either the 14th or the 17th.”

The next morning I checked the calendar to see if either November 14th or November 17th fell on a weekend. Turned out November 14th was a Friday. So that was the day. November 14, 1997.