wedding plans, rain storms, first date and other randomness

I've spent a lot of time in thrift stores and consignment stores the past few weeks.  We have some ideas for Rachel's wedding reception that hopefully can be thrifted, borrowed or repurposed.  It's kind of amazing that you can look at a shelf in a thrift store that looks utterly cluttered, cheap and chaotic, then pick through it all and walk up to the register with 4 or 5 funky pieces of stuff that really look cool all together in the basket. We took a trip to to Safford a couple weeks ago and stopped in every thrift store between here and there - Apache Junction, Superior, Top-of-the-World (yes, a real place), Miami, Globe, Thatcher and Safford. In one store, I found several pieces of cool junk and took about $15 of stuff to the front counter.  The guy at the register looked at it and said, "how about $2.50 for the whole pile?"  I'm not sure what his method was. Each piece had a price tag on it.

This piece cracked me up.  It was actually in a cool consignment shop over on 7th Ave.  Can you read the tag?  It says "Cool Rusty Thing  $6.99".  Oh my heck, it's a piece of rusty plumbing. We have tons of those around. Maybe I should sell them all for $6.99 each and start a little side business.

I also asked Dave if he would walk through his junk around the house with me and look for cool pieces of iron or brass that we could use in an artistic way.  I was startled at how much stuff he keeps, and surprised at how many cool pieces of metal we found.  Most of the metal we found was painted red, because we are in the Fire Protection Industry.  I told him we couldn't use red, but Dave said we could 'fire' the pieces and then just brush the paint off.  "What do you mean 'fire' the pieces?"  He then started a fire in the fire pit in the backyard and tossed in the metal pieces. "There. We just fire the pieces for a while."  It's the middle of August and the temperature is sweltering, and we are working up a big roaring fire in the back yard. I left him to that task and headed out to run some errands. I hadn't driven 3 blocks when some hefty winds came out of nowhere. Five minutes later it was raining. RAINING! Rain like we don't get very often in the desert. Pouring down like crazy. I stopped at a grocery store, grabbed my umbrella I keep under my seat, (but rarely ever get to use) and saw a dozen people out in front of the store shocked to be coming out to that kind of downpour, when it wasn't hinting of rain when they went in.
When I finally got back home, Dave had covered the fire with one of the metal pieces he was 'firing' and was able to keep flames going through the whole storm. He's a magician with fire.
When I was in college, I drove a Toyota with no air conditioning.  When we had one of these hot weather rainstorms, it was hard to decide whether to keep my windows up and suffocate in the sweltering heat, or roll the windows down and drown.
My first date with Dave was to the movie theater at the Colonnade shopping center (which sadly doesn't have a theater anymore). There was no indication of weather when we went in, but when the movie ended, we came out to pouring rain.  We arrived on his motorcycle which was parked all by itself in the middle of an urban parking lot lake. He gallantly swam out to retrieve the motorbike and rolled it to a dry spot until it could drip dry a few minutes, dry enough to get it started anyway.
More to come about Rachel's wedding. But I have never posted all of Roxanne's wedding photos yet, so tomorrow, I'm going to post her photos. This blog becomes our family yearbook at the end of the year and I'm sure it will be mostly a wedding photo album this year.