The wedding that almost wasn't

So now my beloved and I are married - and happily, I might add for the folks over at Statefarm.com, since I'm now hitched to a real  woman.

But you might be interested in knowing that the wedding came > < this close to not happening at all.

Here's the story:  For this wedding to have taken place, we had to attend this marriage seminar thingie at a church.  No problem - I can sit there and fake consciousness for three hours as well as anyone. (grin)

Well, we received a nice little certificate - actually, a letter stating we'd completed the seminar - for our trouble.

So, on Friday, we arrive at the courthouse and go through the obligatory security procedures to get inside.  We take a number - yeah, they follow the tried-and-true dry-cleaner method - fill out our license application, and settle in to wait our turn.

Presently, we get called up to the clerk to get the process started.  Upper-middle-aged black lady, looks exactly the part of the harried bureaucrat.

We hand her the license request, she asks for the course certificate, we hand her that, too.

She gets this little bureaucrat frown on her face that, one hundred percent of the time, means that diarrhea is majorly about to hit the fan.

"I can't accept this".

"Why not?"

"Because it's in Spanish".

My bride-to-be gets this look on her face like, "What the HELL  did you just say?!?!?!?"

"'Scuse us?"

"Our policy is that these certificates have to be in English".

I get this look on my  face like "You.  Can.  Not.  Be.  Serious."

Think about this for a second.  The most international city in the most international state in this country, smack-dab in heavily Demoscummic PC territory...and they have an "English only" policy.

I'd've been laughing my ass off...if the seminar people hadn't explicitly told us that la versión española  was perfectly acceptable to the court.

Now  the argument started in earnest.  We got our entire brood up there arguing...at which point, Ms. Bureaucrat was probably awfully damned glad for the two-inch Plexiglas barrier between us.  She kept insisting that they wouldn't accept it, and we kept insisting that we'd been told that they would.

One hour and a call to the mayor's office later - yep, my sweetie has connections (grin) - we had our license, and twenty minutes later, we were taking pictures after a very nice ceremony (and I promise  I'll have those pics for you as soon as I get them back myself).

But it still amazes me that, in a town where English-speaking WASPs are definitely  the minority, something like that happens.  It do boggle de mind, ayup...

A massive oversight, this is

Allan over at Barking Moonbat Early Warning System posted a poll in which he asked, "If we were stuck in a foxhole in Fallujah, which blogger would we prefer to 'cover our six?"'

Allan, being the wise sage he is, included some of the most honorable Warbloggers in the Blogosphere - Misha, Frank J, Instapundit (Instapundo Delenda Est!!!),  Kim du Toit and the like.

And then he committed the Cardinal Sin™...of excluding  Yours Truly.

Time to call in the Pegasus Fleet™*


*For the Uninitiated™, the Pegasus Fleet™ is comprised of about 20 Federation warships, 10 Galaxy-class starships, 8 Promethius-class warships, and my personal Warbird - all equipped with the Pegasus Cloak™.

The Pegasus Cloak™ is a device which not only cloaks a ship, but also includes a phase discriminator which allows the cloaked ship to pass through matter, such as solid rock.  In other words, when I'm cloaked, you can't hit me with squat.  Neener, neener. (grin))