At our other place...

...I wrote a little bit more about when Amy and I started dating, going to see some Andrew Vladeck shows. Check it out.

Two for the Book

This morning we got word that Teddy and his fiancée Anna Michelle booked their flight up to Maine. Go visit them right down here!

PS. I'm told they got a good deal on Jet Blue flying into Portland. It's a bit farther to drive from there, but might be worth considering!

One-Armed Job: Settling Islesford

A few guests are staying in a house near Eagle Point, which is the northwest corner of the island (on your left as you come into the dock). They may be interested to learn that the first white settlers to Little Cranberry landed there. From Hugh L. Dwelley's "A History of Little Cranberry Island, Maine," pp. 16-17:

One-armed Job Stanwood is thought to have come to Little Cranberry in 1762 and Benjamin Bunker to Great Cranberry. Ted Spurling tells us that Stanwood and Bunker were both veterans of the 1745 First Battle of Louisburg where Stanwood lost an arm. Both came from communities in Sussex County, Massachusetts as did Some and Richardson. They may well have known one another before they came.
...
Governor Bernard returned [to Little Cranberry] in 1764 to survey his grant more fully. Wendell Hadlock wrote that: "His [Bernard's] surveyor took his departure from Sutton's Island to a spruce tree on Job Stanwood's Landing Place on Little Cranberry Island." Thus is Job Stanwood's presence and even the place of his landing (near Eagle Point) confirmed.

The Downeast coast

From Colin Woodward's "The Lobster Coast," p. 32:

The often-used Maine moniker "Downeast" is a sailing term that refers to direction, not location. The prevailing winds on the Maine coast blow from the southwest in the warm months, so ships from Boston were able to run downwind as they sailed along Maine's northeasterly-trending coast. ...

The Downeast coast was the last region to be settled by British subjects because it belonged to France until 1763. France never established much more than a garrison here, in large part because the region's colder climate, ferocious tides, and thin, glacially scoured soil made such undertakings difficult. The task of settlement fell to a great wave of land-hungry English and Scotch-Irish settlers who moved here from other parts of Maine and New England in the last decades of the eighteenth century. It was this movement that pushed Maine to the forefront of the American fishing industry in the first half of the nineteenth century. Most Downeast people discovered they couldn't survive by farming, and turned to the sea by necessity. There they discovered the Gulf of Maine's incredible bounty, and helped establish the maritime way of life on the coast. But the Downeast coast's harsh conditions and remote location have always minimized both settlement and economic activity, and today the region remains the poorest, least developed part of the Maine seaboard.

Congratulations!

To Mike and Virginia Hartmere on the birth of their daughter Abby yesterday! We've updated the guestbook accordingly.

More Folks

We've added Dean Chadwin and his wife Alleen Barber to the guestbook. They're bringing their twin girls to the wedding and booked their place last week. That takes care of page 2, which means pride of place on page 3 goes to my grandparents Don & Katy. They booked their trip this week, which is just amazing (especially if you consider Grandma has refused to fly for who knows how many years. And they're taking three separate planes to get there! Grandpa has promised to knock her upside the head so she can do it).

UPDATE: Jimmie just called with his flight! He's in! Also, we've updated our Schedule of Events with some more specific information.

Nick Bertozzi's THE SALON

Our friend Nick Bertozzi is releasing his long-awaited and much anticipated comic THE SALON this month (St Martin's Press-April 18th) as well as HOUDINI: THE HANDCUFF KING written by Jason Lutes and drawn by Nick (CCS/Hyperion-Out now!).

We're really excited for Nick and from what we've seen it's going to be an incredible piece of work. We're highlighting it here because Nick is the man responsible for our save the date cards, and our invitations, which will be sent out soon, and are really nice.

If you have a chance go see him on one of the following dates:

April 23rd-TuesdayMonday 7pm MacNally-Robinson Bookstore Reading. For those
of you who are too young to drink alcohol, please come to this event!
52 Prince St, New York, NY http://www.mcnallyrobinsonnyc.com

April 26th-Thursday 7pm-Midnight THE SALON Book Launch Party to Benefit
the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund at The Village Pourhouse 64 Third Ave
(Corner of 11th St), Newy York, NY. Live music by The Cangelosi Cards.
7-8 Open Bar and Food ($20 and up donation), 8-12 ($10 and up suggested
donation), 2-for-1 Absolut drinks all night.

April 28th-Saturday 2-4pm SALON/HOUDINI Signing at Big Planet Comics,
4908 Fairmont Ave, Bethesda, MD http://www.bigplanetcomics.com/

May 9th-Wednesday SALON Reading at Happy Ending, 302 Broome St, New
York, NY

May 12th-Saturday 7pm-10 SALON/HOUDINI Signing at Rocketship Comics, 208
Smith St, Brooklyn, NY

I'm planning to attend the MoCCA Arts Festival June 23rd/24th, the San
Diego Comic Convention July 26-29, and the Small Press Expo (Bethesda,
MD) October 12-13.

Attention New Englanders, there'll be a private SALON party in RI on
Sunday, May 27th. More info to come.

The video is a short making-of the book. Lots of fun!

Accommodations in Southwest Harbor

Amy and I were Maine the other week and took a short driving tour of snowy Southwest Harbor, so guests could get at least a tiny sense of where they were staying. We started south of the town at the fork in the road off towards Manset and the Seawall Motel. The other two accommodations that aren't shown on this video are the Island House and The Birches. The former, by the way, is booked up, but the latter looks like a really nice to stay, if (relatively) remote from the others. In the video we pass the Harbor View Motel, the Captain Bennett House, the Kingsleigh Inn, the Inn at Southwest, the Cafe Drydock & Inn, the Harbor Cottage Inn, and end just below the Claremont Hotel.

Below is a little map of where we went. For more detail look at our Maine Map. Note that there's a marker on this map for the Upper Town Dock, which is where the charter boat is currently scheduled to leave. (There are other docks, however, including the Coast Guard and Beale's docks, which I mention in the video as being possible points of departure. Those two are farther out on the point.)

What's This All About?

We've added a blog to the wedding website because we wanted a way to compile a lot more information on the area than we could on the regular website: links, excerpts, big things, little things. Instead of them just sitting in our email and bookmarks, we can put them here for other people to see too.

You can bookmark, or even better, syndicate (or RSS) the site, so that you won't miss any developments or new information.

Also, to the extent anyone has questions on where to stay, what to do, or if they need clarification on anything, this is as good a place to do it as any, especially if everyone would benefit from the clarification/question/etc.

We don't expect the blog to be particularly useful to anyone until right before the wedding, when you're packing up to go and want some ideas on what to do when you get there.

But when that time comes, we hope to have lots of resources for you, both here and on the rest of the website.

Test Post

It won't be long before we're up and running here. See you in Maine!

April 1, 2007

This is an exciting period for us and the wedding planning. We are taking Martin up to Maine this week to settle some of the important issues, like the menu, the ferry, where we're going to have the ceremony, etc. etc. Also, we've finally put up information about wedding gifts here. Please visit and consider donating!

We are considering sending out a reminder email to all of the wedding guests that we don't have unlimited rights to the rooms we've reserved for the wedding. It's almost time for people to be running behind on making their plans!