And here is the full text of the speech:

Welcome. I’m so glad so many people were able to come together on this cold and snowy day. It’s hard for me to believe I am standing here, as I realized the other day, a little over 12 years since Justin first showed up in my US History class. And science class, and math and English classes. Even, we figured out, lunch period.

I can’t say I have been waiting for this day for 12 years, or even 6 years. Stephanie has been, but not me. [pause] But I wasn’t surprised to hear that Justin finally took the plunge, and headed down this incredible path of marriage. And in typically Justin fashion, I found out by email – In a response to a quick note I sent to say rIAm and I were in town after our year of traveling. I have that email here:

After short pleasantries, he wrote:
Steph and I do have some big news. After five years she finally caught me and we are now engaged. The wedding will be December 6th, 2008 and will be held up here around Naperville. We are using the chapel at the Naper settlement and having the reception at the Abbington in Glen Ellyn. Looks like I will now have the occasion to return the best man book to use, as I believe you will need it. I was hoping you would be back in town soon.

And with that, I knew exactly where I’d be this day, and that I had to give this speech. For the record, he never did return that best man book.

Looking back on it all, I suppose it was inevitable that we would become such good friends. Considering we spent over half our day with each other at school, it was no surprise Justin decided we should start hanging out on the weekend. I think the first exchange went about like this, one Friday morning in Eby’s history class:

Justin asked “do you want to get together later?”
To which I responded, “yeah, we always have lunch together”
“No, tonight” Justin responded, holding back on calling me a moron, regretting that he picked me to ask instead of somebody who actually understood what he was talking about.

But we figured out we could go bowling, which led to a pool table, which led to pretty much a standing date every weekend for the next 6 years. We pushed curfew all through high school, only to come home reeking of smoke, and then we pushed closing time at the pool halls all through college. Which is also how we found the meat lovers skillet at Denny’s, and baffled my dad, who could never understand why we would be out so late. We haven’t closed a pool hall – or had a meat lovers skillet – in quite some time, but we found ourselves racking up some nine ball Thursday night like we’ve done a thousand times before.

The cast of supporting characters changed many times through the years. Friends came and went, others stuck around, but our friendship was constant. Ineed, Justin’s family moved, and then moved again, and then moved some more. Friends scattered around the country, but defying all odds, Justin just bounced back and forth between DeKalb and the Greater Naperville Area, the place he can most call home. In fact, it was me who moved this time, first into Chicago then across Asia and now to Toronto.

But it didn’t – doesn’t – matter. It never did. Justin and I share that rare sort of friendship where we can go months without talking, but we pick right back up where we left off the next time. And although we depend on that perhaps a bit more than we’d like, it always works.

I’m not sure that I have much advice for Justin, I preceded him in marriage two and a half years ago, but I do know a few things.

What I’ll call the Stephanie years started out rocky, as far as I was concerned. They had a roommate who defined the word “slob,” one who managed to blow up their toilet. And admittedly, I wasn’t so sure the pairing would stick. But my instinct wasn’t working back then, it seems, and Justin’s never been one to share his emotions readily, so it took a couple years for me to see why this relationship worked.

But first, let me explain a little something about Justin. He loves to learn, particularly if he can then beat somebody at the thing he learns. It’s the mild OCD, as he puts it, that every genius needs to become the very best. He’s had books on chess, pool, skiing, paintball, guitar, cars and probably guitar hero. But I never saw him with a relationship book, so I wasn’t sure how hard he was working on that part of his life. Steph, you’ll be happy to know, I caught Justin this afternoon with a book that should him him tonight.

Another thing about Justin, despite being a huge geek, he always maintained a pretty good sense of the world around him, and a self-awareness that he was a huge geek. So he overcompensated with cars, and fortunately, understood that quoting from the chess book “knight to c5, queen to d6,” and so on just didn’t hold the same social appeal as “9 ball corner pocket.”

So with as many self-absorbed, expensive and time consuming hobbies as Justin has, he’s also managed to keep a wonderful woman happy, and she has in return been extraordinarily patient and made sure that Justin has had, for a number of years – especially so since they bought their house – a warm and inviting home filled with not just candles and cats, but a whole lot of love.

And this is what makes Steph such a good match for Justin. She is that unique personality that is simultaneously supportive and encouraging, but also practical, understanding, and let me emphasize, patient. I know a little something about having such an amazing partner in life, and Justin’s smartest move is making sure this relationship was his last.

The cliche that two people are better together than on their own rings true in this relationship. Steph brings out the best in Justin, without trying to hold him back. And Justin does the same in return, and I’m confident that neither of them would be as happy or as successful as they are today, if they had spent the last six years without each other.

And so that is what makes me so happy to be here today. Some might be thinking, what has changed today? Yes, these two are now married, but they still live together, they have been functioning as a married couple, and other than perhaps changing beneficiaries on a pension plan, what has changed?

Well that is something I do know something about. Justin, it’s going to feel really good now to introduce Steph to people as your wife, and talk about Rod and Terri as your in-laws. It’s a wonderful new adventure ahead of you, and the beauty of it all is that you have the most solid foundation possible upon which to build the rest of your lives.

And so it is with tremendous pleasure, even pride, that I am standing here today. I wish you both nothing but the best, and nothing but happiness. I know you know that it won’t always be easy, but it’s always worthwhile, and at the end of each day, there is nobody either of you would rather come home to.

Let’s all raise our glasses, in celebration of your marriage and love for each other. Congratulations, and, Cheers.

Yes, that would be half of the assembled guests, during the ceremony, in a photo taken by the Bride. During the ceremony. Taken by the bride. Everybody follow? (click photo for more description)

*Don’t expect a photo every day. Hopefully we’ll have occasional posts based on a photo like this, though. It’s pretty easy and fun to do.

Vorrei dire qualche parola per Renee e la sua famiglia. Anzitutto vi prego di scusare il mio accento.

A Renee, ti amo. Vivere insieme e` la cosa piu` bella del mondo, specialmente oggi. Ma devo anche dire che Toronto e le nostre vite non sarebbero quello che sono se non fosse per la tua famiglia e i tuoi amici.

E cosi` desidero dire grazie ai genitori di Renee, i nonni, sorelle, zie e zii, parenti tutti ed amici.

Non solo voi avete condiviso con me l’amore di Renee, ma sin dall’inizio mi avete accettato come un figlio, con amore, rispetto e generosita`. La vostra fiduccia in me non risultera` mal risposta; io avro` sempre cura di Renee. E soprattutto sono orgoglioso di essere parte della vostra famiglia. Grazie.

Translation:

I have a few words for Renée and her family. First of all, please excuse my accent.

To Renée, I say I love you. Sharing our lives with each other is the greatest feeling in the world, especially today. But I must say, Toronto, and our lives, would not be the same without your family and friends.

On that note, to Renée’s parents, grandparents, sisters, aunts & uncles, and other family and friends, I say thank you very much. Not only have you shared Renée with me, but you accepted me from the beginning and treated me the way you treat Renée, with love, respect and generosity. Your trust in me to take care of Renée has not been misplaced. And most of all, I am very proud to consider you all family. Thank you.

And it will be a bender indeed with many last minute details to attend to and much fun planned with our wedding party and families. I have admittedly been a little crazed these last couple of days before I leave (ok, uh, I’ve been through several crazed periods during the time we’ve been planning this wedding), but a lot of it has to do with how incredibly excited I am to see everyone who is coming to our wedding, and to immerse myself in this wedding week bender and our wedding day.

I have had difficulty finding the words to articulate precisely the range of emotions I have been experiencing lately about this event and the whole process we’ve gone through to get to our wedding day. All I can say for certain is I am so thrilled that we are doing this and about how we are doing this. Eloping would have been easy, less costly and yes, less stressful, but I’ve never been about the easy way out. I’ve stuck by my motto to seize the day, and oh boy, me and j. will have some good stories to tell our kids about the crazy yet lovely time we had to get ourselves hitched.

As you can tell, neither of j. or I has spent much time posting to PB in over a month (and it’s been even longer on Flickr, oops). I don’t feel bad about letting this space languish for a bit because I’ve been more interested in enjoying what we can of Chicago and our friends here, all while we make our plans for the wedding and for the future. A part of the future has included working on our masters projects (we’re aiming for December 2006 graduation) and planning our Route 66/Highway 1 honeymoon. But we also have been making progress on some of other scrumptious plans… I’ll leave it at that and spill the beans on those plans closer to when we’ve firmed up the details of what we have up our sleeves…

For now, even though I’m still in Chi-town, my head is already in Toronto and lapping up all that waits for me there. I’m keeping my heart here until I get on the plane tomorrow. Here, because that is where j. is, because wherever he is where I want to be.

In the last days of my 20s, a visit to Chicago’s Little India on Devon Avenue and poking around in wonderous fabric shops has served to heighten my over a decade-long desire to travel to India. I can smell and taste and the advetnure that awaits me and j. there.

I’ve discovered that the one quarter of myself I thought was Polish might really be closer to Belarussian because a western swath of the country traded hands between Poland and Belarus (under the Soviet empire) in my grandfather’s youth. Suddenly where I came from isn’t as straightforward as I thought, but it will no dobut be exciting to devlve into, uncover and absorb. I’ve already started in the last days of my 20s.

My shoe collection (obsession, some might say) is on the increase and my mother, the woman who so many always thinks looks like my sister or a girlfriend, takes full responsibility for me acquiring five pairs of shoes in one day during the last days of my 20s.

I noticed as I put on an outfit for my first wedding shower on Sunday that my body has slimmed down compared to where it was a year ago, but it is not the body I knew when I was 20. But I accept this body and during the last days of my 20s, I have (almost) completely left behind obsessing over feeling it is so flawed.

Wonderful flavours from Mexico at Mi Tierra, Middle Eastern/Persian buffet at Reza’s Restaurant, and hoity toity goodness at Blackbird pepper the last days of my 20s. Some home cooking by j. and me including my very successful first attempt at a quiche, and some goodies picked up from local shops like D’Amato’s Bakery round out my bottom and these last days of my 20s.

During the last days of my 20s, I’ve been cognizant of the richness of these days and how far I’ve come in this decade. I better understand and appreciate the unconditional love and support all my family members continuously give to me. I hope I have grown up enough to give them the same in return. The last days of my 20s have only reminded me how much they all mean to me.

And now my 30s are before me, undefined. How will I define these coming years?

The front of j.’s card to me ties in nicely with my philosophy of “carpe diem”: “Life is a daring adventure or nothing.” – Helen Keller (1880 – 1968)

I, too, look forward to so many wonderful adventures to come.

Obviously, from a strictly legal perspective, we’re not married. We’ve not gotten a license or gone through any formal ceremony. So no, we’re not married. But under Canadian law, we’d qualify as common law partners if we went back to Canada right now. And that’s pretty similar to being married. So let’s go beyond the legal mumbo jumbo for a bit.

The bottom line for those who consider us married already is that I asked rIAm to marry me — to spend the rest of her life with me — and she said yes. So we’ve already made the commitment, right? We’ve both said “I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” and then we shared that decision with everybody we know.

What are we really accomplishing in 205 days that we haven’t already accomplished? Sure we’ll be making it official and legal that we are married — not common law — but really, we’re throwing a giant and fantastic party. Our commitment to each other will not suddenly have changed. Our relationship won’t really change, either; we pretty much function like a married couple as it is. So all of this work rIAm (especially), and many others, are doing in order to have a phenomenal wedding day, is so that our closest friends and family can see us exchange our vows and then have a wonderful meal with us — and party.

In fact, rIAm and I see this as much a great opportunity for a family reunion as much as anything — when else will all of these amazing people be together in one place? But as for being married, back in June when I decided once and for all that rIAm was the woman for me, I made the big commitment — vow — and took the plunge. On July 30th, I’ll simply re-affirm the promise I made in the form of a question, but this time in front of 200 people: I want to spend the rest of my life with one and only one woman, and her name is renée.

So our wedding category is lacking posts, which might lead anyone reading this site (who does read this site, anyhow?) to think we haven’t been doing much planning for this supposed wedding taking place next summer. In fact, we’ve been doing plenty of wedding planning all this fall, but there hasn’t been much to publicize except for our wedding date.

Do you really want to know how much I ooohed and ahhhed when I looked at Noisette Patry Works’s wedding cake gallery? And would you find it as funny as I did that the fellow who owns Sweet Gallery, an Old World-style bakery my family has purchased cakes from for years, exclaimed, “Good girl! They know how to cut wedding cake there.” when I told him the wedding was going to be at the Old Mill Inn and Spa?

We are heading to Toronto for Christmas, followed by roaming to all ends of the GTA for wedding related appointments between Dec. 26 and Dec. 30, which should be productive and fun. All this should also yield some interesting updates as we get deeper into wedding planning: more gift registry scanning, visiting a florist, Old Mill menu and wedding cake tastings (mmmmmm), trying on tuxedos and a bridesmaids night on the town (no drunk pictures of me shall be posted on this web site… but they may get posted on Flickr if I finally get my act together and start posting to my pro account there!)

I’ll try not to bore you with too many details and stick to things that give you insight into what we are planning and at the very least, give you the scoop on what you need to know if you will be one of our wedding guests. I was thinking about saying something snarky here about people who might stumble across this site and who are not invited to our wedding, but for now I will hold my blogging tongue.

One final observation/insight for this post…

The Internet has been our best friend as we plan this wedding from afar, from showing j. what the Old Mill looks like to finding ring designs that we both would be happy wearing for many years to come.

I’ve mostly steered clear of those generic bridal clearinghouse web sites, places like The Knot and the Wedding Channel (there are tonnes more) because a) the sort of wedding they depict and cater to is not the sort of wedding I want and b) the vendors listed are either way too expensive or they don’t rate the vendors because they are paying to appear on the site.

I somehow found Frugal Bride the other day, and although it’s got a garish front page it is a Canadian site and it does cater to people who don’t want to turn their wedding day into an event that costs more than what they make in a year. The site includes an aptly named “babbling brides” bulletin board. Searching the posts there has helped me learn about what a florist costs (it can be a lot cheaper than I thought), that there are people as clueless as me when it comes to centerpiece ideas and even what people think of the Old Mill Inn and Spa as a wedding venue (it’s considered to have excellent food and service, by the way).

It goes against my non-girly nature, but I have gone so far as to include the site in my “rIAm reads” list. I do plan to continue to consult Frugal Bride to find out what people are babbling about, but I sincerely doubt I will post there. I’ll just save all that wedding babble for our dear PB site readers, whoever you might be.

Which brings up one of the best things about this registry. We don’t know exactly where we’ll be or what we’ll need after we get hitched. BBB keeps our registry for two years after the wedding and lets us return, in those two years, anything that’s purchased for us. So if it turns out we’re wrong, and don’t want the cool toaster oven, we can bring it back and get what we end up needing. The store also exists all over the U.S.A. and online, making it easy for people to shop. Eventually, for the fancier dinnerware and some other nice things, we’ll register at William Ashley in Toronto. (BBB actually has the nice stuff too, it’s just not displayed in-store)

BBB became our first choice because of all the things they do for us, making it easy and enjoyable throughout. And Robin, the wedding guru at our Lincoln Park store, is great to have working with us. But it’s still very weird to have a list at the end of the night showing how many things we registered for and the total value of the list — it’s scary, really. Which adds to the bizzare feeling that registering caused.

But we reminded ourselves of a few things. For one, Robin added whole families of items. Like every single Oxo thing they carry — which is a lot. We’ll be deleting a lot of that later (no way we need it all!), when we aren’t faced with a giant wall of gadgets (as much as we love that wall, it’s overwhelming). So the scary numbers will go down. But that doesn’t totally relieve the odd feeling.

So we also reminded ourselves (with Robin’s help) that we are very fortunate in that we have many loving and caring friends and family, who also want to give us a wedding gift. So they may as well see all the things we really want. After all, we don’t want one crock pot, much less four of them (and the crock pot is apparently the number one registry item). So the registry is valuable, and we can live with the fact that a whole lot of very wonderful people are not only in our lives but care a whole lot about us. That’s better than any gifts we’ll receive.

I should also mention that BBB doesn’t put things on sale. They have coupons, usually for 20% off a single item. Those coupons DO NOT EXPIRE (even though they, by law, have to print an expiration). You can also use more than one at a time (as long as you’re getting multiple items). They work in-store and online. Usually they come in the mail, and you can register on the BBB site to get even more. And if you have extras, save them for us — if we over-register, they’ll come in handy completing our wish list.

It’s exciting, though, to think that one day we may have the All-Clad cookware we’ve been salivating over for the last year.