I slept late Thursday morning, as I knew I'd need to be well rested going into the weekend. After running a couple of quick errands in town, I headed to the Bridgewater Mall to meet up with everyone else for lunch and the tuxedo pickup.

The pickup was less than spectacular, although it certainly had its amusing moments. All the men went into the changing rooms, while palingyuan, her mother, amy_pearlman, lurse and I waited. There was quite a bit of in and out of dressing rooms, adding and subtracting pieces here and there. J, palingyuan's brother, had the best luck – his fit perfectly on the first try. Then again, he's also the only one of the group who dresses formally on a regular basis. oidhche's father's tux also fit correctly, but he needed a bit of supervision to make sure he tried on all the pieces and it was all on correctly. oidhche's was close, once the waistband was adjusted, but the pants weren't quite long enough. He also needed to get a different size of shoes. Furthermore, there were some accessories that had been ordered for him which were missing. demongrey needed longer pants and a longer shirt.

blackfog apparently had the Cursed Tuxedo, however. First he emerged in his own shirt and the tuxedo pants, which made him look about twelve. They were short enough to be capri pants. The waist was large enough to fit a second person in with him, although that was fixed by the adjustable buckles on the side. He went in to return the pants and try the rest. Next he came out in the tuxedo shirt and his own pants. The shirt was clearly too tight. I don't recall if he had problems with the jacket as well, but he also needed to try on shoes and get a different size.

The gentlemen arranged to return on Friday to pick up the corrected items, and we moved the entire cavalcade north, back to palingyuan and oidhche's apartment. An intense planning session followed, as we all attempted to think of everything that still needed to be done and assign tasks, both to those present and anyone else who could be roped in.

I left with Amy to go check her and blackfog into the hotel. Sadly, the reservation was in blackfog's name only, and the desk clerk wouldn't let Amy check in. We collected blackfog, who was Greatly Displeased already, and returned to try again. It took at least fifteen minutes for the desk clerk to get around to helping him, by which time we'd all determined that she was both stupid and incompetent. These were not complicated tasks that she was trying to perform, they were things that I quite literally could have done in my sleep, and much better at that. blackfog didn't even bother telling her off, as she wasn't bright enough to have understood.

We returned to Wedding Central, where the planning had about run down. All of us went out to eat at a Thai restaurant. Amy and palingyuan convinced me to try the Thai iced tea, which was not quite to my taste. The meal was quite good, however, and there was a fair amount of interesting conversation. Turns out that J was at the same conference in Las Vegas this spring that my brother went to for his job. palingyuan's mom was astounded at the end of the meal by the way we handled the bill. She'd never seen a group pass the bill around and throw money in before, and wasn't quite sure it would work. I explained it to her, and as she and I were at the end of the loop, we were also the ones counting the money. Much to her surprise, it all worked out (as it always does).

After dinner, we all went off to our separate tasks. demongrey came back to my apartment, as we needed to work on the toast. We'd been trying to pull something together but hadn't gotten very far. It took about two hours, and we got very silly indeed, but finally we managed to come up with something that we both liked and felt would go over well. He drove back to PA (as he had to pick up leftsphenoid at the Philly airport in the morning), and I packed all the things I thought I was going to need for the rest of the weekend before going to bed.