And you thought Jennie and Joe were going to have their first anniversary before we blogged about their wedding!

Every time I sit down to write about Jennie and Joe's wedding — and Dayton CollectiveCon 2010 — I blank. I could blame it on the alcohol, I suppose; Abigail keeps reminding me of things I've forgotten: "Remember how you wouldn't stop hitting on Seth?" "Remember when the jukebox kept playing lame live versions of the songs we chose and Joe kept shouting out his apologies to the whole pub?" "Remember that badass Dayton Dragons beer glass Kat stole for you at the tikki bar?" (So that's where this glass came from!)

This post has been through seventy-four drafts in two weeks and always it turns into a list that could easily be labeled My Most Awesome Favorite Things. Like how the suite Abigail booked in Cincinnati came with a hotel manager named Darren, whose number one goal in life was to give us one million free beers and nachos. Or how Abigail almost wrecked the rental car driving up the interstate when we saw the skeleton of Touchdown Jesus. Or how I almost got Jennie and Joe kicked out of their condo because I was throwing rocks at the fountain in their pond while we were waiting on them to arrive. Or how Joe painted the most perfect Flash coaster at the pottery painting place and Jennie begged for a life-size Pillsbury Doughboy cookie jar. Or how Joe has a voice like an angel, which you totally wouldn't know unless you played Rock Band with him. Which we did.

And that's not even the wedding!

The wedding was like ... the best wedding ever in the history of weddings — times infinity. And I know I'm not supposed to say that because I've been a bridesmaid in at least thirteen weddings and attended dozens more and no one wants to have their Most Special Day ranked in order, but this one was best. I'm sorry. It was. For the prelude, the pianist played Hedwig's Theme! For the processional, the theme from Love Actually! Which: If you cry during the climax of that movie with that music, imagine how hard you would bawl when you saw perfect, perfect Jennie walking down the aisle to it.

The whole wedding was so very Joe and Jennie, and so was the reception, which included games on every single table as centerpieces. GAMES ON EVERY TABLE. Our table was called Hogwarts Adventure and we had a Harry Potter game that was the envy of the entire room! There was an incident, apparently, in which Kat stormed over and explained in a rage that someone had stolen the game off our table, and Abigail and Seth begged us to let it go. But we did not. We went over to that table and took our game back and were all, "Have fun with Trivial Pursuit, LOSERS."

And then we took Hogwarts out onto the dance floor, and oh, how it shined! (Not as brightly as Joe and Jennie — but almost.) At the end of the night, after maybe guzzling a whole bottle of wine, Joe shouted out in his deep, Joe voice, "Better be GRYFFINDOR!" And it was so perfect I wanted to cry.

There was this thing, though, that happened before the wedding. We were all lounging around Jennie and Joe's, and Jennie said, "Joe, give them their batteries! You guys are going to need them for your centerpiece game tomorrow night!" Joe handed the batteries to me, and I absently handed the batteries to Abigail who absently handed them to Kat who put them in her purse. Because that's the chain of responsibility at The Collective. I would have left those batteries at Joe and Jennie's. Abigail would have left them at our house. Only Kat could be trusted to get them to the reception.

That's something you couldn't know unless you knew someone. And somehow, between Blogspot and Vox and Tumblr and Tweeter, I learned — really learned — Abigail and Kat and Jennie. They became more than words to me. Jennie's wedding was best because I love Jennie. And I love Jennie because I know Jennie.

That's the thing about the Internet: Yeah, it's full of axe-murderers. But sometimes, if you're lucky, you meet people who change the shape of your whole entire world. A flock of canards in a sea of YouTube commenters.