Birthday party, last minute vacation and living in sin

I'm back from an unexpected vacation, and I have a fun story for you.
Let me tell you...

Everything begins when an old school mate of my girlfriend is having a birthday party, and we get invited.
Good, right?
Riiiight...
Because turns out the guy's wife is a control freak:

• she calls five times to make sure we have got the date and hour right
• she sends us a note about the dress code (what?!)
• she finally decides she'll send us a taxi to make sure we get there on time
• she actually buys her husband a gift in our name and tells us we can refund her via PayPal 
• and writes the birthday note to go with the gift, and we have only to sign it

Control.
Freak.


And you can imagine what the party feels like.
Night of the living dead, but with none of the fun.
And these guys are my age or younger!

The highlights of the evening are 

• the hostess that is terribly embarrassed because one of her guests came together with her lesbian partner (yeah, that's me), so we are introduced to the other guests as "co-workers"...
•  ... but that's sort of OK because everybody's talking about their jobs and their taxes, and the new car, and where they'll go on vacation this year
• the hostess that rebukes me because I try to get a second serving of the cake (that's excellent, by the way)

Thank goodness we are all on our way home by midnight, because the hostess feels sleepy and tomorrow she's gonna go to work, you know, and her hubby too.

We were able to catch the last bus home.
No, no taxi to bring us back home.
Teaches me to be a cake-loving lesbian, I guess.

Later that night, in bed, my girlfriend whispered in my ear "Promise me we'll never be like that."
We had some fun trying to imagine our life with one of us taking absolute control in such a freakish way, and had a good laugh.
You can imagine the sort of scenarios I proposed. And yes, they will be a good inspiration for future stories.
Then we decided to get married.

So we basically eloped.
We found a last minute offer for a small place in Italy, just outside of Monterosso in the Cinque Terre, breathtakingly beautiful, and spent there the Easter weekend and the following 25th of April (that's an Italian national holyday) and May Day.

The weather was ugly, but who cares?
We remained in our room for most of the time.

And you know what?
We weren't able to get married in Italy, being as we are no EC citizens and that would cause no end of confusion. The guy in the office went seventeen shades of red when we inquired, and in the end he just said no.
"Once again the lesbian doesn't get the cake," as I said.
And this was just good, really, because my mother told me she would have killed me for getting married without involving her.
So now we're back, and buried to our neck in paperwork, while still happily living in sin.