When I married my ex 11 years ago (very small wedding), I asked an old friend to be my MOH. Since she was going through rough financial times I got 2 dresses from my sister who is the same size. This "friend" couldn't even try them on. It got to the point where I wanted help picking out flowers. She always had an excuse & when I asked a few weeks before the wedding if she tried the dresses on, she said no, I decided to give the position to another friend who was helping me with flowers etc. Friend #1 stopped speaking to me for years but finally came around telling me she was so strung up on drugs she couldn't focus on anything else. When I got married almost 3 years ago, she expected to stand in that MOH spot. I decided that I didn't want a repeat (she lives about an hour from me- giving her another excuse) so we went to FL to be married. We invited 1 family member, hubby's grown son as well as his wife. Hubby paid for their plane tickets & was going to pay for their room. They got into a fight about who's car to take to the airport. She won, they took the old car which broke down. After us arranging them to get on the next flight, they fought so much that hubby told them not to come. She was afraid to get on a plane after 911. Hubby ended up fixing their plane tickets so that they could use them for something else, but they never did. It hurt not having his son there especially since he was the only family member invited. Thankfully we had internet friends coming that stood up for us. Good luck with both of your weddings. Thankfully you had enough time to make other arrangements. I don't know what is wrong with people these days, some are so hung up on themselves they just don't care about anyone else. Weddings are stressful enough, you don't need this on top of everything else.

If I understand correctly, you're just tring to smooth the countertop surface after gluing up the boards. You might consider using a cabinet scraper instead of a plane for that job. A cabinet scraper is just a rectangular piece of thin spring steel, the edge of which you file and burnish to create an almost microscopic hooked edge. It's cheap (under $10) and (I think) has a shorter learning curve. Planes often suffer because they seem intuitively simple; just looking at one or watching one used makes you feel you understand how they work, but they are very subtle little machines that demand careful tuning and finesse. To work well they have to be sharper than any blade most people ever encounter in everyday life; it's no good to tell the average person "it's got to be really sharp" because they are unlikely to have any clear sense of what that means. The blade of a new plane is pretty dull to start with. The chip breaker (unless this is a block plane) probably doesn't meet the back of the blade too well either, so shavings probably will jam under it. The bottom of your average plane (Stanley, Record) is not likely to be truly flat, either. Unless you're buying particularly fine tools, such as Clifton or Lie Neilson, you should consider your brand new plane to be a kit from which you can build a functioning tool -- not ready-to-go from the box. At the risk of giving you a second watch, (and this assumes your interest in planes extends beyond your current project) I'd suggest two japanese water stones: one that is around 800-1200 grit and a second that is 3000-4000 grit. Such a pair is plenty sufficient for almost all plane work. The super-fine stones do indeed make a finer edge, but they are expensive and a diminishing-returns dynamic cuts deeply into the payoff of the zillion-grit stones. It's also nice to have a hardware store carborundum stone (for flattening the soft water stones as they wear), a piece of plate glass and some silicon carbide sandpaper for lapping both the back of the blade and the bottom of the plane flat. A strop charged with rouge is great for carving gouges, but I stay away from them with plane irons and joinery chisels, both of which fuction better when the backs of the blades are kept perfectly flat; the strop is prone to round it over a bit. To make a plane perform the way it should, especially on harder woods like purpleheart, you'll ultimately have to make it's bottom very, very flat. The opening in front of the blade shold be as small as possible. Both faces of the blade edge should be very flat and polished to nearly mirror-like smoothness, creating that crisp intersection we call "sharp". The chip breaker should kiss very neatly against the back of the blade so that even shavings thinner than tissue can't get between them and jam. If you manage all that you'll have a gem of a tool, but it's a lot of time and care to get there; that's why so many rummage sale tool dealers have rows of rusting iron that never really got fixed up and used.

Thank you all for the kind words and support. The FAA announced today that weather was not a factor in the crash. The young man will be buried tomorrow afternoon. We are still waiting for Patty's sister and BIL to arrive from Reno so arrangements can be made.

Most of us over the age of 65 have never had to worry about what we served when entertaining except for shellfish - perhaps a severe peanut allergy but I only know one man with this. He simply never eats anything prepared in anyone's home as he knows they probably have used peanuts or peanut butter in their mixing bowls/skillets. I usually just dealt with the shellfish by never serving it unless I absolutely knew my friends ate it. But when we were younger and had and went to lots of dinner parties, no one was on any "special diet" - no gluten-free (not sure anyone had even heard of gluten outside a home ec class!), no paleo, no Mediterranean, no vegans or vegetarian. When I was married 40 years ago, my matron of honor did not eat red meat at the rehearsal dinner, but she found plenty of other things on her plate and did not go hungry. I think she was the first person I knew who didn't eat red meat. If one has never learned to cook for such diets, it's pretty hard to learn, especially when entertaining. I never serve a recipe I have not prepared multiple times before. At my age, just preparing a meal for others is not easy and trying to figure out what is "allowed" is frankly just more than I am up to doing. I wonder how we all survived all those dinner parties in the past. Have people's bodies really changed that much? I don't remember anyone ever becoming ill and we all knew one another pretty wells.