Ordering posts by custom field values (EVENT LIST) Pagination?

Okay so I have been beating the bushes for days now trying to find a solution to my problem. I need to order posts on my events page by a custom field I added called “event_date”. I use the 2011-05-05 format in the field and I finally got some code working that actually orders them the way I want.

The only problem is that I had to remove the previous code that also included the post_per_page limit.

Here is my code:

<?php
	$querystr = "
	    SELECT wposts.*
	    FROM $wpdb->posts wposts, $wpdb->postmeta wpostmeta
	    WHERE wposts.ID = wpostmeta.post_id
	    AND wpostmeta.meta_key = 'event_date'
	    AND wposts.post_type = 'post'
	    ORDER BY wpostmeta.meta_value ASC
	    ";

	 $pageposts = $wpdb->get_results($querystr, OBJECT);

	?>
	 <?php if ($pageposts): ?>
	  <?php foreach ($pageposts as $post): ?>
	    <?php setup_postdata($post); ?>

		<div class="blog_post shadow_round">
			<div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
				<h3 class="post_title"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
				<div class="post_date"><?php the_time(get_option('date_format')); ?></div>
				<hr />
				<div class="post_blurb">
					<?php the_content(); ?>
				</div>
				<?php include ('sharethis.php' ); ?>
			</div>

		</div>

		<?php endforeach; ?>

	<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/inc/nav.php' ); ?>

	<?php else : ?>

		<h2>Not Found</h2>

	<?php endif; ?>

Does anyone have a solution? I don’t even really need pagination, I would just settle for limiting the number of posts that display because I not only need this on the Events page but I am also putting the event posts into the sidebar where I only want to show 2 upcoming events at most.

Its amazing to me how awesome custom fields can be, but there is no way to easily order posts using them.

Thanks alot in advance.
Dave