what an exhausting weekend.

andre and teresa are now good and married, and hopefully enjoying themselves on sunny beaches in hawai’i. teresa was simply radiant as all brides should be, and it seemed like everyone had a fantastic time. pictures of me in a tuxedo forthcoming, apparently i am quite handsome when so attired. not sure if that will be adequate to change my normal apparel habits, but since the temperature hovered between ‘cold’ and ‘ass cold’ i vastly preferred my tuxedo jacket to the thin bridesmaid’s dresses.

after the wedding a few of us remained dressed up and rolled out to tini biggs for fancy drinks. i nursed a glass of glenfiddich and realized as much as i’d like to be classy, i will probably never like scotch. i should have followed josh’s lead and gone with port. mmm, port.

sunday i was woken up early by pjdiddy needing to use my garage as his car’s engine has gone all pear-shaped. that was fortuitious since i had forgotten my obligation to have breakfast with mssrs. evilmike, wolf, and the grifter at the dish in ballard. evilmike showed up and we rolled bikewise down there, despite delays arriving even a tad bit early. bikes are awesome! after enjoying some conversation and a fatty omlette with eggs, we rolled back slowly towards the university. along the way i found denise’s shoe which had gone missing during the thursday night ride debacle.

i checked on paul’s progress and decided that i less and less want a car. while he was crawling around in my garage, i rode up to church and then left from there after dinner to go play trivial pursuit: lord of the rings edition. i chose josh as my teammate, and much like the call on the port he was right on the money – we completely dominated and won a basically uncontested game. i give props to loren and the other josh for throwing the lotr marathon a few weeks back – my brain was relatively fresh.

after all that tomfoolery i once again watched the last disc of firefly and the bonus features. the last episodes always make me sad, knowing that the end is inevitable and it’s evident in the performances by the cast and crew. they give it their all and in the end there was nothing more they could do. it was like a shooting star that shined all the brighter for it’s brevity. what might it had been like had the situation been different, and it had continued on? greg edmonson, the series’ composer, wrote his “farewell track” for an episode towards the end of the series that i think sums up this sense better than words, and i think of it as sort of a soundtrack for this post: greg edmonson – the funeral.

yeah, you know the rest.

so i’ve got marriage on my mind. not in the sense that i’m lookin’ to be married, but in the sense that the institution is something i’ve been thinking about. of course it’s not completely out of the blue – i’ve been surrounded by it in the desert of the real. firstly, i’m a groomsman in andre’s wedding this weekend, which promises to be awesome fun. i’m looking forward to having a good time with my fellow penguins – three awesome guys in tuxedos will perhaps be hitting the town saturday night. secondly, my housemate arick finally got engaged. and i was just thinking on the way home how i was going to straight up cold cock him across the jaw if he was dropping the ball on that front.

between those two events it’s also been a topic of conversation in various contexts, with the bachelor-watching girls from my bible study on monday and with ate chow and kristin on sunday night.

interestingly, this mental barrage of convenantery culminated last night in a bizaare detailed dream in which i found myself walking down the aisle to be married to a girl i knew in middle school. at some point in the ceremony before the ‘i do’ portion i somehow snuck off, grabbed philip and clambered up stairs and ladders to reach a plush room in the steeple of the church. it was urgent because i needed to pray with someone because i didn’t know how to explain to this girl waiting for me at the altar that i was just marrying her because it ’seemed like the thing to do’. and then i was trying to stammer it out as she looked at me – tears in her eyes, wedding dress and all… then i woke up. awkward.

perhaps valentine’s day got to me at some level, that or all the drama that has been going on – 94.3% of which lies purely within the endless expanse known only as my imagination.

i think ze frank has the right idea, as did the beer this afternoon at the college inn pub:

i don’t know what to make of all this.

courtesy of my mother’s scanning skills, here’s one of the more interesting parts of my past:

yeah, i had a holstein. my family has a long history with 4H dairy in clark county, and in fact to this day my mother is the fair’s dairy barn coordinator.

i was such a cute little kid. what the hell happened?

trying to convince 800lbs of unprocessed hamburger to stand correctly is difficult when you are ten years old. especially when she is dumb as a bag of hammers and easily spooked. i don’t remember if i got any show ribbons or not, but i did a solid number on herdsmanship. i scoop the poop!