A Letter From New York

The F and I are back in NYC this weekend. I experienced some arduous travel in driving from DC last night. I hit rush hour in DC, Baltimore, Delaware, and NYC. Throw in two thunderstorms that pounded the east coast and you get a 6 hour drive with plenty of stop-and-go traffic. It wasn't all bad though. I got to chat with some peeps on the phone (with hands free device - no dangerous driving from this bloke) and listen to many 'eclectic' cds that the F wouldn't tolerate had she been in the car (she took the train up early in the week).

Looking forward to our friends getting married today. They are getting married in a park under the Brooklyn Bridge. The weather forecast says it's gonna be a bright, sun-shiny day. Bright! Bright! Sun-Shiny Day. All that is definitely worth some crappy driving conditions.

Not A Shmoe

On this day I am no longer a wuss. I get to join the awesome ranks of such friends as Sam, Kim, Jenny and countless others. I have learned how to drive an manual transmission.

I would like to thank the academy, the F who taught me, and my neighborhood for letting me speed through it so I could reach 4th gear.

Wedding T minus 4

You may be asking yourself, 'What the hell does T minus 4 mean"? It means the F and I attended the first of 3 weddings between now and our wedding. Since I don't want someone else's wedding to be number 1 (apologies to Jen W.) I thought we'd countdown NASA style.

We attended the wedding of S and L. We are friends with the couple, F has been friends with S since they were college freshmen. Since we don't know any of their friends so we went to the dance floor. The dance floor was in a separate room and when we got there we were greeted by a very lonely, neglected DJ that promised to play whatever we wanted. So he played some Elvis and some James Brown while we danced. Then some more people wandered by to watch us act the fool on the dance floor. Then a 13 year old did some breakdancing and, slowly, the dance floor came alive. The DJ thanked us profusely for getting his party started, and the next morning, at breakfast, many people recognized us as that 'great dancing couple'.

In The Key of B

Babies.Baseball.Bridal. All of those things factored into the last couple of day.

Baby. Our very pregnant friend and her mum spent 6 days with us before they headed back to Turkey. It was great fun to have good friends that we only see a few times a year (if that) roaming around our house. I even got to poke around at the pregnant belly and feel random parts of the baby poking back, at the request of the mother, of course. It was as strange as it was amazing.

Baseball. I joined 49 other awesome people on a bus trip to see the Baltimore Orioles play the SF Giants. There was plenty of drinking on the way up, at the game, and on the way home. However when the beer stopped flowing there was still awesome people around to sober up with.

Bridal. The F had both her bridal shower and her bachelorette party the same day as the baseball game. I was told she had a good time and her sluggish scooting around the house the next day confirmed as such. I tried to stay up in hopes of catching her in party mode but, alas, after a day of drinking I was only able to stay up till 1am.

iLAUGH

some weekend entertainment you the readership. Make sure you watch them in order. They make more sense that way.
iSUCK
iBITCH

Thrashing About

Prior to our house guests arriving yesterday the F and I were thrashing about the house in an effort to tidy it up. A majority of the cleaning was done by her since she finished school on Tuesday. However I did pitch in when I came home from work. Once we meet our nightly quota of cleaning an entire room we switched gears to wedding responsibilities. This was a breakthrough week for wedding decisions because we finally agreed on our first dance song.

To celebrate our week of hard work I went off to the Black Cat to see Braid on their reunion tour. It was an amazing show! The band was hyper-energetic on stage, and most of the audience responded by singing and/or dancing along. And if that wasn't enough to make for a good evening, I had dinner and drinks with an old pal from my aborted grad school days. Overall rating: A 4 star night!

Escape From New York

No, this isn’t about that movie. Although if this weekend was made into a movie I would want someone other than Kurt Russel playing me. This weekend was all about being quick. We left DC on a train under the cover of 5am darkness arriving in NYC before 10 am. Once we arrived at our destination in Brooklyn we began cleaning house and garden. The F was throwing a bridal shower for this gal at a friend’s boyfriend’s house. So we swept floors, hung Christmas lights, de-weeded a garden, cleaned walks, and mowed grass over the course of 42 hours. Once the bridal shower began I split for Manhattan, meeting my sister and her beau at Other Music. Around 6pm the shower ended, and the F and I raced for – and barely made – the 7pm train out of town…roll credits and cut!

Alt.No Luck

Whatever time I didn't spent out of the office on a production shoot I spent huddled over a laptop. My goal was to understand, and ultimately fix, a software glitch. Our company bought this very expensive, very powerful laptop with a bunch of external junk that allows us to import video feeds and encode them for watching on the web. The problem is that when you run two different kind of encoding programs - a necessity for these events - the machine crashes to the infamous blue screen.

Amazing I finally got the machine working by the end of the day. However when I called my manager up to explain what steps were required for a successful encoding the whole thing crapped out again. So four days later, the machine is no better than when I started, yet it is still being flown to San Diego with kid gloves and desperate prayer that it will work once again.

Pray for Josh, certainly, but also pray for my manager and this damned laptop.

Early Mornings

Any resting up I accomplished this past Memorial Day has been destroyed thanks to this week's work schedule. On Tuesday I got up at 5am, Wednesday I got up at 6am, and today I got up at 5:40am. The reward for getting up early is that I've spent a lot of time behind the camera which means I'm making good on my desire to be a (video production) shooter at work. So even though there is one day left in the working week, today was my Friday because I survived three days of early production calls.

Three cheers for caffeine!!!

Like Day & Night

As predicted the weekend was a bustle of wedding activity - both of the successful kind and, sadly, utter crap.
Saturday day and Saturday evening were black and white in terms of accomplishing tasks.

Saturday day was the good part. We:
Bought wedding or shower gifts for our friend's weddings.
Picked up my wedding ring.
Dawn shopped for summer clothes; I took a nap in the sun at an outdoor mall.
Returned unwanted merchandise for refunds
F found bathing suits she liked... but...

Saturday evening was a whole other story (the bad kind)
We were prevented from purchasing bathing suits with Macy's credit card because the idiot behind the counter gave up and collapsed on the floor the moment his cash register confused him.
The jeweler were I purchased F's wedding ring delivered to us the wrong ring.

To their credit they handled the event professionally with little fuss over correcting the order.
Sunday was mostly a bust but there's not point in me complaining even further. I'm sure everyone is tired of me whining.

It was refreshing to have Monday off from work. There I said something nice! Are you people happy??!