The Weekend

It was good. It was long. Very long. I opened on Friday and never got round to napping, so it was a twenty hour day. As was Saturday because I didn't sleep well on the ancient pull-out couch at my grandparents' so I woke up again at five.

The wedding was lovely. The suit looked great. It was also a thousand degrees and humid. It was in one of my new step-mom's friend's backyards (it's kind of weird--I have step-mom now. After all these years of having a step-dad. Not a bad thing, though.) I stayed in the suit for about half an hour after the ceremony, which was very nice and very simple, and then changed into a pair of linen shorts and a linen shirt. Much more comfortable. The suit, incidentally, was wool.

I was a bit disappointed that there was no dancing--they only had a two piece band. Sax and keyboard. They weren't bad, though. Sort of jazzy. The food was pretty good. Simple. Perfect for the weather. Salad, BBQ'ed chicken, beef, swordfish and tuna kebabs with BBQ'ed summer squash, zucchini and eggplant. I made my toast after arguing with my uncle who wanted to have his after dinner cigarette first. It was also my grandfather's birthday and my uncle, as the oldest, had been elected to bring the birthday cake to my grandfather. Ugh. Because he's the oldest, he always likes to be in control of everything. And he can be such a bitch about it sometimes.

The toast went well, considering that I had only written it out and looked at it once the day before. Short, sweet, to the point. Light and a bit of humour thrown in.

I met a fellow McGiller, although she graduated a large handful of years before me, I assume. She now has a house in the Eastern Townships and said that anytime I wanted to visit that I could. Yes, please! And one of my dad's long-time co-workers came up to me at one point and introduced himself and told me about how my dad is obviously very proud of me because he's always talking about me and about what I was doing at school, etc.

It was kind of weird, actually, because my dad is generally so non-emotional. I know he approves of what I've done and what I'm doing but he never says anything directly. So it was a bit weird to hear from this third-party about how much he talks about me. Plus, he started to tear up during the ceremony. I don't think I've ever seen my dad cry. It was really really sweet. And made me realise just how much he loves his new wife. Which, needless to say, is really nice.

After the wedding, my roommate and I headed into Northampton, which was just one town away, to spend the rest of the day. Lesbian capital of Western Massachusetts, for those of you unaware, and a generally cool place to spend time. We hit some used bookshops and some used records stores. I picked up a couple of cd's and couple of books. One book (What Jane Austin Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, which is a book about the facts of daily life in 19th century England, is one that I've been wanting to pick up for a while). We had a beer at a micro-brewery which was fairly good and then had fairly crappy Tibetan for dinner.

Sunday, we stayed at my grandparents' for lunch, hit the winery in their town on our way out of town and picked up some more wine to add to our collection. My dad had bought me two bottles of the kind I like (Yankee Boy White) for grad and had forgotten to bring them up in June. We picked up two more (Yankee Girl Blush and Quabbin Native) in addition to the gallon-sized bottle of Merlot that was one of the few left over from the wedding.

It started raining before we got on the Mass Pike and once we were on the Pike, the skies opened up and we drove between 10 and 35 mph for about two hours as it poured and poured and poured and lightning and thundered like crazy. It was pretty intense. But a lot of fun at the same time. We had some good conversations despite my being over-tired my this point because I still hadn't slept well.

We got home, after stopping at my roommate's parents', around 8.30 and I crashed for the night. Although, being over-tired, I couldn't get to sleep for a few hours and ended up watching Mrs Doubtfire. Always fun.

Today will be the first day back at work after three days off, which have been nice, needless to say. And I don't have a day off again until next Saturday. Woo-hoo.

Oh, and since I haven't posted anything for a week, I should give a short update on the man situation.

The EMT (paramedic, actually, which is a step above EMT as I have been corrected by him) came back to town last Wednesday and we met up for a drink on Thursday before I left for the weekend. He and the other guy have decided that they probably work better just being friends. So now there's no other guy in the picture....

We had lunch and ice cream and coffee together yesterday afternoon....