Mea Culpa....and Day 1

A few weeks back, I sat in my living room after work and thought to
myself, "How am I ever going to fill up all this free time I have now
that I have a 10 minute commute home from work?". In fact, I may have
even commented about this in my last blog, which in fact took place a
few weeks back. Well, I don't know how, but I have managed to fill up
my evening schedule with a variety of activities - and not all of it
is playing Mob Wars on Facebook :o/ . BTW, PLEASE join my mob, I'm in
desperate need for more people on my team even if you don't play!

So there are a few events I should mention that have happened in the
last few weeks, notably Friday, May 23rd. It was VERY nice to have my
mom organize and plan our wedding because it reduced the amount of
things that we needed to think about. But there were a few things that
we needed to do, notably find a shirt and tie for me to wear with my
suit. Because I wasn't in wedding planning mode, I didn't really think
much about it until the NIGHT BEFORE I LEFT! I flipped through my
closet and realized that I have nothing that fits well and is decent
to wear so I aptly used this as an excuse to check out some nice
shirts at Charles Tyrwhitt, only to find out that they had an awesome
sale going on for four shirts. So, with permission granted from the
boss, I resolved that issue.

The next and last detail to take care of was wedding vows. I had
previously tossed and turned ideas around in my head for these for the
past few weeks but had generally tried to block it out of my mind.
But, stepping on the plane Wednesday night, I knew it was something we
had to finalize so Erika and I sat in our cramped seats and morphed a
basic set of wedding vows (found online, of course) into something
that was both personal and palatable. Check, and now we were ready for
the flight.

Thursday morning, we woke up early to fresh bagels and took care of
the wedding license at the county office in San Jose. There was no
line there that early in the morning, which was nice because I had
visions of the DMV and the Social Security Administration in my head
when I thought about accomplishing anything with the government. So
with that complete, I was ready to start the tour de Northern
California with Erika, Roland, and Csilla (who were in town). First
Stop: San Francisco.

Anybody who's been to Cali knows that SF is great and is a must-see
location. We drove up there and checked out the Golden Gate Bridge,
took a million pictures of course, and then headed for the main
destination of the day - Alcatraz. I had been there about 20 years ago
so I didn't remember much and was looking forward to checking out the
site and the beautiful views.

Needless to say, this took up a big chunk of our day and by the time
we got back to the city, the day was pretty much done. But you can't
go to SF without riding the cable cars, so we hitched a ride on those
to Union Square, wandered around there for a bit, and then headed back
home - very late. So late that I ended up postponing our meeting with
our "minister" Frank until the DAY OF THE WEDDING! Talk about a
shotgun wedding this would be!

J. Riley, I need to get caught up before the European Cup starts
tomorrow afternoon! Or at least before Roland does!