July 4th and Golden wedding

Last weekend Kelly and I went to Pennsylvania to attend Dan and Heather's wedding. I picked her up from work on Saturday evening. We planned to head directly out of town but we looked at my iPod and the book we wanted to listen seemed to be missing. We stopped at my house to attempt to fix that. It later turned out to be just iPod not showing it in the right place. We then started the trek to my parent's house where would spend the night. When we were a bit over half way there I realized I had forgotten my parent's house key. This is a really big issue since they were in Wisconsin or on the way there. I called information and got my Aunt's phone number. Luckily she had a key to my parent's house. We stopped by there on the way and picked it up.

We got up Sunday morning to get ready for the wedding. I had to go and get Kelly some essentials, Starbucks and hair gel. The gel was a little more difficult since I don't often buy it. We left the house a little later than we had planned but not too bad. On the way up it rained on and off, this was not a good sign since the wedding was supposed to be outside. We got to The Riverside Inn at 2:55 PM for a 3 PM wedding.

We saw the original setup out side that wasn't being used. We walked in and found the new location. We were seated by Travis in the next to last row in the hallway leading to the room with the ceremony. Very shortly after we were seated the groom and his party filed in with the priest then from the opposite side the bride and her party came in. The ceremony was quick, probably less than 15 minutes which was great. The shorter the ceremony is the better. After the ceremony everyone moved over to the reception area. As we went in there was a receiving line. After the line they had a couple of people taking Polaroid’s. The Polaroid’s were then put into a scrap book and people signed the book.

There was an open bar before and after dinner which most people took advantage of. Dinner was very good, a good selection of entree choices. Also the cake was very delicious. There were very few cheesy wedding things done in the reception. The only ones were really the tossing of bouquet and garter. The DJ's were ok, but had some questionable music choices. The table I was seated with was cool, even Kelly seemed to enjoy Roger, Travis, Kevin and Jim. We left the reception about 8 PM since we had to drive back to my parent's house.

Monday we got up and I did my chores that my dad left for me. We started directly back toward my place. I had hoped that we would find a Starbucks in Murrysville on the way toward the turnpike. We didn't however; it ended up taking almost an hour to find a Starbucks on the turnpike. Needless to say Kelly the caffeine junkie was not happy with this. She ended up getting an iced latte as well as a frappuccino to get her caffeine level high and continue her buzz.

We got back to my place about 3 PM. Along the way Roger and Travis managed to pass us and actually beat us home by a few minutes. They came over for a BBQ and some movies. We first went out to get some food and drinks. We got some steaks, beer, corn on the cob, fries, potatoes and chicken strips. We made everything but the strips for dinner. After dinner we watched Independence Day, it was the Special Edition which actually isn't available any longer. We noticed a few scenes that were added or extended. They weren't noticeable due to quality which was good. I hadn't watched the movie in a while and it is a great summer action flick even ten years later now.

After ID4 we had some discussion as to what to watch, with all of us offering options and refining them. We finally settled on BettleJuice. I hadn't seen the movie in really a long time. It is one of my favorites and has the trio of Tim Burton directing, Danny Elfman music and Michael Keaton starring. One thing I immediately noticed about the DVD was just how bad the video quality was. This DVD was one of the first DVD's released early in the DVD format's life. It is one of the original Warner Bros DVD that came in a snapper case and was single layer double sided. One side had a widescreen anamorphic picture and the other was full screen. The combination of a questionable transfer and an early encoding combined to make the picture noticeably bad on my big screen. I still really enjoyed the movie but I just hadn't considered the quality on the early movies such as this.

On the 4th we were planning on going to the Baltimore Symphony at Oregon Ridge. We headed out toward Hunt Valley and it was potentially going to be rained out. It was raining a bit while we ran some errands. We headed over to Wegmans to get something to eat while at the show. While their Kelly's friends called and said the performance was cancelled. Apparently there was a power outage at the park and the show couldn't happen. We just went home and ordered a pizza instead. We then watched Garden State.