Well, here we are at T minus 2 months and counting to the wedding. Things are moving along pretty well, but now I’m starting to realize just how quickly this is coming up. Of course Jolayne has known this all along, but now I’m finally starting to go “Holy crap, we’ve got to do stuff!” For instance, finding people’s addresses. We’ve been realizing that we don’t necessarily have the current addresses of a lot of people we’d like to invite, just because we’ve been out of Columbus for so long. We’ve got to figure out the music for the wedding too. There’s a string quartet, but we’ve got to figure out what we want them to play. Some friends of ours are going to do a song also, but again we’re not sure what yet. At the moment, we’re leaning towards something by Johnny Cash. Then there’s also the matter of figuring out what gifts to get for the wedding party. Jolayne’s got the gifts for her girls, but I still need to figure out what to get the groomsmen. I suppose I can’t really go into any more detail since several of them read this. One major thing that I’ve gotten out of the way is the planning/booking of the honeymoon, and I think it’s going to be awesome. We’re going to spend 9 nights total in Hawaii, 6 on Kauai and 3 on Hawaii. So yeah, all we’ve got to do is survive the next 2 hectic months and then I’ll be on a beach in Hawaii, married to the most wonderful girl ever.
Monthly Archive for February, 2005
Jolayne and I saw Modest Mouse at the Uptown Theater tonight with Mason Jennings opening. Mason Jennings was alright, kind of like a less hippie-fied Jack Johnson singer/songwriter guy with a backing band. Not without its moments, but not great either. As for Modest Mouse, it was a good show, although not quite what I’d been hoping for after waiting so long to finally see them. For one thing, the sound was a little off (not too bad though). The real problem was that the Uptown is all seated and while that’s nice for certain shows I’m sure, it just didn’t seem right for this. Also, Jolayne and I ended up in the balcony which has a nice view but is pretty far from the stage. So even though there was a lot of energy on stage, it didn’t really have as much impact in the balcony seats. I still really regret not going to see them in Columbus when I had the chance a few years ago. That was in a smaller venue and probably would have been more of the experience I was looking for, but tonight was still enjoyable.
Thanks to Microsoft, now parents everywhere can learn l33tsp33k in a misguided attempt to relate to their wayward adolescents.
“Hey Timmy, why don’t “j00″ go “pwn” your homework to get “m4d sk1llz” so you won’t be a “n00b”. Way to go, son!”
“Timmy! Where did you get these “w4r3z”!?”
“I learned it by watching you, dad!”
They also have a list of tips for dealing with griefers for gamers, but more useful would probably be a “What to do if your child is a griefer” guide. Though the obvious answer is to spawn camp the little bastard till he quits.
For Valentine’s Day yesterday, Jolayne and I skipped over the traditional flowers and gifts (and yes, it was a mutual decision. No, seriously!) and instead opted to go all out on a really amazingly good dinner out. We went to a French restaurant called Caf้ des Amis in Parkville, MO a town which is home to quite a few other good restaurants as well. (We went to Piropos there for Jolayne’s birthday and enjoyed it too). I would have to say that this was easily the best meal that I’ve had in KC, by far. Everything from the appetizer to the main course to dessert was flawless I thought. I couldn’t even say any one part was my favorite, they were all so good. Combine all that with the company of Jolayne, and I couldn’t have asked for a better Valentine’s day. I am, however, certain that my high school French teacher would have been shocked and disappointed had she heard me attempt to order with what I’m sure must have been horribly mangled pronunciation. All things considered though, it was good enough to keep the server from laughing at me so I consider it a success.
So now that Gmail accounts have become more ubiquitous and less exclusive (I’ve got 50 invites sitting around on my account) the question of what to actually do with them begins to raise its head. Of course I’ve got one that I kind of use as a secondary email for convenience. But of course the promise of a free gig of space was much too tempting to get just one, and so I actually have several more than that just sitting around. 3rd party tools for Gmail have been pretty common for a while too, including things like scripts that would let you upload files directly to your Gmail account to use as online storage. That seemed like a good idea to me, but always a bit too unwieldy. Not anymore. There’s an app called Gmail Drive (Windows only) that’s a shell extension to add a virtual drive to your machine that stores files in a Gmail account. Pretty slick. You can just drop files onto it, and view files on it as if it were an actual drive. Of course there are a few limitations. For one, there’s a 10 meg individual file size limit, but I think that’s imposed by Gmail itself. Also, it’s currently not possible to open files directly from the Gmail drive. You have to copy them over to an actual drive to open them. It’d be nice to see that added in a later version. Still, its the most convenient interface I’ve seen yet to all those gigs of free storage out there.
A couple of weeks ago Jolayne and I went to Nebraska Furniture Mart and picked out some new furniture: a bedroom set, a table and chairs, and a new desk and chair for my computer. Well, that all got delivered to my apartment this morning, with the time range for delivery set at 7:00am-9:00am. Needless to say, I was hoping it would end up being much closer to 9, but of course they showed up at 7:20. I was supposed to get a call when they were on their way which I had planned to wake up to, but they didn’t call so I was caught totally off guard in the middle of a deep sleep when they got here. Having furniture delivered is a somewhat awkward process I’ve found, as it just feels wrong to me to stand around doing nothing while other people are doing all the work. However, on remembering that I did in fact pay for that service I got over it quickly. The furniture’s all here now, but unfortunately there’s a small chip in the footboard of the bed and a small scratch on the table that’s been poorly covered with wood putty. That’s kind of shoddy, and I’m going to have to call the store to see what they can do about it. It looks like it’s time to get ready for my least favorite sporting event ever: the 100 meter customer service hurdles.
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