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Mr. & Mrs. Kender (Dallas/Houston/Port Arthur)

The Wedding

It was definitely a fine affair. Admittedly, the only christian-type wedding I had in my mind to compare it to was the opening of RHPS, and ... there wasn't much to that. :)

I was priveleged to be the best man, and... again, I had no clue what that meant. I was, at least, informed that it was my duty to lead the toast at the reception. I agonized over it. For weeks. The day of the wedding I realized that at the least it should be something in the form of "to life, liberty, happiness" and the like. For a moment I thought about doing a poem... but it didn't happen. Two nights of no sleep combined with more nervousness than I was due and a healthy dose of confusion left me coming up with a list of things to toast on the back of a business card at the reception while champagne and martinelli's was being circulated.

Before all that, of course, I had to get to Texas (that's down below in the "Other" section), and then pick up the groom-to-be from the airport in houston and drive him to college station. There (at around 3am), we verified the location of the church, found a hotel (scared the clerk), and tried to sleep. At umm, some point early in the morning we met up with the bride-to-be and headed out for a well-rounded macdonald's breakfast and set off to get the wedding certificate. It was a purty little document filled in with lots of chickenscratch. [marriages and guns both have waiting periods, ain't that cute? but if you're active duty you don't have to wait (to get married) ]

His soon-to-be-better-half disappeared to begin the trials of getting her hair done and crying out the butterflies in her stomach (nasty pest, those!). Meanwhile, we headed back to the hotel to shower/pack/checkout by way of the tux shop. We put our tuxes on and headed to the church.

No one was there.

Well, someone was, and the door was unlocked, so we walked around for a while, chatted about nothing, took a couple of pictures, and ... called to make sure that we were at the right place. We were. "They'd be there soon."

People trickled in and we cornered the reverend regarding our duties. Apparently, I was simply to follow in after the groom-to-be and the reverend, and then hand him the ring (which was entrusted to me during this discussion, pretty much) when asked for.

Which is basically what happened. The wedding took a long while to start, mostly due to a LARGE accident closing down a main highway and the fact that (several) people thought the church was much further down the road than it seemed it ought to be and as such had trouble finding it.

The wedding was a wedding, as best as I can tell. The bride's maid and myself had to be scooted down the aisle after the newlyweds (neither of us had been informed of this part), and then after we made it out there were many many many pictures taken.

Of course then there was the reception at the olive garden (the olive garden folks seemed slightly inept, but maybe I'm just used to San Francisco) -- the food was indeed good. The "important folks" at the celebration got strawberries in their champagne glasses and, with much trepidation, I led the toast.

It worked, I sat down, food came and was eaten, the cakes were cut and indeed they were quite good. We headed back and I watched presents get unwrapped. And then I booked, a day and a bit early -- texas scared me. Oh yeah, and there were bubble wars at the olive garden -- those were good. :)

Other -- the trip

So... I was planning on being gone from Thursday to Sunday. Don't ask me why, I don't know what crack I'd inhaled when making the reservation. Notch it up as confusion. I was under obligation to produce a fair amount of code (patching together stuff other people wrote with stuff other people wrote and stuff I wrote... lots of library conflicts...) Suffice it to say -- It was 5 am Thursday morning, I was still working on stuff, I hadn't packed, and my flight left at 8 am. I hurriedly packed, sent an apology email giving the current status of everything, downed the rest of my coffee/tea mixture (actually really good), and ran to do the BART/bus thing.

I get in to Texas around 3pm and the first thought that hits me is ... "my god this place is muggy! Yeuch!" Or as Max put it a few years ago, as soon as I stepped off the plane, the air was sweating onto me. I can't say I appreciated the feeling.

I meandered through the airport, found the shuttle bus to the rental, nabbed the rental (at thrice the cost I was quoted -- they didn't mention some expensive insurance PLUS the (expected) under-25 fee). However, it was unlimited mileage. I drove off to Port Arthur (after getting a map) which is where I spent 7 (or so?) !$%$%@% years of my life.

The place hadn't really changed. It was... small and dirty and ... such. I stopped in at places I'd rememembered (amazing myself I could find them, though it did take a little backtracking here and there... but it hadn't dawned on me just how small Port Arthur really was...) My highschool, my old house, one of the places where I worked (nobody there that I knew), and the art foundry of the gulf coast.

There I ran into folks I knew and spent most of the day. Then it was time to dash out to make it back to Houston (with enough time to FIND houston, FIND the airport, and ... such). In addition, I found out that Kender was flying in earlier than anticipated. Luckily, I've always had trouble keeping down to the speed limit, and I made it there with about fifteen minutes to spare. I closed my eyes and promptly passed out. I was awoken very happily shortly thereafter.

His luggage shipped with his original flight, so we killed time by getting grub. And talking, and such. Then we went back, picked up his stuff, and disappeared to college station. There, we got a few snips of sleep, mostly talking instead of lying there pretending to sleep because we couldn't.

Then all the wedding stuff above.

I had plans to meet with a friend the next day in houston after he got off from work, so I (deliriously) headed that direction; I pulled off at a rest stop and spent a good twelve hours attempting to catch up on two nights of essentially no sleep. Didn't quite work out that way because it was friggin' COLD! It's not like I'd brought my blanket... I had most of my clothes on (including jacket), and woke up every hour or so to turn the engine on and run the heater. Around 6am I decided I was as rested as I was going to get, and headed on out. By then (actually, before then) I was *really* hating texas -- the place drained me like nobody's business. I stopped by at the rental and found out I could drop it off then for half of what I'd otherwise pay, took the shuttle to the airport, and changed my tickets. I was out of there.

I fell asleep waiting for the plane to arrive, woke up with about three minutes to spare and noticed that I was at the wrong gate -- the wrong number had fixed itself in my zombiemind. [very vivid dreams -- a new book of mine slowly losing all of its pages which I'm very accepting of (these things happen, right?) and a bunch of friends standing around nodding... and an ad for a movie that I *hope* was just a bad dream, but... I suppose I'll find out. It could have been a real television somewhere... a horrid cross of Unbreakable and X-men (in theme/presentation) very very very real, both]

But I do make it on the plane, a huge C-10 or something like that, and... well... I slept most of the way. By the time I made it home, I was finally caught up on sleep. :) [or so I hope]