Prelude

Well, that was a weekend I'd love to do again sometime soon. Only, I'm not really sure I'd want to do that again sometime soon.

Nena and I drove up to Chicago this weekend for a wedding. It was freakin' fabulous. Belle's college roommate got married on Sunday and there was nary a dry eye in the house. To be honest though, I've never known the happy couple to not be a couple so that changes my perspective on this whole wedding thing.

By the time Belle had managed to get her roommate and I in the same place at the same time, 5 years had passed since her initial mention of her fabulous roommate and she was already with the man she would marry this weekend.

This was one of those weddings I'm really pleased to be at, though. It's nice when good people find each other, yknow?

Getting there, however. . .

We left for Chicago at noon on Friday. I picked Nena up at work and we took off from there. The weather was absolutely terrible for driving. Torrential rains were with us on and off (mostly on) through Kansas and Missouri. By the time we got to Iowa we thought we'd seen enough of the rain. Yeah, we hadn't. We got hit a few more times in Iowa, but by the time I handed over the wheel to Nena it was finished.

We'd forgotten to bring change for the tolls in Illinois and that sucked. Then we stopped by to pick up the dinner my mother had ordered for the family at Lou Malnati's to find that Drieg had told them we'd be in half an hour after my mother and I had arranged for us to pick up the pizzas.

Yup, not pleased.

All of that was forgiven when we got home. Even though it was 10p when we finally sat down to eat, it was a great time. My whole family was around one table and my cousin 'Cena, who was in town from NY for the weekend, joined us. A truly amazing time that ended around 2a.

Saturday Nena got to meet my godfather and his wife. Again, an amazing time. They loved her, as we knew they would, and there was more family and togetherness and conversations that lasted way past everyone's bedtime. Which, yknow, not good when you have a wedding to be at by 10a.

The wedding was beautiful. And Nena and I danced until we could dance no more and slumped off home to get a few hours sleep before we left for Kansas.

The drive back . . .yeah. It all started when Nena left my CD case on the roof of the car when we were packing up at my parents' place. Yeah. We realized what she'd done twenty minutes later and by then it was too late. For those of you who know me well, you know how much that hurt. Thing is, Nena took this far worse than I did. I mean, they're only CDs. . .yes, I just said that.

On the advice of the weather channel we went through St. Louis rather than Des Moines and we managed to miss all the rain. Thanks to the earlier error all we had to listen to besides the radio was the new Ozo and the soundtrack to Avenue Q, which Drieg had given to us as a gift.

By and large, Nena isn't a fan of musical theater but she really dug this show about surviving your twenties. I have to agree with her. Sometimes the show gets really gratuitous, but the story itself is brilliant. To sum it up, what do you do with a B.A. in English?

We got home around 7:30p, made dinner, attempted to unpack and passed out.

We close on the new house tomorrow and we're painting this weekend, if anyone wants to come by and help.

It's been a long weekend, and this is going to be a really, really long month. I feel kinda like Lance Armstrong, yknow? This was just the prelude to a long race.