Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Ska: The Third Wave, Volume 4 – Animal Chin – Time-out

This weekend was good. On Friday I drove to Houston. I was in town for three reasons:

1) See my sister Colleen
2) See the Red Elvises perform
3) Attend Cory’s wedding

Friday night was spent accomplishing the first two items on the list. In fact, Colleen went with me to the show, and seemed to like the Red Elvises a lot. She also gave me a haircut. It wasn’t her best work, but who can complain about a free haircut? So what if my nickname was Patches for the rest of my stay?

But yeah, the show was very good. It was at The Continental Club, which also has a location in Austin. The two are kinda similar, but I prefer the one in Austin — it’s slightly bigger, and nobody waiting at the bar has ever tried to pick a fight with me in Austin. I guess if I lived in Houston, I’d be more likely to pick fights with people. It’s just an angry city.

The rest of Friday night (until 5 or 6am) was spent hanging out with Colleen at her place. I learned about the plight of the Irish. Colleen is half-Irish, has been to Ireland once, and feels their pain as if it was her own. She hates the English. Hates them. I’m not half Irish — we’re only half-siblings. We’re both half Polish, though, and it seems to me that she should save some of her emotional energy for lamenting the plight of the Polish. But no. The Irish get all her sympathy.

So yeah, Friday night spent crying about the Irish. She got up early (well, 10am) the next morning to go to some birthday party, or something like that. I slept until 1pm or 2pm. Cory’s wedding was at 4pm. It was actually happening pretty close to Colleen’s place, but I don’t dress up too often, so I wanted to leave myself plenty of time to prepare — in order to deal with any unforseen difficulties.

The wedding was good, Cory got married, although I will say that the wedding was unique (in my experience) in a couple ways:

1) It was the first wedding I’ve attended in which the audience takes an active role. Not only did the bride and groom have to say “I do” (which I’m used to), but the audience had to agree to help support their marriage. We agreed to this by saying “With God’s help I will”. I’m not sure if the marriage would have been canceled if we hadn’t agreed.

2) Christ was brought up more than I’ve ever seen at a wedding. Yes, the wedding was in a church, but I’ve been to weddings in churches before. Sure, Jesus is always mentioned, but he usually isn’t a central theme. At Cory’s wedding, he definitely was.

It was a good wedding, and I’m happy for Cory. And they gave me free food, which was good, because Colleen has absolutely NO food in her house. None. So I was pretty hungry, and I didn’t dare eat before the wedding while I was all dressed up, lest I get food on my clothes. Not that I’m a sloppy eater, but you never can be too careful about that sort of thing.

One of the highlights of the wedding (for me) was when Newton (one of my friends who was also at the wedding) dropped a strawberry into the chocolate dip and had to fish it out with a fork, which held up the entire buffet line.

I drove back to Austin after the wedding, because the Red Elvises were playing in Austin on Saturday night. Their show on Saturday was very crowded, and we almost didn’t get in. But it was good, of course. I learned that my friend Andy (not the Andy whose parties I discussed in a previous post) never really drinks alcohol, despite his protests to the contrary. He wanted to do a shot with me, and I agreed. He told me to name the shot. I said “Vodka”. He said “Mixed with what?” I rest my case. He was flabbergasted at the idea of shooting straight vodka. He initially balked at the idea, but finally I convinced him to do it. You should have seen the look on his face when he drank it. He had to chase it immediately with a lot of beer. Ha. I sloshed mine around my mouth, in order to make my point. I had no chaser.

Ok, time out for a second. I need a way to distinguish between the two Andy’s. It occurs to me that it would be useful to post a cast of characters in my life. That’s too much work. But what I will do is post a brief description of each person who comes up in my journal entries. I know I’ve already mentioned several people. So my next entry will start out with brief descriptions of these people. And then in the future, if a journal entry talks about someone new, I’ll try to write a brief description about them in that entry. Good enough? It had better be!

Ok, back to the weekend.

I went home and slept after the show on Saturday, and woke up super early (8am) on Sunday. I drove to pick up Cecillee in Luling, and then we drove to Fiesta Texas in San Antonio. It’s an amusement park. We spent most of the day running around there, being kicked off rides because she was wearing earrings. I had no idea the earring Nazis were out in such force. We did get on some rides, though, so it wasn’t too bad. And there were ENORMOUS catfish in a pond there. Cecillee told me they weren’t that big, and then turned right around and told some kid to look at the big catfish! What duplicity! Despite this (or perhaps because of it), Cecillee is pretty awesome. She put up with a day of my rambling, so she’s either awesome or masochistic. Or both, possibly.

We left Fiesta Texas around 5pm and headed for Austin, because the Red Elvises were playing there again, this time at Jovita’s. Jovita’s is a nice venue because it’s also a Mexican restaurant. So we ate dinner (with Carrie and Rob, who also came ot the show), and then watched the Red Elvises. Good good good.

So yeah, it was a good weekend. Sunday in particular. And the next couple days following the weekend were pretty great also — the network at work was all screwed up, so nobody could really get any work done. So we basically had two days off. The network came back up late on Tuesday, so we worked on Wednesday.

Ok, more later, including a brief cast of characters. Harf harf.