Happy Summer Solstice!

The longest day of the year is also our anniversary. Four years ago Corrie and I were getting hitched in that little town of Yelapa, Mexico. Located on one side of a small inlet on the Bay of Banderas, the Hotel Lagunitas was overtaken by our people, and after the ceremony, both the hotel and the village on the other side of the inlet got a show of smuggled fireworks.

I love you baby. Here's to all the rest.

The Scenic Route Home

On the mend now, after an unfortunate accident last Friday (I'll get to that later), but to finish the "Dan and Lupita's Wedding" series, we took the scenic route home from Sacramento. We didn't plan it like that, but when we got to I-5, I decided to just keep going down I-80 towards San Francisco.

We decided to get a cup of coffee and a pastry in SF, then head down 280 to San Jose and pick up 101, and head back to Long Beach along a different, more scenic route, adding a few extra hours onto the trip.

We found a parking spot in North Beach close to Coit Tower, found a coffee shop, then, seeing how much time we had on our meter, went for a hike up to the tower.

From the hill leading up to the tower...

What set of San Francisco pictures would be complete without the Trans America Pyramid.

I wanted to get this picture for many years. This is very hard to see, but...this is an on ramp to Hwy 101, the right lane heads north and the left lane heads south, and painted on the ground are the ultimate big city abbreviations: LA on the left, and SF on the right.

Stopping for a pee break in Ventura we pulled into a gas station that had lower prices for cash than for credit cards (we didn't need gas at the time). Taking a look at the pumps, one could see that they all had cash values showing as the last purchases, one $20, two $10s, and this one, so sad I had to take a picture.

Five bucks only got this person 1.18 gallons; that's like a gallon and a fifth of gas.

So, now, I'm pretty much done with the set of posts about the wedding, and all of the collateral aspects of hanging out in Sacramento for a week. It was fun, and it was hot. I'll leave my few readers with an image of an inside joke that caused much laughter and steam release among the bride, groom, and yours truly:

I colored it in. The Map.

The Reception

Okay, so here are some pictures from the reception. This is more of an album than a post full of insight and commentary...well, maybe a little commentary.

Here's a cool candid shot of Lupita, having noticed Corrie from a distance aiming her lens. My ear is sneaking into the frame on the right:

Here's 'Pita tossing her bouquet, and the girl catching it...

...turned out to be the girlfriend of the guy who caught the garter that Dan is removing here. Seriously, what were the chances?

Here's our dad, giving a speech, the speech, and Dan smiled and laughed the whole time. 'Twas a success.

Here's Dan and and our mom during their dance, when Dan wheeled her around for an emotional partial song.

Here's Saroj and Vel, old family friends:

Bobbi, Auntie Erm and Uncle Rich, family members we rarely get to see...

Kate, our cousin Mike's special lady, Mike, and Lizzie, our cousin who flew in from Santiago...

And I wasn't sure how to end it...so here I am, taking a long look at Corrie as she did her thing...

The Ceremony

This is the second ceremony I was a part of that wasn't mine, which makes it the third wedding ceremony total. Funny, Dan and Norm were also parts of all three.

The early evening had just really gotten underway, which ultimately means that the blanket of heat has been kicked off and the beauty of the "Sacramento Evening" is starting to blossom. Even is this was technically Folsom.

So, Dan and Lupita wanted a short ceremony, and they pretty much got it. A family friend named Vel got legalized to perform ceremonies, and was excited to be invited to be a part of their day.

The following pictures Corrie took, and seeing as how she wasn't the paid photographer, she wasn't running up into everyone's business.

It started with Vel wheeling my mom, who was in the wheelchair, down to her spot in the front row.

Then Dan and his new mother-in-law, Maria:

Then the best-man and the maid-of-honor, our dad and 'Pita's sister, Carol:

So, then it gets weird. Dan had just pops, me, and Norm, while Lupita had five girls in her party, so both Norm and I escorted two girls a piece. This was in stark contrast to the only other time I was a groomsman, for Norm, when he had more fellas than Holly had ladies, and Dan and I escorted a single girl...a role reversal.

So here I am with Jackie and Marisela (sp?):

And here's Norm with Lisbeth and Holly:

Then when Lupita became visible, I heard Dan, upon seeing her for the first time that day and in her dress, say "Oh shit..." and you could hear his face smiling through the words.

The ceremony was nice, and swift, and deep, and we were swept away for forty minutes of portraiture.

Congratulations again you two, and welcome to the family, 'Pita.

Ceremony Day: Getting Ready

The day of the wedding itself, and in the early hours of it the ladies get ready. Lupita and her dress...

The flowers were orchids and the bouquets, seen here, were heavy with orchids:

Here's the set up for the ceremony:

And this ends the preliminary pictures taken by Corrie. My preliminary pictures are from something else, as on the day itself my brother and his groomsmen (our dad, me and Norm) went on a limousine adventure.

The plan was to get picked up at noon, ride up to Auburn, have lunch at a fancy Italian restaurant, and meander back to the hotel to get ready for the ceremony. The limo was spacious, as evidenced by Dan and Norm, and later by Dan and dad, but these pictures don't really show an accurate feel for the size.

One bizarre thing was the shading filter on the window. Impenetrable from the outside, it rendered all green plants red. Look at these pictures...

Can you believe it? Green street signs were left unaffected, while everything with chlorophyll was left red. I'm still working on the how...

So, after we learned that the restaurant didn't open on Sunday until later, we had lunch at a restaurant close by the venue, and then went and changed.

Dan, keeping it old-school, made sure he wouldn't see 'Pita beforehand, and here he is chilling out:

Since Corrie's picture files are so large, I'll hold off on posting so many at one time. So, in the next few posts, we'll get just some of the greatest hits.

Rehearsal Dinner, My Way, and Are We Almost Through?

My mom, after doing some research discovered that according to traditional American wedding, er, traditions, the mother of the groom is responsible for the Rehearsal Dinner. My misguided understanding notwithstanding, this is a time for the bridal party to practice the ceremony and then have a nice dinner the night before the wedding.

So many disparate members of my mom's family were going to be in town together for such a short time my mom was compelled to invite them to the Rehearsal Dinner. The dinner turned into more of a party, a pre-wedding party, with a few minutes we were able to steel away into the living room and go over the ceremony proceedings.

It was a blast.

But it did underscore a subject that always has a way of creating a certain level of havoc with whatever laid-back-ness is present in brides and grooms.

Sometimes with birthday parties that are for you even though you're not into them it's almost the same thing: a situation that is all about you but is also a train off the tracks; something out of your control. I imagine many weddings go like that. A party controlled by other people that you have no say in but stars you as a central character.

I would never say that my brother didn't appreciate the Rehearsal Dinner Party my mom threw for him and Lupita. But, from my own observation, I would say that an accurate statement would be that the whole shebang did cause stress for my brother.

Dan and Lupita were all about control of a certain kind: control of their own stress levels. They had meticulously planned and delegated to just the right lengths and just the right people to maintain their own extraordinarily high level of sanity during the end-game maelstrom of the wedding. The dinner represented a thing they hadn't planned for, and a thing that made what it was supposed to be about that much harder to accomplish.

While Holly was the master planner and wedding attache for the what seemed like, eh, everything, it would be wrong to say that Dan and Lupita were cool as cucumbers.

Well, maybe they were. Actually, cooler, even, but they did have tiny invisible frazzled moments. I had the right kind of glasses on to be able to see.

I did get to see some of the real person that my brother and his new wife have become. 'Pita and I had the talk that's characterized as the "I just can't wait for all this to be over with" talk. I've had it before with other people, and it usually is a topic broached initially with a hushed tone of, "I know this sounds awful, but..."

No, no it doesn't sound awful. It sounds natural. It's cathartic to talk about it, really.

I also sort of felt guilty a little, and told Dan and 'Pita that.

Some of the stress being supplied by my mom, my mom doing a thing she felt obligated to do, maybe rather a perceived role that she felt obligated to fill, but it was a role fully denied to her by the nature of mine and Corrie's wedding. So, in that way, by maybe fueling her motivation to do something, I felt responsible.

Of course, when it was all said and done, the Rehearsal Dinner Party was super cool. The food was good, the company better, as a more badass event I couldn't have planned myself.

Visiting Old Stomping Grounds

Before we left the Bay Area for the Sacramento area, I attended a few months of Selby Lane Elementary School in kindergarten. After arriving in Citrus Heights, I started kindergarten right after Christmas break. Our school, which was walking distance even after we moved a few months later to the Basswood house (where Dan still rules from on high), was (and is still) called Lichen Elementary. It's named after the street, which is named after a prehistoric fungus that affects most of the trees in the neighborhood.

On one of the days that I was up helping out, I had some time that was open while Dan and Richard worked on household fix-er-ups and my mom napped, so I took Dan's bike out over to Lichen, and then off to Westwood Park, an equally close by park that Norm and I certainly hung out at more often than I ever did when I was a kid going to Lichen.

Considering it's been 21 years since I stopped attending Lichen, it's kinda neat how little has changed while accounting for how much has changed.

I was looking through the pictures I took and was kinda surprised. I pretty much took pictures, not deliberately, of all the spots where I had a class during my K-6 grades. I was going to post pictures here, pictures of places that held memories for me, when I realized I could do that through my classes as well. But I decided not to, rather wait for that project until later. So, more like regular pictures...

Lichen is now a K-8 school, and I took a picture that tells me something of the demographics attending a now sought after schooling destination:

Two languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet? I'm guessing one is Russian, since Sacramento has a very populous Russian contingent, and I'll guess that the other is Ukrainian, since that is another of the Russo-Slavs to be residences of Sac. (I read that a while back the Slavs split into an upper sub-group and a lower sub-group; the uppers became Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian, while the lowers were the remaining Slavic groups.)

I don't remember the neighborhood being so full of white ethnics...either I wasn't listening hard enough, or Lichen is an important destination.

This picture and the next are Edvard Munch-ish, and show some of the long hallways that lead to playgrounds and recess.

The next shot opens out onto the recess area, and actually has recreational area on two sides. When I attended school, there were less permanent structures situated in a line perpendicular to the plane this bank of doors is on, and would have been visible here at the end of the line, where it now opens up to grass. I had two classes in those missing portables...

This planter box/circulation controller was very important for me, especially after I realized it was shaped like Superman's chest logo.

I always liked the shapes that this connection of roofing elements made with the sky...

During the early recesses this bathroom/water fountain area was shaded, and was a nice stop in after a rousing game of prison ball, basketball, or running and such off in the adjacent field. Football was played on the Lichen Drive side of the playground, while other grassy sports were played on this side's grass lands, the field tucked into the neighborhood. The football side had their own bathroom setup like this, but farher away from here. The men's room is on the left side of the picture, and is the first place I heard anyone claim the "Bloody Mary" phenomena truly worked. I was skeptical and didn't believe that "it" was possible, but I never tried it myself to prove or disprove.

What "Bloody Mary" phenomena is that, you may ask? Well, at Lichen, ca. 1988, the story went that if you turned your back on the mirror and said "Bloody Mary" three times, when you turned around the visage of a somehow now summonsed banshee or ghoul named "Bloody Mary" would be staring back at you. Magic in the mirrors.

Seeing as how I'm a science guy and a mathematician nowadays, and skeptical barely begins to describe how I approach things, I can safely say I know what will happen if I try to conjure "Bloody Mary" up in a mirror: a tiny part of the child-like mystery from the world of youth will die forever.

I still haven't ever let that sense of mystery die.

Here's a shot of two wings of class rooms, their intersection is the point from the picture before about the "shapes created against the sky". Four-square courts ready and prison ball courts just out of frame. For clarification's sake, what we called "prison ball" was called "dodgeball" in the Ben Stiller/Vince Vaughn movie of the same name. It was the same game. What we called "dodgeball" was a different game, where either one kid or a group of kids were at the center of a circle of kids who were ready with the ball-weapons.

After leaving Lichen I rode down to our first house in Citrus Heights, the house on Castleberry Circle. We lived there for a few months before moving to the Basswood house.

Nothing says Citrus Heights like the terminus of Zenith into Butternut. Seriously, these are two, eh, "important" CH streets, well, important in the cut, and one merges into the other deep in the cut.

This is the creek/drainway at Westwood Park. To the left of this picture are the two playgrounds that have conventional jungle-gyms. One side is smaller than the other, and the structure lets you know that it's for the littlest-adventurers. The bigger side always had the greatest large-scale jungle-gyms. Towering fortresses if fiberglass and curved steel. They've changed much of it since Norm and Shannon and Trishta and Curtis and I would teach younger hoodlums how to hood it up. Sometimes even Melly Mel was there. It's still representing big playground-ness. I felt funny taking pictures though, what with parents giving me the stink-eye.

This creek though, is where I saw Chris Farley catch crawdads, or attempt to catch them with hot-dog bits on string. (The bridge is newer than my last trip.)

To the right is a large expanse of grass that you could take your dogs to, or play catch, or practice baseball. I had practices here, on the large green grassy area, but strangely, never any games on the local diamond off behind the big-kids playground.

Behind the sign you can almost see one of the jungle-gyms. The original sign, or what counts as original for me and mine, was a wooden thing up at the corner of the property. Now the grassy area has a basketball court and a tennis court and far less open green grass, but it's still kinda cool.

Some young hoodlums saw me taking these pictures, as they were getting out of their car and taking a spot on a picnic table that isn't but twenty feet behind my back as I took this picture. They were mugging me in a curious way, not quite menacing, but they would have done so if I'd acted differently. They were more curious (I used that word to describe them, not their mugging ways).

So, if you know me, then you know what I did. I put my camera away, turned to face the kids, walked right over to their table and had a seat. One kid fumbled trying to light his cigarette.

They asked if I was a photographer (I was also carrying Corrie's Pentax 35mm SLR film-camera). I smiled and said it was a hobby. I told them that I grew up around the corner, that I went to Lichen, and that my friends and I used to come up to the park and get loaded and scare the younger punks. They thought that was funny.

I told them that the last time I regularly hung out at Westwood, there were no basketball courts or tennis courts, and that the green grass went on the whole way. "Damn!" they laughed, followed by a when was that line of questioning.

When was that? I thought about it, wanting to be as fully accurate as I could. It was before I'd left Sac for San Luis Obispo the second time, which was in 2000, and I'd been serious about school for maybe 10 months before that.

"Eh, I guess that was in...1999," I nodded as I said it, and they erupted into a chorus of damns and sheeeits.

"You're old!"

"Yup...I surely am," I nodded with a laugh.

I performed the handshake-to-fist-bump action that constitutes farewell gesturing in certain pockets of society, bid them adieu, and rode off back to Basswood, back to the easiest going bride and groom pair I've ever had the pleasure of being around.