before my brother’s wedding

you know, at this point i don’t remember much about the earlier part of last week. i ended up buying the second palm/directors label the work of directors box set with the border’s coupon. (i already have the first one.) this one has a dvd and book for stephane sednaoui, anton corbijn, jonathan glazer, and mark romanek (he did the johnny cash “hurt” video…*swoon*…which is on this dvd). what i should have bought instead was the 3-disc criterion edition of brasil. i didn’t realize the criterion version i have is so much less.
one day (tuesday? thursday?) i went over to the potts’ and ate supper with them and watched word wars. it’s a documentary about tournament scrabble players. it’s an interesting peek into the lives of some intelligent and/or eclectic folk. the movie is rather aware it is making jokes or poking fun at some of the participants, but at the same time you also end up understanding them better and hoping for the best for them. or at least i did. i also determined i don’t really want to invest the energy in becoming a “serious” scrabble player. i’d rather know what a word means and not know how to spell it than know how to spell lots of words but not really know what they mean (or have the only reason for knowing them be their odd letters or small size).
if anything else happened before my extended weekend, i appear to have forgotten it.
i took friday, monday, and tuesday off of work. the occasion? my brother was getting married on the 22nd in brenham. i spent a couple of days in brenham for the wedding, then spent a couple of days with my parents. unfortunately, i started feeling sick and was ill with a head cold/fever for pretty much the whole time i was away from work. i started popping vitamin c and zinc lozenges after i got up friday morning, hoping it would take the edge off or (preferably) stop any impending illness. it didn’t. (well, maybe it did, but i was still felt pretty bad a few days.) but i was pretty much back to normal by the day i came back to work (wednesday). how is it exactly that’s the way things work out?
thursday i went by men’s wearhouse and tried on my tux. the pants were a little too long, so they told me to come back by on friday around noon. i went back by on friday and picked the tux up. it was more traditional than i’d been expecting. linc had been looking at some western-ish tuxes, but in the end went with a conservative traditional black tux, silver and grey vest and tie, and a white shirt.
i had originally thought i might ride the motorcycle up there, but in the end i decided to go with the truck because i needed a way to reasonably transport the wedding gifts, my clothes for the weekend, and the tux. as for the gifts: one was a mixer/blender in a decently big box, and the other was a cannister set in a box almost as big and a lot heavier. getting that stuff on a motorcycle didn’t really seem practical. i left houston around 2pm, and even though i figured that’d mean smooth sailing i spent half an hour to an hour in slow traffic on 290 headed out. bleh.
i got to brenham an hour or two before the rehearsal and met my parents at the bed and breakfast we were staying at. it’s called m’s hide-a-way. (seems like an extra hyphen to me, but i’m just copying what they have.) the land around there is nice, but the specific building we were in (the “out back”) felt and looked more like a trailer. it wasn’t — it was built on the second floor of a long barn — but it was long and narrow and had wood paneling. (the other accommodations there look more like typical bed and breakfast fare.)
after being there a bit, i went with my parents over to heather’s (the bride) parents’ house to help set up for the rehearsal dinner. my parents had conveniently chosen a place to stay that was right across the (rural, dirt) road from heather’s parents. i met heather’s parents and some of her family, helped do a little setup stuff, and sat around. my mom convinced me to go ahead and take my gifts over to the house instead of leaving them where we were staying. linc and heather showed up, and i hung out there awhile, then we went to the rehearsal.
the wedding was taking place at the mariposa ranch, a few miles outside of brenham. (and only a couple of miles from heather’s parents’ place.) the mariposa is a bed and breakfast place, but they also have a big pavilion and a glass and wood outdoor open chapel. i met the various people who were going to be in the wedding, linc’s other groomsmen all being people i’ve met and known somewhat over the years. the rehearsal went fine, then we went back to heather’s parents’ house for the dinner.
they had bbq and sides, homemade blackberry and peach cobblers, imperial cane sugar dr. pepper, etc. they also had some tecate and wine, but i didn’t feel like drinking. someone decided linc and heather should go ahead and open the few wedding presents already there, so they did. i had them open the blender first, since it’s a higher dollar item than the cannister set. but what i’d added to the cannister set made it worth a lot more, and made it very heavy. everyone who had picked it up was commenting on how heavy it was, and there was plenty of speculation about what it could be. not knowing i’d be there for them to open it, i’d also made sure and added a note to it to make sure they opened it all up. (i had a bit of fear they’d return it or something, not knowing what was inside…although i think that was unfounded considering how oddly heavy it was.) i had also made the additions so that more showed up with each cannister they opened. so what did i add? $1 coins. a lot of $1 coins. everyone seemed to be impressed by the creative gift giving. i felt a bit self-conscious about it, since i hadn’t really planned for the whole wedding party and family to be there when they opened it. nevertheless, i think it went over well and they were pleasantly surprised, so i felt good about my method of delivery. my illness was also getting worse, so it sort of heightened my normal lack of social outgoingness, but i stuck things out and left with my parents fairly late.