Sheep Guarding Llama

Today, Min and I decided, is going to be a nice relaxing day at home. We have been out almost minute this week and we need some time at home to relax. But of course, that didn’t actually end up happening. We started the day by sleeping in. Then we decided that we had a bunch of errands to run in the city so we headed up there around noon. We decided to pick Eric up and go someplace vegetarian for lunch. I thought that I had seen a new place but when we got up to the city we weren’t able to find it so we ended up going to Basha for Mediterranean. Basha is a great place though and Min had never been there. So it worked out well anyway. After lunch we just ended up running all over the place trying to get things done that we needed to get done before Min had to return to work. She has really been enjoying her week and a half off and isn’t looking forward to returning to work at all. We got Eric back to his car and ran some more errands and even ran into Mrs. West (Andy’s mom).

We spent the evening just relaxing around the house. There is a ton of cleaning that needs to be done and Min needed to relax before work. So we through on some DVDs and just relaxed for the evening. Min headed off to work at 10:45 and I ended up working until 2:00 am. I have to be up relatively early tomorrow because Danielle and I are going out to do sales in Perry. Plus I have a ton of work around the house that I need to get to after having been off for so long.

Today Min and I are going to the Genesee Country Museum in Mumford. Min has never been there and I haven’t been there for a regular tour during the day in forever. Maybe ten years or more. I was there with Nate, Karen and Peanut about three years ago for the Halloween special thing that they did but that was at night and it was trick or treating. Not the same thing. Their traditional programs like that are really neat though.

We headed out to breakfast in Caledonia and then to the museum right about when they were opening. There were about 650 kids there today so that made for a bit of a crowd even though there weren’t too many people overall. In fact, the place was mostly deserted. We spent about six hours at the museum. We were there all day. Min really enjoyed it. We even ended up joining the museum because we plan to return at least a couple of times next year. If we come back just two times, it will save us money. We got lunch in the museum although that wasn’t very exciting.

After the museum, it was time to go furniture shopping once again. This time we went to Ruby Gordon in Henrietta. It wasn’t the most exciting place but we did manage to get a really good deal on dining room chairs. It will save us like $600 over other chairs that we have looked at and we really liked them too. So that was a trip well worth having taken. We still haven’t been able to decide on any kind of end tables yet. That is going to be the hardest thing to figure out what we want to do about. Everything is so expensive and nothing really works that well for us. And since we aren’t going to be getting a coffee table, there are fewer options to choose from.

Tonight is Min’s last night at home and she wanted to stay up late so that she would be ready to go back to work tomorrow night. So we watched a ton of movies on DVD while I set up the new speakers. It took a ton of work and I had to steal the Rotel Amplifier from Andy so that we would have something to power the system with but after about an hour of being squeezed in behind the television, I finally got it all hooked up. It is a million times nicer watching DVDs now because you can really hear them. The sound coming from the television is just awful. We choose the Totems because they are so transparent and smooth. They make dialogue very easy to understand even at really low volumes. They really help allow us to run the television at much lower volumes that we had to in the past. We are somewhat worried about letting the television get too loud because it points right at the wall that we share with Linda. She has said that she hasn’t heard us yet but we don’t want to start either. We are going to be mounting the quilt that we got from the wedding on the wall that the television faces and that will help a bit once that is in place. Between the two, it should be much easier to hear the television.

Well, things can start getting back to normal now. I am trying to get caught up with the updates. I moved September over to the archives so that the main page wouldn’t get to be unruly. Summer 2003 (Quarter 3) in the archives is the third busiest season for updates yet on SGL. I was worried that it was going to be really short but we pulled that one off in the eleventh hour.

Min and I decided that we were going to do some serious shopping today but we had to sleep in first to make up for the crazy weeekend. The house phone is rerouted over to Arti and Danielle’s house so that we can have some privacy for a couple of days. Andy was supposed to fly out to Puerto Rico this morning but none of the four travel coordinators from his company could handle calling him to tell him when his flight was so they didn’t let him know that he had missed it until five hours after he would have had to have left the house to have even been able to make it. He had been bugging them for five days to get him the itinerary but they just blew him off until they made him miss his flight. They booked him another one this afternoon and so he is going to be out of the house around noon. It was kind of nice for him to have it later, though. They had originally scheduled him so early that he would have had to have left the house just after 4:00 am. Which means that he would have had to have gotten up long before then and that was pretty ridiculous after a big weekend. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were willing to fly him out of Rochester’s airport which is just twenty minutes away. But no, they only fly him out of Buffalo so he has to drive over an hour just to get to the airport.

So, as soon as Andy left, Min and I went out and did some shopping with our wedding money. We picked up some new movies to get us through the week of hiding at home. We got Series Two of A Fine Romance with Judy Dench from 1981. We also got Waiting for Guffman, Sweet Sixteen, Thin Red Line and Russian Ark. After getting more movies, we went to look at furniture. We went to a couple of different places. Eric and I went furniture shopping at Contemporary Trends in Ithaca on Aurora St. about a year and a half ago and we discovered a bunch of stuff that we had really like. Most notably, a dining table that extends without leaves, a recliner and a “luna” chair that I have always thought would be just perfect for the listening room. Well, funny enough, at Viking in the Frontier Commons on Jefferson, Min managed to independantly pick out the SAME THREE ITEMS that Eric and I had liked so much over a year ago. I didn’t have anything to do with it at all. She immediately ran around the store and fell in love with those three exact items. And we aren’t talking similar furniture here, we are talking the same three exact items that I had liked so much. Talk about meant for each other. So since we were both so set on those pieces, we decided to get them. We got both the recliner and the luna chair (and its ottoman) in matching saddle and teak. One is going to go in the living room for Min to sit on because she needs a good chair for her back and the other is going to go into the basement for me to be my ultimate listening room chair and ottoman. We figure that eventually we will get more matching chairs for the listening room slash theatre room because they are so perfect and flexible for down there. We didn’t get any chairs for the dining room table because we couldn’t decide on anything and everything seemed so expensive. Min also found a bookshelf that she liked in teak but wasn’t sure if it would fit or not where she wanted to put it so we decided that we would go home and measure to see if it would fit there. We also bought a little viking clock and a puzzle block wood cow to go in the living room to decorate. The furniture is going to be arriving at the house a week from tomorrow.

After picking out furniture, Min let me go shopping at SoundWorks up on Monroe Ave. too! We ordered a B+W subwoofer, the ASW 300, which is a matching piece for my DM303’s that I have for the basement theatre room. I have been dying to get the matching sub ever since I sold the Paradigms to Josh. I have had so much less power since then. This will really help. We now have all but the surround (rear) speakers that we need for the basement system. We were originally just looking for small stereo speakers to put upstairs in the living room because the television there is very hard to understand. The dialogue isn’t very clear coming through the television speakers and we don’t want to turn it up very loud in case the neighbors can hear it. So we decided to get something like Energy Take-5’s for the living room. But Soundworks isn’t carrying the Energy line anymore so we had to look into other options. We thought about going with an Acoustic Energy model. But we weren’t really impressed with how it sounded or how it looked. So we looked around some more and decided to just splurge and get ourselves and really beautiful looking AND sounding speaker, the Totem Dreamcatcher. We got them with the Maple finish. They look awesome in the living room. We are putting an emphasis on getting the theatre room together because Andy decided that he is giving us a project for a wedding gift so we want to get the system all together so that we can really use that room. Arti and I are planning on getting started on the electrical system down there maybe as early as next week. That is the first step.

After shopping, Min and I went down to see my parents and grandparents. My mom’s parents are still at my parent’s house from the wedding and we had barely gotten a chance to see them at the wedding so we thought that we would stop by and visit a little bit.

Wow am I exhausted today. Today is my first day of being married. What a weird thing it is to suddenly be married. For those of you who have never done it, let me tell you, it does come as a bit of a shock. I am sure it is even weirder for Min who is now Mrs. Miller. Doesn’t that make us sound so old? So we started the morning off at the Inn. We thought about having breakfast there or at least in town but we got up late enough that we really didn’t have any time to relax in the morning. We ran around the hotel getting everything together and packing the car and checking out. Then we drove over to the house where Bob and Lisa and Andy were at. We unloaded all of the stuff that we had in the car and then we got everyone out the door to get down to the Yard of Ale in Piffard for Sunday Brunch. Nate, Tammy and Emily met us there. We had a terrible time convincing the restuarant that they wanted to let us eat there. They made a big deal about us not having reservations. But they finally seated us (actually, we finally seated ourselves… they were very rude.) I would have understood if there had been anyone else in the entire restaurant but they were empty except for Andy’s aunt sitting in the bar/buffet room. There were about five totally deserted rooms. So the only other person in the entire place was a relative. In fact, they were so slow there that we managed, even with the incredibly slow and pathetic service that we got, to eat our meals and leave just in time to pass the next people coming in in the doorway. Apparantly, it was all that there staff of five could do to serve eggs and orange juice to eight adults and two children. I was totally unimpressed. And I have eaten there before and don’t remember it being very good then either. I keep hearing stories of people who have enjoyed eating there but I never have the good fortune of enjoying my time there. I doubt that I will ever return. I have been kind enough to eat there far too many times as it is. We only went there this time because it was close and they had a buffet. Had anything else been open with a buffet that we had known of, we would never have considered it.

After lunch, Min’s parents came over to the house to help us open presents. Boy is there a lot of stuff. You really do make out pretty well at weddings. We have so much new stuff that we really feel like we just moved into a new house and everything we have is new. There is nothing left that we use from just a few months ago. That is really weird. All new cups and dishes and silverware and towels and everything. Even new decorations. It’s like we just moved into someone else’s decorated house! We got a lot of really nice stuff. I think we made out exceptionally well compared to most people after a wedding. We really like all of the stuff that we got and we are really going to be able to use all of it.

My arm is still not any better. It has gotten hard to tell if it changes at all and I barely notice it anymore. I have adjusted to sleeping with it in funny positions and I know what it feels like when I do something to it. I have been taking my ibuprofin on a regular basis and I have been taking B vitamins too. It just seems to be holding steady. If nothing happens by the end of the week, I will have to talk to the doctor again and have a nerve test done. I was really hoping that it wouldn’t come to that but I don’t think that there is any other option at this point. Maybe surgery will not be necessary, though.

After everyone had left and things were starting to calm down, Andy, Min and I went to Walmart to get some movies to get us through the week. We picked up Smokey and the Bandit which is a total classic that everyone has to have, Solaris which is a newer Sci-Fi that I had heard really good things about from Wilfort and finally, The Last Starfighter which both Min and I love and it turned out that Andy had never seen it so we had to have it. Since tonight is Andy’s last chance to hang out with us for forever, we all sat around and watched The Last Starfighter. Andy ended up really falling in love with the movie and wishing that he had bought himself a copy of it. I hadn’t seen it in quite a long time. It was one of my favorite movies from when I was very young. It came out when I was eight.

Well, today is the big day. The day you have all been waiting for. Can you believe it is finally today?

Nate, Josh and I started off the day at Nate’s parent’s house in Perry. We had hoped that all of the guys would be able to get together this morning to play some golf before heading over for the wedding but the weather ended up not being too agreeable so that had to be cancelled. John had a rough morning over at Hillside where he is staying and wasn’t able to make it over to join everyone before the wedding. Andy ran errands around Geneseo and also couldn’t make it. Eric came over a little bit later in the morning so the four of us got ready together. We went out to breakfast at the Hole in the Wall out on Main Street. The waitress thought that the fact that we were wearing kilts to the wedding was just the most amazing thing. The entire restaurant was talking about it by the time that we left there. They were all very excited about it. After breakfast, we went back to Nate’s parent’s house to get ready and to put our kilts on. We did a pretty good job of getting ourselves all dressed up. We looked really sexy in our kilts.

We headed over to Hillside Inn around 1:00. The girls had been there all morning getting things ready for the ceremony. Min and I are staying there tonight so the girls are all using the Bridal Suite to get dressed and to do the hair and all of that stuff. Nate and I arrived at John’s cottage at Hillside and found him with his kilt backwards. So we had to get that straightened out. Andy arrived just seconds after Nate and I. Eric and Josh ran down into Warsaw to pick up some Grand Marnier before the service. They made it up about twenty minutes later.

We discovered quickly that they had decided to move the ceremony indoors. It was probably for the best but we heard that Min was really upset and we were having a heck of a time trying to figure out all of the logistics because everything was drastically different from what we had done in rehearsal and there wasn’t enough room for everyone to make it down the aisle and there wasn’t enough room to stand up front and chairs were blocking the path and then, as we started to seat people, we realized that there weren’t enough seats by quite a number for everyone to have a place to sit. So we had to start bringing in more chairs at the last second. So I had little time to get nervous before the wedding since so many things were going on at the last second. Plus there were so many people to say hello to as they were coming in. All the while, our bagpiper was playing away out in front of the inn. That was a really nice touch.

Nate and I finally made it up to the front of the ceremony so that we could wait for Min and her entourage to come down. We ended up going forward prematurely as Min wasn’t ready yet but because we had to way to communicate with her, we had no idea when she was planning on coming down.

The girls finally came down from upstairs and it was a beautiful service. Min and I really missed most of it. There is just so much going on and so many people there that everything really flies by very quickly. After the officially ceremony we went out to the back and did the official pictures. We hired a friend of Min’s from Advion to take our pictures so that we would get to actually own them and not just have license for viewing them at home. We didn’t do a lot of formal pictures because neither of us really like formal pics. We much prefer informal ones done at the reception. So we tried to keep the time doing the pics to a minimum. It was hectic enough as it was with what we did. After the pictures it was on to the reception. The bridal party entered and then Min and I entered to “Soul Bossa Nova”, the theme from Austin Powers. It went over really well and the place really got into the mood. I think it was important to not let everyone think that it was going to be really formal since the ceremony itself had been very traditional and formal. We wanted the party to be just that, a party. So we started it off right. We ate almost immediately. It was a buffet of chicken cordon bleu, some kind of beef (hey, I am a vegetarian, I didn’t pay much attention) and vegetarian lasagna. I was really surprised by how good dinner was. It was the best wedding food I have ever had.

At the reception we had dancing and karaoke. The selection of songs for karaoke was pretty bad but it was okay. We made due. Nate and I sang three songs together. And a lot of people sang to us which was really nice. I was really happy with how many of my friends were able to make it. It was really nice to get to see everyone all together. We had a really great time. My cousin Jeremy had a blast. I think that he might have spent more time out on the dance floor than anyone else at the party. Everyone really got a kick out of him. Oh, to be 14 again.

After the reception, at 9:30, we gathered up all of the real partiers and headed on down to the Cannonball Run Pub down the street at the bottom of the hill in Wyoming. John called them and let them know that we were coming and they agreed to stay open for us. That was really great. It was nice to have somewhere to go to wind down after the reception. We hung out there for a couple of hours. Most everyone started to head home from there. After we were done there, John, Michelle, Mary, Jocelyn, Josh, JoAnne, Min and I went out to get some pizza in Warsaw. So this was the after-after-party.

After pizza was over, we headed back to the Inn to begin our married life together. We had the bridal suite which is a huge room. But the funny thing was, in such a huge room, there was only a double bed. And it was so high off of the floor that we had to have a step stool to get up to it!

What an awesome day. It couldn’t have turned out any better than it did. We had a really wonderful time sharing our wedding with all of you. I am so glad that so many of you were able to make it and so sorry that so many were unable to be there. Thank you all for coming or at least trying to come. And the kilts really turned out awesome too. They looked really good and they made it a lot more interesting. I think that they managed to both add to the formality and traditionalism of the ceremony but made for a great crowd pleaser at the reception. Everyone thought that we were really hilarious dancing around in our skirts.

Emily told us at the wedding that Craig had had a car accident on Thursday, October 2nd, and had been trying, right up to the last minute, to come to the wedding but he felt really bad and decided that he couldn’t make it. We really wish that he could have been there. Apparenlty he is fine… just really soar from the accident. I will let you know more when I hear something.

Min did change her name so she is now officially, Dominica Anne Miller.