Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is the big day!  Andy and Miranda are finally tying the knot.

It was a gorgeous sunrise over the Mojave Desert with the reds and oranges and purples splashing across the distant mountains.  Very cool.  A great way to wake up when you are high in the Vdara and have a commanding view of the region.

I was up very early this morning around six.  I got a great night’s sleep last night and felt pretty good this morning.  Liesl was up at about the same time as me.  She doesn’t put up with jet lag and just keeps herself on her regular schedule regardless.  Dominica got up about then as well.  No point (or way) sleeping in when everyone is awake.

It was good timing since I was able to continue working on New York time.  Dominica and Liesl settled into the living room area and watching HGTV-type television, Dominica’s vice when we are in a location that has cable television, and we devoured the pastries that we had remaining after we had eaten last night.  That was a much more cost effective breakfast than yesterday.

The day passed pretty quickly.  We did not leave the hotel room pretty much all day until time rolled around to start getting ready for the wedding.  Then I got my suit on and signed off from work.  It is just me going to the wedding – Dominica and Liesl are just going to hang out at the Vdara.  Liesl fell asleep just a little bit before I left so Dominica didn’t even get to come down to the lobby to see us all off.

I went up to Andy and Miranda’s room to help Andy get ready.  Not that he actually needed me for anything.  Really all we had to do was to regroup, put on our matching silvery-pink ties and head on down to the lobby to meet up with everyone getting into the limo to head out to Red Rock for the wedding itself.

Everyone gathered in the Vdara lobby.  We had about half an hour to wait on the limo and then we piled in and headed out to the Red Rock Canyon.  The drive took about forty five minutes and gave us a nice tour of much of the city of Las Vegas which was quite interesting as most people in Vegas never see anything except for the casinos and the strip (and the airport) but we got to go through lots of shopping and residential areas.  There are some really nice areas to live out there if you enjoy desert living.

We got out to the end and hiked a little ways into the park (not very far, maybe a five minute walk.)  The ceremony was held on a wooden platform suspended over the desert a few inches.  There was a wooden walkway going from the parking lot out to where we were which, I presume, was used to protect the desert from people tromping all through it all of the time.

The ceremony was really nice.  It was neat having it is such a cool location.  The weather was perfect for a wedding too.  Cool enough that people were not getting warm and warm enough that no one needed a jacket or anything.  And it was dry but that is to be expected in the desert.

After the ceremony itself there were some quick pictures and then back to the limo to follow the photographer as we traveled through the Red Rock Canyon Conservation Area.  We got to see some really cool stuff and drove way up into the mountains getting very close to the snow line.  There was a surprising amount of snow up there.  No snow where we were but quite a bit not very far away.  There were some awesome vistas from up in the mountains and at one point we could see the city of Las Vegas way off in the distance.

The picture taking took an hour or two and then it was time to drive back to the hotel in the city.  We got back at about the perfect time for coordinating dinner.  Some people ran to change and do other post-wedding activities.  While we were waiting for people Natalie’s father and I hit the Vdara lobby bar and had a drink.  Then Natalie’s mom joined us for another drink and eventually Tony joined us as well.  We had sidecars, aviators, Brooker’s bourbon, etc.  I love the quality of drinks in Las Vegas bars.  Las Vegas takes its drinking very seriously.

Some of the group ran to the Aria casino, because the Vdara is a non-gaming resort which is awesome, and did a little quick gambling before the dinner.  Then we all met at Jean-George’s Steakhouse for the wedding reception dinner.  Dinner there was fantastic.  Tony had his first oysters from the chilled seafood appetizer starters that we all had.

For dinner I got the black cod which was excellent.  I also had the beet salad which was completely amazing.  Endive, mushrooms, warm goat cheese fondue and beets.  Totally amazing.  The whole meal was really something.  It is too bad that Dominica and Liesl couldn’t go but Liesl would not have been happy and small children are not allowed in the restaurant.

After dinner, most everyone headed off to bed or to their own activities.  Andy and I went to the tapas restaurant from last night to pick up dinner for Dominica.  She had tried to order in from the 24 hour room service and found out that they always open room service closed at ten.  Umm, what?  A “five star” resort that advertises around the clock room service closes, without warning, at ten in the evening on a Friday night?  I thought that around the clock room service was  a base requirement to even be remotely considered a four star resort.  Dominica was not happy.  It was prime dinner time on a Friday night in Vegas and our resort stopped serving dinner!

So Andy and I delivered dinner up to the room while Miranda and Natalie went down to the bar to get started without us.  While Andy and I were having coffee and waiting for the food Julian Serrano came into the restaurant and was right behind us.  He was busy so I didn’t say hello but we did get to see him just a foot away from us.  Cool.

When Andy and I made it to the bar to pick up Miranda, Natalie, Kip and Jan to head out they had drinks waiting for us.  So Andy and I had to do tequila shots and cable cars that were already prepared “to go” for us.  This is going to be one rough night.  There was champagne on the way to the wedding, champagne on the way back, then sidecars, aviators, bourban and more at the bar between the wedding and dinner, wine and dinner and now tequila shots and cable cars!  Whoa.  Andy and I are not as young as we used to be.  I knew this was coming so was eating bread as much as I could at dinner.

Miranda and Natalie wanted to get “Eiffle Towers” from Paris which are massive rum-filled plastic novelty drinks that cost about thirty dollars each.  So that was our mission for the evening.

We got over to Paris just in time for them to close the “Eiffle Tower” station.  They were turning people away and had shut down the drink machines.  Natalie somehow managed to persuade the guy to turn the machines back on and make drinks just for the five of us (Kip was not drinking, just along for the walk) while continuing to turn other people away.  Those drinks cost a small fortune.

From there we walked the strip and made an attempt at riding the monorail that runs through the strip.  Getting to the monorail proved to be quite a challenge with the directions guiding us through one resort after another through casinos and shopping areas.  It was very confusing.

We eventually made it to the monorail and rode it all over Vegas.  It was probably one or two in the morning when we stumbled back to the Vdara where everyone was staying.  I have jet lag or at least “jet confusion” so I was not completely clear on the time and did not have a watch so was not really paying attention to the time.

It was a good day.  Everyone had a lot of fun.  Andy and I have not been out drinking together in many years.  Maybe five or six years.  Possibly longer, I suppose.  It was nice to get a night out on the town in Vegas.  Vegas is an interesting place to go out.  The complete lack of day and night (except, apparently, for the Vdara’s room service) makes it a truly weird place to be.  It would appear that no one can tell what time it is when they are there.

Tomorrow we fly back to Houston at noon.  Andy and Miranda are taking a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon at noon.  I have to work for the office early in the morning so not much time to relax for me.  We will be back home in Irving on Sunday evening.

We were up at four but it was a restless night and we were still very tired.  Liesl tossed and turned all night long and never really let us get to sleep at all.  That is going to make today very rough indeed.

We got ready to go as quickly as we could and were on to the road at four forty five to drive across the city before rush hour started which is a real concern going from League City up to the big airport up north.  It is a long drive and i45 can become very congested if you get past five thirty or so.

The drive up to the airport was fine.  No traffic at all.  We are leaving the car at the airport and Brian is picking it later once he wakes up.  He will use the car for the rest of the week which works out pretty well.

We got to the airport and through security pretty well.  We found out that our particular flight was not in the terminal normally used by Continental  and so while we were in our terminal with plenty of time we had to take a massive hike out two terminals away to catch our flight.  That ate up a lot of time and was rather exhausting.  We did not check any luggage on this trip and are carrying a lot of stuff with us.

We had not eaten before getting to the airport and were pretty hungry, especially after yesterday when I only managed to eat once all day anyway.  So Dominica watched Liesl and I quickly picked us up something to eat.  Breakfast tacos for me.  Dominica just had a bagel.

We ended up cutting it really close and didn’t really have time to eat before getting on to the flight.  We are trying this flight with a car seat for Liesl rather than holding her in our laps.  We thought that this might work better but boy oh boy were we ever wrong.

Having the car seat on the plane meant that Liesl was pissed because she did not want to sit that way and it also meant that we had no room in our row to maneuver because the car seat was taking up so much of the space.  Bad idea.  We still had to hold Liesl for much of the trip but without having enough space to do so she was incredibly unhappy as were we.  She just screamed and screamed making pretty much everyone else pretty unhappy as well.  She is the loudest child ever.

We were very thankful when we touched down in Las Vegas at eight forty five and could get off of the plane.  Vegas falls into Pacific Time and so we have jet lag to deal with for the next few days as well.

We had a shuttle all scheduled and ready for us so we just had to grab our luggage and make it to the taxi stands.  That was incredibly easy.  Dominica is really good at getting this stuff all organized prior to us ever leaving.

We got to the hotel around ten local time which was almost noon back in Texas and one in the afternoon back in New York.  A bit later than I had been thinking that it would be.

We were incredibly hungry when we finally got to the hotel and got unpacked but we were really impressed with the hotel room.  We got room 30-034 which, of course, was on the thirtieth floor and had views out over the Belagio, Paris, Rio, etc.  It was an awesome room.  We loved the layout.  The bedroom and the living room were split only by a narrow wall that had a large LCD screen on either side – one facing the king bed and the other facing the couch.  Very nice setup.  Attractive and very functional.  There was a great workstation for me to setup my laptop as well and tons of windows with a gorgeous view.

Even though it felt like the middle of the afternoon it was still pretty early on Pacific Time so we called down to room service and ordered up some breakfast.  It took about half an hour for breakfast to arrive.  It was very impressive.  They set the table just like we were at a nice restaurant and they even brought up a toaster and toasted our bread right there on the spot so that it would be hot.  The food was excellent although at $80 for two adults and a toddler it was rather pricey.  Maybe avoiding room service is the way to go for future meals!

After breakfast I set up shop and worked for the day.  In the middle of the afternoon Andy came down to visit for a little while and then went and did some more wedding preparation stuff while I finished up working for the day.  After the work day was over we went down and met up with Andy and Miranda and Miranda’s brother Kip and his fiancee Jan and we went out for a walk in Vegas looking to find the Walgreen’s that carried soy milk as we had run out for Liesl and it was just a matter of time before she was going to get hungry and would be very upset if we did not have any more food for her.

The walk was surprisingly long considering that the Walgreen’s was practically right across the street.  But to get out to the strip required walking through the Vdara and then through the Aria and out through the new City Center shopping complex and then down the street and across Las Vegas Boulevard and then back to the Walgreen’s.  It was a good hike.  We did manage to find soy milk, though, so Liesl was happy.

We did some wandering around on the strip for a little while and then returned to the hotel and got ready for dinner.  Once everyone was changed and ready we met in the lobby of the Vdara where almost everyone was staying.  Dinner was Andy’s parents, Tony, Dominica, Liesl, Miranda’s parents, Miranda’s brother and fiancee and, of course, the wedding couple of me, as well.  We walked over to the Aria where we had a Spanish tapas dinner at Julian Serrano.

Dinner was excellent.  Everyone really enjoyed the food.  Tony thought that it was the best meal that he had ever eaten, in fact.  Everyone did tapas and some people went on to do paella as well which Dominica and I decided to forgo.

After dinner we stopped by the Aria’s patisserie and picked up dessert for tonight and breakfast for tomorrow to save us from the temptation of ordering room service unnecessarily.

After hitting the patisserie it was only about eight thirty but everyone was exhausted and decided that it was time to turn in for bed.  So we all went out separate ways.  Dominica and I were definitely ready to get some sleep.  Eight thirty local time is ten thirty at home in Texas and eleven thirty back in New York and since I still work on New York hours we were pretty tired – especially after getting almost no sleep last night and having traveled so much in the last twenty four hours.

Tomorrow morning I have to be up early as I am working a normal day before the wedding.  Luckily working from the hotel room has proven to be really easy.

It was a busy morning.  I got up and worked from home for a little bit then Brian drove me over to the office to cut down on the walking time.  Today is going to be one crazy day.  I am still pretty tired after not having gotten much sleep two nights ago.

Work was quite busy today.  So busy that I ended up skipping breakfast this morning so that I could speed things up and then ended up skipping lunch as well!  I was starving by the time that the end of the day rolled around.  It was good that I worked through everything, though, because I really needed to get a lot of work done so that we would be able to get out and on to the road at a decent time this evening as we have a lot of traveling to do and every minute that we leave later is a minute less sleep that Dominica, Liesl and I are going to get tonight.

I actually managed to be done with work right at five o’clock.  Dominica and Brian actually weren’t ready yet.  I had to wait twenty minutes before they were ready to roll.  They swung by the office and picked me up from there so that I could keep working until the last possible minute.  I ended up getting caught for another ten minutes but by five thirty we were out the door and on our way over to Men’s Warehouse where we had to pick up my suit that I need for the wedding on Friday.

The stop at Men’s Warehouse was very quick.  The suit was ready but there was no time to try it on since we could not get alterations done anyway.  So we just grabbed the suit and ran out the door to get on to the highway.

So it was roughly six when we got on the road to drive from Irving to Houston.  We stopped on the road to pick up some Jack in the Box to eat in the car.  JitB has a pretty big menu that Dominica and I can eat so they are a great fast food stop and the quality is really good.  We are appreciating much of the extended dining options that we have down here.

We made pretty good time once we ate and fueled the car.  It was on to the Baymont as quickly as possible to drop off Brian where he will be staying this week.  Then back on to the road to get down to the Grices’ in League City so that we could get a little sleep.  It was pretty late when we got in and got to bed.  Probably around midnight we finally got to bed.  Liesl was very restless, though, so there was almost no really good sleep for us.

We have to be up at five in the morning so that we can rush off to Bush Intercontinental Airport to get off to Vegas in the morning.  We have a very tight schedule.

We went to bed a little after eleven last night.  Liesl then woke me up around two thirty this morning.  I tried to fall back asleep after she did that but after being awake until almost four I decided to just give up on the whole idea and to just get up and get out of bed.  Better to be productive and feel good about myself rather than to just lay in bed thinking about all of the work that I should be doing but am not.

So at four in the morning I sat down at my little built in desk in the living room and got to work on my laptop.  I did a ton of work today.  I mean a ton.  The amount of work that I had managed to complete before anyone else was awake in the house was pretty crazy.

My biggest project was getting SMB IT Journal, the ezine of small business technology, migrated from a custom hosted server over to the Rackspace Cloud in San Antonio.  Not that it was a complicated project, just time consuming.  I have several CMS systems that need to go through this migration so I will be working on that as time permits.  I managed to get several systems migrated today which helped to take a load off of my plate.

I was intending to head into the office early today but ended up getting caught up with a few issues at the office that kept me from going in and then there was one phone conference after another and it just ended up being a work from home day.  A really, really busy day, in fact.

This morning I got up and walked into the office carrying three dozen doughnuts from Round Rock Donuts.  People have been waiting for a long time to get to try these.  We figured out that if you microwave them for ten seconds they are almost just like fresh.  Not quite the same as getting them down in Round Rock but still way better than normal doughnuts.

It ended up being a crazy doughnut day as someone else in the office brought in two dozen doughnuts from Dunkin Donuts this morning as well so we had five dozen altogether not including the almost one dozen that I left back at the house that Dominica and Brian tore through today while I was at work.

We ate a ton of doughnuts today.  Once we figured out how to microwave them we just ate them all day.  For lunch Brian drove over and picked up John and I and we went to Rockfish.

This evening, after work, I walked home the leftover doughnuts as Dominica was desperate to get more of them – she had finished off the box that I had left for her (it had not been entirely full, but still) and wanted more.  Liesl had started trying them as well and liked them.  My daughter is going to be very, very spoiled – her first taste of doughnut was a Round Rock Donut!

This evening we went out and did some really quick shopping at Walmart – just basic supplies.  Then we ran to a meeting that Brian had set up.  We had dinner in Dallas’ West End district at Spaghetti Warehouse.  I haven’t eaten at a Spaghetti Warehouse in probably twenty years or possibly more.  Dominica has never eaten at one and neither has Liesl, obviously.

We had a nice dinner.  We were meeting with a friend of Brian’s that he had met online on a video game that he plays on Facebook and had wanted to meet while Brian was in town.  It was nice to get to see some of downtown Dallas.   I have driven through but have never stopped there before.

After dinner we just drove back to the house and pretty much headed straight off to bed.  It was rather late.