sylvar

Last night, as I was finishing what I'd been writing about Penzey's, Bryan (the groom), Krista (the bride), and Brad (her brother) came by to invite us to join them at Dave and Buster's.  I like D&B a lot more than GameWorks, which is Tampa's lame excuse for a grownups' arcade.  I had mentioned going there while we were at Al's Pizza in Riverside, blocks away from the wedding site.

So Jodi and I drove -- it was about a quarter mile, but chilly with 20-30mph wind -- and we got there at the same time as the pedestrians.  Brad used to be a manager at this store, so he was greeted by the guys at the door, who let us in without a cover.  He even got Jodi a game card (and I bought one for myself).

They mostly played classic games; I played a trivia game that could have up to six players competing.  Alone, you can get about 20 prize tickets for the game.  With six players, the player with the most correct answers (and, as a tiebreaker, the least total time elapsed) can win up to 190 tickets. 

Even though Jodi and I took a break for a drink and a snack at the restaurant area, I still quickly and easily racked up enough tickets to win her a Care Bears plush.  Appropriately enough (it was after midnight), it was the beshamrocked Lucky Bear.  (Shut up, Firefox, I know beshamrocked isn't in your spelling dictionary.)  I've had no luck convincing this laptop to recognize the camera, so I might not be able to post photos for a few days.  But there's a cute photo of Jodi and her new stuffed animal, and you'll get to see it eventually.

This morning we gathered at the house my aunt Linda (mother of the bride) bought when it was a foreclosed-upon crack house and improved the hell out of.  We had brunch, featuring a chocolate fountain, champagne punch, homemade egg-a-mooby-biscuits, etc.  (Linda runs a cafe in Riverside and has also had a catering business--thus the chocolate fountain--so she was happy to be the brunch walla.)  They weren't asking for gifts, but they happily accepted a few.  They were excited about Penzey's and would have gone for themselves if they'd had time.  Oh, and by the way, since Linda's cafe is in another part of town, she's selling the house brunch was in.

This afternoon I fetched some lunch for Jodi from Dave and Buster's and walked over there with my aunt Susan.  I showed her a few of my favorites, and we shot up some aliens together while we waited for Jodi's food.  When Jodi called to see what was taking me so long, Susan answered my phone "Hello, Dave and Buster's", which got a laugh.  Jodi is now napping, and while I'd like to be out at D&B for the next half-hour or so, I accepted "how about you stay here and Internet for a while" as a compromise.  I'm sure I'll be back there tonight after the reception anyway.

I really wish the camera would connect to the laptop.  There are some wonderful shots in there.

These t-shirts are clever ways of raising funds for breast cancer research. I especially like the one that says fuck c*ncer (it's cancer that's obscene, says the explanation).

I woke up at 2:20 this morning and had some ice water and got into bed just in time for jitterbug5bi5 to return home from what turns out to have been her first official day as an employee of Sacred Grounds. I am so proud of my 妹妹!

And I am also very proud of Jodi, who will be going to Oregon next weekend to present a paper on friendship in Aristotelian and Confucian philosophy. This is her first professional presentation, and she's worked very hard on her material. I am confident that she will wow them.

I woke again at 5:00 and decided to use the morning productively: I looked up the azimuth (that's "which direction on the horizon?", if you're as new to astronomy as I am; this morning, at my latitude, it was around 101 degrees, or just south of east) and time of sunrise, grabbed some bagels near campus, and drove to the top of the less popular parking garage on campus to take photographs of sunrise and the dawn-lit campus.

Since this was all tripod work for long exposures, I don't think the shutter problem will have affected any of my shots. And since the moon was setting almost opposite the sunrise, I was able to get some nice telephoto shots of the moon setting behind a dawn-lit flag. (Which I'm sure will be blurred, but might be interesting. Swear not by the inconstant moon, nor less by an intemperate flag.)

I'll drop off the film later this morning. Costco does an amazing job -- for around $5 I get the film developed and scanned to CD at about 5MB per photo. And I can always get prints if I want them. I'd have to shoot 20 rolls a month to run into Flickr's upload limit for paying users, and I don't think I'll ever keep that pace with a full-time job. Which is fine by me.

(Update: here are the photos.)
 

I've got a new LJ friend, mattyo3000, who is also my brother. So if you see him posting comments on my journal, you'll know who belongs to this new head popping up all of a sudden. Don't whack that mole!