I don’t know why I don’t write here more often, but in case you were wondering, I’m still alive.

I was going to take a writing class online this summer, but after much procrastination I decided to withdraw from that at the end of the second week and try again sometime when I was actually interested in starting off on the right foot (so to speak).

After the spring semester ended (I definitely could have studied harder and done better), I had a few weeks off. These were spent working and doing not much of any significance or interest, which could probably summarize my summer so far. Hooray for being an adult!

My most recent adventures, at least in real life, involve weddings. I had a cousin’s wedding the weekend before last (more on that later) and about a month ago, I accompanied a friend to a wedding reception. For both events, I wore a tie like this, which says “Ties suck” in binary (ASCII) and was purchased shortly before prom my junior year of high school. Has it really been 6 years since 2008?

I wasn’t sure what to wear to the wedding, so after making inquiries and showing the friend I was accompanying my tie selection, she (with assistance from the mystical fashion powers granted by an additional X chromosome) chose the binary tie, which I thought was a good choice anyway, and seemed appropriate after I learned the bride is a chemical engineer.

Our original plan was to leave that morning, drive the 5 hours to the wedding, attend the wedding and reception, and then drive back that night. Before we left town, we stopped for coffee and burn a playlist to CDs so we could listen to it on the drive, but we were having technical difficulties. I wondered if we should have just left and maybe tried getting it to work while on the road. Anyway, as we left town the GPS estimated we’d be there a few minutes after the wedding started, so I thought I’d try shaving some time off by driving slightly over the speed limit. After driving for slightly over an hour, I decided that I was ready to stop for a restroom and food break (having drank too much coffee too fast and not eaten breakfast), but we didn’t actually stop for a while after that since we were looking for a McDonald’s and kept finding excuses to not stop (wanting to get as far as possible, not wanting to hit the lunch rush, not finding one, etc.). We finally stopped at a McDonald’s after about 2.5 or 3 hours of driving.
I was already dressed for the wedding (shirt, khakis, dress shoes, and my tie was in the car) but, understandably, the friend I was with didn’t want to wear her dress and heels for the 5 hour drive, so she had planned on changing before we arrived at the wedding. After I got my food, she said that she couldn’t find her dress in the car, so I had looked while she bought food.  I didn’t find it either, so we started driving back the way we came. After she called her parents (and I had driven south for about 20 minutes), we turned around and started heading north again. After driving through some rain, we switched places and arrived just in time for the reception to start. We stayed at the reception for about 4 hours, which was long enough for the meal, some cake, and a bit of dancing. After getting more coffee, we drove south. There was a bit more rain, and we switched places again shortly before returning to where we had started our long day. As it turned out, she had forgotten to grab the dress when I picked her up from her apartment that morning.

The weekend before last, I left my apartment, met my parents and siblings for lunch about an hour before the wedding, and after arriving at the church I got to help by saving seats for some of my aunts and cousins. I had never attended a Catholic wedding before, so there’s a first time for everything. I thought it was interesting that the priest seemed to have a bit of an accent, but I had trouble identifying exactly what it was. After the wedding, we drove back to the hotel and checked in, shortly before it started raining buckets. As for the reception, it was nice seeing relatives and cousins I don’t get to see very often. When the time came for the garter toss I went up with one of my cousins, both of us hoping we wouldn’t be the only single guys there, but luckily we weren’t. The garter was wrapped around a football, which was spiked, and some little boy caught it first. I didn’t do any dancing (and I didn’t take advantage of the bar), but like I said it was nice seeing relatives I don’t get to see very often.
After leaving the hotel the next morning, I was slightly lost trying to find a gas station and a road south, but after filling up I was on my merry way. After about half an hour, I started noticing the car vibrating, so I pulled over hoping I hadn’t lost a tire and didn’t see anything wrong. I stopped again a bit later and noticed a lug nut was missing from one tire. After stopping in a small town and buying a lug nut, I had hoped that would fix the problem but it didn’t seem to help very much. I managed to limp back to my apartment (driving through heavy rain was exciting, by which I mean kind of scary). As soon as I got back to the city I live in, my car reached the mileage where it was due for an oil change, so I made an appointment to get the oil changed and tires balanced and rotated. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to fix the problem, so I made another appointment to get it looked at again.

That’s pretty much all of the excitement in my (real) life lately. I’ve also been working fewer hours lately, which I’ve enjoyed aside from seeing slightly smaller paychecks. I have plenty of ideas for writing projects, but I have yet to actually get started on any of those. Also, I’m part of a group that recently started a new Pathfinder adventure path. I might have to actually start one or both of my major writing project ideas in the very near future. Today’s my last day off this week, unfortunately, but I should learn tomorrow what my work schedule looks like.