giza | Entries tagged with family

I had a pretty awesome Memorial Day weekend last weekend. I went up to my parents' place for the first time since Christmas. They're fine, the cat is ~~stupid~~ fine, and the rest of my family is fine.

I've been wearing my knee braces whenever I walk around, just like my doctor told me to, and they've gotten much much better. I have an MRI scheduled for this coming Wednesday, so we can see what precisely is going on inside the knee. Still, I can walk for considerable distances and feel well enough to do my normal thing at Anthrocon at this point.

(PROTIP: Want to get the smell out of neoprene knee braces? Soak in 1 cup vinegar and 1 cup hot water for an hour. That kills the fungus.)

Speaking of Anthrocon, I spent yesterday working with registration laptops, giving funny looks to MSIE 8, and testing all of our badge printers. Everything still works, and I feel more confident about onsite registration this year (not that last year didn't go fine) because my code has remained largely unchanged since last year, and I made more documentation for troubleshooting purposes, should anything go wrong.

While visiting my parents, I took a trip to the old neighborhood where I grew up, walked around, and took many pictures. Once again, the UV filter on my camera did its job.

And here's the whole set, browseable in Flash:

Enjoy!

My younger sister and my aunt had the idea of throwing a surprise 38th anniversary party for my parents so they could renew their wedding vows. While their actual 38th anniversary isn't until October, she felt that Summer would be a better time to hold an outdoor party, and especially since their last Summer was pretty much wrecked with a couple of hospital trips.

So on Saturday afternoon, about 80 friends of my parents arrived early in the afternoon, followed by my parents arriving around 2:30, and finding a big crowd of their friends waiting for them.

Then Monsignor Murphy walked out and renewed their vows in front of everyone, which was all sorts of cool.

I also got to chat with Msgr. Murphy for a little while, which I really enjoyed as he was a childhood hero of mine. No really--straight from the muzzle of Mr. I-hate-religion here. While I'm not a huge fan of religion, praying, or churches, I was raised as a Roman Catholic and went to church nearly every Sunday until about age 15 or 16. I got to see many of Msgr's homilies, and I never once heard a word about politics, gays, or evolution. What I did hear lots of was tolerance, forgiveness, and understanding. In other words, he acted the way a Christian should be acting.

Maybe I should change my name to Mr. I-hate-religion-mixed-with-politics.

Anyway... getting back to my post about the weekend, a cake maker was hired to create a replica of my parents' original wedding cake, and it turned out pretty well.

After the party, it was back to my parents' place to crash, then back again to my aunt's place on Sunday to finish cleaning up. I then spent the afternoon amusing myself by doing some channel surfing and playing pool against myself (I lost) while my parents chatted with Theo and Kathlene and played catchup.

The full dump of pictures can be found here.

Finally, we got to see some deer wander through the yard on Sunday afternoon: