Wedding.

My eldest sister was married last Saturday. I had the honor of being a torchbearer.

On Friday night we had the rehearsal. It was scheduled to start at 7, but we ended up starting at half past. We all went over to the Stemms' house for the dinner. The dinner was an informal munching down of Papa Murphy's Pizza and crazy conversations. We decided that the Harry Potter series would end with the British prime minister nuking Hogwarts.

We didn't get to bed until after midnight, and we had to get up early next morning to set up the Reception Hall. We were there two and a half ours before the ceremony. The cheesecake Matt cut got a little sloppy, and he had this mass of cheesy, cakey stuffing that was piled off to the side. He refused to eat it so I did. (don't worry, the cake looked fine.)

The Reception was pretty cool. Other than the obligatory wild-dancing-like-a-maniac (which we got the newly weds in on too, we rock!), which, as I'm sure you guessed, is necessary, there weren't too many other big things that stood out. Just the cheese ball, and the stick whacking game.

I tried to get Pastor's son and the one violinists sister to join us in our dancing, but they both refused.

Mike pointed out the cheese ball. (FYI: The cheese ball was a roll of cheese dip.) It was lying on the cracker dish with a knife stuck upright in it. My explanation was that it must have been attacking someone, and the "someone" killed the cruel cheese ball. Patchy said that it was definitely, brutally murdered. He pointed out that the knife was upright, and that if the cheese ball fell back the knife should be at an angle. He was obviously right.

And the stick whacky game (for lack of a better name) is just what it's name implies. All the players stand around in a circle with wooden dowels. Then there's one dowel - with Styrofoam balls duct taped onto the ends - that's used as a "ball" to be passed around the circle using the sticks. It's really hard, but really fun. So after work today I stopped by Lowes and bought me the equipment.

I was also instructed to see the Pachelbel Rant on Youtube.

Goodbye Milky Way; Hello Andromeda!

So I was surfing around wikipedia for stuff on Galaxies.

I tell you, that is one fun thing to surf.

Well, as I was bopping around the pages I come across the Andromeda-Milky Way collision page. Apparently, by measuring the Redshift (or in this case "Blue shift") they calculated the velocity of the Andromeda Galaxy. It's heading towards us as a velocity of 301 ± 1 km/s. At that speed the estimated time before it gets here is around 2 billion years.

During my surfing I stumbled onto this Fox News article from last week (the 16th) on this very same subject.

A simple rundown of what it says is: In a few billion years when every who reads this is dead and wont care anymore, there is the smallest possibility that we might get shunted over to the Andromeda Galaxy.

Well, It's not that dramatic about it. It does state it in a more reasonable manner. But I still got a good laugh out of it.

Bring on that test!

I had one pint of bear and one shot of scotch,
One bottle of wine and a bourbon on the rocks,
I had one lasse on me right another on me left,
I looked that puppet in the eye and said, "Give me that test!"

The Jedi drinking song!

The Prequel!

For those with slow 'net connections:

Original.

Prequel.

myHT

So, with much pomp and fanfare, myHT was released last Thursday. And I must say, I was completely underwhelmed.

For quite some time now (I don't know exactly how long.) we've been hearing about this "Project BAMBI" - the working title for myHT. It was supposed to be incredible, it was supposed to be stupendous, it was supposed to rock my little world full of awe.

Now that it's been released I've taken a look at it. It's a collection of links to various articles or blogs (Which are cool, to be sure.) in little bubbles that you can change the order so as to get your favorite on top (Which is also pretty cool.)

Now don't get me wrong, I think it's pretty cool. But we were promised something that would blow us away with awe. When I looked at it I was rather disappointed. I think it would have been much more incredible if it hadn't been quite so over-hyped.

And my eyes... I used to be able to spend so much time on the computer. But now I feel as though my eyes have caught up with me. Altogether the blogs I read - the email - the forums. Maybe if we took all the myHT articles and made the HT magazine go bi-monthly instead of quarterly. I think my eyes could handle that.

Now I just got to wait until I get mobbed by all y'all people who disagree with me for whatever reasons.

Rickrolled

Apparently there's this new internet phenomenon where you link to this certain Rick Astley video on Youtube. However, you tell people you are linking to a different thing.

My brother said when he first got this prank pulled on him the view counter on the video was really low. Now it's over 300,000. (in fact, it's over 9000) ;)

I saw this really funny video response to this whole phenomenon, you can find it here.

I think this Rickrolling idea seems funny, I'll have to try it sometime. (Beware)

Canada

So I think I've at least mentioned to everyone that I'm going to Canada, but I don't think I've told anyone when. Some of y'all may have found out from other sources when I'm going, but I doubt y'all did.

Anyway, I'll tell ya' now. It was this past week. (So that is why, if any of you tried to contact me recently, it didn't work.)

Now you're going to want to know how my trip went, right? That's okay, I was planning on telling you anyway.

We went to the town/city of St. Catharines for a conference. It was about the Pastor and Songwriter Paul Gerhardt. He was born 400 years ago this year. It was pretty cool. We had Dr. Kleinig speaking. Some of the other speakers I liked more, some less. But on the whole it is pretty cool.

There was the problem there were hardly any other people my own age there. In fact, beside my siblings, the only other people around my age were the Tomesch girls, and I really don't know them. I would have introduced myself, but, It's awkward enough to introduce yourself to a single person, but it can be done. When they're all in the middle of a conversation with each other, it's about 10x more awkward. (Just imagine, "Hi, I'm a stranger, and I'm here to hang out with you, don't worry about it, just continue your conversation.")

So what was my impression of Canada? I was only mostly in the Golden Horseshoe area, and just traveled through Southwestern Ontario. It was a lot like the US, except that one-way and yield signs didn't have any words on them, everything was metric, they had funny money, and the Canadian flag was everywhere. The Tim Hortons restaurants were everywhere too, there were more of those than McDs.

It also reminded me of Texas a bit. The Southwestern bit especially. The land seemed "bigger" than Wisconsin's, and there were few trees and fewer people. It was also pretty hot. Though I think that that was just the Midwestern region weather, and not an isolated climate phenomenon.

After the conference we stayed around for a bit and saw the locks, the falls, and toured a winery. I can't imagine why anyone would want to see the falls from the American side. It didn't seem like they had a good view at all.

I also saw a couple episodes of Andromeda, the 20 and 22 episodes of the fourth season. Real good place to start, I know.