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My trip to California was great. The wedding was beautiful. I’m so glad I was there to see Serena and Ed get married. Serena was beautiful.

I really liked the rabbi. It was the first Jewish wedding I’ve attended so I don’t know where traditional ceremony ended and the rabbi’s personality began. If most of it was standard then I’d like a Jewish wedding. It was so real and personal. It celebrated unity of the couple and the individual at the same time. Spiritual life and human relations shared equal time. I’ve never heard the word “lover” used so many times during a wedding.

There were four of Serena’s college friends there, plus a girlfriend from grade school. I had met them each before at some point, but we had never hung out. Serena, Shelly and I worked at the college newspaper together. I hung out with Shelly most of the day. A group of us also went out for dinner Sunday night. I had so much fun. I talked too much, but maybe not as much as I would have if I wasn’t trying to shut up. I’m still giggling over some of the conversations.

The sightseeing I did Saturday afternoon was nice. I got smashed pennies from both places. The Egyptian museum was very cheesy. The objects themselves were cool, but the displays were awful. It was like a small city historical society museum. There were typos in the display text. Many objects weren’t labeled at all and the ones that were labeled you had to walk back and forth up to ten feet to read the description for an object. I tried to stop reading because the misspellings and typos were driving me crazy, but there really was some cool stuff that I wanted to know about. I bought the museum catalog so I could read about some of the stuff. Hopefully the book is copyedited. I sent BugBoy a postcard with two cat mummies on it. They were pretty cool.

The Winchester Mystery House was really cool. I took all three tours, although the garden tour was an accident. The tour guides were fun and seemed to be enjoying themselves. On the manor tour we walked over a mile as we weaved up and down and through three floors of that crazy 160 room house. I got four different pennies there, including one design with a hard hat on it. You have to wear a hard hat for the basement part of the behind the scenes tour. I’d go back again to see it.

In October and each Friday the Thirteenth they do flashlight tours. That would be cool. Mom would have loved it. Her favorite number was thirteen too. There all many groups of thirteen within the house. The thirteenth bathroom has thirteen windows and thirteen steps leading to it. My favorite room was the daisy room. The stained glass was beautiful. The owner designed the daisy windows and Tiffany’s built them. I bought the book for the house too.

Oh, and Oakland Airport sucks. It is under construction and is more rinky-dink than Midway was before the expansion. There was one Women’s room for all 26 of Southwest’s gates. There was hardly any seating and the ground crew ran way behind with the luggage on both legs of my trip. I know they aren’t used to the volume of checked luggage, but Midway didn’t seem crippled by the load. There were two babies across the aisle from me on the trip back. One of them screamed for the whole four hours. I felt bad for the baby, but worse for the rest of us. The crowning touch was the stench of used diaper for that last hour. I’m pretty sure it originated from the toddler seated behind me.

So the trip was worth the cost and trouble, even the smell of poo. Serena is married, and the next time she comes home for a visit we plan to all meet at someone’s home so we can have more time with her and with each other.

Comments

[karen]

Post a pic of the wedding outfit and fake tan!

[Dodi]

I have no pictures. I did not bring my camera to Califoria and I didn't think to document the fake tan. Sorry