Somehow I ended up going to a wedding of a friend of a friend of Mom's; the theme was Latino-western-autumn, which worked surprisingly well.
It was a gorgeous day if you weren't behind a viewfinder; of course I didn't bring a polarizing filter (which helps control light and color saturation) or a lens hood (which helps with lens flares), which left half my pictures washed out or speckled with haze.

The ceremony was at the top of a 35% grade rain-softened grassy hill, which I assumed meant I could wear flats. Then I got there and every other woman had sacked up and worn stilettos. Ladyfail!

The funniest/most mortifying point was when Mom and I realized we both had been admiring the same Ryan Reynolds-esque wedding guest (sorry, girls, no pic available).

Dad has been helping Tipton Haynes, a local living history farm, make sorghum molasses for the past ten years. I'm not sure how he got involved, but like all of the odd stuff he does - being a standardized patient for the medical school, measuring road race courses for the track club - once he gets started he goes all out.


It was a little rainy, unfortunately. And when I say rainy, I mean we had our own flash flood warning.

If everyone is very good, tomorrow I'll treat you to the video that the Johnson City Press made.
More pictures here.

Well, it did for a few days, although they issued a flash flood warning yesterday morning.

Helping a box turtle cross the street; right after this Steve made me rub Purell all over my hands because "turtles carry bacteria". Let the turtle flu rumormongering begin!


Justin is concerned about something, probably the fact that he'll be our only friend in Athens and will be forced to come to all our dinner parties.

Another place I could envision living for a while, another place crossed off the list because of weather. Then again, how the heck do girls maintain their boot collections in the mist?

So I actually did record a very literal version of the title of this post, as planned with Sabrina, complete with yowling and feline obfuscation/revelation, but the problem with Grendel is that when he's unhappy he's more zombie than ninja, so it ended up being less spastic and funny and more eh and aww. Not to mention that the only bag I could successfully encapsulate him in was a mesh laundry bag, so you can actually see him before he jumps out, which sort of ruins the "what's in the box bag?!" aspect of it. And then finally, when he's escaping, he's kind of, um, not great at finding the exit. What can I say, maybe all those times my roommates baked him out in college did actually have an affect.
Short story sufficiently embiggened, next Friday (August 7th) will be my last day at Sugar. I'm quitting because Steve and I are leaving the Bay Area, and we are doing that because we like the idea of moving around and living different places. The downside of this plan is that sometimes we don't see eye to eye on WHEN to move, and then somebody goes to Iowa and somebody stays in California and everybody is a little cranky, including the cat that is currently underneath the deck right now thinking, "WTF was THAT."
Even though I'm sad to give up nice co-workers and interesting work and mad scrilla, I'm also excited about our plan, which is more or less as follows:

1. Pack up the hippie car and drive it one last time through the mean streets of Berkeley at the end of August.
2. I take a road trip across the US on I-40 with a hopped-up-on-kitty-Valium cat in the passenger seat; Steve, having flown back to Iowa after helping me pack up the house, takes a road trip on I-80 and I-65.
3. Meet up and hang out with my parents in upper east Tennessee. Eat pie. Listen to Steve and Dad discuss how there is totally still going to be an economic apocalypse.
4. Find jobs. Preferably in the same city as each other. And somewhere to live. Hopefully in the South.

That's it. We're talking about Athens, Georgia; Steve's brother will be going to school there. We're considering Savannah and Charleston. We like the idea of living somewhere warm and cheap, where "traffic" is when it takes you more than one red light to get through a stop, but we also realize that there may not be jobs in our chosen fancy media/design career paths in any of these places and that we might have to look in Atlanta or D.C. or even New York. It is both a fun and ridiculously stressful way to go about things, to be sure, but it works for us.
Finally, and most importantly, I'll be accepting applications for a new resident Arthur heckler all next week. Ideally, the candidate will have a background in baseless contrarian debate and underhanded personal insults, although I'll consider anyone with experience in class warfare/political subterfuge. Also, you need to have a camera and some expertise in balancing items on domed surfaces. Tryouts will be on Friday, so start warming up your populist rage!