Friday: started making notes at 6:50 PM. We're at the Waterfall in Delaware for the wedding of Jeremy and Victoria Baker, where they've started the dancing portion of the reception. Julie and I ate way too much during the cocktail hour. Going to have to make this abbreviated to get through everything.
Wake up; had day off work.
Laundry: managed to get all my clothes cleaned and folded.
Caught up on Hearthstone for an hour.
Went to bank (for money to be included with the wedding card) and corner store (for caffeinated soft drinks)
Shower, shave, survey my flesh with dismay: Grey Goose has left her clawmarks all over my neck and jaw
Lunch (full-sized salad with chicken)
Outline (making sure events from books 8, 4, and 2 are forecast appropriately in book 1)
Get dressed; disappointed in the shortcomings of my wardrobe (belt? Socks? Shoes? Jacket button repair?)
Julie drove us to Chester; GPS struggled with World Cup traffic. Waiting in a line of cars at a stop light while people cut in and out of line to try to get ahead
Champagne in lobby; left message for the couple on their phone. (Forgot to include our names.)
Outdoor seating: too much sun on the starboard side
Julie picked up a fan and a water bottle; I didn't want to have something I'd be tempted to fiddle with
The ceremony: officiant stood to one side with the couple in the middle. Jeremy had to hug everybody in his wedding party and clap them on the back as they arrived during the procession (except for Victoria, of course). Victoria's train kept getting caught on the stones of the walkway.
Moving into solarium for cocktail hour. Too many snack stations! "Back the Blue" version of a Blue Hawaiian. General Tso's Chicken, yakisoba noodles, fried rice, barbecue brisket, barbecue chicken, mashed potato bar, meat and cheese sampler, slices of melon and honeydew and cantaloupe and pineapple, grapes, and that's not even counting the taco bar or pizza station or whatever they had at the opposite end of the hall that we never got to.
Catching up with people about the cruise, about our jobs, about life in Philly
Ushered into the dining hall. Table 13 out of 18 total, up to ten per table
Indoor pyrotechnics? Julie reminded of nightclub fires and crowd crush scenarios. The groom swapped out his black jacket for a new one in white
We danced for a bit, but the music wasn't great for it
The toasts. Parents of the bride, best man, father of the groom. Julie and I did a lot of silent communication with our eyes and our grip on one another's hand.
Dinner. How on earth can we eat any more? Salad with pear tart before the entree; steak for me and salmon for Julie; we shared our portions.
My social battery is pretty depleted by this point, which is why I'm taking the opportunity to summarize the proceedings on my phone while I try to muscle through this irresponsibly large slice of meat.
We ended up surrendering our plates in defeat, but I was able to take out 60% of my grilled ribeye before I yielded to the catering staff.
Julie reported that dessert stations have gone up in the hall, including a popcorn machine and a s'mores stand.
The electric violin player with the light-up bow is going real hard on his rendition of Aerosmith's "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing".
Julie: "I'm so full I'm uncomfortable. I just wanna beach."
The bride is dancing with her father, and this song is so purpose-constructed for this moment that I'm in disbelief. Julie said it was hard to find a song that didn't match that profile for our wedding.
Denise dancing with Jeremy to a song he picked out.
They're inviting everyone to the dance floor; pyrotechnics are back. We're TOO FULL
I guess I only just registered that the musicians are here to play along to whatever songs the DJ is playing? While they wander around and through the crowd on the dance floor?
As the dances progressed and Julie posted an Instagram story with one of the pictures of us that she'd taken, my phone notified me that I was running out of wireless Internet for the month, so I turned on airplane mode.
Toured the dessert hall; saw a chocolate fountain, a popcorn stand, a pegboard of donuts, racks of brownies and cookies and cakes and chocolate mousse, a creme brulee station, a cotton candy station, a chocolate waffle station, and a corner where they'd set up a photo booth. I just had a brownie, while Julie took a few snacks from the chocolate fountain to eat plain.
Somebody snagged us for a photo booth picture. I found a sultry bunny ear headband in the box to wear, which I paired with a very serious, solemn expression.
It's ten til ten and the dance floor is mostly the younger attendees, though Victoria's parents are still mixing it up.
Didn't think I'd have an opinion on this, but I guess I like these dresses with the thin horizontal back straps; they're suggestive in a way that a bare back isn't.
It's getting to the point where I want to take my contacts out.
Julie mentioned some relationship consultant who had said that couples that last the longest are those who can be weird around each other. I told her that we've got that quality in SPADES.
At five after ten, we decided to start making our farewells before we excused ourselves from the proceedings. Said farewell to Larry and Denise. On the way out, we finally found the wedding cake: it's part of the take-home treats along with chicken sandwich sliders wrapped in foil and more of the water bottles.
I drove us home. We couldn't stop talking about how over-the-top everything was. I treated the cats and crashed by 1:30 AM.
Thursday: didn't really feel like I was as productive at work as I would have liked, so I spent a lot of the day anticipating that I'd log back on to finally finish this week's reworks. After dinner, I went out to the living room to play more Zelda, and I finally finished the "Sage of Spirit" storyline. I'm coming up on the end of that game.
Wednesday: it's my Friday! I got a lot of project work done. For dinner, we had more of the chili, though we didn't finish it. We continued watching Archer, after which I leveled up another character through MoP Remix.
Monday: not a bad day for calls, but I had new departmental trainees with me for a couple hours and it messed up my break schedule. Phil bought Cliff over for a couple of weeks of cat-sitting. Julie went to Quizzo with Grace for the first time, so I had more goulash for dinner. The big reddit blackout due to their API changes is underway, so I spent most of my time watching Hearthstone and Magic players trying to draft in the opposite game's limited format, followed by a little bit of IF work. Julie's been stressing about how much worse her commute is going to be due to the highway bridge collapse, so she was having a hard time going to sleep. We'll see if I fare any better.
I missed this in my update, but it looks like I played Mask of the Rose today! Maybe it was in last night's info? Oh well.
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Way back in 1997, I wrote a letter to myself which I was supposed to read as a 30-year-old. I rediscovered it today, at the age of 35, and I wrote a reply on Select Button, which I am reproducing below.
Hey, Jason. Sorry I'm only getting to you after 20 years, instead of the 15 you were expecting. I am "out of college" in the sense that I'm not going there anymore, and I am married. No kids, actually, and in fact, we're so dedicated to not having kids that you got fixed last fall.
The reason you don't know what to write—and the reason you're kind of circumspect about the wordings you use in the rest of this letter—is that you and I are uncomfortable articulating our true desires, which is pretty hilarious considering how mainstream, predictable, and vanilla our tastes run. You want to ask me about the girl or girls you have crushes on, about whether sex is as awesome as you think it's going to be, and about making video games, not just "computer programs" or whatever bullshit phrase we used.
No, you won't write a book over the next twenty years, although you'll write more than a book's worth of text on various forums and blog posts in that time. No, you won't have created a game in the next two decades, because you're going to be wasting a lot of time making custom levels and halfhearted IF projects that you're never going to be satisfied with because you don't have patience and you're easily distracted. Case in point: I was actually working on an IF project today when I decided to look through my old notebooks one last time in case I'd squirreled additional notes away somewhere, and I came across this letter. Yes, you're still in contact with your parents, and your sister, and your closest cousins. Yes, you still play fucking video games, and they are the strangle-vine draining your life of time and money and sleep.
Yes, you still have the journal you have in mind, although it's in a box somewhere and it's probably going into the trash as soon as I find it. (Editor's note from 2026: I did not throw it away. I still have it on the shelf behind me. It is exactly as embarrassing as I feared it would be.)
I've got our unicycle in the basement behind me right now. I was never as good at riding as Dad, and we don't really have time or reason to ride it anymore. As far as debate and forensics are concerned, you won't do the research to excel in debate, and your interests are too asinine to pick good material for forensics. You'll get poor grades for three years before finally realizing maybe you shouldn't keep enrolling, so you decide to enroll in something else as a senior. That's probably one of the last good decisions you'll make for the next six to eight years. The programming classes go fine, although you were so coy about articulating an interest that you could have actually focused on this in high school and maybe done something with programming in college, although I should warn you that your poorly-chosen major of psychology will be the least of your problems at that age.
You've got another couple of decent years playing Magic: the Gathering coming up, but you're going to lose interest right around the same time you start having access to money with which to buy video games. You'll get back into it later, only to quit again later still. I expect this cycle to continue.
I am guessing that you're pretty firmly indoctrinated in Nintendo-centric thinking since you mentioned Clayfighter, as you have little to no interest in fighting games otherwise, and no, we don't wind up getting Clayfighter. Pretty sure it wound up to be terrible. You're probably still riding high on the great times you're having with your Nintendo 64, a little embittered at your previous fave Square for ditching Nintendo; when they start advertising FF7 in a few months, you're going to badmouth it because of how ridiculously oversized Cloud's sword is, but they'll win you over with the PC version.
It's kind of funny that you should mention RoboRally, since you never actually get to play it, let alone purchase a copy, but board games will eventually become a big piece of your entertainment budget! (Editor's note from 2026: I'd forgotten that I played a digital version sometime between 2005 and 2010. I also picked up a physical copy of RoboRally a few years after writing this update.)
"Got people on my mind," huh? Alright, let's go over the list. Your first crush, J., may have already moved to Seattle by the time you wrote that letter. Twenty years later, a website called Facebook will let you discover that she's now some sort of anti-anxiety comedian/activist. I don't know what that means, either. Crush #2, A., will graduate high school a year before you do and you'll never see or hear from or think about her again. A cursory Facebook search suggests she's still alive. Crush #3, C., will *also* move to Seattle some time after college, and you're going to make such a mess of things in 2000 (and, unfortunately, a fair number of years afterward) that you should probably rule out ever living in the state of Washington. There are going to be other crushes, and eventually you get married. Stop worrying about it.
I haven't read "The Social Me". You're going to get over your interest in psychology in the next four years. (Editor's note, etc.: that interest will resurface within the next ten years, actually, though more in the context of "patient" than of "provider".)
You won't get better about procrastinating in the next twenty.
Speaking of which, I'd better get back to work. (Final editor's note: things seem better in 2026. I wasn't ready to forgive myself for my errors yet, back in 2017.)
Sunday: time for the annual picnic at the zoo that my employer hosts. This was the time we got to check out the new elephant enclosure for the first time. It's a much nicer area with a lot more space. Julie estimated it's maybe six times bigger than the old area.
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@familyjules727 on twitter:
First day of waking up at 6 am to get our run out of the way was successful, if not jarring. Still waiting for that energy boost...
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Friday: went out to eat with friends. Julie persuaded me to wear a mustache for the evening.
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