I spent the majority of the weekend with the family, celebrating Emily and Jared's Friday evening wedding at the Palmdale Estates where last summer my friend Joe was married. The ceremony itself was pretty brisk, and was done within 15 minutes. My dad needed a bit more practice as he went back to his seat after walking Emily down the aisle without acknowledging to the officiant that he was presenting her for marriage. Oops. All's well that ends well though, and the ceremony was heartfelt and genuine, and that's all it needs to be.

At the reception i got a chance to talk a bit with my cousin Joanna as well as with my aunt Nancy, and chatted a bit with my groomsman Chris about our upcoming ceremony. I volunteered for all the excursions back to the house to get forgotten items (such as the all-important marriage license), so i did a fair bit of running around in between mingling. Luckily the Palmdale Estates is only a 5 minute drive from my parents' house. Later in the evening, i got to see what a year or so of dancing lessons have done for my parents ... looks like they're ready to put me to shame at my reception.

The following day i spent at Stanford playing with cells and acquiring the first of what i hope will be piles upon piles of data. Good data, moreover. I then got my car washed and went home to take a long overdue nap. When V returned from work, she rattled me back into coherence after which we again headed to Fremont to have pizza and wedding/rehearsal dinner leftovers with Emily and Jared. I got to see some very nice photos of great grandparents that were a wedding gift to Emily from our auntie Cathy. Emily and Jared then headed back to their hotel to rest before Emily flew back to Chicago Sunday morning. Meanwhile, Hilary, V, and i found that Kill Bill, Volume 2 was playing at the second-run theater in Milpitas, so we drove down for the 10:15 show. Where the first film revolved more around the beautiful action sequences, the second focused more on character development and interaction. Tarantino creates fantastic amounts of tension in several scenes, particularly the opening during the Bride's wedding, and also during the trailer showdown between the Bride and Elle. Collectively, one of the best films i've seen in a while.

Sunday was a no-shower, work-on-wedding-stuff, and generally-be-lazy kind of day. Got the rehearsal invites done, and finished reading Tom Robbins' Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. As far as Robbins books go, this one was probably one of the more subtle variety, relying on symbols to make the point rather than explicit philosophical discourse as in Jitterbug Perfume. I still have to give Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates the nod as my favorite of his works, but Frog Pajamas is now lodged in the back of my brain as i keep returning to query it for more meaning.