The story went that while decorating the cake, Kirst noted that there were 24 candles in a pack and told Teddy that next year would be annoying because she'd have to buy a second pack for one candle. She apparently said this while writing on the cake and so, put 25 instead of 24. Makes sense to me, and still pretty funny.
Toward the end of the month Mom heard about a listing for Corgi puppies for sale. With Lily's impending departure to Charlottesville in August, she needed a new pup to keep her company. Of course, the listing included at least two puppies, and we had to go meet with them too and help pick out my mom's puppy. The decision to drive up to Winchester that Saturday to meet the woman with the puppies was made early in the week, and it was clear well before we left Blacksburg that we would most likely be returning with the second puppy. We couldn't leave him by himself now could we?
We arrived and met with two little reddish-brown fuzzballs. The woman told us about them and the litter, telling us that they'd been born without tails, that the little one was the runt of the litter, but also the Alpha without a doubt. I was duly appointed with choosing which pup would be mine and which would go home with my mom. I ended up choosing the runt, partly because he had already shown himself to be a bit devilish and I didn't want poor aging Mally to deal with him. I had just about made my decision known when, after shopping at Petco with him in my arms, I was heading for grass to set him down and he peed all over me. Little chet.
I cleaned myself and then declared that the little one was Crash, and he was coming with me, despite the peeing incident. We actually then headed to Fairfax to spend some time with each other before Kirst and I finally headed back down to Blacksburg. We went to Stonegate first so Cory could meet Crash. We were all sitting with Crash in the kitchen and talking for about twenty minutes before I realized I hadn't seen Zubie in a while. I looked around the apartment and quickly found him, sitting in the corner of the living room, ears down, and an ultimately pathetic look on his face. I called to him and he was very excited to find out we weren't replacing him and that we still liked him.
After a while, we headed over to Windsor Hills and got ready to go to bed. We put crash in his crate and he promptly began crying pitifully, regardless of anything we said. The only way we got him to shut up was Kirsten laid on the floor with her fingers through the door of the crate. If, after he fell asleep, she got up to come to bed, he would wake and begin crying almost instantly. So she slept on the floor the first night, I the next, and so on. It didn't take long before we gave up and let him sleep in the bed with us so that we could actually sleep too.
Eventually Crash got over his whining thing (mostly, he still does it in the mornings if we put him in the crate for the night, usually because he refuses to go to sleep). And just a couple weeks later, the semester was over and Kirsten, Teddy, Chris, Katie, and Dylan were all putting on their long, flowing, black robes and getting ready to graduate.
The large ceremony on Friday night was threatened by thundershowers and delayed for a while. Eventually they set up a some-what shortened ceremony in Lane Stadium. The rather more meaningful ceremony took place the next day, with the individual college graduations. While Kirst had wanted to go to as many of our friends' graduations, after hanging out at Katie's the night before for a party and generally the exhaustion (plus amount of traffic), we bailed on the others and just went to the English department's graduation ceremony where Kirst got her well deserved diploma.
I'm sure I'll leave things out, but the summer seemed to be a bit of a whirlwind of activity. We moved out of Windsor Hills and all my stuff managed to clutter up the Stonegate apartment for a while. We also repainted all the walls from their various colors back to white. It was a bit of a rushed job, to the point where the primer we were using was cracking as it dried. However, they renovated the place after we moved out so they didn't charge us a cent, despite the bad paint and the hole in the carpet courtesy of Zubie. A little over a week after I moved all my stuff into Stonegate, we helped Cory move out into his new place.
In June we had our wedding shower, which I was originally advised to avoid, then told to make an appearance where I was promptly wrapped in a toilet paper wedding dress. A few days later, for Kirst's birthday, we went up to Baltimore and took a tour of the park before going to the game against the Nats. During BP before the game, I caught a ball courtesy of one of the coaches. It was the first time I'd ever caught a ball at a game, so I was smiling like a little kid for most of the night.
At the beginning of July we moved out of Stonegate and into our new place. My mom was a saint and drove down for the weekend to help us pack and move everything. Well, to step back, the first day we painted the whole place. Then the next day we had a 14ft Uhaul reserved. We show up at the place and this guy looks at me blankly and tells me they don't have any trucks. I spent the next half-hour or so on the phone with Uhaul, seething, pacing back and forth behind this building. Apparently the guy was a moron and didn't inform Uhaul that they needed to assign the reservation to another franchise. Eventually I got to someone helpful and she managed to find a much smaller truck for 6 hours and gave me $50 off for the inconvenience, which Mollified me a bit.
We hauled ass to get everything packed in the limited time we had. In the end we didn't get everything, but all the big stuff and big boxes. Over the next week we would pick up the rest. The following weekend mom and Kirst's mom came down and helped with the finishing touches and the like. After living in our new place for all of a week and change, we headed up to Northern Virginia to be around for the last minute wedding prep and bachelor/bachelorette parties.
For the bachelor party, Sweede arranged a trip to Atlantic City for two nights. The guys were incredibly kind (thank you all again) and donated money for me to gamble with since I couldn't afford any of my own (which I managed to mostly lose). It was a great time hanging out with the guys for a few days. We concluded the trip with an O's game with terrific seats down the third base line.
A few days later was the big day. It also happened to be the hottest day of the year. I woke up before the sun as near as I can recall, and then sat around not doing much until around noon, when I had the longest, most painstaking shave of my life. A little after two, Nick and I drove over to the Ritz Carlton where Kirst and I would be staying and checked in. We then got over to Meadowlark around 3:00 and made some last minute adjustments for the DJ table and the like, and then sat around some more.
The whole event is a bit of a blur. We had an absolute blast seeing everyone and then dancing like crazy all night. By the end it was just immediate family and best friends, which was a lot of fun. I'm not doing the night justice at all, but then I could spend an entire post on just the wedding and not do it justice (and maybe I'll try at some point).
Someone managed to find out where we were staying and have a baby crib placed in the room for when we got there. The scarier part was that the door wasn't closed all the way when we arrived. I'm still not sure who did it. The little baby-proofing bag came in handy when Kirst cut herself shaving the next morning. She got to wear a dino-band-aid.
A few days after the wedding we were off for the honeymoon in Europe. Once again, it deserves a post of its own, complete with pictures. For now I'll skip over it and just say that Santorini is probably the most beautiful spot on Earth, at least as far as I've seen, and that I want to go back both on a cruise and back to Italy and Greece.
A few days after we got back from Europe, we headed back to Blacksburg and I geared up for my final year of grad school.
This post is long enough as it is, so I will hold off on the last four months of the year for my next post, which I will try to make sooner rather than later.
All the best to you and yours,
-TES
