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A really good weekend
Mar. 26th, 2007 07:00 amI started the weekend off Friday night with a wedding rehearsal for my sister-in-law Lise's wedding. As you can imagine, it's pretty hard to mess up a wedding rehearsal. We went out to an Italian restaurant afterwards as a group, then returned to the condo in Westbrook, CT where we're staying all week and sat around chatting for a while with the rest of Monique's family who came in from all over for Saturday's wedding.
When I say "we're staying at a condo all week", I mean "Monique is staying there all week". I was just up there for the weekend. She has something like 6 or 7 weeks vacation a year. I only have 3, so she's up there and I'm back to work this morning. :-(
Saturday morning I got to the church ahead of the rest of the family because my flute choir was playing for the ceremony and we needed to be there early to set up and warm up and start playing 15 minutes before it started. This was the only snag to my weekend. Two of the members showed up early and decided to go for breakfast. They got back to the church 5 minutes *after* we were supposed to start playing. This was a bit annoying, but we pulled of a really good performance and everyone was happy. The bride and groom even gave us $50 more than the agreed upon price.
We did the typical favorite, Pachelbel's "Canon in D" (in G because it's a better key for the flute choir). We also did Faure's Pavane because it's Monique's favorite and she has some influence with the group's director. ;-) We were going to do Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata but our time ran short because we started late. The bride and groom didn't want the typical wedding march and recessional, so I chose three movements from Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusick for these. We played the Menuetto for the usher, maid of honor, matron of honor, flower girl and the groom and his parents. We played the Romanze for the bride and her parents to walk into and we played the Rondo for the recessional. The final piece we played was Schubert's Ave Maria for the unity candle ceremony during the ceremony.
The reception was good. We had a fine point of excitement when a lady at the next table over started a fire on the table when she accidentally knocked the table identification card into a candle. Fortunately, the guy next to her was quick thinking and used the water decanter on the table to extinguish it.
We headed back to the condo and Monique had time to nap for about an hour and a half before her family came back for an evening of socialization in our unit, during which time I caught up a bit on reading.
During the evening came the true highlight of my weekend. I was supposed to do a call-in presentation to the Foamies to present Erin Graham her award for Best Moment of Glory for 2006 for all her fine work on The Madrigals (tm) last year. As it turns out, they had already done this presentation, though I still got to publicly congratulate her on her work (which was amazing). The phone call was actually a ruse to give me a Special Sekrit Surprise Ninja Award (tm) in Music and Logistics. This is one of those awards that is not on the public ballot and is limited to a very small number of people each year. I'm still awestruck and I'm sure I sounded like an idiot accepting because my brain just stopped working. Oh well, I guess that's the point of doing it as a surprise. If you can't look like an idiot in front of all your friends and family, what's the fun of it? ;-)
We got up at oh-dark-hundred hours Sunday morning to go to the casino (Mohegan Suns) to do a little slots with Monique's family before they all headed home. We got to the casino around 7:00 am. It's nice and quiet at that hour of a Sunday morning. We watched a lot and ended up donating $60 to the Mohegan tribe (roughly $0.20 at a time). My donations were all made at a collection machine called Midas' Touch. It was medieval in nature and had cool little brass fanfares and the buttons all made different pitched tones that sounded like lute strings. There was this awesome jester character that changed the normal rules of the machine and he talked in a corny French accent, "Lines? Who needs lines? Allow me to asseest you." Now if only he had done some juggling or told a joke when you lost, it would have been all worthwhile.
Monique and I spent a couple hours in the afternoon working on prepping for an offsite team building session she's doing with her senior staff this week. They're all coming over for two days to the 4 condos we have. We also worked on the design of a new database I'll probably end up writing for her team for work.
Lise and Mark came over in the late afternoon and we talked for a few hours and then went out to dinner.
All in all, a very pleasant weekend. Now if Monique could just stop being in constant pain, we could actually enjoy weekends like this, but that's a story for another post, because I refuse to bring my weekend down.
When I say "we're staying at a condo all week", I mean "Monique is staying there all week". I was just up there for the weekend. She has something like 6 or 7 weeks vacation a year. I only have 3, so she's up there and I'm back to work this morning. :-(
Saturday morning I got to the church ahead of the rest of the family because my flute choir was playing for the ceremony and we needed to be there early to set up and warm up and start playing 15 minutes before it started. This was the only snag to my weekend. Two of the members showed up early and decided to go for breakfast. They got back to the church 5 minutes *after* we were supposed to start playing. This was a bit annoying, but we pulled of a really good performance and everyone was happy. The bride and groom even gave us $50 more than the agreed upon price.
We did the typical favorite, Pachelbel's "Canon in D" (in G because it's a better key for the flute choir). We also did Faure's Pavane because it's Monique's favorite and she has some influence with the group's director. ;-) We were going to do Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata but our time ran short because we started late. The bride and groom didn't want the typical wedding march and recessional, so I chose three movements from Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusick for these. We played the Menuetto for the usher, maid of honor, matron of honor, flower girl and the groom and his parents. We played the Romanze for the bride and her parents to walk into and we played the Rondo for the recessional. The final piece we played was Schubert's Ave Maria for the unity candle ceremony during the ceremony.
The reception was good. We had a fine point of excitement when a lady at the next table over started a fire on the table when she accidentally knocked the table identification card into a candle. Fortunately, the guy next to her was quick thinking and used the water decanter on the table to extinguish it.
We headed back to the condo and Monique had time to nap for about an hour and a half before her family came back for an evening of socialization in our unit, during which time I caught up a bit on reading.
During the evening came the true highlight of my weekend. I was supposed to do a call-in presentation to the Foamies to present Erin Graham her award for Best Moment of Glory for 2006 for all her fine work on The Madrigals (tm) last year. As it turns out, they had already done this presentation, though I still got to publicly congratulate her on her work (which was amazing). The phone call was actually a ruse to give me a Special Sekrit Surprise Ninja Award (tm) in Music and Logistics. This is one of those awards that is not on the public ballot and is limited to a very small number of people each year. I'm still awestruck and I'm sure I sounded like an idiot accepting because my brain just stopped working. Oh well, I guess that's the point of doing it as a surprise. If you can't look like an idiot in front of all your friends and family, what's the fun of it? ;-)
We got up at oh-dark-hundred hours Sunday morning to go to the casino (Mohegan Suns) to do a little slots with Monique's family before they all headed home. We got to the casino around 7:00 am. It's nice and quiet at that hour of a Sunday morning. We watched a lot and ended up donating $60 to the Mohegan tribe (roughly $0.20 at a time). My donations were all made at a collection machine called Midas' Touch. It was medieval in nature and had cool little brass fanfares and the buttons all made different pitched tones that sounded like lute strings. There was this awesome jester character that changed the normal rules of the machine and he talked in a corny French accent, "Lines? Who needs lines? Allow me to asseest you." Now if only he had done some juggling or told a joke when you lost, it would have been all worthwhile.
Monique and I spent a couple hours in the afternoon working on prepping for an offsite team building session she's doing with her senior staff this week. They're all coming over for two days to the 4 condos we have. We also worked on the design of a new database I'll probably end up writing for her team for work.
Lise and Mark came over in the late afternoon and we talked for a few hours and then went out to dinner.
All in all, a very pleasant weekend. Now if Monique could just stop being in constant pain, we could actually enjoy weekends like this, but that's a story for another post, because I refuse to bring my weekend down.
