Attempted to spend the weekend in Vermont at Greg's Uncle's uber-cool cabin but it was a bit of a bust. We both took Friday off, planned to leave after a meeting I had at 11am. Well the meeting got cancelled but it ended up not mattering because (a) it took us forever to pack and get out of the house anyway and (b) it poured.

Great. Hasn't rained in like a month and it pours on our weekend of outdoor bliss! Plus, it's a good 2.5hrs up there, so we thought we'd try and wait the rain out. No good. We waited, finally left at 3pm with the dogs in the back of the Volvo and way way way too much stuff, got there at 5pm. We didn't know whether the Uncle would be there or not, but he gave Greg instructions on how to find the spare key ("Under the eaves of the back door"). We spent 30 minutes searching for the key - no luck. No cell phone reception either. We drove 30 minutes back to reception and called the Uncle, who reiterated the instructoins with greater detail. 30 minutes back to the cabin. 30 minutes more searching. Nothing. 30 minutes back to cell phone reception. Uncle decided to skip plans to go to a music venue and drive up to the cabin to let us in - many thanks. In the meantime, we had mediocre Chinese food (Greg had a curry shrimp dish, what? Weird for Chinese food) and the dogs drooled in the back of the Volvo. Poor guys were couped up back there for like 7 hours. It turned out the key was perfectly jammed in a slot in the wood so that it was literally undetectable by touch. They had to use a flashlight and a footstool to locate it.

Spent Friday night drinking good wine and going to bed early. Woke up Saturday morning at 6am by Tori's furious scratching at the back door when she discovered that an entire flock of wild Turkeys were currently strutting through the backyard. Went for a mini hike but couldn't locate the trail, came back for lunch and crashed. It totally poured on Sunday and we didn't get to go hiking at all.

Oh well, fun weekend anyway. We went with our friends Kim and Ian, who are superb examples of San Jose Californian Minimalists. They moved cross country by getting rid of everything except what would fit in the lower half of a Toyota Tacoma truck bed (they slept in the upper half for three weeks until they got to New Haven). Anyway, they're always a good lesson: we have too much crap. I get random urges to throw out half of what I own, and I usually make a good hearted attempt but no overall luck so far. I'm reducing my total number of worldly objects to fewer and fewer, but not by enough yet, especially cause I continue buying them too. Compared to them, Greg and I with our dogs, yummy food, sleeping stuff, clothes, board games, cameras, and etc... were almost offensive to the philosophy!

No ring yet. We'll probably visit the jeweler guy on Thursday.

Villa might have been selected. No more details to be written here than that! Greg and I will decide within the next few days. Select family members received detailed instructions and RSVP requests (and also photos of everybody, since nobody has met). We've decided to keep the Italy part of this thing very small.

I'm putting together invitation wording and I think that's the one thing I'd just like to have done at a printer's. Not worth the 80 bucks I'd save by spending hours and hours doing them myself. I like having little things done like that. Wording the invitations is a very complicated thing, because we need to make clear that the Italy wedding part of it is really just a family thing and probably wouldn't even be very interesting for other people. We'd really like people to come to the reception in CT more than anything.

Have spent the entire week not cleaning and not cooking and not working and really just being an unproductive mess in front of the TV or computer. I swear I'll cook something tomorrow.