summercomfort (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summercomfort) wrote2009-06-29 11:28 am
summercomfort) wrote2009-06-29 11:28 am
Weekend of AWESOME
Friday morning: WEDDING
One of my favorite moments was the half hour in between registering for the marriage license and everyone showing up. We walked down the street and had a quiet breakfast at a cute cafe in Redwood City:
Then, came, of course, the wedding, which I've already talked about previously. But! I uploaded the webcam video of the wedding to youtube, so now you can watch all of the awkwardness!!
Friday afternoon: I attended the wake for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
syra2's mother, and came home to discover that Jono's family had swept through and laid out the marital bed:
They'd changed the sheets, and sprinkled it with rice, 9 coins, and rose petals. So cute! And the sheets were extra-soft, too!
Saturday afternoon: PICNIC
These photos are all courtesy of Cat via facebook. If you have any pictures on facebook/flickr/picasa, send a link my way, pretty please? We had a picnic in Stevens Creek Park. Despite the Driving Directions Fail, most people were able to make it by 2pm. It was great seeing and talking to everyone, and getting introduced to Jono's friends, and introducing him to my friends! THERE WAS SO MUCH FOOD. At first I was worried that the potluck thing wouldn't work out, so we got lots of grilling items, but everyone brought so many yummies, I barely had a chance to try all of them. Alexis and Aviva also made us an awesome red velvet wedding cake with a light fluffy frosting. Yum!!
At around 3pm, we started the "entertainment". First I made people do ice breaker games -- like finding the person who was the most internet-famous, or has taught in public school, etc.
Then, people performed stuff as our wedding present.
First, Isaac and Stephen performed a piece for cello and trumpet that Isaac wrote for us.
Then Brian told a story about his current road trip
Then my brother juggled the diabolo. He's gotten even better since the last time!! My brother can be pretty freakin' awesome sometimes.
Those shirts were from a Mozilla summit. What's cool is that they have a "Name Tag" in the front. Jono picked one up for me from the "free shirts" pile. :D
Mary played two beautiful love songs for us on the ukelele
And Pren did a toast for us in all the languages that he knows, which is like 10 of them or something crazy, and not just your normal German and Japanese, but weird ones like Macedonian and Albanian. Pren will be going to grad school at Berkeley next year, which means we'll see more of him. Yay!
Even though it got really hot and we ran out of liquids (water fountain to the rescue!), it was still lots of fun. It was great to see friends from one stage in my life mingling with friends from another stage. And all of our friends are sooooo cool! So many of you have lived over a year overseas, speak multiple languages with fluency, played indie role-playing games, cosplayed, painted, started companies. It was so awesome to have such adventurous and talented friends. AND to have them all show up for our wedding! About 20 of them drove or flew over from far away. I love you guys!! (It made all the wedding planning so much easier, too, to be able to say, "bring food to picnic" and "I need people to help clean up" and it magically happens!)
Saturday evening: BANQUET
So the picnic concluded at around 6pm, so we caravan-ed over to the banquet location in Palo Alto. Jono and I had to stop and change into more formal wedding stuff. Jono wore the tux that he rented (it had tails!) and I basically threw on my wedding dress.
The banquet was 9 tables at a Chinese restaurant. We basically reserved the whole place. There were 3 tables of my Chinese family friends, and then 1 table of our families and us, and then 5 tables of our picnic friends.
Aza was our MC. We said "Hi, thanks for coming, you guyz are awesome." Then the moms talked about us. (My mom made a presentation that featured a tiny bundled me, a photo of me holding my brother, and then a letter I wrote to myself when I was 15, pretending to be me at 25 giving advice for my 15-yr-old self, where I mention being unemployed due to an impractical interest in the humanities, but that I would also have a totally cute boyfriend. Thinking back to 15-yr-old Sushu and the passage of time made me all teary. ::sniff::
Then we fooded, walked around to toast at tables, etc.
Then there were the toasts at dessert-time, where people were like "u r awesome!" and "has lotsa babies!" and I was really touched/embarrassed.
There was the 2nd wedding cake of the day, for which we made a cake-topper of me and Jono riding a phoenix and dragon and doing a mid-air fist-bump. (I made it out of air-dry modeling clay and then Jono painted it.
Mmmm! Cake! Apparently we were supposed to keep a piece from the top layer or something? And have it at our 1st year anniversary? Yeah, not doing that. Sounds gross. We did keep the cake-topper, though.
So at around 9:30pm, we were done, and so 26 of us went over to Gamba for some karaoke. (The wedding dress is just one piece, so I wore a camisole and skirt underneath, which made changing out of it in the parking lot super-easy).
We all crammed into the "party room" at Gamba:
The projector kept on overheating, so we resorted to using the small tv in the room. There was only 1 bottle of secret-wine and no other liquids, so we had to get water from the bathroom. Sketchiness FTW!!
But everyone sang awesomely and had lots of fun.nendil did an amazing rendition of 青藏高原, Jono rocked Mazinger Z and Sweet Transvestite, Alexis and Isaac led everyone in singing Zankoku na Tenshi, Stephen killed on Baba O'Reilly (including 5 minute dancing during the outro at the end!), and Ben surprised us all with Mary Jane. But yes, everyone was awesome, it was lots of fun. We finished early at 1am b/c Jono and I wanted to go to sleep after such a momentous and awesome day. :D
Sunday:
We were all hoarse from the singing. (Cat was like, "Welcome to my world!").
Relaxing morning. In the afternoon Jono really wanted to take his kid sister to the Exploratorium, so off we went! Quick lunch at Japantown, and then it was off to the Exploratorium! Since Cat and I went recently, we hung out in the park outside and shot the breeze.
Then, since there was 2 hours to waste before meeting up with peeps for dinner in Daly City, Jono pointed to a random spot in Golden Gate Park and said, "What's the Buffalo Paddock? Let's go there!" And because there was a complete leadership vacuum, we piled into the car and found the buffalo paddock. Where there were real buffalo!
The black splotch in the background is a standing buffalo. It stood up when Stephen did his Buffalo call, which was saying "BUFFALO!" in a "taking the hobbits to ISENGARD!" voice. Since the Buffalo Paddock was so successful, Stephen then pointed to another spot on the map and we went to find the Chinese Pagoda.
It was supposed to be on an island, and so I saw stairs and said, "it should be on the way up if they appropriated my heritage appropriately." But we went all the way to the top and around the back and didn't find anything.
We were rather stumped.
Although that didn't stop us from leveraging the stump.
But finally, at the very bottom of the hill/island, right by where we started, we found the "pagoda" which is actually a pavilion given to SF by Taipei. The text carved onto the table inside clearly indicated that it was intended for the top of the hill. But at least we found it!
Then Brian wanted to know what the "Bercut Equitation Field" was, so we drove over to that to find:
A round fenced in area with a safety cone in the middle, which Stephen called a "pylon". After some debate of the proper pronunciation of Bercut, we settled on "Bearcoot", which is obviously French for pylon. Since we were defining words, we also declared caffeine to be henceforth known as "spider crack".
It was good to relax and be silly!
One of my favorite moments was the half hour in between registering for the marriage license and everyone showing up. We walked down the street and had a quiet breakfast at a cute cafe in Redwood City:
Then, came, of course, the wedding, which I've already talked about previously. But! I uploaded the webcam video of the wedding to youtube, so now you can watch all of the awkwardness!!
Friday afternoon: I attended the wake for
syra2's mother, and came home to discover that Jono's family had swept through and laid out the marital bed:They'd changed the sheets, and sprinkled it with rice, 9 coins, and rose petals. So cute! And the sheets were extra-soft, too!
Saturday afternoon: PICNIC
These photos are all courtesy of Cat via facebook. If you have any pictures on facebook/flickr/picasa, send a link my way, pretty please? We had a picnic in Stevens Creek Park. Despite the Driving Directions Fail, most people were able to make it by 2pm. It was great seeing and talking to everyone, and getting introduced to Jono's friends, and introducing him to my friends! THERE WAS SO MUCH FOOD. At first I was worried that the potluck thing wouldn't work out, so we got lots of grilling items, but everyone brought so many yummies, I barely had a chance to try all of them. Alexis and Aviva also made us an awesome red velvet wedding cake with a light fluffy frosting. Yum!!
At around 3pm, we started the "entertainment". First I made people do ice breaker games -- like finding the person who was the most internet-famous, or has taught in public school, etc.
Then, people performed stuff as our wedding present.
First, Isaac and Stephen performed a piece for cello and trumpet that Isaac wrote for us.
Then Brian told a story about his current road trip
Then my brother juggled the diabolo. He's gotten even better since the last time!! My brother can be pretty freakin' awesome sometimes.
Those shirts were from a Mozilla summit. What's cool is that they have a "Name Tag" in the front. Jono picked one up for me from the "free shirts" pile. :D
Mary played two beautiful love songs for us on the ukelele
And Pren did a toast for us in all the languages that he knows, which is like 10 of them or something crazy, and not just your normal German and Japanese, but weird ones like Macedonian and Albanian. Pren will be going to grad school at Berkeley next year, which means we'll see more of him. Yay!
Even though it got really hot and we ran out of liquids (water fountain to the rescue!), it was still lots of fun. It was great to see friends from one stage in my life mingling with friends from another stage. And all of our friends are sooooo cool! So many of you have lived over a year overseas, speak multiple languages with fluency, played indie role-playing games, cosplayed, painted, started companies. It was so awesome to have such adventurous and talented friends. AND to have them all show up for our wedding! About 20 of them drove or flew over from far away. I love you guys!! (It made all the wedding planning so much easier, too, to be able to say, "bring food to picnic" and "I need people to help clean up" and it magically happens!)
Saturday evening: BANQUET
So the picnic concluded at around 6pm, so we caravan-ed over to the banquet location in Palo Alto. Jono and I had to stop and change into more formal wedding stuff. Jono wore the tux that he rented (it had tails!) and I basically threw on my wedding dress.
The banquet was 9 tables at a Chinese restaurant. We basically reserved the whole place. There were 3 tables of my Chinese family friends, and then 1 table of our families and us, and then 5 tables of our picnic friends.
Aza was our MC. We said "Hi, thanks for coming, you guyz are awesome." Then the moms talked about us. (My mom made a presentation that featured a tiny bundled me, a photo of me holding my brother, and then a letter I wrote to myself when I was 15, pretending to be me at 25 giving advice for my 15-yr-old self, where I mention being unemployed due to an impractical interest in the humanities, but that I would also have a totally cute boyfriend. Thinking back to 15-yr-old Sushu and the passage of time made me all teary. ::sniff::
Then we fooded, walked around to toast at tables, etc.
Then there were the toasts at dessert-time, where people were like "u r awesome!" and "has lotsa babies!" and I was really touched/embarrassed.
There was the 2nd wedding cake of the day, for which we made a cake-topper of me and Jono riding a phoenix and dragon and doing a mid-air fist-bump. (I made it out of air-dry modeling clay and then Jono painted it.
Mmmm! Cake! Apparently we were supposed to keep a piece from the top layer or something? And have it at our 1st year anniversary? Yeah, not doing that. Sounds gross. We did keep the cake-topper, though.
So at around 9:30pm, we were done, and so 26 of us went over to Gamba for some karaoke. (The wedding dress is just one piece, so I wore a camisole and skirt underneath, which made changing out of it in the parking lot super-easy).
We all crammed into the "party room" at Gamba:
The projector kept on overheating, so we resorted to using the small tv in the room. There was only 1 bottle of secret-wine and no other liquids, so we had to get water from the bathroom. Sketchiness FTW!!
But everyone sang awesomely and had lots of fun.
nendil did an amazing rendition of 青藏高原, Jono rocked Mazinger Z and Sweet Transvestite, Alexis and Isaac led everyone in singing Zankoku na Tenshi, Stephen killed on Baba O'Reilly (including 5 minute dancing during the outro at the end!), and Ben surprised us all with Mary Jane. But yes, everyone was awesome, it was lots of fun. We finished early at 1am b/c Jono and I wanted to go to sleep after such a momentous and awesome day. :DSunday:
We were all hoarse from the singing. (Cat was like, "Welcome to my world!").
Relaxing morning. In the afternoon Jono really wanted to take his kid sister to the Exploratorium, so off we went! Quick lunch at Japantown, and then it was off to the Exploratorium! Since Cat and I went recently, we hung out in the park outside and shot the breeze.
Then, since there was 2 hours to waste before meeting up with peeps for dinner in Daly City, Jono pointed to a random spot in Golden Gate Park and said, "What's the Buffalo Paddock? Let's go there!" And because there was a complete leadership vacuum, we piled into the car and found the buffalo paddock. Where there were real buffalo!
The black splotch in the background is a standing buffalo. It stood up when Stephen did his Buffalo call, which was saying "BUFFALO!" in a "taking the hobbits to ISENGARD!" voice. Since the Buffalo Paddock was so successful, Stephen then pointed to another spot on the map and we went to find the Chinese Pagoda.
It was supposed to be on an island, and so I saw stairs and said, "it should be on the way up if they appropriated my heritage appropriately." But we went all the way to the top and around the back and didn't find anything.
We were rather stumped.
Although that didn't stop us from leveraging the stump.
But finally, at the very bottom of the hill/island, right by where we started, we found the "pagoda" which is actually a pavilion given to SF by Taipei. The text carved onto the table inside clearly indicated that it was intended for the top of the hill. But at least we found it!
Then Brian wanted to know what the "Bercut Equitation Field" was, so we drove over to that to find:
A round fenced in area with a safety cone in the middle, which Stephen called a "pylon". After some debate of the proper pronunciation of Bercut, we settled on "Bearcoot", which is obviously French for pylon. Since we were defining words, we also declared caffeine to be henceforth known as "spider crack".
It was good to relax and be silly!
no subject
Jono or Aza is the most internet-famous, right?
yrs--
--Ben
no subject
I guess this means I don't have to try to figure out how to upload the video I recorded off the webcam. I knew someone would get to it before me. XD