After we finally left town for our honey-night1, Ariesna nodded off and went to sleep for most of the drive. Once we got to Davenport, I got a bit too caught up in looking for street names and went past the place we were staying… a couple of times. *sigh* I’m convinced I’ve got less direction sense than a rock. I can learn an area so I know where I’m going but it takes me a fairly long time and even after years of living in this area; I tend to turn down a street only to be surprised when it joins up with a different street I’m already familiar with. All this is building up to say that I ended up having to tell Ariesna where we were staying before we found the place2. I did so want it to be a complete surprise. *sigh*

Any hoo, the place we stayed at is called Fulton’s Landing. It’s a late 19th century house that has been beautifully maintained and is decorated with many a wonderful antique. When we finally arrived, Ariesna & I walked inside but found ourselves faced with a small problem. There was no sign of the proprietor! After a bit of shouting hello and ringing the doorbell, I went back outside and started walking around the grounds to see if I could find somebody. Later Ariesna confided in me that just after I’d gone searching that she found a small note saying that our hostess could be found painting the front porch.

After locating Pat, our gracious and charming host, we headed back to where Ariesna was waiting and then up to our room. Ariesna was thrilled and while I did find it to be a lovely room; it was a bit pink for me. We freshened ourselves up a bit and then went to a nearby Japanese restaurant that we are familiar with from previous visits to the area. Their yummy rolls weren’t as good as the ones we’d had back in Kansas City once upon a time, but the Hawaiian rolls were fantastic3! Then she had the Shrimp Tempura and I had the Chicken Katsu. Both dishes were delicious and much larger than I remembered from previous visits. After eaching our fill, we headed back to Fulton’s Landing.

Just a brief side note for the single folks who read this blog: when you get married some day; make sure to eat a good breakfast and/or hide some sort of energy bar in your pocket/purse for later. That way you don’t starve as your wedding guests are likely to keep you so busy that the serving staff will remove your food before you get a chance to eat any of it!

We did get back to Fulton’s Landing without any troubles and had a very pleasant evening relaxing… and doing those things that newlyweds do. The next morning, we had a marvelous breakfast with the other guests: a couple from Nebraska with their daughter from Brazil and a writer from England. Apparently, he writes a column called “The Best…” for The European; this has him gaunting around the world finding the best places to stay, best foods to eat and writing all about it for his clientelle. After listening to him talk for a few minutes, I’m became convinced that I’m in the wrong profession. 🙂 After breakfast, we checked out but Pat allowed us to leave our car parked there so we could go for a walk around the area. There are many gorgeous houses over there, a few of them for sale –and quite undoubtably out of my price range–. It ended up being a longer walk than we had really thought we were in for, with a good chunk leading us up-hill but it also very enjoyable. Particularly once we left the housing area and got back down by the river with the cool breeze coming in off the water. Hmm, that was soo nice.

Then it was time to retrieve the car and head for home, which we spent just quietly enjoying the day & each other’s company. Later in the evening, Ariesna’s parents came up and we unwrapped all the wedding loot. It was a good haul. Heck, there were even gifts in there that were aimed more towards me than they were towards the bride. Don’t misunderstand me, there were plenty of gifts that were definitely picked with the bride in mind! And of course, there was also a nice selection of checks and cold, hard cash as well. All in all, I think Ariesna & I should get married more often if it’s going to bring in this kind of loot.

1 Due to time & financial constraints, we didn’t get to do a full honeymoon right now but we hope to do one later. Since it was just a night away from home, I’m calling it our honey-night. 🙂
2 For the record, she’d already noticed the sign for the place a couple of times before I broke down and told her.
3 For those unfamiliar with Japanese cuisine, these rolls are actually types of sushi.

*Grumpf* is my word for when I’m feeling just a slightly bit grouchy. Not enough to make me want to rip people’s heads off, but enough that I’m less than enthusiastic about Life, the Universe and Everything. Of course, feeling *grumpf* today is mostly my own fault. I’ve been staying up far too late: reading, playing on the computer and what not. But it’s also work’s fault; what with the recent changes and all.1 Then for an extra kick in the chops, I finished the book I was reading and went to grab the next one in the series for something to read over my lunch hour.2 Naturally, I can find books 3, 4 & 5 but not book 2. *grumpf*

Still, today’s not been all bad. While searching for book 2; I did run across some Discworld books that I’d forgotten I had and those will give me something to read for the next couple of days. Maybe even enough to get me through to the weekend, when I might rip the house apart to find book 2. *shrug* I hate having to stop reading in the middle of the series. Particularly, when I know I have the next book. But I’m trying to focus on the good things about today here; so that’s enough of that. Umm, tonight was the monthly Mindbridge meeting. It appears now that I have officially taken over their webmaster duties. Spif. Now I just need to finalize our plans regarding the hosting and what I’ll be basing their site on. As mentioned in previous postings, their current site is a nightmare of M$ FrontPage generated vomit and since I’m a lazy git; I want to implement a CMS. Of course, I also need to know what all they want out of the site and if they want to merge their Yahoo! group into the real site or to keep that seperate. It’ll be a lot of work, but I’m oddly looking forward to it, even –and this is the kicker– in my *grumpf* mood. Anyway, that’s enough for tonight; so good night inkernet  vast repository of porn  all you people out there in TV land. Ah screw it, stop reading this drivel and go get yourself some sleep.

1 I’m not really going to get into it further here; as I need to keep my job. So let is suffice to say some people have left the company recently due to changes that are a result in the company having been bought out. I respect their decision and somewhat wish I could take the moral high ground with them. However, I’m in a 2 person household with a 1 person income and plenty of bills; so that’s not really an option for me. *grumpf*
2 Sometimes I surf the internet. Other times I play video games. Occassionally I’ll watch some anime, but lately I’ve been really enjoying kicking up my feet and reading in peace & quiet. *sigh*

I use the Update Linkroll plugin and all the links on my portal page. The advantage to doing this is when one of the blogs I read updates and pings Weblogs.com; my portal page will show that the site has been updated. Having just finished staying up far too late watching videos on my computer; I was just briefly checking a few things on my site before heading off to sleep. That’s when I noticed something interesting. My portal page showed Greg Dean’s Real Life webcomic had been updated. This had never happened before, so I was curious to see what Greg had done. *shock & surprise* Greg changed his webcomic’s rant system to be using WordPress!

Unfortunately, I’m not able to get through to the WordPress site at the moment (or I’d toss something up on their forums), but I thought it was pretty damn cool and definitely worth mentioning. Oh and if Mr. Dean reads this; it’s wonderful that you’ve ditched Outlook. Now, you just need to ditch Pepsi for Coke. *runs and hides from the Shirt Ninja*

*UGH* That was a looooooooooooong day. The night before, I’d headed to bed around 11 (slighly early for me) thinking I was bit a head of the game. Boy was that ever the wrong thing to be thinking. I layed down in bed and then tossed & turned for the next 5 hours without ever falling asleep. Finally around 4am, I got out of bed and dinked around on the computer until it was time to get ready for work.

I got to the office and after an extra strong cup of coffee1; I started hitting the program hard-core. I setup a spreadsheet to list off all the possible things I wanted to look at while testing this particular part of the program and went to town getting it setup. It was slower progress in the morning and I was still fairly out of it when my phone rang. No, no, no. You don’t understand. MY PHONE RANG!
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Just I had another night were I stayed up far, far too late dinking around on my computer getting some stuff setup on my local test server. This means when my alarm went off this morning; I was still in the deeper levels of sleep and it awoke me out of some dreaming. As I usually do I just kept hitting at the snooze for as long as I knew I could get away with. Finally though it was time to get up and when I did so I could still remember bits of what I had been dreaming. Those bits were enough for me to discover that my dreams had been changing each time I smacked that old snooze button.
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