Skyline

We had a rare commitment-free weekend, so we spent several hours just wandering around the city today. We crossed a bridge in Fairmount Park and came across a really excellent view of the city:

It is so good to be back home!

Nerd love through the ages

I officiated my friends' amazingly nerdy wedding this weekend! I'm still too flabbergasted to write about it coherently, so let me just share that the ringbearer was a falcon and leave it at that.

In this photo I've just retrieved the rings from the falcon.
I'm also tremendously relieved that nobody got pooped on.

For their wedding gift, I made them a sampler themed "nerd love through the ages." It's one of the more complicated samplers I have made, but I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

Here are close-ups of the individual couples, since it's kind of hard to see them in that picture.

Han Solo & Princess Leia (Star Wars)	Aragorn & Arwen (Lord of the Rings)	Apollo & Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica)
Westley & Buttercup (The Princess Bride)	Chris & Alana (The actual couple!)	Ron & Hermione (Harry Potter)
Rory & Amy (Doctor Who)	Wash & Zoe (Firefly)	Fry & Leela (Futurama)

I had a lot of fun making it, but it also made me realize (for the umpteenth time) how white and heteronormative most nerd culture is.

We've already got five weddings on the docket for next year - I better get cracking!

Cronuts!

Everyone has been talking about cronuts lately. We found out about a Philly bakery that makes them (well, technically they make a knockoff cronut, since only the original NYC bakery makes official ones), but the first time we attempted to get them was a failure - we went on a Sunday morning, and they don't make them on weekends. You know, because why would you make a popular breakfast item on the two days of the week when people have time for a nice bakery breakfast? Anyway, we vowed to be back, and yesterday we finally lived up to that vow:

CRONUTS

Unsurprisingly, they were really, really good. They were also heavier than I had expected - they are filled with a dense, delicious creamy goo of some sort. I also didn't anticipate that they would be rolled in cinnamon sugar, which was the icing on the cake... or the cinnamon sugar on the cronut.

Mariel before eating hers

Her first bite

I'm pretty sure that I just consumed my caloric allotment for the entire weekend, possibly the week. It was worth it.

Tulsa

I just got back from four days in Tulsa, for a conference. The conference was fantastic, but I didn't really leave the hotel for most of the time I was there (partly because of all the conference events, and partly out of a fear of cricket swarms). I did manage to get one picture of my time in the Sooner State, though:

This was in the women's room at the airport.

Farewell, Paris of Oklahoma!

Dialect

Ben and a bunch of his work friends took the dialect quiz that has been going around lately, and it did a pretty good job of pinpointing where Ben is from:

Definitely from Northeastern Illinois!

It was similarly accurate for most of his friends, so I decided to take it too. I was... surprised by the results:

Apparently I am definitely from Texas.

It even tells you the five cities your dialect is the most similar too - mine were all in Texas. Four of my five least similar cities were in Michigan, and the fifth was in Wisconsin. So, I'm really not from the Northeastern part of the Midwest - which was a bit surprising since my mom grew up in Illinois and I thought I have a lot of her speech patterns.

Anyway, I thought maybe it was a sample size error, since I took the shorter, 25 question version of the quiz. So I spent an hour doing the longer, 140 question version, and once again was flummoxed by the results:

I guess that week in San Diego really rubbed off on me?

This time my five most similar cities were all in SoCal (including San Diego and Fresno), four of my five least similar were in Louisiana, and the fifth was in Mississippi. So, I'm definitely not from the Deep South, except for the fact that I'm from Texas...  At least my actual home state of Maryland is red on this one!

Ben thinks the fact that my results are so inconsistent and all over the place means that it has no idea where I'm from. I guess that's what happens when you grow up in between DC and Appalachia, have one parent who isn't a native English speaker, one from the Midwest but who was raised by an Irish immigrant, and you have lived in Philadelphia, NYC, Boston, and (briefly) San Francisco in the past several years.

Russian Wedding

Yesterday we went to my cousin's wedding right outside of Philly. He's a cousin on my dad's side, meaning he is Russian (as is his new bride), meaning it was a traditional eat-and-drink-until-you-explode Russian wedding. Here is our table when we first entered the reception:

Things to note about this photo:

1. This is the cold appetizers, and the cold appetizers only. Those two stands are there so they can bring out more plates and have multiple levels of cold and hot appetizers going on.
2. In addition to the three bottles of wine on the table, there is also a large bottle of cognac and a big bottle of vodka (in the back, by my dad). There was this much alcohol at every table (as in, one large bottle of vodka for every eight people, in addition to all the wine and cognac).

I didn't really take pictures of the various courses as they came out because I was too busy eating, but the entrees were lamb, beef, salmon, and ravioli. Notice that I said and - those weren't the options you could choose from, there was a giant platter of each of those things at each table. By the time all those courses were done it was about 11:00 pm and they started clearing all our plates - we thought it was time for dessert, but it was time for shish kebabs! All meat, too - chicken and more lamb. It wasn't time for dessert until closer to midnight, but it's a good thing we had some time to digest because this was the dessert table:

This is just one half, there is an equal amount on the other side of the cake.

We got home around 1 am, but the party was still going strong when we left - it probably went until 3 or 4, and they probably made it through all of the alcohol.

Also, before all the festivities started, Ben and I attempted to take a nice picture since we don't usually dress up. Here's how that turned out:
I guess it's not surprising that we don't have more nice pictures together...