Yet Another Wedding
/My girlfriend and I spent the weekend in Carroll, Iowa, at yet another wedding. We have three to go to this month, two down, one to go. This one was for a good friend of mine from high school, and was a nice affair, except for the unnecessarily long Catholic wedding ceremony. It took well over an hour, and we non-Catholics weren't even supplied with the script, so none of us even responded during the times we were supposed to. Why couldn't he have married a nice atheist girl instead?
After the reception, I was elected designated driver to haul a bunch of high school friends to Ruby's, a local bar. We checked out the topless G-String joint next door (the girls wanted to, and I swear I am not making this up). It was disappointing to say the least, though I will say this, if you're looking for budget strippers, Carroll, Iowa has you covered. They did things for a buck that cost $20 at the only other nudity-related bar I've ever been in.
Fortunately, the other half of the bar had Monkey's Uncle playing, and they turned out to be a pretty good cover band. They had the crowd rocking along, and even did a pretty passable version of Billy Joel's "Piano Man", complete with harmonica. The drinks at this bar turned out to be pretty cheap too, a round for the five of us came to only $10.50, which isn't too bad for two bottled premium beers, two mixed drinks, and my Pepsi. We left a little after 1:00 a.m. and went back to the Super 8 to crash. If you're ever in Carroll, it has TWO Super 8 Motels, which is surprising for a middle-sized Iowan town, not to mention confusing if you made your reservation over the phone, and didn't pay any attention to the address of your destination.
We ate at Hickory Park on the way back through Ames yesterday, and stopped to check out the Reiman Gardens, since they've been expanded this year. I ran into Donald Lewis there, who works with John for the ISU Entomology Department where I did computer support as a student. He remembered me from doing all of the Y2K checks on the computer equipment, which dragged up a whole bunch of memories of boring computer work that I'd rather forget.
I got home to find a snotty message from one of our faculty members who couldn't figure out how to log in to his computer. It wasn't exactly a difficult problem, he simply wasn't replacing my username on both the Novell login screen and the Microsoft login screen, even though this is discussed in bold in the documentation that we gave him when we created his Netware account. I'll give him points for persistance, if not for reading comprehension, as he called my house 5 times this weekend, and stopped by my house twice. Fortunately for him, I was on the other side of the state, saving him from a probable black eye, as I don't really like to do computer support on my days off, especially at my front door, and certainly not for user-error type of questions.
