Today we attended a wedding of some long time family friends, Charissa Wong and Patrick Godfrey.  The Wongs have known Ray forever.  He is the one they call when the clocks that are up too high in the house need their batteries changed or when the eight foot Christmas tree needs to be decorated and straightened.  Mrs. Wong has plied Ray's favor over many years by providing his favorite fried rice and inviting us to countless BBQs and Chinese dinners.

The wedding was aboard the Spirit of Ethan Allen II, with the ceremony outside on the bow of the boat.  While it had rained earlier in the day (thunder and lighting) by the time of the ceremony it was just over-cast, but nice enough to have it outside, as planned.  Ray and I bouced back and forth between the second and third decks, trying to get a good view of the ceremony.  While Patrick and Charissa had technically already been  married in Miami in June, that ceremony was more for the air force paperwork requirements, and today's wedding was what they had been hoping for and planning for a while.

Even though the breeze off the lake made it a little cold, and blew out their unity candle, they were all smiles!  It was on everyone's face how happy they were for Patrick and Charissa and how proud their parents were.

Ray managed to captures some great shots just after the ceremony!

After dinner was served there was the traditional cutting of the cake!  Patrick and Charissa had decided that they didn't want to smash cake in each other's faces.  The bridal party did not agree.  So right after they fed each other, the maid of honor (Heather, Charissa's sister) and the best man each took a finger full of frosting and smushed it on the faces of the bride and groom! 

Charissa then changed in to her traditional (red) Chinese wedding dress for the Tea Ceremony.

As part of the Tea Ceremony both Charissa and Patrick each served tea to her parents, his parents, his grandparents, and her grandparent and great aunt and uncle.  After Patrick and Charissa had each served both members of each couple they were given gifts (necklaces, bracelets, etc) and red envelopes (rumor has it with monetary gifts).  The ceremony was beautiful and it was great to have Nick (Charissa's older brother and Ray's good friend from high school) explain some of the finer points.

Then it was time to par-tay!  The DJ got the music going, Patrick and Charissa had their first dance, the bridesmaids almost killed each other over the bouquet, the garter toss saw less enthusiam and the boys did a wonderful and soulful rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Ray rocks out!

The proud parents of the bride!

I even got a dance in with Nick!

The most brillant thing Patrick and Charissa did was to set up a Flickr account ahead of time.  They included the address and log in information with the thank you note in the favor (yummy Lake Champlain Chocolates).  They asked everyone to upload any digital photos taken at the wedding.  This way anyone who attended could browse and download photos.  It also means that they will have quite the album when everyone is done!  Ray got his photos in order first thing when we got home.  We went to bed while they were still uploading to the site.  Brillant!

As many of your know, this summer has been particularly rainy and grey.  Amazingly, and very unexpectedly, I woke up on Saturday morning to a bright and sunshine-y day!  There was a nice breeze, with the temperature in the middle 70's and some whispy clouds in the sky.  Completely beautiful!

To celebrate the suddenly summer-like weather Ray and I decided to head down to North Beach and rent kayaks for a few hours.  We packed some water and snacks and were even daring enough to bring my little camera with us and take some lovely shots.  There would have been more, but I am a total loser who forgot that she should occassionally charge her camera battery.  Needless to say, the battery died after a few shots.    My bad!

Here are a few of the lovely photos we did manage to take:

Here is a view of downtown Burlington from the lake and the island out in the middle that we (very ambiously) tried to row out to.

So a friend of mine, Colleen, forwarded me this article today talking about ethics and vacation.  It was very interesting to note that most people fall into one of the four categories:

A) I receive 15 days of paid vacation each year, and I take them—guilt-free.

B) I receive 15 days of paid vacation each year, but I feel guilty if I take any of them.

C) I haven’t had a vacation in years; I’m loyal to my company or business and am proud of this fact.

D) I work for myself and don’t take vacations; if I don’t work, I don’t make money.

I believe I'm more of the "B" type and that's not because I want attention.  I usually get this feeling that I shouldn't take vacation, or even on some days when I plan on it, I'll cancel my vacation date to work.  Is it so important to cancel?  Well, yes and no?  This whole week I planned a while ago to take off along with next, however, with all the stuff going on at the Emergent Media Center (my favorite place of work), I felt it was necessary to take it off.  Mostly because I felt I would be strongly needed and that I'd probably upset my employer if I wasn't there if working when they needed me.  Because of this, I will be losing vacation since it goes away.

I feel sometimes it's not very easy to take a vacation day or two... In fact, I feel it's selfish (for myself) to do so.  I guess that's part of why I feel guilty about it.  Believe me; I really feel the need to take a vacation a lot of times.  In fact, I'd prefer to just simply stay home and do stuff around the house.  I've been feeling that a lot of my time lately has been devoted to projects at home or someone else's need (adult/grown-up stuff) like doing taxes or moving.  This is stuff that's not really fun, but I guess it's necessary.  But staycation in this case makes me feel a little better about being lazy since I don't really have an itinerary to worry about just as if we decided to go to Disney world.  If Corinn and I did that (which would be awesome, I've never been to either parks) and I just came off of a ridiculous work week load, I'd feel exhausted and guilty that all I wanted to do was sleep or relax rather than needing to try every ride, go to the beach, see stuff... basically I don't like rigid schedules on vacation.  Don't get me wrong, getting to do things is totally cool and part of the human perpetuated interest.  However, if they are regimented, then they're not much more fun than being at the office (and believe me, the students I work with are a blast!).

So another reason why I don't take a vacation or feel bad about vocalizing it has to do with habits created by my bosses.  Sometimes you see them taking time off and then saying "I'll be doing work from home," or "I'm canceling and going back into work/will be available." This makes me feel bad when I kind of want to be selfish and say, "I'm keeping to my time off." or what inevitably happens is that I don't take the time off.

I don't know... I guess it's just a frustrating place to be in... Especially when I come home and feel like I've done nothing because I'm doing work pretty much until 6-8pm in the evening.  Oh well, it'd be interesting to see if people who will post comments to this blog regarding the 4 choices share in the discussion.  I feel in general that I do work a lot, but it's because I really enjoy the cause that the college goes for which makes me feel a little bit better when I work late hours.... That somehow what I'm doing is worth it to someone else or that it is a noble effort to work for the college.

I'm now fading in and out of sleep... I guess I should go, but I still have so much to talk about!  Eeek!  

So tonight Ray, Jami, Tonya and I braved the weather, mud and psychological scarring and headed south to the Addison County Fair and Field Days for the Figure-Eight and Demolition Derby.  This was my first demolition derby experience ever.

It had poured rain all morning, and looked threatening at mid-day, so we weren't sure if we were going to make.  By six o'clock things looked clear, so we decided to try our luck.  I have to say I was a bit hesitant, as I was unsure what we were going to find.  Upon arrival Tonya summed it up best when she said "I never felt like Burlington was the 'big city' until we got here..."  It was all very small-town USA: the people spoke with that Vermont accident I've only ever heard people make fun of on the radio before, the beer tent was the only close to as popular as the demo derby and everyone seemed to know everyone else (except for us).

We made it in time to watch most of the action.  There were two heats: each heat had two races and a feature (which included all of the cars that could still move on their own from the two races).  The first heat was the double figure eight.  I can honestly say I've never seen automobiles in this kind of shape before, and the fact that some of them could still move was astonding! 

Most of the cars required the forklift to remove them after the race!

After the first heat we decided we were hungry.  As we got up to get our dinner, we noticed one of the lovely side effects of the morning's rain: wet butts. 

Ray decided to remain behind and guard our towel (not that it was doing us much good), so Jami, Tonya and I went off to procure a fair food dinner!

The second heat started while we ate dinner.  No figure eight nonsense this time - this was an all out demolition!  The first race included the 6 cylinder cars and the second heat was the 8 cylinders. 

 
The announcer kept promising the crowd "a whale of a feature" to finish off the race - featuring the still moving 6 and 8 cylinder cars.  Unfortunately, night had fallen at that point, so all of the photos are a bit too dark to share.  I will confess that we stayed until the end and had a fantastic time!  We saw cars catch on fire, go from 4-door to about 2.5-door, hoods crinkle, tunks smashed in and the worst paint jobs of all time. 

The one side-effect of our little trip, and probably the single most memorable part, was the mud.  We were careful at first, but by the time we were heading back to the car, there was no help for us.   These photos don't do the mud justice. 

Our shoes were so muddy that I had everyone sit in the car and take their shoes off before they put their feet in.  The shoes were stored in a lucky orange bag in the trunk - along with the sopping wet towel! 

Jami and Tonya are sooooo happy to have their wet and muddy shoes off!  Unfortunately, there was no help for our wet bums! 

So that seems to have been fairly successful.... except for the type-os....

So now I'll try to put some more photos up, but back-date the blogs so that the photos appear on the day they were taken!