Two days before Ben and I got engaged, we had portraits taken at Don Taylor's as a Christmas present from my dad. This photo is my favorite, though I have looked at it so much that now it looks weird, like my hair is too dark and I'm all hunched over. Ben looks cute though.

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As I've mentioned, my mom is sewing my wedding dress. Since she hasn't made a dress like this before, needed to combine several patterns, and can't easily have me try it on, what she decided to do was sew a practice dress out of muslin and send it to me. I can indicate alterations that need to be made, and send it back, and then she will make the alterations and then disassemble the muslin dress and use it as a pattern for the real thing. I received the practice dress in the mail yesterday, and had Ben take some pictures to e-mail to my mom. I was going through them this morning and found this really striking one he took, which was backlit because it was getting dark but we were trying to keep the natural lighting. Ben never takes pictures and doesn't even own a camera, but he's really quite good at it.

practice dress, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

We are trying to get a ceremony venue and a date for our wedding, since this seems to be the part one does way in advance. Once we have that, we can probably relax more about the other details, plus now we are on vacation and have time. So we've been working on that today, and since neither of us really likes cold calling people or companies for information, we've been alternating.

There was a lady who runs a flower shop and does wedding consulting, who is a friend of Ben's family, who we had to call. It was my turn, and Ben argued I'd be better equipped to do it because she'd probably have a lot of information and I could take notes and process it more easily. So I called her, and wrote down some of her venue suggestions, notes like "cheap" or "ceremony only could be a problem" or "overused". She mentioned the lakes along the June Lake loop as being a nice location that would be very cheap or free, so we looked for information on that online. They didn't have anything very helpful, so Ben sat down with the notepad and called the chamber of commerce for June Lake. He talked to someone there for a bit, who eventually said they'd compile some information and call him back, so he gave her his name and phone number. When he got off the phone, he looked up at me and said, "I don't think my notes are very useful. I just wrote down my name."

And it was true, he did, and it was just so hilarious.

I am still a little bit bowled over, and there are things I have been thinking that I forgot to say yesterday.

Firstly, I was floored that Ben actually got some friends and family to be there when he proposed, because one of the silly things I'd told him was that it would be cool to be proposed to in front of friends or parents or something, but I didn't expect him to really do that. And it happening in New Mexico was perfect. Every time I come back here I have mixed feelings; on the one hand, I grew up here, and I miss lots of things about it, but on the other hand, I don't want to move back, to the town or the state, and it grates on me after awhile. I didn't want to get married here, if we did get married. And the reason is that New Mexico feels like the past, and a wedding is about the future. But on the other hand, I have deep roots here. Having our engagement happen here gives me enough connection to here, though, that I feel totally fine getting married somewhere else.

At Starbucks afterwards, either Jeanine or Ben came up with the idea of getting married in Mammoth Lakes, where Ben's dad has a big house. That really appeals to me, because it has beautiful mountains and scenery, but is in California and is convenient for lots of people. And though Ben's family doesn't live there any more, they moved away pretty recently and have connections, so it wouldn't be so horrible planning everything from afar. I know it is easiest to have your wedding in the same place you are planning things from, but Philadelphia and the East Coast don't mean a lot to me, and I'd rather not do it there.

Because Ben told my parents and some of my closest friends before he told me that he wanted to get married, I have had somewhat fewer people to call about it. But I had to tell my bridesmaids (yes, I kind of already knew who it would be) and my dad has been calling relatives all day, both to wish them a Merry Christmas and to tell them about it. I will get to see all my relatives! At the same time! That's exciting; my family is terrible about keeping in touch. And I will have another round of telling people when I visit Berkeley in January and go up to LBL, which will be fun. And again when I get back to Philadelphia. I'm not sure whether or not to announce it to my WoW guild, ha. Maybe.

It makes me really happy that this happened right before Christmas. I am just overflowing with joy this year. We cooked a big dinner with my dad today, with a pork roast, Moroccan sweet potatoes, stuffing, jalapeno corn chowder, salad, biscuits, and apricot cream. And we drove out to my mom's street to look at the farolitos, under a nearly full moon.

Life is amazing! I love you all!

ring, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Ben asked me to marry him, and I said yes.

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Our house is big enough that it's easy to have several guests, and we finally got to test that for Thanksgiving. Four of my friends from high school came out, arrived Tues/Weds, and stayed through the weekend. It was so fun! This was the first year I had done Thanksgiving just with friends, not with either my family or Ben's, but it was a blast. On Wednesday we walked around Chinatown and historical Philly after I came home from work, and on Thursday we all cooked a lot. It was also fun going for a run, and playing Kill Doctor Lucky, and eating until stuffed. And I was happy with how much people helped out chopping things for cooking, cleaning up, putting things away... it was a bit overwhelming for me in terms of mess but everyone kept things flowing and prevented any mouse-friendly situations. Friday we went to campus, had lunch at Bubble House, walked around downtown some more and then had delicious gelato (new beloved flavor: molasses). Steph and Scott left Friday night, and Jeanine and Andrew stuck around Saturday for Italian Market, pho, running, and general hanging out. They helped me make turkey soup, and since they had some work to do I finished reading Freakonomics (I know, I'm really behind the times here).

Jeanine and Andrew left early this morning for the twelve-hour drive back to Indiana, and I spent the day doing some chores, many loads of laundry, and playing a little WoW. I'm very excited for going back to New Mexico in less than a month now, and taking Ben with me to see farolitos and my mom's holiday cooking in full force. (Most of the things I made for Thanksgiving, I got the recipes from her.) I'm glad to have had the break, and guests visiting is both a good excuse to really clean the house, and a good excuse to walk around and see fun parts of the city, eat good food, and try to share good times with people I'm fond of and see entirely too rarely.

I'm sure you can guess, when I came home from teaching on Friday to find Ben at home, I was quite happy. His trip went well, he took fun pictures that he showed me, and he brought back some sake and a small tapestry. The main session of his conference was in a No theater! How cool is that!

We had sort of a lazy weekend since Ben was a bit jetlagged, or at least kind of in the wrong time zone. I made sourdough pancakes on Saturday, we watched The Wire, I went for a run, and then we went to Uzu with Aimee, Ben's sister, who was in town for a psychology conference. We had a great time talking, walked to Naked Chocolate and had toffee caramel Belgian waffles, and then walked down to that mural I really like at Broad and Lombard. It was a lot of fun; she's a cool person to talk to. And today... ugh, so I want things to be clean for guests at Thanksgiving, like really clean, so we spent a huge amount of time cleaning the upstairs of our house really thoroughly. I can't believe how long it took, but we really did everything, so I'm pretty happy about it. I don't think the downstairs should take nearly as long, but then it does include the kitchen. BAH.

We got pizza for dinner, and watched the movie Down By Law which someone clearly recommended to me at some point, maybe Ron. It was great; really funny and strange, and Ben pointed out it was similar to a stage play with minimal reliance on sets or large casts, but a lot of great dialogue and interesting interactions. Plus it has the strange combination of Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni, before he was known much at all.

I'm trying to think of idiosyncratic Christmas presents for people. It's hard.

I got my NSF application in on Friday, after a lot of help editing my essays from Jen and my dad. It was interesting reading Jen's essays and seeing some of the amazing outreach things she's done, and talking about how we wanted to represent ourselves in our essays. In our initial drafts, we were both too hesitant to blow our own horns. It reminded me of a study I read about a long time ago, asking high school students who had been accepted to good schools how they got in. The guys were all, "I got in because I'm really good and the school knew I'd do well," and the girls said things like, "It must be a fluke, I'm not really good enough to go there, etc." Women also tend to share credit more, though successful people also do this because they know they can. But I digress.

I feel I have a better chance at actually winning this time, just because I understand better what they want and have a stronger record. It didn't occur to me as I was doing it, but the WISP (POW, whatever) revitalization speaks strongly for my efforts at outreach, which is very important to the NSF. Of course, it's something like 17% of applicants who actually win in physics, so it's unlikely. But at least I tried, and I'll try for the NDSEG and NASA GSRP too.

Then Saturday morning, I got up really early and drove Ben to the airport for his trip to Japan. I'm excited for him, very much so. But I do miss him, especially late at night. This is a little silly, but for a long time now I've liked to talk a little to him just before bed. When we were long-distance, before moving here and over this summer, I always called him when I went to bed and talked a little. And of course now that we're living together and I still go to bed earlier than he does quite often, I make him come hug me before I go to sleep. It's sad not doing that. On the other hand, being the only person in a bed and comforter large enough for two, with twice as many pillows as usual, is extremely cozy in its own way. And I can have a week of eating lots of granola, salad, and salsa.

I read a really interesting short book, called Ten Nights' Dreams by Natsume Soseki. It's ten short stories, all of dreams, and each is beautiful and thought-provoking. Anybody else reading anything interesting?

green tomatoes, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Weekends in the fall here are: going to the Italian market with Ben, picking out bell peppers and eggplants and sweet potatoes, watching A Better Tomorrow and Back to the Future, teaching him tennis, working on wall-scrolls, going running along the Schuylkill in the crisp cold air. I discovered something important, that if I wear ridiculous-looking clothes running in order to be warm and comfortable, I'm guaranteed to run into one of my professors as well as one of my students. As opposed to normally when I go running, when I run into no one.

I keep meaning to write and having things to write, but I never quite do it. Maybe someday I'll be better at keeping a schedule. I always have to do lists that things fall to the bottom of and lie there, like these wall scrolls that I've had posters for for weeks and weeks. But now they're cut and we have fabric, so it's just sawing and gluing left to do. We also need to eat the remaining tomatoes out back, before it finally freezes. Some of them are reddish but many are still green; who knows why they didn't ripen.

backyard, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

If you want to read about someone having a stranger autumn than I am, you should read my friend Ron's livejournal; he's travelling through China/India/Africa with his wife until January, and it's very enjoyable to peruse his entries and see his photos.

We were in NYC for the weekend, because Ben's mom, Winnie, got some cheap last-minute tickets to come out and see her parents, as well as other miscellaneous family in the area. It was really fun!

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On Sunday we had our anniversary observed, which I planned because it's an even year. I took as a loose theme, the theme of pirates, and chartered us a vessel. Well, a canoe. We left before dawn to drive north, to the Delaware water gap, to take an 18-mile canoe trip. The Delaware river is pretty gentle, and the trees were starting to turn gold and crimson and shed their leaves into the water. We saw a lot of geese and ducks, and fish jumping out of the water, and we talked some and listened some, because the water makes things very quiet. And we had a picnic, and a few scenic stops, and at one point I jumped out of the canoe to swim in the cold water. It was very relaxing and idyllic, though also somewhat hard work. By the end of the day my shoulders and back were sore, and my hands a little too, but it was very rewarding.

Afterwards we drove back, which was fun because we were driving past scenery at sundown we had seen at sunup the same day. We had time for a quick shower and then got changed and headed to Buddakan for dinner. The atmosphere inside is beautiful, and the centerpiece of the room is this giant golden buddha, maybe twenty feet tall. We shared everything (I love places that serve food family style), and split a wasabi tuna pizza, lobster egg rolls, crispy duck salad, grilled sea bass, and ponzu chicken. At this point we were too stuffed for dessert, and headed home, where we promptly went to bed because we had gotten up so early. We slept about ten hours last night, and then today was work as usual.

It was really fun. I have to admit that one reason we went canoeing was that I knew that convincing Ben to do it would be hard because of how early we got up, but if I decided for us, it wasn't open for discussion. Heh heh heh. The dinner was great, too, really superb; Philadelphia has this amazing upscale dining scene, but unfortunately we can't afford to go there except on the cheap and for special occasions. I would trade it for the gourmet ghetto in Berkeley, just because I could eat there more frequently, but it is really fun to go have these really inventive dishes at great restaurants. A good example is the wasabi tuna pizza, which was raw tuna, avocado, bitter sprouts, and wasabi on this crispy flatbread with sesame oil and soy dipping sauce. It was delicious, and very interesting. Eating out is a third about the taste, a third about analyzing the cooking, and a third about the experience, or so we were thinking. Though taste is the most important third.

When I see things that are beautiful, or fun, or interesting, I always want strongly to share them with Ben. So it was great to have this wonderful day with him.

ben and me, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Six years ago, on a Friday night, was when I met Ben for the first time. We met through chih, talked online a lot, and then he came to Berkeley to meet me. Since then we've both changed, definitely for the better, and I'm happy to say that we've both improved ourselves quite a bit for each other. We were long-distance for almost five years, with a few summers off, and now we've been living together for about a year. Ha, I mistyped that as 'loving together'. :)

I could say a lot of things, and I've said a lot of them a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, four years ago , five years ago. It is incredible to think that I've been with Ben more than a quarter of my life, and yet not, because it's hard to imagine not being with him. For a long time, we loved each other and we were so perfect together, but there was also this element of story. We were apart, it was tragic, and there was this ideal of someday, when we'd be together and live in the same place and cuddle up every night. And it seemed unachievable, and during my last year in Berkeley it started to wear on us, and yet here we are.

There are always more things for us to discover together, and Ben is so knowledgeable and so fun that I really feel I have the perfect companion. I love walking to campus together, watching weird shows together, going places and singing Feeling Groovy about a cemetery or something. I love how last night, as I was reading the New Yorker in bed, he snuggled into my back and fell asleep. I love Ben so much, and I'm so happy! There aren't words, but I don't need them anyways. :)

This week is Restaurant Week in Philadelphia, a twice-a-year thing where some very nice restaurants offer a three-course prix fixe meal. The upscale dining scene here is huge, which is nice I guess unless you can't afford to pay a lot for dinner very often. But restaurant week is sort of a nice way to visit some great places more cheaply than usual, so last night Ben and I went to Haru.

Haru is a sushi/fusion place, in Old City near Uzu (which, if you'll recall, is the tiny place I think has the best sushi in Philly). The interior of the restaurant was really beautiful, the service was amazing, and the food was really quite good. I had sushi, a really nice spicy roll and then some assorted sushi and sashimi, and interesting bitter green tea ice cream for dessert. I think that the quality of the sushi was about the same as at Uzu (Ben suggested that they might have the same supplier), but Haru is normally much more expensive. Plus the intimate atmosphere of Uzu is really nice. So it was a fun dinner, but I wouldn't go there for normal prices. Afterwards we walked home, along South Street, which was nice. I liked going to dinner group during the summer somewhere across town and then walking back. I know I've said it before, but this is a great walking city.

I have something nice planned out for my anniversary with Ben in a couple weeks. But I can't tell you what it is.

I went with Ben to the Flying Fish Brewery, in Cherry Hill, on Saturday to get a tour. It was pretty cool, sort of like the Scharffen Berger tour, to see how they make beer in a smaller brewery. Everything was slick stainless steel tubing and containers, but then there was a hose running into a bucket overflowing with foam. Ha. I saw one of my former students there, who was one of the other 8 people on the tour. But I couldn't (still can't) remember his name.

Last-minute, one of my friends from high school and Berkeley decided to come out to the East Coast to visit, to celebrate having gotten a job. She'll be here this weekend with her boyfriend, and I'm very excited. Plus Ben and I are planning to go to Cape May on Saturday.

I've been reading The Green Flag, which is a detailed history of Irish nationalism from 1600 or so to 1925. It's really interesting reading, and it's embarrassing how familiar I am with England's history in the same time period, but not at all with Ireland's. (My mom's family is Irish-American, emigrated during the potato famine, so I also have some personal connection to the topic.) Things of note that I have learned:

1. Some Irish republicans tried to induce Germany to help Ireland during WWI, offering that they could invade England from Ireland. The Germans were interested until they found out how little popular support there was for Germany over England.
2. Winston Churchill was a huge jerk. I knew he was a big jerk about India (when someone sent him a telegram saying that Gandhi was hunger striking, he responded something like 'hasn't he died yet?'), but I did not know he was also a huge jerk about Ireland. Very imperialist, I guess.
3. There were many, many Irish rebellions, and most of them were pathetic failures. This mostly seems to have added pathos to the national character.
4. France tried to help Ireland revolt, many times. But it never really worked because most of the Irish people, despite producing fine goods for England and living in abject poverty, were fiercely loyal to the crown until the 20th century.
5. I never before knew what a Black and Tan was, other than the drink.

The reading has been slow going but fascinating. I should read nonfiction more.

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So, long story short, I am teaching three lab sections instead of one, and have a lot more grading that I have in the past. And am still expected to do research. But at least I'm not doing two sections at once.

Something kind of funny happened at my first lab section last night; after I finished explaining grading policy and everything, and told everyone to get started, one of the guys at the station nearest me turns to me and says, "So you're Ben's girlfriend?" I was very surprised and said yes, and then he told me he's an undergrad in the graphics lab Ben works in, and has seen me around. Ben and I wondered if we'd ever end up teaching the same students, and this is probably as close as we'll get.

And apparently last night, when I had fallen asleep and Ben was reading in bed, I rolled over and opened my eyes and glared at him. Ben claims that he said, "What is it, sweets?" and I said, "Bang! Bang!" and rolled back over. I don't remember that, but his telling me has prompted me to randomly interject "Bang!" into our conversations and e-mails today.

While I agree that it's good for couples to have separate hobbies, I sometimes wish I didn't have so very many hobbies that Ben doesn't do. I've tried to get him to try some of them, but often he doesn't want to because he feels that if we do something together that I'm much better at, neither of us will enjoy it. But this weekend we played tennis together, and that was really nice.

I've played tennis since I was really little, but only seriously for three years or so in high school. I haven't played much recently since before I hurt my knee, because of those sudden starts and stops, but my doctor gave me a hinged knee brace and said to go for it. Ben had never really played before, so we got him a cheap racket from Target and took my bag of mostly-flat balls to the Penn courts. What we ended up doing was having me at the net feeding, and Ben at the baseline learning forehand and backhand. This was very familiar to me, because when I practiced ground strokes with my dad, it was the same thing, but with him feeding to me. It was actually a lot of fun for me, for three major reasons: firstly, that feeding is hard and consistency is a very useful thing to practice; secondly, it was neat watching someone improve so obviously in a short time; and thirdly, it was a beautiful day and I was outside spending time with Ben. I would really like to keep doing this with him, at least until it gets too cold for it. I also played tennis with Jen on Friday, with more running and less feeding, and that was nice too. The courts are right by my building, as you may remember.

We also went out to Uzu on Saturday night, which I was worried I had built up in my mind as the best sushi in Philly. I did not build them up; they are so great! Some of the best sushi I've ever had, really, and the interior design is great. Afterwards we walked around Old City, Market and Chestnut between 1st and 4th. It is a really hip dining area, with a lot of the best, most obscenely expensive places in town. Uzu has nice design, but it is designed with the idea that you are enjoying a cozy, delicious dinner there. Some of the places we walked by were dark, with colored lights in the floor, sleek metal furniture, edgy music... infinitely cool-looking, yeah, but it seems like eating there would be bizarre.

Me: Are we hip young people?
Ben: Well, we're young people.

path, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

This weekend, Ben and I spent the first two days doing chores and various things, mostly around the house stuff because I want my house to look nice for my mom. We're expanding our basement storage, we made coq au vin with this wine that tastes much more awful than last year, and we cleaned up a lot. And watched the 60s movie Bedazzled, which was strange and funny. Then on Monday, we drove up to the Poconos, to the Thunder Swamp trail. It's a 50-mile trail system, which we hiked about five miles of, in a very green and pretty, gently-rolling-hills kind of area. It's the sort of hiking environment that Ben loves: lush, fertile, with no particular destination. We saw several tiny frogs, a very large black snake, and small fish in a stream that flowed backwards under a bridge, making it terrible for pooh-sticks. And we found ourselves someplace quiet, where if you stop you can only hear insects, birds, and the wind.

creek falls, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Returning to weekends with Ben is easy, comfortable, delightful. We went to the Italian Market to get stuff for cold vegetable soups on Saturday, then took a picnic of blue cheese, bread, and wine to Fitler Square where we played cribbage and read things, he the New Yorker, me Flow. We had a lot of moving kind of things to do around the house, to move our computer stuff back into the office, and to move things back into the office closet that are taking up the space Ben's clothes are supposed to be in. Sunday was a day around the house, partly because it rained nonstop all day, and partly because there were things around the house to do. We made Cold Avocado Soup, which was very tasty though it needed more lemon or lime juice. Time with Ben is bliss: silly comments, eating lime wedges with cayenne, pinching, constant physical affection. Talking about the future.

We bought plane tickets for the holidays already, to get them cheaper and to make it easy for us to visit all of our parents. This means a tour of four households, which is a little long and silly, but it'll be nice to spend winter break together for the first time. After Ojai, I'll head up to Berkeley for a couple of days, since the extra cost isn't too bad. I asked Joao if that was an okay time to come, and he mentioned that he and Gersende might be moving back to Europe early next year, though they'll definitely not have moved yet in January. But already a lot of BFCers are leaving Berkeley, since most of them were postdocs, and Ron will be traveling, and lots of the people who made the last part of my time in Berkeley so great will be gone. It's sad to watch that happen to a place you've left, and it makes me a little nervous because that's how I came to be less emotionally tied to Los Alamos. Though, of course, the emotional ties that remain between me and New Mexico are permanent. I was happy this weekend, at Trader Joe's, to taste New Mexico Pinon Coffee, really enjoy it, and see the NM flag on the label.

We watched Une Femme Est Une Femme this weekend, at the end of my summer glut of foreign films, and I really liked it. I especially liked the note the movie ends on, though I assure you I don't intend to make a habit of closing out entries with French movie quotes.

E: Angela, tu es infâme!
A: Moi, je ne suis pas infâme. Je suis UNE femme.

I picked Ben up at the airport last night, late, and brought him back home. It is really weird to have him in the house now, since I've gotten really used to him not being there. But it is also really awesome.

I'm pleased overall with how my summer went; I was initially worried that I wouldn't enjoy it much, that I would be lonely, that I'd be unhappy. The first week was really hard, just because I had to reprogram myself to not expect Ben to be around, but after that it was pretty great. I traveled a fair amount (but not expensively), did outdoorsy stuff, visited friends, played piano more than I had been, started running along the Schuylkill River Trail a couple times a week, etc. etc. The only thing that could have been better was my job, which wasn't as great as I was hoping it would be. But it's gotten better since the beginning of the summer, I'm moving towards doing more science, and I did a good job with the work I did get. Oh yeah, and I read a lot of books and watched a lot of interesting movies, and got out and met more graduate students in other departments (as well as more in my own department). Now that I don't have massive coursework demands on my time, I'm trying to experience the East Coast really thoroughly, in part because I suspect that when I graduate, I'll move back west, and in part because at Berkeley I felt like I got a lot more out of living there the longer I was there, and it was only near the end that I'd found everything I really loved. I definitely had the feeling there that I did more fun things in the last five months I was there than in the first two years I lived there, and I want to even things out more so that I'm finding cool things from the very beginning.

Ben loved his internship, and while I didn't like us being apart for the summer, I do like that it makes him that much more marketable for later when we have to find jobs near each other. He really enjoyed working at EA, and it's obvious to me that he's in the right field: he programs and plays computer games all day at work, then goes home and... plays computer games and programs. He has a focus which I don't have and will probably never have; I think that if I were making a living writing, or playing piano, I would go home and exercise or read or do math. He is extremely broadly knowledgeable, one of my favorite things about him, but I'm not sure he has a driving desire to do lots of crazy different things all the time. We match each other well, because I admire him for his focus and immense competence in his field, and he admires me for my breadth, even though really we both have each of those things somewhat. But one thing that I like about him loving game development so much is that he can almost certainly have a stable, well-paying career, and so I feel less pressure to have one myself (though it's pretty likely, hopefully).

glasses, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

The rest of my time in LA was really nice. I had a great time at the beach on Friday, because it was uncrowded, clean, and beautiful. Saturday morning, Ben went up to Ojai to see his family and pick up a rental car, and I went with Laura, Steph (Erin's UCLA friend, not my Steph), and Chih to take Aislin and Erin to get manicures. It was my first manicure, and I am shocked at the amount of cuticle skin they remove. Not to mention how weird it feels to pay someone to fuss over your hands. Anyhow, then we went to Agoura Hills for the out-of-town-guests' dinner, which was really nice. We had a bachelorette party for Erin afterwards which was really fun, a nice combination of wacky fun and just chatting. I'm embarrassed to note that I won the weird game we played called something like 'Who is the biggest pervert', but glad that Chih was just one space behind me.

On Sunday, Ben and I went up to Ojai to spend the day with his family, and then were very nearly late to the actual wedding because of traffic. Erin and Josh's wedding was really lovely, and very fun! It led me to the conclusion that Jewish weddings are great, because everyone seems to be having so much fun. Also, the amount of dancing was higher than I'd previously seen at weddings, and that made me quite happy. And Ben looks extremely cute in a kippah.

Overall, the weekend was great, seeing friends and family was great, but I am really happy not to be flying cross-country again for a while. What's even better, though, is that tonight at 11:30 I get to go pick up Ben from the airport. :)