I didn’t do much while I was back. I just settled into a rhythm of walks with my mom in the afternoons, working remotely with whoever I happened to be paired with that day, and sleeping in combined with a lot of late nights.
get it? OK? no? Well, anyway, this was actually a pretty fun night. there was food off a truck, and ice cream, and a record store that had materialized in the plaza district since my last visit. Oh yeah, and hanging out with one of my best firends in the world, KJ. There are a few people I miss since moving away, and she’s pretty high up on the list.
Can I talk about how much I didn’t want to leave my freshly official wife for two weeks? Because I really didn’t. I had to though; my mom got a kidney transplant, and I was needed to help out around the house, and I also personally needed to go out there and see her getting better. Anyway, I crossed about 1/2 the country before dinner, and I was exhausted at the end of it. Any flight that’s too early to catch BART to get to out of SFO is officially off the table. (I’ve officially doomed myself to 6AM flights forever with that statement, I know). The color of the ground on this flight though. I’ve never seen fall like that before.
The way home was pretty awesome. Instead of going through Sacramento, we went through the Sierras. The day started out kind of gray, but then the clouds sort of broke open, with a high, thin haze and a bunch of small cumulus clouds closer to us. Really good light, as long as you can get your exposures right. I was shooting through all the windows, but I think the dirt and reflections work here. We stopped for pizza at Fallon’s uncle’s, which was amazing. After that I was pretty much out for the day. I think I may have also run out of camera batteries; I know I was tired and hung over. Everyone who came: Thanks so much. You guys helped make it special, and I know it wouldn’t have been as fun without you. Now I’m going to stop, because I’m getting a sympathy hangover thinking about that day.
We got to Tahoe about 1:30, with little idea of what to do next; we hadn’t booked anything in advance except the airbnb we stayed in. The rooms were nice, but they didn’t come with a chapel or courhouse, so we went to the internet in search of one. I found a chapel just up the way that would be able to do it for us, for something like $300, which was about what I expected. The lady on the phone sounded like she was used to dealing with the likes of me. Unprepared, not knowing what was going on. Fortunately, Sophie was there. She’d also been internetting in search of a solution, and found that the Nevada side of the lake had a weekend county recorders office open, and we could go there to get a license for $50. So, we all got in our cars and drove across the border. We got lucky, in that there was a officiant there; she was doing a ceremony up the hill or something, but she would come back for us in half an hour and do our ceremony for $40. So she did, and we did, and that was that. Here is where the subtitle comes in; I was a bit busy at the time, and so others in the party took pictures with mine and sophie’s cameras, to varying degrees of success. All of the photos of the ceremony were a bit blurry or cutting vital parts of our anatomies, so none of thse are here. The group shots after were great, as were a couple of the portraits of me and sophie. Then there’s the cake cutting picture from that night, where Sophie looks ready to kill, which is really one of my favorte pictures of her. I think someone implied that she was unabel to cut cake alone. At some point, later in the night, we decided to go down to the shore and look at the stars, which was pretty nice. Cold as all hell, but nice.
Copyright © 2008-Forever, Matt Mills.
