So after Shannon finished work on Saturday we packed up the car and headed towards Cedar Rapids.

Our First stop, was West Side Sewing, where we met up with Shannon's Mom to look at lace for her dress. Shannon ended up getting a nice lace, and it better be, since it was $90 something for 3/4th's of a yard of lace fabric.

Then we headed to my parents to look for pictures of me during my youth...It was interesting. Shannon saw pictures of my grandparents, and cousins and what not, plus quite a few of my pictures from the youth. It was kind of fun looking down memory lane. We ending by picking out a couple of slides (which we will get processed) and a couple of school type pictures.

Then around 6:PM we headed over to to the Matta's for Cameron's Party. Cam has been in Japan for a while and I've not seen him for quite a while. So it was fun to catch up and all that. Attending the party was: Nathan & Jenny (hosts) (and Taylor and Cali), Scott, Wade, Brett (his wife and kid), Clif, Myself & Shannon and of course Cameron. There was much noshing of food (burgers, hot dogs, etc), drinking of booze and what not.

Very early on in the night I got to test drive Wade's WRX (replacing his old car). It was fun to drive. It had a few things that I didn't like. I like the VTEC in my car, where when you hit around 6000 RPM you get a extra boost of power. I thought the gearing ratio was a bit wide between first and second gear. It seemed to me that it shouldn't drop the RPM so much when going into second...but that's just me...maybe I'm getting spoiled by 6 gears.

Cameron had brought some beer (Redhook ESB and another one), Nathan let me try one of his Bell's Brewery beers (which was just delicious).

Around 8:30, I think, a couple of people left to participate in a "raid" on WoW. Which, in my opinion, was extraordinarily lame. Yes I understand that there were previous commitments and all that, but, you know...*sigh*

My boss called, with two other Directors to ask me a question about work (I was on call that weekend), and I believe this is what I said, "I would like to preface my answer by stating that I'm drunk and you may not be able to trust my opinion". However Clif agreed with what I said, so they got off the phone.

Bret and crew left a bit later to put their child to bed.

Anyways, the night continued on and Cam told us stories of Japan, and we eventually headed downstairs. Jenny and Shannon watched When Harry met Sally, and Clif, Cam, Nate and I started playing Air Hockey. Nathan opened up a bottle of a 10 year old port (I think), I'd provide more details, but I'm not good with names. It was something that Jenny's mom picked up on her travels. It was actually very good, and I enjoyed it...and a lot of it too. He also opened up a bottle of cheap white wine (He's trying to find something inexspenive to keep around the house) that I thought was...well...awful (again the name escapes me).

Air hockey moved along to triple puck air hockey, and laughing at the drunk Sam (which was ok, cause I was drunk and being silly). Nathan actually recorded me playing it that way.

A bit later the party simmered out and people left and we head upstairs to the Matta's spare bedroom.

The next morning, after a bit of waking up early, playing with Taylor and Cali, and breakfast, we headed to my parents to see if my mom had found some more cute kid pictures of me (she hadn't) but she did dig up some chives and put them in a bucket for me to trasfer to my yard, so I can have fresh chives whenever I want. My mom had decided to do some serious cooking and had some rubarb cake and corn beef making...but it wouldn't be ready until much later in the day, and we had plans, so we headed off.

Next, we went to Shannon's parents, and went through her photo album and picked out a few pictures of herself, and we also looked at some table decorations and decorations for the rooms. Shannon's Mom does have quite the eye where that goes. We also made a suggestion about glass tiles (that was given to us by the Matta's) from a hardware store (as opposed to the expensive ones from the craft stores).

We then headed back to Des Moines, stopped by the house, dropped off the things, planted the chives (on the side of the house near the two bed of flowers). And then headed out west to go to Jordan Creek for Shannon to buy a new dress for Adam's and Tiff's wedding. I wondered off and checked out the macbooks (deciding if I wanted a black one). I also ended up getting a new pair of sandals. Shannon tried on a lot of things but wasn't happy with the look of most of them (the one dress I think she liked she didn't want to have one that was strapless). We headed over to Target (where she looked some more) where I got some water for my machine and picked out a present for the wedding. Then we headed off to try to find stores around the target that had clothes, but most of them weren't open on sunday or at least past 5 on sunday. We wanted to go eat and Fudruckers, but it was way to busy, so we went back and tried to go to crave (not open on sunday) and ended up at Wok in Motion (good food, not bad price).

Then we thought we would check out Kohl's (she got the outfit she bought for the engagement pictures there), but by the time we got there they were about to close (10 minutes), so we headed home. Shannon was pretty upset, by all this. We spent the short rest of the Sunday watching a bit of DVR'd TV and then went to bed.