sarah and i decided to carpool from the "greater metro area" to st. cloud to meet up with my dad and TJ. good times are always had in a car ride with sarah. we can discuss issues such as: our grandfather's criminal history, false depression interventions, and also the intensity of the weeds finale (she's pregnant!?). upon reaching st. cloud, we joined vehicles with our friends ronald and t-jen. [sidenote: i have quite the history of car rides with those two. my dad finds it necessary to find the smallest rental car possible whenever we go on vacation, and proceeds to leave the person behind the driver's seat with 2.5 inches of leg-room. don't even get me started.] our car ride was fairly uneventful, i'm sure sarah and i told my dad at least 49 times to turn down NPR because the reason he couldn't hear it is because the speakers were located in the back of the car, not the front. hence turning it up louder only served to deafen those located in the backseat. not that hours of speculation about sarah palin's pregnant daughter isn't my cup of tea...
somewhere along the two hour car ride, sarah and i discovered a few of tj's hats in the back of the car. of course it was time for a fashion show. not gonna lie, that kept us entertained for a good ten minutes.
when we reached new london, my father realized that he had forgotten to get his niece a card. nice. sarah, being the mature adult in the family, had a card but had already sealed it. ronald insisted that she tear it open so he could put some money in it and sign his name. he rifled through his pockets and found $41 of odd bills. i'm not kidding you. he wanted to put $41 in a card. that had been ripped open. sarah kept the one dollar bill to save a little embarrassment for our branch of the woltjer family tree.
we arrived at the wedding a half an hour early. let me tell you, this has never happened. usually the bride and groom lie to ronald about the time of the wedding (an hour earlier, sometimes two) so that he will be there on time and not walk in during the vows. laugh, but it's happened more than once. and i've been in tow both times. bitter.
my uncle danny (we'll talk about him later) was videotaping the wedding (not sure if he was hired or just bored?) and was on top of every inch of footage he could get. like when the mother of the bride was escorted down the aisle by the usher to the front row and informed my grandfather that he needed to move over one seat. this process literally took about two minutes for my grandpa to actually stand up and move over a seat. but it's ok people, we got it on tape. i mean, we missed three bridesmaids walking down the aisle, but we will never forget that my grandfather sat in the fourth seat of the front row and not the third. and also that he was wearing his signature suit (tailored when he was in high school, roughly 60 years ago) and a trucker hat supporting his favorite state: florida. he wore it through the whole ceremony, including the prayers. such a gentleman. my mom would've had a stroke if she had seen that.
i missed most of the ceremony because little nate was ripping apart my necklace and clawing my chest (i still have scratch marks). he's a pretty cute kid though, he can get away with anything. even biting my eyebrow ring. thanks bud. but he almost ripped all of sarah's hair out, so i should really count my blessings.
overall it was a beautiful outdoor wedding. the reception was pretty great, the food exceeded the typical woltjer "ham sandwich bar". always a nice surprise. my dad recently discovered the "camera feature" on his blackberry and his been a picture whore ever since. he always seems to get the most "candid" shots of me. i pray he never learns how to send them/put them on his computer. as we were leaving he decided it would be a good idea for sarah and i to have a picture with our favorite grandpa. my g-pa literally was holding sarah's right boob in the picture. too great. and i'm so glad i was not on the side of his "good arm".
this is a really long story spattered with many woltjer family histories, and i'm sorry that you just spent ten minutes reading it. but this is my life. and i love it.
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