What an awesome Memorial Day weekend. Mine started last Thursday morning, but I'm sure most of you enjoyed your's as well.
I had the pleasure of standing in my college roommates, wedding on Friday evening in York, PA. (Congratulations Tim and Nicole by the way.) Drove out on Thursday morning, and ended up getting stuck in traffic only 40 miles from my house. I ended up missing the rehearsal, however I did show up in time for the rehearsal dinner of course. Their wedding was wonderful and Nicole was beautiful. Tim had a little trick up his sleve during the ceremony and it turned out to be a pretty funny event. For those of you who know Tim, he's 6'8", and Nicole I believe is something like 5'8". Well after they had their customary bride and groom kiss, Tim goes "hold on, I need to get something," he walks away and reaches behind a curtain and pulls out a stepstool which he had made. He presents it to her and she steps on it and they redo there bride and groom kiss. Good times. Bye the way I also caught my seventh garter at the reception. Thats right I said seven. I guess that kind of disproves the whole theory that whoever catches it, is going to be the next one to get married. I guess I better start trying a little harder. I'd also like to give a shout out to my escort Kathryn, and my new friends Matt and Mark, who also stood for Tim who were friends from York.After the wedding on Friday night I drove down to stay at my friend Dan's place over the weekend in Baltimore. Saturday morning I got up and headed on down to Washington D.C. for the day. I've never seen the place so crowded. Since I was by myself I decided to check out some of the attractions that people in large groups never seem to visit. Checked out the National Gallery of Art and the Natural History Museum. The Natural History museum had some of the most lifelike animals I have ever seen. The Hope Diamond was also pretty cool. I ended up heading on over to the Washington Nationals vs. L.A. Dodgers game for the afternoon. Here it is 1/4 of the way through the baseball season and I've been to two teams on two different coasts, and yet the team (Tigers) that plays 10 miles from my house I haven't seen. That will all change this week however as we are going to see the first place Tigers take on the Yankees. After D.C. I headed on over to Annapolis to meet Dan and do some good seafood and some bar action. I had some of the best crabcakes (and most expensive) I've ever had in my life.

After thinking that our college group Memorial Day weekend streak may be over after five years, it somehow made a miraculous survival at the last minute. After looking at my travel map it looked as though it wouldn't take too much effort to stop by my friends Jenn and Nelsons place in Canton, OH on my way back to Detroit. They just had a beautiful baby girl named Emily a couple of weeks ago, so I wanted to stop by and check her out. To my surprise our friend Laura from Alabama also had come up for the weekend, so 6/8 college friends I'd say is pretty sucessful. (I miss you Ben and Anne!) Their baby was absolutely amazing, I can't remember the last time I had held such a small child. She also seemed to be very well behaved. Kind of makes you want to be a parent, although I guess I better start working on that whole wife thing before the baby thing.
Have a great week, I've got four days of work here and then I'm heading out to Boston with Kyle and Mike for a little 3 day weekend on Saturday morning.

Later

Well a heated debate occurred at a party (Thanks to Liz by the way for hosting us) this afternoon and I thought I'd continue my part of the discussion here on my blog. The heated debate was something of great worldly importance and an item that every man should decide on at some point in his life. I'm talking of course about My Top Five. My Top Five is in reference to who I view as the five most beautiful women in the world. Drumroll please........In ranked order........

#1 Jessica ......#2 Mandy.......#3 Rachel ......#4 Rachel ........#5 Kate
.....Alba............... Moore ........McAdams .......Stevens ...... Beckinsale







So Chad and Scott let me know if you have any issues with this and we can debate a little more : )

I had a little embarrassing moment today during our flag football playoffs this morning. I'm sure we all remember Pat the character from Saturday Night Live whose sex could never be determined. Well I had an It's Pat moment today. Our football league is coed and every third offensive play has to be run to a girl. I'm lined up on one of these plays against someone I thought was a man (I'm not joking here), well ball is snapped I don't focus on the person I'm guarding (since technically the ball can't be thrown to them) and a couple of seconds later I find the football being thrown over my head. In my mind I'm thinking "what a bunch of idiots, they just threw the ball to a guy." Well I was wrong, huge pass completion for like 20 yards. Everybody wonders what the heck I was doing and I quietly try to plead my case to my teammates without embarrassing the individual whose sex I had been confused about. Quite an embarrassing moment for me.

Kyle and I attended a Cedarville Alumni function on Saturday in Detroit, that was pretty interesting. I was quite surprised I went actually, and probably wouldn't have if it wouldn't have been for Kyle's prodding. I am finally starting to truly appreciate my Cedarville experience, and have lost a lot of the cynicism I had when I originally graduated. Anyway it turned out to be a pretty cool experience, although we only saw one person that we had known from school. We did get to sit by the new university president, Dr. Bill Brown, for dinner. Several interesting discussions were had and I've never met a biblical speaker who was so in tune with popular culture. He didn't seem to appreciate however my story about skipping 38 of 50 chapel services my final Senior quarter. We also ran into one of Kyles buddys , who now works for Cedarville, by the name of Joel Tomkinson. He was a big guy who used to sing in chapel sometimes if you can remember. We took him downtown for a little tour of Detroit. Ended up watching a couple of innings of the Tigers/Reds sold out baseball game from the fence with a bum (which is a whole post in and of itself), and also went down to the Downtown Country Hoedown, which is basically a big free jammed packed full of people country music festival. We ended up watching Tracy Byrd for a couple of songs and then remembered that none of us really loved country music all that much. Judging by the crowd that was heavily biased towards cowboy boots and hats, I'm guessing that most of these people were not from Detroit.

Should be a good week, three days of work and then I'm off to York, PA for Tim Fentons wedding on Friday night. I'm then heading down to Baltimore for Memorial day weekend and spending some time in Washington D.C. and also catching up with Dan Cochrane.

Anybody want to buy a 2000 Suzuki SV650? I've got one for sale. This past week I happened to come across a new bike that I've been looking at buying for a couple of years now. I wasn't exactly planning on getting another bike, but I'll have to say that it was destiny that I came across it when I did (is that possible with inanimate objects?). I am now the proud owner of a 2002 Honda VFR800 Interceptor. This bike is a bit bigger and alot faster. It also has attachable luggage so it will now be a lot easier to do some traveling and be able to take along more than just one change of clothes.
Jeremy Beadners wedding was pretty cool on Saturday. Not quite as many Cedarville grads as I had hoped to see but got catch up with Dave Wolfe, Bob Lutz, and Joe Mulvaney. I'll have to say that it was unlike any other wedding I had ever been to. They had a beach theme. Rebecca (his new wife) wore a traditional dress, and he had on a creme colored suit, but after that things were pretty interesting. The groomsmen were barefoot, and wore decorative lais. They also had a thatch umbrella they were married under. Instead of lighting a unity candle they had a sand ceremony. I have no idea why the beach them, considering it was Michigan, but hey its Beadner. We also threw beachballs at them instead of rice when they left.











Until we meet again......

Look closely at the picture to the left and you'll notice I look a little different. I now have gone blonde! No not exactly on purpose, but I'm pretty happy with the results. Heres the story. Last summer, my friend Laura, gave me some cool blonde highlights which I really enjoyed. So I thought I'd do the same this summer. Note to User: Make sure person doing highlights has done highlights before. My mother had not. I looked in the mirror and it looked like she had put about 10 times the amount of solution on she should have. Anyway here I am today. I think it looks cool, but I can guarantee you that other engineers will not. I can't wait to walk in with this puppy at work on Monday and hear the ribbing begin. By the way the attractive woman with me is my Grandmother.
My weekend in Indiana was absolutely amazing. I got to catch up with a lot of people. Actually probably too many people as I didn't even see my parents until Sat. night. I had a great time with Ross and Sarah (thanks for putting me up), and also had a good ol' guy's night out with Justin Miller. Sunday was my dad's birthday and the whole family was over. We ended up playing a little badmitton, as well as some boche ball. There was even a little wind to do a little kite flying, which I can't remember the last time I did. As you'll see in the picture, we wern't 100% successful but managed to get the thing up a couple of times. We also made a trip back to my dad's little project, I'll call a pond, which at one time was a pond, but now has become more of a wildlife refuge. Beavers and all! If anybody's ever up for any camping this is a great spot. We even mangaged to take a family photo, even though everybody's not exactly dressed in what I would call there Sunday best.

Later Dudes!

No, I'm not moving home or anything like that, but this weekend I will be making a pilgramage back to the motherland. It seems like these trips are becoming fewer and fewer as I get older and that seems like a shame. Heck I remember the first summer I spent up here in Detroit, where I went home every single weekend for three months straight. Ok, so that might have been a little excessive. Its also amazed me as I've gotten older the greater sense of appreciation I've obtained for my parents, sisters, and many other relatives. You begin to view these people much differently when you don't interact with them on a continual basis and truly begin to appreciate them for who they are. Thought I'd attach a recent pic of the family from this past Christmas, minus Camille, who was living in Columbia, MO at the time with her husband Jeremy. They've since moved back to the South Bend area. Anyway it will be nice to catch up with many friends and the family.
May is turning out to be a pretty interesting month. I've got two weddings on the calender. One as a guest, and one as a participant (not as the groom of course). Jeremy Beadner is getting married. Those of you from college will remember this name fondly (hopefully). And don't worry, Beadner hasn't changed one bit since college. Still looking to make a buck off of any kind of scheme. A certain Mr. Tim Fenton is also getting married in York, PA Memorial Day weekend, and he has asked me to share in his joy, by standing in his party. For those of you who don't know Tim, he was my college roommate for 3 years. We were blindly set up as roommates freshmen year, and to this day have mantained a great friendship. The tall 6-8 skinny kid with the short 5-10 fat kid. The perfect combo (see picture below). This also brings up the fact that I'm now pretty much the only person left out of all of my church, high school, and college group yet to get married. Thats like 30 people. That means that I'm in the 3.33 percentile of people who aren't married who have been good friends with Ben Carpenter. Sorry to throw that in there, but I'm taking a statistics class right now. At least I can still count on most of my Detroit friends for several more years of irresponsible, wild, and reckless fun.

Toodles!