We’ve added some new information to our wedding page, including our colors and registry. As we said on that page, please feel free to not use our registry–if you have a better idea for our home than we had, by all means, use the better idea! :) Of course, you are certainly welcome to use the registry–that’s what we have it for. :)

Second in an occasional series

Of all the people who pass through the doors to a restaurant, a surprising number are incapable of answering the basic question, What do you want to eat? [Read more »]

Tonight Abby and I visited a store to begin looking at various necessities for when we are married. Mostly I relied on her expertise, but by her own request I made what contributions of frugality or preference that I could. I am very thankful that I will soon have a prudent and capable (and beautiful, see below) wife.

Yesterday Lincoln and my mom and I met with Kami, our wedding coordinator. We went over all sorts of things, from dress colors to cake to sound-system techs. It was good to get a clearer picture of the things we have to do. Thankfully, most of what we talked about, I had already thought about, at least abstractly.

I have a big blue notebook in which reside all my scribblings, ideas, magazine pictures, and other miscellanies. So far it’s been quite handy in keeping me organized–but we haven’t done much more than just think yet. Organization isn’t really my strong suit, so we’ll see what happens when I need to keep track of important things. :)

If anyone has any fabulous decoration ideas for a bride with not too much talent and not too much money and not too much time on the day of the wedding, I’d love to hear them.

Since I last posted, we’ve gone through the Grand Teton National Park and then back across the country. We visited some family friends, the Fosters, in Roscoe, IL, on Wednesday and Thursday and then my uncle and his family on Friday. Today we started the really and truly final leg home. Right now we’re in Shelbyville, KY, and tomorrow we will finally be home. Tomorrow (maybe) I’ll post pictures of the Tetons, which are lovely.

Much of the time I am busy doing something but not really using my mind. I’ve found a way to fill that space at LibriVox. LibriVox offers audio recording of books that are in the public domain. All of the books that I’ve listened to so far have been well done, and the reader for one did as good a job as any other audiobook or dramatic production I’ve heard. In about a week, I’ve listened to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, E. M. Forster’s Howards End, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

To be sure, listening to audiobooks is no substitute for actually reading the book. Both because of the medium and because I’m doing something else at the time, I don’t comprehend as much as I would when reading. But a more valid comparison in my case is between listening to such books and not reading them at all. Most of the time that I can devote to reading is spent on histories that demand my full attention. Recently I’ve read Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, Eugene Genovese’s The Slaveholders’ Dilemma, Samuel Eliot Morison’s By Land and By Sea: Essays and Addresses, Richard Bushman’s From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765, and several books about the slave trade, and I’ve just started Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. Audiobooks are a good way to work in some literature too.

I heard about the site from Kellen, who heard about it from Anna Beth. Kellen, Anna Beth, Abby, and I even have tentative plans to do our own recording for LibriVox.

On the last day of our trip to Lynchburg, Brian and I traveled to Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, and to Ash Lawn, the home of Jame Monroe. Neither location allowed us to take pictures inside. Monticello’s website has a good online tour.

Today’s journey took us around to several geyser basins. But our first encounter of interest occurred soon after we entered the park. We saw probably thirty cars all parked or pulling off to the side of the road near Mary Bay, and, as usual, where there are cars, there’s an animal. This animal happened to be a grizzly bear, out for a bath in the lake. We got to watch it enter the lake, rinse off, exit, and cross the road to the forest, followed by dozens of amateur camera lenses (such as mine) and some high-falutin’ camera lenses too. I thoroughly enjoyed watching it do its business, seemingly unaware of the frenzy it was creating.

The geysers weren’t as smelly as I expected; I thought they were lovely. Many of them were a beautiful turquoise blue, with rims of orange and yellow. They bubbled merrily, some sporadically and some constantly. A few truly erupted. Of course, no trip to Yellowston’s geysers would be complete without Old Faithful, so we patiently waited for it to erupt, and it did–right on schedule.

To round out my scientific experience in Yellowstone, we went to one of the visitor centers that explained all about why the land has so many hot springs, geysers, and earthquakes (800-something in 2005). Basically, Yellowstone is a mammoth volcano. It’s not just one mountain’s worth; it used to be (dates are up for discussion) a huge caldera that erupted, but it’s erupted several times since then, according to the geologists, creating not just one area of volcanic activity, but a huge area. The constant shift and flow of magma and the earth’s plates creates the hot springs and geysers, and the earthquakes actually help to keep the springs working. They get clogged up with the mineral deposits; earthquakes open new holes and shake the deposits away. However, because the volcanic activity is so volatile, the thermal areas may be very active or completely inactive within a matter of years.

See the gallery for pictures.