Kim & Brian's Wedding Weekend, Part Deaux - The Rehearsaless Dinner

So after our tour of the Capitol, we all headed back to the hotel to get ready for the rehearsal dinner. I got in a good 30-45 second nap, so that was nice, but we had to get ready. I'm pretty sure the temperature dropped about 20 degrees in an hour or so. We walked over to the Italian restaurant that the rehearsal dinner was at and it was FREEZING cold outside! On the way I almost got my dad and I killed by walking across the street. It seemed clear when we started, but that didn't last long. We were standing on the double yellow line, ready to make a run for the sidewalk as soon as we thought we wouldn't die. Luckily we made it, and we realized everyone else we were originally walking with were smarter than us...they went to this thing they call an "intersection". I'll have to look it up on wikipedia.

I've been to maybe 2 rehearsal dinners in my day...on average I'd say they had about 15-20 people. Tops. I have no idea if that was the norm, but it certainly wasn't in Kim & Brian's plans. There were over 100 people at this thing! It was nuts! But it was a lot of fun. For the first time, I finally met Brian's family. They were beginning to think I didn't exist, but since they are apparently big fans of my blog - and here I thought 3 or 4 people paid attention to my rambling - I decided I would prove my existence...I think they bought it!

I'm sure most of you know how Kim & Brian originally met, but if not, time for a quick recap. Kim was with her friends at bar in Georgetown called Tony and Joe's. Some random guy bought her a bright blue Windex looking drink. Along comes Brian, staring at Kim's drink - not her. Kim then asks Brian if he'd like to taste it. He says he doesn't take drinks from strangers. Little did he know, they wouldn't be strangers for long!

So I think the highlight of the rehearsal dinner...wait, hold up, this is something I haven't been able to figure out yet. Why are these things called rehearsal dinners? We didn't rehearse anything! Ok, I had to get that out. Anyways, the highlight was Brian's Uncle Jay (not to be confused with me, because I'm "ay"-less) created an awesome slide show detective drama about the Mystery of the Blue Drink. It was pretty funny too, he had all the old 80's detective show music involved...including, my favorite...Inspector Gadget. It was really creative and funny. He went and found tons of old pictures of Kim and then of Brian. But the highlight for us Zaikov's was probably the video clip of our old Co-op in Howard Beach. Apparent Jay has a friend who lives in Queens. He sent them on a mission, first to buy a VHS Camera - to make it look like a video from the 80's...$15 at your local pawn shop. Then gave him our old address and off he went. He shot footage of our old place and a bunch of hot spots in the area. Brought back lots of memories from the old childhood!

So I mentioned in Part one that Kim had me and Alyssa draw some stick figures. Turns out she had a plan for them. Kim & Brian brought both sets of parents up and presented them with framed pictures...of our stick figures :) Apparently real pictures will replace them eventually. They also called up all the bridesmaids and groomsmen to give them little gifts. I'm not sure what the ladies got, but Brian gave each groomsman a very FSU-colored tie :) and we each got cuff-links with our initials on them in these cool boxes in the shape of a tux. Very cool. However, Brian felt the need to totally ruin it all by taking a cheap shot at my Noles though, questioning whether FSU was even gonna make a bowl game! pffftttt!!!! I believe his dad put him in his place for me, after all, Kansas has only been good for 3 months now!

Saturday morning I woke up and headed downstairs because I was pretty sure I could hear some Zaikov's chattering all the way from the 9th floor. So I hung out with the family for a while, the hotel provided a lunch at 11:30 us in Bubbie's room. It was nice, but all I cared about was getting to a bar to watch the Maryland-FSU game. Priorities!!! I managed to grab dad and we Metro'd our way to an absolutely terrible bar called Buffalo Billiards. I've been there before, but it was always pretty empty. Keeping in mind that the University of Maryland is maybe 10 miles away I'd guess...there were NO TV's with the Maryland-FSU game when we got there at about 12:15 (kickoff was noon). Unbelievable!!! There was a huge crowd gathered for the Ohio State-Michigan game for some reason. I had to talk to a manager to even get the FSU game on a TV in the corner. It took him what seemed like forever and finally he turned it on right as I got to see a replay of FSU's first touchdown! Woohoooo. So, we were warned that we weren't gonna be getting any wait service in the section we were in. No big deal, the bar wasn't that far. Little did we know what we were in for! Eventually a crowd of Brian's friends and family showed up. I'm pretty sure Brett was the only Maryland fan in this PACKED bar. WTF? And that wasn't even the worst of it for Brett (neither was the fact that Maryland lost) he ordered a chicken sandwich from the bar...and after asking about it 2 or 3 times, it finally showed up, literally an hour later. By this time, we all had to leave really soon to get back in time for pictures. I also went to the bar to get one last beer and close my tab. Unfortunately I signed my check before he physically gave me my beer. He began pouring my beer, stopped the tap so that the head would clear...but he walked away. He was taking other people's orders, putting dishes away. My evil look in his direction was no match for his plan to completely forget about my poor little half filled Guinness. I was soooooo tempted to cross off the - already small - tip from my check! Finally I yelled out to him to ask him to finish with my beer already. He said he forgot. Great. I took my beer and ran off. Drank it way too quickly and as soon as FSU officially finished off Maryland, off we went. We were quickly running out of time before we were supposed to be ready for pictures.

Did we make it back in time??? Tune in for Part 3!!!!

Kim & Brian's Wedding Weekend, Part 1 - The Days Before

I don't think its really sunk in yet. It doesn't exactly roll off my tongue just yet, but its true...I now have a brother-in-law. For one day anyways...I was a BLOG (get it? Ok, Brother in Law Of the Groom) Oh come on, thats funny!!!!

Anyways, it was an awesome weekend, and I will now tell you all about, so hope you brought your reading glasses, and maybe some coffee...if you're into that sort of thing. Actually I'm gonna split this up into a couple of blogs, just so no one gets scared away from seeing an obnoxiously long blog! So here comes Part 1...

The weekend got started in typical fashion...my flight was delayed. I met my cousin Alyssa who had a layover in ATL. Her flight was an hour after mine. I tried to work it out to where we could get on the same flight, but Delta wouldn't have it. Oh well. I got into DC and was just gonna wait on her. My parents and Kim met me at the airport and wouldn't you know it...my suitcase was actually one of the first ones out! Figures...since I was in no rush. Alyssa got in about an hour later, in between, to kill time, my dad learned all about how Segway's worked from a cop in the airport riding around on one. Finally, Alyssa showed up - apparently her bags arrived on my flight, good thing they couldn't work that deal out for people! My parents then finally dropped us off at Kim's condo. Kim had me draw a couple of stick figures on two separate pieces of paper, but wouldn't tell me why. Alyssa didn't like my first attempt so she drew the 2nd one. Meanwhile, I made Brian watch the end of the Oregon-Arizona game, where #2 Oregon lost to unranked Arizona, which is good for his and my adopted Jayhawks. We were all pretty exhausted, so it was bed time.

Friday morning, Kim and my parents met up with Brian and his parents and the rabbi who was to marry them. I got to sleep in :) When they were done me and my dad left for our day of tourism. We were hoping to go see the Air and Space Museum along with getting a tour of the capitol, but ran out of time. We also had to pickup my tux, and that took way too long, so we only had time to go to the capitol tour. My cousin Rob works for Congressman Michael Honda (CA). We missed out on meeting him, but were told that he gets a kick out of people taking pictures from his chair. So...we did just that. Then we got a tour of the Capitol from a co-worker of Rob's. It got off to a bad start when Alyssa got caught with mace. Apparently they don't want you bringing mace on tours of the capitol. They were very against us just throwing it away, so Rob had to bring it back to his office. Finally the tour started and I've gotta admit...it was pretty boring. Our tour guide was pretty much worthless. To her credit, there were almost 20 of us on the tour, when I think they're used to groups of about 5-10. And even Rob admitted that she wasn't very helpful. The only fun part was this one room which was built in such a way where, at one spot on the floor, if you speak into the floor, you can hear that person in another spot on the floor across the room. That's kinda hard to explain, but thats the best I got. There were lots of statues all over the place - Samuel Adams for example. I enjoy his beer, so I took a picture pretending to be drinking a beer. I only mention that because its hard to tell what the hell I'm doing in that picture (below). The fun part was trying to emulate the poses of some of the statues, also seen below - from left to right - Beer Man Samuel Adams, General U.S. Grant, and Robert M. La Follette, whose name, ironically rhymes with toilet, which is where I believe this guy was sitting when they made this statue.

My cousin Liz's wedding weekend

Ok, after I typed the title I started thinking about My Cousin Vinny - the movie. No reason, I'm guessing you can say My Cousin - fill in the blank - and it'd make me think of that movie. Its a good one! I digress.

So, this past Saturday, the first of the Zaikov cousins got married. Ok, technically she's never been a Zaikov, but i'm not sure how else to label us, so I just went for it. It was up north in Cape Cod and it was a really nice weekend. It was especially nice to get away from the 100+ degree weather we'd been dealing with in Atlanta! I flew up to Boston at 7am on Saturday morning (ughhh, waking up at 4:30 is NOT for me!). I was so tired that i remember flying over Cape Cod and thinking hmmmm, thats Long Island I think? i don't function when i'm tired!!! My sister and her fiance - who will now be known as "Brian" flew up an hour before me, rented a car, found me and we drove from Boston to Cape Cod. Traffic was pretty miserable, as it was all weekend. We finally made it to the hotel. First thing we needed was a beer...then lunch...then a nap. Then a few of my a-little-too-young-cousins got the idea to play drinking games. So, we went out, bought beer...plastic cups...and, of course...ping pong balls :) Thats right, we played flip-cup first. Got my dad in on that! He struggled at first...but came back strong in game 2. Next we played Beer Pong. I'd never actually played before. I teamed up with my cousin Ashley and we pretty much dominated that. The best was getting my grandmother - Bubbie involved. That to me was the highlight of the weekend!

Saturday night was the rehearsal dinner. Anything with free drinks is good as far as I'm concerned. There's a picture from that night on the right (Alyssa, Kim, Bubbie, Liz, Ashley). Towards the end of the night, a somewhat obnoxious guy was trying to get some of my not-officially-21-years-old cousins (although their ID's say otherwise) to go to a bar. They did...with Bubbie. Sorry I missed that, but I was pretty much exhausted at that point - and had to go back to the hotel. So I did, just hung out at the hotel. Found my cousin Rob hanging outside his room with a friend, so I hung out with them as people started coming back to the hotel, they joined us. Nothing too exciting.

Sunday morning was the wedding. Just off the beach. It was hot. Not Paris Hilton hot, temperature hot, although not Atlanta-hot. But when I'm wearing a suit, its easy for it to be too hot out. Anyways, everyone that was supposed to say "I do", did...so thats always a good thing. After the ceremony we went into a large tented area for finger food and drink. I was almost surprised with myself when I just ordered an ice water. But it wasn't even noon yet and it was HOT still. A bunch of us gathered around a table, we were about to take a picture when someones beer got knocked over and spilled all over the back of Bubbie's dress. She's a good sport though...cleaned herself off and still had a great time...not to mention she smelled good the rest of the day :)

For some reason bunch of us decided it'd be fun to wear sunglasses and pose with ancient hebrew gang signals. Not bad, huh? I dare anyone to find a cooler grandmother!


The wedding reception was fun, I felt really bad for my cousin Josh who had a really bad virus of some sort all day Sunday. He was miserable. (He's the one in that last picture with his sister Alyssa bugging him) I didn't really drink, but I did force myself to dance. Hell, its a bunch of jews, how ridiculous could I possibly look? And actually the correct answer to that would would be one Harry Pierson. (Sorry, I probably shouldn't go there, but anyone who was there saw it). When it was time to cut the cake, the band played "Pour Some Sugar On Me" (Def Leppard) so that was fun! After the reception, Liz and Greg got on board a little boat and literally sailed off into the sunset. We didn't get a chance to write on the boats' windshield or attach coke cans to it.

Sunday night, Alyssa and Ashley REALLY wanted to have a barbecue. It was starting to get close to the time where it gets dark, but they still REALLY wanted this. They went out shopping, got enough stuff to feed about 16 of us. But the charcoal we got just wouldnt light! Even with pretty much a whole bottle of lighter fluid! Hayden (another cousin) wound up getting ANOTHER bottle of lighter fluid. In the meantime, we were trying anything we could think of to get the charcoal burning. We lit the bag from the charcoal...that wasn't even easy to light. But it didn't work either. We finally went into the woods and broke off a couple of branches from some trees. That finally got things going and about 3 hours after we began...we finally were able to eat. Afterwards we just kinda hung out and were looking for some shooting stars. I actually found a couple. Its amazing how many stars you can see when you're in the middle of nowhere!

So that was pretty much it, Monday morning, me, Kim and Brian left Cape Cod and headed to Boston to, amongst other things, took a tour of Fenway Park. There will most certainly be a new blog about that! It was really pretty cool!