Great Weekend!

Well, I had such a great weekend, it's taken me until now to find the time to write about it. :)''On Saturday, we had my niece's wedding. I am always happy when nice people find one another, as I know what a long and hard search that can be to find a good person. I'm happy to say that on Saturday, we witnessed the marriage of two such good people who've found one another. :)

My 6-year-old great-niece was the flower girl. Her dress was designed to match the bride's gown. So of course she announced that her aunt (the bride) was dressed like HER. :-)

I was struck, once again, at what a cute flock of kids we have on that side of the family. My great-niece has a bunch of cousins on her dad's side of the family, ranging in age from 9 to 3 (plus a few tiny babies that are too small just yet to hang out with the set of cousins in question), and I swear they all ought to model for a kid's catalog. Someone ought to just bring the lot of them in a group to a department store, where they can be given the latest fashions to wear and the latest toys to play with, and let some photographers go to town taking catalog photos. Doggone but my brother-in-law's family has a nice set of cuteness genes that they're passing along to the next generation. :-)

OK, so I'm far from unbiased here, but even a neutral third party would surely agree that these kids are cute.

BTW... we had an Italian/German and Iranian wedding, with a mariachi band providing dinner music. THAT was fun. If the rest of the world would follow that example, of varying nationalities and cultures getting together and enjoying themselves, there'd be a lot more peace on earth.

The mariachi band made me feel like we were back in San Diego. They had guitars and trumpets, but two of the guitars were instruments I hadn't seen before. One was a smaller-than-average-sized guitar. The other was an ENORMOUS guitar, easily the largest such instrument I've ever seen. After the band finished, I asked the player what his guitar is called. It's a bass guitar for mariachi music, called a guitarròn. Now I regret not asking the guy with the small guitar what HIS instrument is. It shouldn't be too hard to track that info down online, though.

I play violin, so I'm certainly familiar with the fact that there can be a family of instruments of similar appearance and different sizes. The viol family has the violin, viola, cello (its full name is violoncello), and bass violin, plus there are a few other uncommon viol-type instruments out there that I've read about over the years. But I never knew, until this weekend, that the GUITAR belongs to a family of similar-looking instruments of varying sizes. Live and learn.

On Sunday, Mark and I went to the Cote Carnival. It was a pleasure to see fellow fans, Flyers and Phantoms (and my favorite Goalie Coach and his g/f :-) ) during the summer. The Carnival raised over $25,000 to fight MS, which I think is absolutely OUTSTANDING!

So I'm finally recovered from all the activity of the weekend. Time to start getting ready for NEXT weekend. ;-)