Merri Su and Brian's Blog

Bride and Groom's first dance? Hokey Pokey.

2008-07-24T18:46:00.000-07:00

We woke up on the day of Carter and Tary's wedding in Carmel refreshed and ready to finally relax after being lost the entire previous day. We met up with the Rice crew and decided to go to Katy's for breakfast. This was a place suggested by both Carter and our hotel. It must be good, right? (Foreshadow: It was)

Katy's Place specializes in breakfast. They had about a dozen different varieties of my favorite breakfast treat, Egg's Benedict. (Because I now consider myself a Texan) I never thought there were enough non-vegans in California to support such a menu. Of course, now that I think of it, they probably did have a vegan "Egg's Benedict" option made with spinach and uncooked tofu covered in olive oil. Disgusting? Sure. But at least that chicken is happy that it's infertile egg rotted in a corner instead of filling your tummy and making you go "yummy".

And, of course, we found the greatest painting anyone has ever seen.For our afternoon activity, Erica, Josh, Merri Su, and I drove the 17-mile drive near the coast that is inhabbited by the Pebble Beach Golf Links. We took full advantage of the rented convertible and took some wonderful pictures along the way. I think my favorite was a small tide pool we discoverred abot 200 feet from the road. I'll let the pictures say the rest.

LOOK OUT! The Loch Ness monster has found the Pacific!
And finally, there was the wedding. The ceremony took place on a deck overlooking the ocean. It was one of the most beautiful weddings we've ever seen. Apparently, Carter and Tary had originally considerred this location before deciding on having the wedding in the heart of Big Sur. When the fires hit a week before the wedding, they asked if there was any availability. Lucky for all of us, the Red Cross had the venue booked. But they were too busy because, apparently, there was a fire nearby.

The wedding was beautiful. The party was great. (Open bar, dude!) The food was wonderful. And, most importantly, the people were some of our favorite people. The weekend ended well and you would never know that all the events were planned at the last minute unless someone told you. Thank you, Carter and Tary. We love you guys. However, as much as you want to deny it, I know your first dance together as a married couple was to the Hokey Pokey. Just embrace it, already. Your kids will love that story!

And now, for something completely different.

2008-07-22T23:22:00.000-07:00

As a Michigander I must say....

HAHAHAHA! ROFLMAOBBQ!

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/07/23/detroit.mayor.ap/index.html

I can't help but to say that this is still better than everything from the Coleman Young era. Do you still live near Detroit?!? Get out. NOW! Do you know who runs that place? Even when the mayor was competent (Dennis Archer), was it worth while? That's what I thought.

Happy Anniversary to Us!

2008-07-07T07:23:00.000-07:00

One year ago today, we said our vows, escaped a downpour, partied with friends and family, and all in all had a great time as we committed to spending the rest of our lives together. Thanks for an amazing and wonderful year! Happy anniversary to us!

P.S. The cake is the only wedding-related photo I have with me at the moment. Maybe I'll post more later...

Proud to be an American

2008-07-04T22:36:00.000-07:00

This country has problems. But so does every other country. What makes this country better than most is that we admit our faults and constantly work, as a group, to fix things. I think the American people have learned a lot over the past decade. We've seen economic highs and lows. We've seen peace and war. We've witnessed an attack on American soil, something we will never forget.

This country became independent by winning a war that was fought in an extremely unconventional manner. We won because we were willing to do whatever it took to surprise and strike fear into our enemy. The American rebels adopted tactics that were considered unfair and savage at the time. But we had to fight that way. That was the only way to win. And we knew we had something worth fighting for, our freedom. Freedom to have different opinions from those that are in power. Freedom to control our own government. Freedom to have faith in whatever we choose.

Next time you are upset at someone because they have an opinion that is different than yours, try to remember what this country was founded upon. Many men and women lost their lives fighting for our freedom of opinion. It would be a shame if we forgot how important that freedom was when it comes to harmless things like religion, sexual preference, or the color of someone's skin.

I have never been in the military, but I would be willing to risk my life for this country if I felt it was necessary. I don't have to wear an American flag on my lapel to prove my love for this country. All you have to do is ask. I think that goes for almost all Americans.

Oh, and blowing shit up on July 4th, well that's just what makes America awesome. Despite a bad economy and gasoline prices quadrupling in the past 3 years, we still buy shit like this:

Why is the owner of the Alamo Drafthouse holding a phallic recreational explosive? Well, that's because it is awesome and we will soon make it go boom. I love this country! And now for a picture of me and our soon to be married friends, Josh and Erica. Yay USA!

How to get lost in Carmel

2008-07-03T12:11:00.000-07:00

My wife and I are now experts on how to get lost in Carmel. I don't mean "lost" in the romantic way that tourism boards and advertisers use. We didn't fall in love with the place and forget where we were. We had maps. We had Google. We had TomTom. We asked people for directions. They all failed us at least once last weekend.

We were in Carmel for Carter and Tary's wedding. Their wedding was originally going to be in the middle Big Sur, but that was on fire. All the resorts in Big Sur had to evacuate earlier in the week due to approaching wildfires that were started by a freak lightning storm. Fortunately, a new venue in Carmel was quickly booked and wedding went off without a hitch (except for the bride and groom who were, in fact, hitched).

Merri Su and I booked a beautiful room in the Pine Inn. Now all we had to do was find it. I used Google to find the address of the hotel and when we got to our rental car I punched the address into our TomTom and followed it all the way to a hotel. While it looked like a beautiful, quaint hotel, it was not the Pine Inn. I was very confused.

We decided to go in and figure out if maybe the name of the inn was changed recently or something. "Is this the... Pine Inn?"

"Umm... No, sir. This is..." I could immediately tell that the woman behind the desk was almost as confused as I was.

"OK, I can read. I realize the sign said something else. I'm just very confused because this is where our nav system brought us." I immediately thought of all those stories I read about trucks getting stuck in back roads because the driver blindly followed his or her nav system down a road that isn't even wide enough for a motorcycle. I always thought those drivers were such morons. I was now one of those morons. In the end, we found out that the address Google gives for the Pine Inn is wrong, so it wasn't entirely my fault, just mostly.

We got directions to the Pine Inn and a map from the helpful woman at what turned out to be the wrong hotel. Merri Su tried navigating us there using the map but when she told me to turn into the ocean, I knew something was not right. She then studied the map. "Oh what the hell! The top of this map points East, not North. Who does that?" Apparently the tourism board of Carmel does that. (Oh, and I do that all the time too by accident. Don't ever ask me to draw you a map unless you're looking for a brain teaser.)

Once we found the hotel it was time for a new adventure. Unfortunately, we were not feeling adventurous. We decided to get ourselves lost trying to find the rehearsal dinner that we were already late for. We knew approximately where the hotel was, but not what exit to take. We tried to find it ourselves but failed. It was time to give TomTom another try. We found the hotel in TomTom's list of nearby points of interest so we thought we were home free. TomTom brought is right to the hotel. Well, not really. It brought us to the point on the freeway right outside the hotel. For the rest of the weekend, TomTom was dead to Merri Su.

A few phone calls later we figured out the correct exit and found the hotel. Now, if only we knew where the dinner was at the hotel. I can now tell you that my wife and I know where every banquet area is in the Hyatt Regency Monterey. Everyone that worked at the hotel kept pointing us in different directions. It took a guest at the hotel who recognized our frustration to help us. It so hapenned that he noticed a rehearsal dinner earlier and pointed us to the right place.

I swear that the rest of our vacation was wonderful and we both had an absolute blast. We stopped using maps. We stopped using TomTom (after all, he was now dead to Merri Su). We stopped asking strangers for directions. The only trusted source for directions the rest of the weekend was our friends. I'll try to post about the fun parts of our trip soon. Here's a teaser:

I am Ironman

2008-06-20T10:31:00.000-07:00

Or perhaps "I am RoboFoot", as we've come to call it.

See, I sprained my ankle a couple of weeks ago, making it inadvisable for me to do the triathlon I'd been training for, and more or less cramping my style ever since due to the plastic Ironman-looking contraption I'm strapped into.

I thought I'd be able to take it off for good yesterday, but the podiatrist said no, one more week. Then time for physical therapy. I'm still hoping that I'll be able to get back to triathlon training in time for a few late-summer races. We'll see.

Ziplining in Wimberley

2008-05-27T17:57:00.000-07:00

For day two of Carter's bachelor weekend, we went ziplining in Wimberley Texas. While I feel that $60 was a little high for a tour that lasted less than two hours, it was still really fun. Here's the whole crew at the highest platform.

I have videos, too. The first one is of Joe and the second is of Emily.

Carter's Bachelor Weekend (Day 1)

2008-05-27T17:29:00.000-07:00

If you know Carter, you know that a weekend dedicated to him would include Texas barbecue. That's exactly where we started on Saturday. Everyone met in Lockhart at Smitty's. I think I still prefer Kruez, but there's nothing wrong with Smitty's. Unfortunately, we didn't get any pictures here. If we did, I might have proof of just how clear red butcher's paper can become after pounds of fatty brisket and sausage has been eaten off of it. Disgusting! But in a "oh my God that is freaking delicious and I want to eat it every day for the rest of my life until I am too fat to leave my house and I'm embarrassed but it was worth it for all that sausage and brisket" kind of way.

From there we headed to Carter's fiance's parent's river house (take a minute to figure out what that means, there are a lot of possessive modifiers, it can be tough, think of it like a complex sudoku puzzle and it might be more fun) on the Guadalupe horseshoe. On the way there I wondered if Tary's parent's house was anywhere near the incredible house I have envied from the river so many times with three decks and a beautiful view of the river. As we pulled up...

Holy F@$*! It's that house! That's me standing on the middle deck. This is one of the most incredible houses I have ever visited. Thank you Carter. There's a great view of the river.

But it's tough to go on the river when you can relax here:

There's really no point in being jealous. I'm sure the place you were at this weekend had at least one or two decks. It was probably nice. Besides, we had trouble having the awesome, incredible time we had since our stomachs were so full of delicious barbecue. Your kosher hot dogs and burnt hamburgers were very... nice, I'm sure.

Photos, Photos, Photos

2007-07-20T08:37:00.000-07:00

Our wedding was an absolute blast! We loved every second of it (even the rain provided some adventure and excitment!), and we wouldn't change a thing. Thank you so much to everyone who was able to travel to be with us and to those of you who weren't but still thought good thoughts for us on our wedding day.

We've started getting non-pro photos from our wedding back from friends and family. I created a shutterfly collection to house them all for easy viewing: merrisuandbrian.shutterfly.com. Email one of us (you should know how) for the password or if you have trouble with it. If you'd like, you can create a photo album of your own through shutterfly (it's free) and add it to the collection. (I think. Again, email me if you have issues.)

In other photographic news, I had a photo shoot with an Austin-American Statesman photographer on Wednesday. It was really fun. I've been in my hometown newspaper before, but I've never had such an elaborate photo shoot for the paper with so many different configurations and poses. This shoot was for an article (for which I was interviewed on Monday) about planning weddings using online tools and sites. It was a lot of fun to be able to geek out about all the planning we did and wax nostalgic about the wedding. I'll let you know when the article comes out!

Details, Details

2007-06-12T20:52:00.000-07:00

We've been working hard to iron our wedding details lately, including the schedule of events. We're just three and a half weeks away from the wedding now, and we're getting more and more excited every day. We look forward to seeing you soon! Also check out this page for ideas for non-wedding things to do in Austin.

Invitations: Check!

2007-05-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

I dropped off most of the invitations at the post office today! Whew! Special thanks to my friends Lynn Huang and Carrie Riche for finishing up the stamping and labeling while we were in California last weekend. The change in postal rate caused a few headaches, but I think we got it all taken care of! All that's left invitation-wise is getting the last few missing addresses, correcting some mis-typed addresses, and printing the international addresses. The countdown has begun! (52 days to go, in case you're wondering... :-)

Grumblecakes

2007-04-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

Grumblecakes. I didn't know this until this morning, but our website was completely unusable on Internet Explorer. Since 90% of web users use Internet Explorer instead of the far superior Firefox, this was a big problem. You see, the people we are ordering invitations from put the CSS together. (A CSS, or cascading style sheet, defines the look and style of a website so that all of the html pages can simply contain content and maintain a consistent look with all the other pages on the site.) They gave me the CSS, saying that they had a huge problem getting it to look right in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, the latter being the bigger problem. I then completely altered the CSS to make it look better in Firefox, forgetting to test my changes in Internet Explorer. I have now replaced my awesome-but-only-works-in-Firefox CSS with the original CSS given to us by ElizabethLouise.

One More Thing

2007-04-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

I forgot to mention that we've booked the airfare and lodging for our honeymoon in August. We're going to Maui! Yay! It'll be after NIWeek, a big company-wide event that is a major milestone for both our product groups every year and that requires much working up to. We found a good deal on airfare on cheapoair.com and a great deal on lodging on tripadvisor.com. I love the internet!

Less than 3 Months to Go

2007-04-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

We're now 86 days from our wedding, and all the planning and preparation is going smoothly. We need to start thinking about favors and wedding day timeline, and I'd like to add some more content to the site about stuff to do in and around Austin. All this will have to wait until after this weekend, though, because we're off to Baltimore to see my stepbrother marry his lovely fiance. I'm looking forward to some time with my family and getting to see a bit of a new city, but once we get back, it'll be nose back to the grindstone with wedding planning, work, and all the usual everyday stuff.

We've Been Busy!

2007-03-29T19:27:00.000-07:00

We've definitely been busy in the last couple of months, with both of us working on major product releases. We have made some time to do wedding stuff, like finally mailing out save-the-date cards for all the addresses we have and making time to register for gifts. We registered at Sears, Crate & Barrel, and Bed, Bath & Beyond. We also made sure to get some photos among the bluebonnets, a very popular spring-time activity in central Texas. You'll see a photo or two of us among the wildflowers at the wedding. Only a few months away now!

Hotels

2007-02-13T07:33:00.000-08:00

We just got the first, and for now only, block of hotel rooms reserved for our wedding. The Omni Hotel is absolutely gorgeous and only a block away from 6th Street, the social center of downtown Austin. You can reserve a room online through this web page:

http://www.omnihotels.com/FindAHotel/AustinDowntown/MeetingFacilities/RuhmannWilsonWedding.aspx

If this hotel is too expensive for you, there are many other hotels you can try. We just don't have any rooms blocked off at other locations. I don't know of any hotels near the Terrace Club, so I would just suggest getting a hotel downtown near 6th Street.

Austin Marriott at the Capitol
(512) 478-1111

La Quinta Austin Capitol
(512) 476-1166

La Quinta Austin Mopac North (Close to our house, but far from downtown)
(512) 832-2121

They're Here! They're Here!

2007-02-02T13:27:00.001-08:00

Our save-the-date postcards arrived from the printer today, and I couldn't be more excited about them. They turned out beautifully, and I can't wait to get some postage on them and mail them out. I hope y'all love them, too!

First Post!

2007-02-01T17:48:00.000-08:00

Welcome to our wedding blog! Merri Su and I will post news about the wedding and share of our experiences as we prepare for the most important day of our lives. More to come.