Cooler But High Still in 80's( Shorten Wedding)

6:30

The Ceremony

AB and Peter Shorten

The Proud Parents, Scott and Michelle Shorten

Barb and Mike Cassell

At 6:30, the sun is blinding, as I come downstairs to a cup of coffee.  Not much action on the lake, a nice breeze from the north, the flags actually moving,  though the downstairs living room still feels muggy.  It's 67 degrees outside, 74 inside, even though we have the windows open.  No kayaking this morning, as I am too tired, as we did not get back to the lake until 12:30 from a wedding in Hudson.

So, yesterday was a busy day, starting off with a visit to the Transfer Station, then to Home Depot to have a free water check, a waste of time as all they want to do is sell you their system.  I did find out about a new deck product called Restore, which though expensive, seems to create a surface on your deck or dock that fills in the cracks, gets rid of splinters, and creates a smooth surface.  I am tempted to try it though a hundred square feet will cost about $160.00, just about the size of end piece of dock.

We left for Euclid around 1:30 and spent a couple hours at my sister Linda's house on Lake Erie.  It was so warm that we never went down to the beach, just stayed in her house and caught up on all the news.  As usual, they have had a busy summer, with all their grand children, thirteen of them, just a walk a way.  How nice.  We left for Hudson, at 5:15, and stopped at our good friends, the Cassells house, before we all went to Shorten house, good friends of ours in Hudson, for a 6:30 wedding ceremony of their son Peter, one of my favorite students at Reserve.  It was hot, no doubt, probably in the mid nineties when the ceremony took place in their green backyard.  Unfortunately, all the chairs were in the sun for the ceremony.  The vows were taken in front of a lovely background of pines and annuals and it lasted only 15 minutes.  Scott, the Dad, was proud, as he later told me,  to have found a minister who married his son without ever mentioning Jesus or God.  It was refreshing.

Fortunately, after the ceremony, there were lots of trees to stand under, talk, drink and enjoy the late afternoon in their lovely back yard.  They had Blue Moon on tap, other bottled beer in tubs of ice, plus a bar.  In their side yard, they had a huge tent, with seating for about hundred people, with four huge fans at the corners, the kind you might find on an NFL field.  


It was still muggy once we were seated, but bearable and they had a buffet line of pulled pork, chicken breasts, macaroni  and cheese, and salad, all quite good.  Everything was planned by Pete and AB, and I thought just right, not too fancy, but tasteful and fun.  There was a dance floor in the middle of the tent, a DJ, and though it was still warm at 10:00, people were having fun.  Pete is in his third year of med school at Wright State and his wife, AB, a neighbor in Hudson, is a physical therapist.  They left for a honeymoon in Belize this morning at 7:00.  We spent much of the evening talking with Barb and Mike Cassell, our good friends from Hudson, and Herb and Margaret Haller, one of my former students, also a colleague, and the AD at Reserve.  I was surprised how few Reserve students were at the wedding, as most of the young people were the couple's friends from Denison, the neighborhood or Med School.  O, yes, I forgot...only one woman needed to be taken away by EMS because of heat stroke!  

We left about 10:00, deciding to return to the lake, rather than stay overnight.  It was an easy drive, with a stop at the Ohio border for gas and a burger, coke, and fries, to keep us both alert.  We got home about 12:30 to a warm house, turned on the AC in our bedroom, and went to bed.