Honkers and Vaders and Fairs...oh my

I was going to do this in 2 or 3 posts but here it is Sunday night and, well, I'm going to abbreviate a bit...

The weekend kind of started Thursday night when I got some free tickets to the Sommerby deck at the Honkers game. Smaller than the main sports deck, they also had some additional good food including ribs, roast beef sandwiches, lasagna, pasta salad, and 7th inning cheesecake. A big thanks to Zac, my financial advisor at Ameriprise, who gave me the 6 tickets and let me bring some friends. (as a side note, if anyone is looking for a financial advisor - Zac Saiki at Amerprise Financial, I've had him for 4 years and he's been terrific). We got home around 11 - if you want to know the story of me losing my wallet at the game and finding it the next morning refer to my earlier post.

I was excited for Friday night because my good friends Trevor and Karli from Nebraska were arriving for the weekend. I've known Trevor since the 6th grade, and we always have fun - they love movies and video games just as much as we do! Friday night was low-key, we ordered some pizza and caught up, and Erin made bread and from-scratch english muffins for breakfast the next day (yeah, I've never seen that done before and they were GOOD).

Saturday after a wonderful breakfast of strawberry pancakes (again from-scratch), juice, coffee, and milk we decided what to do with the day. We ended up playing some video games, hanging out some more, and then Karli decided we should go play mini golf. I have occasionally gone to the mini golf course in Byron so we headed out there, picked up DQ on the way, and did a round of mini golf. I won't mention the scores, but I'll say Erin wasn't too happy :) but I think the ice cream made up for it. By then it was 5:30 and we headed over to Shelley and Ryan's for grilling/dinner/drinks and to celebrate Shelley's birthday - I actually got another bday present from Paul, Anne, Lukas, Shelley and Ryan as well since S&R weren't in town for my birthday dinner. I have to say the theme of my birthday presents this year was Star Wars - mom got me a Star Wars talking card and the gang got me all sorts of Star Wars stuff including a cool yo-yo (I used to be quite the yo-yo champ). We left around 7:45 and decided to hit Batman:Dark Knight - Trevor and Karli had already seen it, but were up for seeing it again. I hadn't heard a single bad thing about the movie from anyone, and my expectation level was pretty high but it did not disappoint. I'm really sad that we'll never see Heath Ledger in another movie - obviously I'm sad that he died, but his performance in this movie was just amazing. It's rare these days that a 2 1/2 hour movie can keep your attention the whole time but this one sure did.

We pre-purchased tickets to the MN Science Museum for Sunday, and headed up at 8:30 loaded up with english muffins and Caribou coffee, to get to a 10:00am show at the IMax. The current big attraction is the Star Wars display (more Star Wars!) and the IMax show was all about special effects - pretty neat stuff. Seeing all the technology they have now for special effects makes you appreciate even more the 1977 Star Wars movie - no computers, no motion sensor cameras, etc - it really did set the bar pretty high. We then headed down to the actual Star Wars display and saw everything Star Wars you could think of, from all 3 movies. Many models, costumes, interactive displays - fantastic. Lunch a few blocks away at McGovern's, my favorite place to eat in St. Paul, then headed back home so that Trevor and Karli could start the long trek back to Omaha.

(the whole set of pictures is here - too many to put on the blog page)

This week, looking forward to our last softball game (we may very well finish 4th out of 12th, didn't seem possible at the beginning of the season!), and on Friday, IBM day at the fair, where they give us a half day off to go enjoy the Olmsted County Fair. And we get to attend a wedding of one of Erin's friends this weekend - I will have to dust off the awesome suit I never wear. The next weekend in Ames, the following in Vegas! Where does the summer go???