Epic Weekend

Last weekend ended up being incredibly busy. A lot of things I'd been looking forward to all happened at the same time. It was all really fun, even if my house is still a bit of a disaster area.

On Saturday night, a group of us went to see The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring at Wolftrap. This is a special event where they pull the music track out of the movie and a live orchestra and choir perform all of the music. I got to see The Return of the King this way when I first moved to Virginia a few years ago. It's a pretty awesome experience.

We sat on the lawn, which meant we were able to bring a picnic dinner and our own wine and beer. However it also meant that we couldn't see the orchestra or the choir that was performing. Their performance was so seamless that it was easy to forget they were there at all, which made it even cooler whenever we did remember.

The performance was for only the theatrical version of the first movie, complete with an intermission to give the musicians a break. It's a good thing they didn't show the extended edition as I'm not sure we would have lasted until the end. I always forget how long these movies are until I'm actually watching them.

On Sunday a bunch of us went to Reston for the Great Grapes Wine Festival. This is basically a really big, really long wine tasting. A bunch of local wineries come and provide tastings of anywhere from 3 to 10 wines. Knowing that this would involve a bunch of drinking, we took cabs to and from the festival. Then we ordered pizza and watched the 49ers game so Zach could sober up for the drive home. After a couple of games of beer pong, that is.

The 49ers ended up doing much better than the Redskins, who played their first game of the season on Monday night. Zach and Sarah came over for the game, which was pretty disappointing. Our defense just could not get it together against the Eagles in the beginning and we let them score far too many points. Apparently we rallied in the last quarter and very nearly came back to tie it, but I had already fallen asleep by then. Next week should go better. And hopefully the week after that will go even better, as I won a pair of tickets from work. It'll be my first time actually attending a football game, so they better play well.

On Tuesday Kevin was scheduled to umpire a few games. This had completely slipped my mind until I came home to a blessedly empty house. Getting an evening all to myself was a nice surprise after the intensity of the previous few days. I made the most of it by eating scrambled eggs for dinner and falling asleep at 9:30.