i'm married. have been for three weeks now. it's great so far. one of my favorite things (not counting the obvious one) is that we now live together. no more of the "i'll drive you home now" or "see you tomorrow" as she goes out the door. it's just "goodnight, love you" and we fall asleep together. very awesome.

the wedding itself was amazing. everything went perfectly as far as i'm concerned. i was totally stunned by how amanda looked in her dress. literally stunned. i had expected her to look incredible. i wasn't expecting enough. she was without question the most beautiful bride i have ever seen. (i might be a tad bias, but probably not more than i'm due) there are a ton of pictures on facebook as you'd expect, taken from many different people. also included is a video taken by grant of our first dance. we did a swing dance to the song "in the mood" by glenn miller. it was definitely in the top five (three?) best things about the day.

last year we started going to some classes at our church on sunday mornings. (yes this is still related to the wedding, i'm getting to the point eventually) the group was led by van carlson, a person who had been going to the church for a long time. his wife periodically would help him lead. a few months ago they invited the group over to their house for a barbecue. amanda and i went and stayed later than any of the other guests. during this evening, julie (van's wife) mentioned that if we wanted to stay at their cabin for our honeymoon that they would be happy to let us. we decided to do so. (see, i told you it was related) turns out that they let people stay there a lot, such as members of the church staff for retreats or study breaks. it's like their ministry for the church.

the week at the cabin for our honeymoon was totally awesome. it honestly was much more like a house than a cabin for how nice it was. it was right on a lake so we went swimming a couple of the days, and went kayaking another. we also watched a bunch of movies and played lots of games. it was a super good time and i'm very thankful that van and julie let us stay there.

i once again went to gencon with fantasy flight games this year. gencon is a 28,000 person board game convention where you can try out games, meet designers, and hang out with other gamers. i demoed descent: sea of blood for most of the time that i was working for fantasy flight. my other time was spent demoing games such as thunderstone, the adventurers, and small world. i also spent a lot of time in the auction room, where i got a bunch of good deals including merchants of amsterdam (yay!) for $22, runebound for $16, and mad gab for $5. very nice.

one of the highlights of the convention was that the newest expansion for dominion called prosperity was on sale in limited copies. i was the first person to get a copy which felt pretty cool. i then proceeded to go back to the hotel room and post a full card spoiler on board game geek. i know there are a lot of other gamers out there that were dying to know what the cards were but couldn't make it to gencon. i've been in that situation before and definitely wanted to help out my fellow gamers.

well, the wedding and gencon were the two major things that have happened lately. a bunch of other stuff too, but i wanted to highlight the major ones since it has been so long since my last blog entry. thanks for reading as always and keep on gaming!

(note: for those non-programmers reading this, the ++ in the title is not a typo, it's a programming concept meaning increment)