The wedding down in San Diego was supposed to be with ten people coming from our family. Mom was going to rent a fifteen-passenger van to haul everyone down. After everything was said and done only Ethan and I went with Mom and Dad. We listened to the book “Hunt for Red October” on the way down and back.
Mom and I went to the San Diego Temple early Saturday morning after I nursed Ethan. It was incredible!!! I mean, I thought it was beautiful on the outside…but the inside is overwhelmingly gorgeous! The two spires on the Temple are filled with panes of lightly colored glass that fills the Temple with natural light.
Leading up to the endowment rooms is a soft white winding staircase with large solid wood banisters that hangs suspended between floors. From the staircase you can look right up into the first spire. The endowment rooms are relatively small compared to Oakland. It felt kind of like a large living room.
The Celestial room is under the second spire, which fills the room with light from all sides. What was unique about the San Diego Celestial room is that is has two stories. There is a staircase there that leads up to the fourth floor where there is a balcony that looks down into the main portion of the Celestial room. There are crystal chandlers that look like a great bouquet of a thousand tiny ice cycles. There is a door from the second story of the Celestial room that leads to the main part of the fourth floor where all the sealing rooms are.
Each sealing room has one wall made entirely of the Temple windows which fills each room with light. In the antechamber of the sealing rooms there is a garden. No kidding! A honest-to-goodness garden that sits in encased in glass that serves as a sort of skylight. Looking into the garden and up toward the Celestial room you can see the angel Moroni up close. It was absolutely amazing!
After the Temple all four of us went to the world famous San Diego Zoo. It is world famous because you can’t tell that you’re in a zoo. If you look out over the whole place, you’d think you were in the middle of the jungle. You don’t have to wear a hat or sunglasses because you’re in the shade from all the trees most of the time. We saw a momma hippo nursing her baby and a family of Gorillas. We saw young giraffes grooming one another. After a while Ethan screamed about being in the stroller because he couldn’t see everything. That and I think he was exhausted.
THEN we went to the wedding. It was in a huge Protestant church with stained glass windows and large window that revealed a grassy hill and an olive tree at the front of the church. I think that it was ironic that the church should have windows similar to those of the Temple. The Temple, however, was immensely more beautiful, full of light and especially full of love and peace.
The wedding was short and sweet. It was beautiful, for a civil marriage. The bride and groom were living together from what I gathered, but… whatever. My policy is, “Why have a big expensive wedding if you’ve already had the honeymoon?” Ethan screamed before it got started, so I went to the back of the church and stifled his screams so that the bride wouldn’t have a baby crying on her wedding video. He hadn’t had a nap all day and was just exhausted.
The reception was on the naval base, which had the most incredible view of the ocean. Daddy even pointed out that we could see Mexico. WOW! They had great food and fun music. I even danced with Ethan for a few songs. He was SO tired by the end of the night he fell asleep in a sitting position while mom was holding him and eating dinner. Ya, lets drag the baby around till he collapses from exhaustion.
Highlights from the reception? Well, the bride shoved cake in the groom’s face, the groom took the garter off with his teeth and the teenie-boppers that were the bride’s girl scout troop drilled me on why I was there when I went out to the lobby to nurse Ethan. I hated that age!
Overall San Diego was a BLAST! I'd love to live there on a permanent basis.
We headed out to Las Vegas for the Con-Ag Expo. It's only held every three years so Michael made a management decision to go. Ethan and I went with him along with Russ, another Heavy Equipment contractor friend of Michael's. We left at 5am and pulled into Vegas at about 2pm. We stopped at the Bass Pro Shop on our way to Karen's house. They had the most impressive outdoor store I have EVER seen, WOW! They had taxidermied animals in realistic poses including a pride of lions, a cougar attacking a deer, a leopard, a family of bears trying to get into a camper. The walls were covered with mounted heads of every kind of horned type animal imaginable. 
They also had an indoor waterfall with carp, ducks, turtles and a sturgeon. Ethan was impressed by the fish tank to be rivaled only by something from Monterey Bay Aquarium. I wondered how they could pay for such extravagance until I found that the other half of the store was a casino. Figures.
