Europe, Asia, Nostalgia, South America, Europe again

I just had another of those all-too-short weekends at Rob’s house.  We did some fun things.  Somehow, I feel weird moving from that sentence into saying that we watched the movie Downfall with Rob’s dad.  It’s a German movie about the last few days in Hitler’s bunker.  Suicides galore, but also lots of interesting characters.  It was really well done, but not quite classifiable as “fun.”  Whenever I think of it, the part that comes to mind first is when Magda Goebbels poisons her six children so they won’t have to live in a world without National Socialism.

Saturday evening Rob and I went out to eat with Beth and Jeff at a Japanese restaurant.  I had tempura.  Yummy.  Then we went over to Jeff’s to play “Axis and Allies,” a game Jesse, Geoff and Lucas used to play when they were younger.  I never paid much attention because it seemed kind of boring.  The game is basically designed to cause rifts in friendship, as one player is Germany, and three others are banded together as Russia, Great Britain and the United States.  Jeff was Germany, and his first turn took an hour.  He took over my motherland (Great Britain) relatively quickly, so I was left with a few boats I sailed around.  We ended up quitting at about 1:30 in the morning, 5 hours into the game.  It was an experience.

Sunday Rob’s mom, Beth and I went on a hunt for the mother-of-the-groom dress.  And, a few hours later, we emerged victorious.  I think the dress looks really nice.  Not everyone has shoes figured out yet, but at least we know now that all wedding party and family members will be clothed.

That evening, Rob and I made the first of what we intend to be a series of video snapshots of our life.  It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t have a webcam in my youth.  There’s part of me that’s so obsessed with chronicling – I probably would have ended up with hours of recordings.  It’s easier to skim through my mountains of journals, I think.  Then again, it might have been cool to have seen my mannerisms and what I looked like/talked like throughout the years…  Anyway, we just talked a bit about things that are going on now and things that we’re looking forward to.  We may be setting ourselves up for retrospective condescension from our future selves, but that’s a risk you have to be willing to take any time you make a record of your thoughts.

We played some Perudo and watched A Nightmare Before Christmas with Rob’s mom before going to sleep.

Rob drove me back home this morning, picked up the invitation stuff (we need to reprint a couple from his printer at home), went with me to church to back up our files onto an external hard drive, and then drove home.  We’ve kind of been doing weeks here, weekends at his house for a while, but we’re going to be here this weekend, so it seemed like he should see his family for a while.  He was offered a pretty astounding job today – one of the several unusual things about it is that he’d get “paid vacation expenses”… what???  Unfortunately, one of the other unusual things is that it’s located in Poland.  He sent back an exploratory email to see if they’d still be interested if he couldn’t start right away (at least sometime after the wedding would be nice) and if he couldn’t give a multi-year commitment from the get-go, as they would prefer.  We’ll see what they say.