Happy 4th!

That was a long weekend, but not long enough.

Friday

Marc had Friday off, and I took the day off. We woke up really early, and drove down to the Social Security office in Fremont, with all the documents in hand that I needed for my name change. It turned out to be easier than we expected - I think we only waited for like 15 - 20 minutes before we were done. While we waited, I debated on what to do with my middle name. I was thinking about hyphenating it to Shieh-Lau, which I don't even know for sure that you can do. I didn't want to hyphenate the last names, since that's just too complicated and messy. Anyways, we decided that was going to be too complicated, so I just left it as Shieh.

From the SS office, we went to the DMV office, and that wasn't bad either, only took about an hour. And that was that! We went to the bank too, to get that changed, but I still have to take care of all my credit cards and other junk. That's gonna be the biggest PITA probably.

I was telling Marc that it felt kind of wierd not to have my old name anymore - and that it felt like it was a temporary thing, hahaha. I mean, I was born with one name, and now I'm gonna die with another. It's a bit trippy.

After we did all that, we went to Costco, to buy food and stuff for Sunday's party. It was pretty crowded in there - apparently we're not the only ones who decided to take Friday off.

We had Bandit's sheep herding lesson in the evening, which went fairly well. Marc and I rented Secret Window, which was a really wierd, creepy movie.

Saturday

I took Bandit to Petsmart on Saturday, and he did okay. He seems fine with people who are sitting down, and when there's another dog around, he has no problem letting strange people, even kids, pet him.

Bill and Brenda and Hayden came over in the afternoon to hang out, since we hadn't seen them in a while. We ordered out from Armadillo Willy's (got the Belly Buster) for dinner, and played some games on the Gamecube. Hayden is so big now! He's saying some words now, which is so cute. Brenda was trying to teach him how to say "Bandit," which came out kinda like "Bun-dah." It was really adorable.

After they left, we spent the rest of the evening running to and from the store, buying last-minute things, and prepping stuff for Sunday. We'd bought beef ribs to make, but after looking at them and deciding they didn't have a lot of meat on them, we picked up some pork spare ribs instead. At least the beef ribs were super cheap.

Sunday

Sunday morning we got up, gave the dog a bath, and started preparing the grill. I'd boiled the ribs and put on the rub the night before, so it was just a matter of throwing them on the grill. I did them in two batches, since I didn't have enough room on our little charcoal grill, and they need to cook for about 4 hours.

Well, stupid me totally forgot to open the vents on the bottom of the grill, which keeps the fire going. So we kept feeding the stupid thing coals, and it kept cooling off. So for the first batch, some of the leaner pieces came out more like jerky. The bigger, fatter pieces managed to turn out fairly tender. I figured out the vent thing about an hour into cooking the second batch, so luckily those turned out much better. I served those first, of course. I was pretty pleased with how those turned out.

People started showing up a little before 5 pm - my parents and grandmother were the first to arrive. Marc started cooking the chicken on our big gas grill. We also had garlic bread, which he put on the grill for a while, before he realized you were supposed to cook it IN the bag. So he put it back in the bag and cooked it some more, and it ended up being a little overdone (but not bad). My dad thought it was smoked chicken when I cut it up and was bringing it to the table.

We had lots of food!

When it got dark, we got ready to do fireworks. We had about $130 worth of fireworks, heh. Leslie went out and bought a few more, too. It was a good show, although the downside was that it was super windy. Our big finale firework turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, too. We'll have to try something else next year. Marc got some of them on video, but I haven't had a chance to look at them yet - if they turned out, I'll put them up.

Then everyone went home, we cleaned up, and we went to sleep, exhausted!

Monday

We totally slept in on Monday. When we finally woke up, we had some leftovers for lunch, then bummed around the house watching TV for a bit. In the afternoon, Kenny came up, and we went to go see Spiderman 2. There were tons of kids at the movie. One girl behind us insisted on repeating all the lines that she thought were funny. And I know she thought they were funny, because she'd say, "Oh, that's funny!" I wanted to smack her. Other than that (and the many crying babies), it was a really good movie. I think I liked it better than the first one.

We didn't do much the rest of the day. It was kind of a wasted day, I guess, but it was nice to just rest and kick back and do nothing. :)