No Strings Attached

Posted By Kathleen David on July 12, 2011

I could also call this one the “my eyes are barely open” edition.

We are home. We made it back about 11:30 last night after a rather long drive from Wheeling to home.

Mystery Trekkie went over very well. Peter pulled off the open sketch called “Red Shirt Riot” to the tune of “Zoot Suit Riot”. I would like to thank everyone who participated willingly or was dragooned into participating at the last minute. Y’all did a great job and that was probably one of our best looking sketched. We tossed Nicky into the mix because he was wearing a red shirt.

The evening before there were two participants in the Masquerade who were dressed from the Star Trek episode called “The Way to Eden” which happened to be this year’s episode for Mystery Trekkie. The costumes they did were just wonderful and Peter convinced them to participate in the opening sketch which added a whole other level of insanity to the whole thing.

Here is a photo of the Avenue “Q” puppets from Shoreleave 2011

Avenue “Q”
This photograph is copyright Dawn Swingle who was kind enough to take the photo and share it.

(For the VI: From left to right Meg is holding a Mr. Sulu puppet. She is dressed in black with a black hat on her head. Her puppet is yellow with a yellow shirt and black hair. Her puppet is kissing the Rod puppet that is blue wearing a blue shirt with white hair and blue antenna. Ariel is standing off to the far left wearing black clothing and a black hat on her head. Under these two puppets is me in a Q costume holding Nicky who is green with an orange nose wearing a Star Trek original series red shirt)

We ate dinner and then got on the road to get to West Virginia. Peter got us there by 2:30 AM so that was night number 4 with not a lot of sleep. I got up about 6:30 and took care of some stuff before going down to breakfast. I met up with my parents and sister there and worked out the rest of the day.

The funeral mass was what most Catholic funeral masses are. The internment at the cemetery was done very nicely by the priest. The family gathered at the church’s community center and a nice lunch was had by all courtesy of the ladies of the church. It was a good day of remember my aunt and what she meant to all of us.

I didn’t take Caroline to the funeral or the internment. She is rather young for that. However Peter and Caroline did join me for the luncheon. She got to meet a bunch of my family members that she had only seen in pictures. And they got to meet her who they had gotten to know through pictures and e-mails from my mom or from Aunt Mary Ann. Peter met a few new people and caught up with a bunch of my family members that had been at our wedding when we last saw them. We talked about things we had done since we last met up. We reminisced about Aunt Mary Ann and comforted each other.

We departed about 2:00 for the trip back with a slight detour to the Toy and Train museum that is in Wheeling. If you are in the area, it is worth a trip especially if you are into old toys and the history of toys. They also have some kicking train set-ups. It left Caroline in a good mood for the ride home and gave her another memory of Wheeling besides the funeral. They were working on a temporary exhibit on building toys like legos and blocks. They have some really old examples of blocks through the ages.

The trip back was long but uneventful which is how you really want these sorts of trips to be. The only really traffic snag we had was figuring out how to get through a mess on the LIE and the Cross I. We managed to wend our way around it and got home about 11:30.

I woke up at my usual 6:30 because of a cat yowling outside the door. So I got up and am letting Peter the Iron Driver to sleep in. Today is about unpacking and unwinding. Tomorrow we move onto the next project.

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