Western Union by Mitra L. '07

(I should note that I stole this title from a People article on Kate Hudson’s wedding in Aspen, Colorado.)

Last weekend, I went up to Seattle to celebrate the wedding of one of my floormates. She met her husband during Class of 2005 Orientation in August 2001, and they’ve been inseparable since. (They are both Course 3: Materials Science & Engineering, and are both going to Stanford for grad school. Say it with me now: “Aww.”) Their wedding took place in Bellevue last Saturday, and was a bittersweet reunion with many of the ’05s from my floor. Okay, enough with the romance and nostalgia, and on with the nerdiness.

Mike Short ’05 (Course 22: Nuclear Engineering) — the original person who put a laptop on his door, no matter what anyone else tells you — took out the LCD screen on his iPod and made it an iPod Shuffle. I really think there is a technological explanation for why he did this, but it might be that he was just bored.

A bunch of us out-of-towners met up with some MITers who are working in Seattle for the summer (Boeing, Microsoft, etc.) and had dinner at The Crab Pot, on Pier 57. The cool half of the group got a meal that requires the contents to be strewn across the table.

(I apologize to all vegetarians, temporary and permanent alike, about the undoubtedly offensive nature of these photographs.)

Since eating seafood at an overpriced restaurant on the water’s edge and taking countless photographs of the food is not touristy enough, we headed on over to the Space Needle to continue our quest for Most Touristy 3 Hours. Ever.

You’d be surprised how many photos like this I took.

Can you figure out the riddle?

On the way down, we wanted to stop at the restaurant (Top of the Needle?) and get dessert, but they were closing. Someone suggested that we tip the maitre d’ — something along the lines of, “Perhaps you know my friend, Ben Franklin?” I had a better idea: We hold up our right hands very non-chalantly and ask, “Perhaps you know my friend, Tim the Beaver?” Everyone laughed politely and realized he/she wasn’t craving dessert quite so much.

Then we came back to the hotel, watched Full House (D.J. unknowingly snuck an old man out of his retirement home; Uncle Jesse crashed Danny’s car on his birthday; Stephanie had bad hair), and told ghost stories. Jerry told us about these haunted dolls people sell on eBay, and even found a doll’s homepage. It looks like the haunted doll knows more HTML than I do — bummer. After that, most of us went to bed. A certain someone was up until 4:00 AM playing Warcraft, but I don’t want to mention his name, since he will be working in admissions next year.

The next morning, we ate free breakfast (waffle machine! I should have gotten pictures…), put on our Saturday best, and realized we were ready about 2 hours too early. When this happens, the only acceptable thing to do is drive around and take pictures of any funny signs you find.

During the ceremony, the priest asked all of the MIT people in the audience to raise our hands, which made us feel sort of special, which was nice. Then he ruined it by asking all the recent MIT graduates to raise their hands, and of everyone who raised his/her hand before, I was the only one to lower my hand. I wanted to explain, “I have two more years to go! I didn’t fail the swim test!” but I didn’t want to steal the bride and the groom’s collective thunder.

The priest also described how the groom proposed to the bride, but my blog entry does a much better job than he did. Sorry, dude.

At the reception, I sat next to Mike Short (iPod guy), who rubbed his finger around the rim of his glass and made a visible standing wave.

What, you can’t see it?

The reception site was on the edge of Lake Washington.

Thanks for the wonderful weekend =)