Best of the Wurst

Imagine my surprise while flipping through my new Everyday with Rachael Ray magazine yesterday (thanks to my mother-in-law for getting me the subscription for my birthday!) when I came across this:

That's right, our small town of New Braunfels made a national magazine! I'm not that surprised, Wurstfest IS the best thing about fall.

We love Wurstfest so much that four years ago, after our wedding getaway from our reception, we stopped by Wurstfest. We spontaneously made the decision to go after driving away and realizing that we weren't done celebrating just yet. We drove up with the cans and streamers still trailing from our car, me still dressed in my wedding dress and Kent still wearing his tux.

When we walked up to the ticket window, the guy said, "That'll be $16."

I looked down at my dress, then help up my hands, shrugged and replied, "No pockets!"

He took a closer look at us and asked, "Did you two really just get married?"

"Sure did!" we answered.

Then he let us in for free, plus gave us about 20 free drink tickets.

It was super crowded as it usually is on the second-to-last-night of the ten-day-salute-to-sausage. Random people were asking to take their picture with us, the drunk people were yelling at us, "Dont do it!!!" and we ran into a few people that we knew.

We made our way to the "big tent" where a band was playing. Someone in charge spotted us, and pulled us up on stage. The lead singer proceeded to announce to the entire audience of a couple thousand people that we had just gotten married, and that the band wanted to play us a special song. So we danced on stage to Elvis' Love Me Tender. In a way, this song now has more meaning to us than the first dance song that we chose for ourselves.

Sadly, we don't have even one photo from our little adventure. I ended up getting the bottom of my wedding dress really dirty. My mom wasn't too happy about that, but we had a blast!

Five years ago today ...

... Kent proposed. We had gone tubing that day, and sun + water always wears me out, so I took a nap at his apartment afterwards. It was almost dark when Kent woke me up and asked if I still wanted to go to the fireworks show at the park. I did, so we headed out.

He brought a blanket and some sparklers, and we found a nice spot under a big tree. We lit some sparklers while we were waiting for the show to begin. Kent was having some trouble lighting them with the lighter that he'd brought. I told him not to worry about it, but he was persistent! The fireworks display started, and Kent was still messing with the sparklers. I told him that they weren't a big deal and to just enjoy the fireworks with me. He eventually did, but I could tell that he was still annoyed about the sparklers.

When the finale was over, I started packing up our stuff to go, and he said, "Do you want to stay and finish the sparklers?" I was thinking, 'Geez, what is UP with him and these sparklers?!?,' but I said, "OK, sure." We were successful in lighting the remaining sparklers. When my final sparkler burnt out, I turned to look at Kent who still had one burning. At the base of the sparkler, I noticed something shiny. It was a ring! He told me that this was the REAL finale, and asked me to be his wife.

The next year, some friends threw us an engagement party over the July 4th weekend, complete with a personal fireworks show on the lake.

And for our wedding send-off, all of our guests held extra-long sparklers while we ran under them to our getaway car. (Our photographer holds the rights to that photo, darn!)

So today is very special to us! Happy 4th everyone!

Remembering ...

I called my grandpa today to wish him a happy 86th birthday ... 86 years ... pretty impressive, huh? I couldn't help but be reminded of what we were doing on his birthday last year. Burying his son. His son. My uncle. My mom's younger brother. Uncle Randy was admitted to the hospital one month prior for a few complications. Things took a turn for the worse rather quickly, and soon his major organs started to shut down. We lost him on February 19th and buried him on February 24th. Here's how I remember my uncle: