For no good reason, highlights of the weekend:

Friday Went to Manchester and watched the parade, about 20 minutes of stuff in 90 minutes of time. The funny thing is that it's been the same 20 minutes of stuff since 1996, at least. The only thing that really changes are the bands, depending on what we can get with the other towns in the area (Gloucester does their parade the night of the 3rd, Rockport the evening of the 4th, so they often split the cost of bringing bands up for all three). The cars, fire trucks, bicycles, even most of the floats, are the same year in and year out. But we keep going back.

It was slightly less hot this year as we drove to my sisters, and we had AC to boot. We also managed not to get lost using the same route as last year, though we encountered the same problem: there's no sign indicating where Route 133 junctions with Route 125. This year I just figured it out from the maps; last year we blew right by the turn and eventually tracked over to 495.

In any case, a good time was had by all at my sister's. I think I sawllowed part of a tine from my plastic fork, but in the words of Sherman Potter, "this too shall pass."

Saturday Started by going cake tasting in Danvers. This took much less time than anticipated. We wound up going with a lemon cake with a raspberry mousse filling, which does indeed meet the tasty requirement I put on our wedding website.

We then went over to Salem to do the touristy thing. Sarah was thinking beach, but we didn't have a lot of plan as to what beach. There is quite a bit to see in Salem, much of it witch-related and much of it pure crap, but in a fun way. As is our custom we did a trolley tour, not bad but our guide had an unusual accent which made it hard to figure out what he was saying from time to time.

We had a migrane-induced early end to the day, which was too bad. Sarah's feeling much better now, thanks. Probably a combo of too hot and too bright.

Sunday Nothing of real note here, other than I almost drove myself crazy watching a Mail Call marathon on the History Channel. Problem being that every commerical break, and I am not exaggerating here, had a promo for the Mail Call second season premiere. Thankfully, they got to some episodes I'd seen more than once as the day wore on and I could move on.