As we all know, when you make plans in life, life often has other plans for you. Such was the case for me this weekend.

I had been planning for weeks — well really years, I guess — to travel again to Memphis this weekend, this time to see a dear friend of mine from childhood be ordained a Catholic priest. A very big deal as the Catholic church is obviously in need of some good, young priests and my friend had been preparing for some time for this big day.

Alas, I realized by Tuesday that I might not physically make it to Memphis. With back-to-back long weekends in Memphis and San Francisco which included the 24 hours of traveling it took to get to and from those two places, my body was about to give up on me — my brain more or less already had — and I couldn’t find anyone who was interested in making the trip with me. I was torn, but I knew I had to make the decision to stay put in Knoxville for the weekend for my own health. And it would give me a chance to get my life sort of back on track after being gone so much. The plan was to wash clothes, cook meals, sign the lease on the house and just take a breather.

Heh.

On Wednesday, another good childhood buddy came to Knoxville for an extended weekend of wedding festivities of a high school classmate of ours, with whom I was also friends. We had plans even while I was still anticipating driving to Memphis to get dinner on Wednesday night. Dinner Wednesday night turned into participation in some of the subsequent wedding week partying after I decided not to go to Memphis. Before I knew it, I too was invited to the wedding.

There ended up being five or six guys in attendance for the wedding whom I knew really well in high school. I was in many, many classes with them, we did band together and I even worked with one of them. To a teenage girl, they were your typical high school boys: weird but funny, also awkward and (some of them) only manageable in small doses.

Well, guess what. They grow up. They’re still weird and funny but not nearly as awkward as they once were and much more enjoyable in longer doses. We had a blast, and it made me actually want to go to my high school reunion which will be looming over my head in about a year.

And as an added bonus, the wedding photographer just happened to be the Modern Fella, who makes his living making photographs (though for more than just weddings). He ended up hanging out for all the festivities. Having not seen him much in the past few weeks, it was good to be around him even if he was working most of the time.

The wedding was outside and very, very laid-back — well suited for the bride and groom, who met while playing ultimate frisbee. Also well suited for some ultimate frisbeeing before and after the ceremony, which was performed by a friend of theirs who had gotten ordained via the internet. If the frisbee wasn’t enough, there was also a slip-n-slide, provided by the father of the groom. The bride, groom, parents of the happy couple and friends all took turns racing each other down the slide.

And I can say this much: if you’re going to crash a wedding, you might as well crash one that involves frisbee and slip-n-sliding, amiright?

The groom (left) and his father racing down the slip-n-slide.