It’s Been 4 Happy Years

Today was a good day.

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My wife and I got married 4 years ago today.  As I recall that was a hectic day, but not as hectic as I thought it was going to be.  I made the whole day easier by de-stressing myself just a hair by managing a 3½ mile hill run before the beginning of festivities.  Any day I can break a sweat running is a less stressful day than it otherwise would be for me.

The ceremony was funny, because the… oh what do you call it… the practice wedding the day before?  Whatever you actually call that thing, was not really a run through of any of the stuff we would be doing.  It was just people standing around looking at the deacon, and him more or less saying “Do you know what to do?”  You do? Good!”  “Do you?  Ya? Great!  With most everyone there thinking “Screw this crap, let’s go to the dinner and have a few beers!!!”

Kinda like that.

Except the answers, if I (not we, I will not speak for my wife here) was honest with the deacon would probably been more like “huh?” &  “Whu … umm … No …  I’m supposed to what again?”  Prolly would have saved much bullshit later on.

And we still would have made the dinner with plenty of time to spare.

Which meant that the wedding itself was filled with gaffes, from me not putting the ring on the proper finger, to not quite getting the wording on the vows right, there were flowers given out, and I flubbed that as I recall.  The candle lighting went surprisingly well.  I was shaking like a leaf, and could have easily been described as a fire hazard to the entire neighborhood trying to light the damn thing.

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Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!

Robert Browning, Rabbi ben Ezra

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It was funny.  Doesn’t matter though, we got the wedding certificate, despite the deacon who ran the ceremonies best effort to screw us up, with our hearty, if unknowing, help.

His name was Maroon, to this day we still refer to him as Moron, and have only gone back to that church once. I think that is a result of the debacle that was his poor planning for people who were clearly unsure of what was going on logistically.

What a maroon. 

Most of the rest of the day went pretty well.  At least the way I remember it.  The photographer was a stupid, annoying, graceless, pushy pain in the ass, who got her camera caught in my wife’s veil, and yanked it, damn near putting my wife on the ground during our first dance together, and was about the most nastily obtrusive person at our wedding.  My wife didn’t like the DJ either, but he was OK as far as I remember.  Played a song my wife didn’t want played, but it didn’t hurt anything, as I recall.

All in all, we had a pretty damn good wedding day, even if some of the minutiae didn’t go quite as planned.  Almost sounds like a good way to look at our lives, both before and since, one day that was a microcosm of our lives.

Yeah things went wrong, some looked pretty damned bad when they first happened, but after all, in the scheme of things it didn’t make a difference.  Life still goes on, and we can giggle our asses off at some of the stuff that happened.

Except that thing with the veil.

My wife is still pissed about that.

Don’t know that I blame her.

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The years have been tumultuous, difficult in ways neither of us could have imagined, but we have survived in large part because we trust and believe in one another.  The employment situation sucks for both of us now, and things look mighty dark, but as long as we have each other, we will be able to find a path to a better tomorrow.  We will make it together because we are a team, and work well together.

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That’s it from here America.  G’night.

Romantic Quotes

   In honor of Saint Valentines day, and dedicated to my wonderful wife, a number of romantic quotes.  No news, no politics, just love.

     Enjoy.

We have common cause against the night…Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes the air of a world that I know; therefore I love that nose. Her ears hear the music I might sing half the night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokecherry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain…We love what we know, we love what we are. Common cause, common cause, common cause of mouth, eye, ear, tongue, hand, nose, flesh, heart, and soul.  Ray Bradbury

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How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! —and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”  Robert Browning, in response to “How do I love Thee”

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Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.   Augustine of Hippo

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Love works magic.
It is the final purpose
Of the world story,
The Amen of the universe.  Novalis

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Love feels no burden, regards not labors, strives toward more than it attains, argues not of impossibility, since it believes that it may and can do all things. Therefore it avails for all things, and fulfils and accomplishes much where one not a lover falls and lies helpless.  Thomas A Kempis

Reindeer Droppings

    I’ve had a pretty long day.  A good one but a long one.   I got back from the Family Christmas party a while ago, and I tell ya, it took a lot out of me.  And I wasn’t playing around with the kids as much as I usually do, so I don’t have that as an excuse.  I did hurl my little brothers son around the place a few times…well, not hurl per se, more hold the boy and run back and forth with him pretending like he was flying.  Flying into walls, well almost into walls, as well as flying into other people, and generally tossing the boy around like a sack of potatoes.  He was a giggling mess, I was as well, twas cool.

    To go back in time a bit, I woke up early, before 9,  after getting to sleep late, after 3.  I was up making chili, helping my wife make “Italian cookies”, ya know, breaking eggs on my forehead, punching the dough for the cookies so you could see a clear fist print in it, while making with the Bruce Lee sound effects (and yes my hands were clean, I may be a nut, but I’m not a dirt-bag) and other such joyfully weird things. 

     The chili I made was not very hot this year, not the 5 alarm, nasal passage clearing, taste bud destroying, hemorrhoid inducing psycho death chili that I normally make.  It was actually almost exactly Wendy’s knock off chili.  Ya know, 2 meats, pinto beans (which is where much of the flavor comes from), a few tomatoes, a few onions and some garlic, some jalapenos.  Brown the meat, drain, add the other ingredients + one cup of water, simmer for 45 minutes and yer done.  Easy. 

    The cookies took longer to make, just because we made 8 cookie sheets worth, and it takes ten minutes per sheet + prep time.  But it’s worth it, those f****** cookies are delicious.

    Like I said, doing all that took til 3 am. Set the alarm for 9.  Woke up a few times during the night, thanks to cats taking covers and space.  Woke up groggy, made the coffee, fed the cats, turned on the computer, looked for a job for a few minutes, played a few games, woke up the wife, and headed out to help prep the hall.

   Woke her up too late because I got caught up playing games on the computer.  Didn’t realize I had let that much time slip.  Silly husband, games are for kids.  Read some news next time, jackass.  LOL

    I walked down, carrying my chili.  It’s maybe a half a mile, and only takes a few minutes to walk, and it wasn’t too bad out.  When I got there, I was surprised to find that no one else from the family was there.  I had beaten everyone there.  Kewl.  Waited a few minutes, and My mom and dad showed up followed shortly after that by my younger brother and his wife. We put down table cloths, put out dip, blew up balloons, gave food, sterno, utensils, plates and other such amenities to the guys at the hall, ya know, set-up.  Blowing up the balloons actually took up the most time.   I am apparently slow at this, and it was my job to blow up, tie, then attach to string the balloons.  Everyone ended up pitching in, and everything got done relatively quick. 

    At about this point in the proceedings I got an offer to go to a skate with the Rangers for tomorrow, a meet and greet kinda thing and I turned it down. I should have said yes.  I didn’t.  I have clothes to wash tomorrow.  Not a real reason, you say?  I need to wash my best work clothes, which I wore this week to two interviews, and want clean just in case more interviews come my way this week.  Job stuff comes first.  Work before pleasure, first, last and always.

     Plus, my skating skills are nearly nil, and I would be hella embarrassed to have to have my wife pull my stupid ass off of the stupid ice every other minute with every single New F****** York Ranger on the team watching me fall on my ass and giggling at my stupid ass. 

   If I want strangers to laugh at me in public, I’ll go on a f****** reality TV show.  But I digress…

    After this, I picked up the wife, with cookies and XM receiver in tow, and got down to the serious business of relaxing with family. Relaxed and social. Me.  No, really, me.  Serious!  Twas fun, truly.   A ton of different conversations that I will not repeat here. If your family you know what happened, if your not, you don’t need to know.  ‘Nuff said.

    We sang Christmas carols, badly, especially me.  I was loud, happily loud, off key, and generally just slightly off time.   Loud is just what I do, loud worked there so I go with it, off key isn’t what I aim for, but with my voice too deep for the highs and not deep enough for the lows kinda gives me no choice in the matter there.  The timing i do on purpose, I time it the way i think it’s supposed to sound, with the proper syncopation, at least what I think is proper syncopation, not just singing with the crowd of family who are always metronome steady.  That’s just me. 

    The twelve days of Christmas is just us Jumping around screaming like banshees and generally having a fun.  A big fun. 

    One disappointment for me this year.  Every year, until this year, we’ve sung “O Come All Ye Faithful” Including the Latin versus (adeste fideles)  I am about the only person who knows the Latin on this one, me and a few aunts and uncles.  I was ready to go.  No go this year though. 

    Ah well.  No worries, I can sing it here to my wife.  I think the marriage will survive it. 

    Had the annual guess, in which one aunt, the same aunt every year (she’s cool, we’re cool, it’s cool, just not naming names) buys something, writes out a few hints as to what it might be and then we have to try to guess what it is.  If several people guess, those names are put in a hat and one winner is drawn (been a while since that happened) If no one guesses all the adults pay and a name is pulled at random and random drawn name wins (as I recall) Rarely is there one winner, when there is one (again, as I recall).   This year, I had no idea, not an original one, so i put down one that I knew was wrong, just to have my name in the hat.  I believe it was  “A festive assortment of holiday cheeses and meats.”

   No one gets my crappy jokes… which is why i rarely tell them. 

Santa invades Japan

    ANYWAY… to make a long story even longer, there aren’t too many people who have pulled off more than one win.  I have won once, in a family tradition that spans the length of my entire life, where I have been guessing at this since 1985.  My wife won the first year she did it, she won a bike. She couldn’t use it, because she was living in Boston at the time and we couldn’t ship it, too expensive so we kept it here.  Guess who won this year.

    My wife.   And what is the gift? A nativity scene, an actual, large outdoor nativity scene.  Too bad we live in an apartment.  What we are doing with it is this.  This year my younger brother is going to have it on his front lawn.  I floated the idea, and my wife accepted, that we can do a draw to see who gets to have it on their lawn next year.

     There was a moment of stupid from me regarding this happy nativity scene, but i will not tell that story here. 

    Food we ate early, and I ate as much as I could(didn’t write about it because me getting fat seems uneventful).  Had about 2345987324 pounds of food. Chili.  Pasta.  Meatballs.  Turkey. Stuffing.  Potatoes.  NOMS, MANY NOMS!   Big FAT rhino now! FAT! Happily fat!  Gonna have to start running again soon, or else there gonna have to roll me to the f****** park.  LOL.   But i digress…

  We had coffee.  We had cookies and other assorted pastries.  We packed up and we left, fat and happy after the annual Christmas party.

   A long, but happy day.  Hope, you all had fun, I did.

Anagram: Parentage Puns/ Pregnant Pause

       There is a special point to the anagram today, which i will get to at the end of today’s blog. 

    

      The latest news I have says that in Mexico there are 68 dead, and 1,300 ill from a swine flu outbreak.  And while the CDC says the outbreak in America is limited to California and Texas, there is information out there that says there are possible cases in both Kansas and New York City. 

     Now this doesn’t mean that there is a pandemic on our hands in the United States, but that there is a threat of unknown size in a few spots.  I’ll keep you posted when I learn more. In Mexico things have gotten hairy enough were the locals are staying indoors, bars and restaurants are closed, and streets are empty in a city of 20,000,000 people.  Fùtbol games have been moved to stadiums outside the city, and will be played in empty stadiums. The government is handing out masks to people who are outside, and the few that are out,  from what I have heard say they are out only because they have to be. 

       Mexico City is paralyzed with fear.  A city of 20,000,000 brought to a standstill by a virus.  In a curious side note, A man by the name of Felipe Solis, an archaeologist from Mexico city, met with President Obama in Mexico City during his trip to Mexico.  Mr. Solis died the next day from “symptoms similar to flu” though there is no news yet on whether he actually had swine flu or not.

   A few links for you to peruse on the outbreak, here, here, here, here, and here.

      A quick blurb for the AIG and Bear Stearns haters out there.  Apparently between the two of them, they managed to drop approximately $74,000,000,000 in debt on the Fed.  The debt is apparently in the form of sub-prime mortgages, depreciating commercial leases and CDOs. A quote from the story by bloomberg:      

The losses on securities backed by assets such as home loans in Florida and California signal that U.S. taxpayers may be forced to reimburse the central bank through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, according to Christopher Whalen, managing director of Torrance, California-based Institutional Risk Analytics.

       Mr. Whalen goes on to say that it will be up to the Treasury to bail out the fed.

       Nice.

   That’s it for me, except the second viddy, the quotes, and that thing I mentioned about the Anagram having a special point today. 

      The second viddy from Bloomberg, talking about the myth that stocks bottom out a few months before the economy.   

     

Hackers start younger and younger nowadays...

    And now for the Personal news/anagram thing.  My wife missed her period by a few days.  I figured it was just stress from me being out of work affecting it.  Stress does sometimes affect a woman’s period. I thought this was the case, but she asked me to go out and buy pregnancy tests, just to check.  I agreed and went out and spent the $12 or whatever it was, came back, she tested.  One line = not pregnant, two lines  =  Pregnant.  She does the test.  

     2 lines.  But the second line, the important one,  looks a little on the faint side, but I go WOOOHOOOO and make similar happy noises(POKE A BABY).  But I was also somewhat skeptical, so I asked her to test again the next day(today).

     2 lines, this time it was a stronger line.   Apparently I’m gonna be a daddy!(POKE A BABY)  Now she is also going to go to a clinic and get tested there as well, just to make sure I guess, but…

     I’M GONNA BE A DADDY! HOLY SH*T IT’S CHRISTMAS!   BTW, (POKE A BABY) there’s a reason I toss out ”Christmas” there.  She went on to some website yesterday and checked the due date. I just went to a few and checked, and usually the average date comes out as….

    December 25th. Mind you I also got a December 27th and a 28th, but still, it looks like a Christmas baby! I AM Mr. Christmas, ain’t I?   And the Poke a baby thing, don’t worry about it, that’s just me touching my wifes stomach with one finger and saying POKE A BABY! 

  On That note, I am out.  Later!

Today’s Nuggets, Via Wikiquote:  Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.  If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.  Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.  Ludwig Wittgenstein

Train them to virtue; habituate them to industry, activity, and spirit. Make them consider every vice as shameful and unmanly. Fire them with ambition to be useful. Make them disdain to be destitute of any useful knowledge. Fix their ambition upon great and solid objects, and their contempt upon little, frivolous, and useless ones.   John Adams

Anagram: Thirteen Years/Enter Hysteria

      Hysteria? OH NOES! Serious kids, this is gonna be a short blog.  Very short.  Spending Quality time with the Wife tonight.  it was 13 years ago tonight that we met in Boston Mass.  Well this is when we celebrate it anyway, it was a three day weekend we spent together.  That may well be the worlds longest first date.   It went pretty well I think.  We had a helluva good time.  So good I married her.  Still having fun.  And I love her very much. 

    No Politics, No Bullshit, No Nothing.  Just a quote or two and then I’m done.

    Have a good night.

Today’s Nuggets:  The Encyclopedia Galactica, in its chapter on Love states that it is far too complicated to define. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of love: Avoid, if you are able to.  Douglas Adams

The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one’s relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of Divine accident.   Hugh Walpole