This song came on the radio on Saturday as The Girl and I were in the car. She mentioned that this was a song that she played in the car for our foster dogs each time she was taking them to be adopted.
Her cassette player is broken. There isn't a cd player. So she calls the video up on her phone on YouTube before she takes them to their new family.
I didn't know that.
I was - and am - incredibly touched by that. Heck, I'm welling up a little just typing it.
Their adoption day is going to be the best day of their lives.
There's a little dust in here. I'm gonna go now...
But, does anybody wanna meet a giant (90-lb), sweet, easy going, not terribly active dog that's available for adoption right now? Mordecai is incredibly sweet...
It's easily one of the top attractions in all of Cincinnati, an absolute must-see for any out-of-town visitors. There's an acre of produce, fresh fish, seeming miles of imported foods, cheese as big as a small car, beer tasting, a great deli and bakery, and a whole bunch more.
It's awesome.
If anyone loves the Jungle more than I do, though, it's The Girl. She spends a couple of hours there every Sunday morning. She bakes Christmas cookies for her friends at the fish counter, in the kitchen goods area, and behind the produce section. She loves, loves, loves Jungle Jim's.
So it makes sense that she'd appear in the updated version of The Jungle Jim Story. Check her out above at 7:35. She's the one in the short, brown hair and the teal, 3/4-sleeve baseball shirt working her way through the produce section.
The Girl added one more purchase for the list of things to get once she's gainfully employed again: a family photo.
I've long wanted to get a family photo of the two of us and our pets. It's a little late to get one with LeRoy, but it's not too late for Ayla and Harlan.
She proposed getting a sitting with the Phodographer, a Cincinnati woman who does studio or in-house sessions for pets (and secondarily their owners). She's a little pricey, but she does good work - both of high quality and of charitable mind, particularly for Adore-a-Bull Rescue, about whom I might have some news soon.
Check some of her work with the Adore-a-Bull folks here...
Back when we'd first gotten our second desktop computer (there have been four laptops since then - two for each of us), I burned a cd for each of us. This is the one I made for The Girl. I'll post the one for me next week.
I do want to warn you that one of the songs is , but I'm hoping you folks can handle that.
The Girl made her purse, bought the jean jacket from Valley Thrift, borrowed the goggles, and sprayed the hair.
I bought the ringer (are those things going out of style? it was nearly impossible to find one) and the wrist bands and grabbed the guitar from the basement. There was a hat, too, but it wasn't right.
And if you don't know who we were, you are dead to me.
The Girl's costume, by the way, way better than mine. Apparently I'm the Scott Pilgrim who has two chins.
There was a time, an era if you will when mixtapes were a big thing.
I'm sure the mixtape era lasted longer than I remember it - people clearly had cassette tapes and recorders before 1990, but I didn't start making mixtapes until I was in high school, until The Girl came into my romantic world. Before that, I'd been content to play music in whatever order had been prescribed to me by a DJ in Louisville or by an artist in some distant land, sequencing their own songs in whatever way they wanted me to listen to them.
And then came dating...I needed to say something...I didn't entirely know what that something was, but it was definitely something, and I needed to say it. Only I didn't know how, so I searched for songs that already said it for me. Then I started making mixtapes. I don't know that I had codified the rules quite as well as Nick Hornby's Rob ever did, but I knew that the song choice mattered but so did the order of the songs. There had to be a flow, a rhythm, a sequence that somehow added to whatever it was that I needed to say.
So I made mixtapes, keeping notebooks of possible songs, sequencing them in my head, playing them through on my little portable stereo, on my parents' larger stereo, recording a song, recording another, rewinding and rerecording something else because the flow wasn't right, the something wasn't being said correctly by the songs in that order. Things had to be switched. Songs had to be taped in the other way because otherwise that something wouldn't get across with the listening.
There had to be enough songs already known to resonate with The Girl - things that she knew and loved but that said that thing well enough, songs would tell her that I was cool enough to recognize the music she already liked, that would put me into the group of people who already got the good music. But there also had to be songs that she'd never heard before because I couldn't just parrot her tastes right back to her. I wanted to be able to introduce her to new music that she would love, that we could come to enjoy together. The lists of possible songs kept growing and growing, longer and longer, only rarely with songs getting crossed off because either they ended up saying the wrong something or because they'd been chosen to step up to the big leagues and be used on a tape.
But then, when, the mixtape was as perfect as it could be, it would become finalized. The songs would be patiently written on the tape cover in pen - pencil was too temporary for something of this import. Pen was the only way to go, and the penmanship had to be at its finest and most mistake-free.
When the mixtape was given isn't something that I remember. I don't remember ever passing mixtapes in the halls, but I'm guessing that it wasn't something handed over in any momentous ceremony, either. The mixtape was supposed to be something given casually, as though it didn't take any effort to make, no biggie, just something I threw together without any subtext of needing it to say that something that I couldn't manage in my own words.
Whatever I needed those first mixtapes to say, they must have said well enough because there were more mixtapes after that first one. There were the ones that I made for The Girl...
There were the ones that she made for me...
You'll notice that most of the mixtapes have picture covers. That's something that I'm thinking The Girl came up with. I might've been the first there, but I doubt it. It meant that each tape had a name - Knitting Girl, Fleas Navidog, Booster Gold, Licking Dog, Golden Star, whatever, and each would be referred to by name. We would be talking on the phone and would ask what the other was listening to - "Oh, Knitting Girl right now." It was an easy connection across whatever divide there was - three blocks back in The Hometown or a couple hours drive between Crawfordsville and Bloomington.
The mixtapes faded, of course, as did the use of cassette tapes - pretty much at about the same time. I haven't played any of the tapes in a few years now, only pulling them out from time to time for nostalgic reasons. I don't know that I would go back into a burning building to save them, but I do know that it somehow reassures me to know that they're around, that I could listen to them, that I could play them again to know where I first learned about "Wholly Humble Heart" and why "Crimson and Clover" is supposed to follow it every time.
When the first post-college computers showed up, I made a cd mixtape for The Girl, but it just wasn't the same. It was too easy to rearrange the songs, too nice and tidy to print up a cd cover, and I didn't need to say that something any more. We were living together. I'd said it.
To give you an idea of what a mixtape was, here are the playlists from a few of the ones in the photos...
Knitting Girl...from her to me...
"Hound Dog" by Willie Mae Thorton
"Shake a Little" by Bonnie Raitt
"If I Had a Boat" by Lyle Lovett
"The Sweater" by Meryn Cadell
"Wholly Humble Heart" by Martin Stephenson
"Crimson and Clover" by Tommy James & the Shondells
"Angel" by Jimi Hendrix
"The Violin" by Brian Dewan
"What'll I Do" by Nat King Cole
"Boom Boom" by John Lee Hooker
"Blood in My Eyes" by Bob Dylan
"Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" by the Beatles
"Skinny Dip" by Garrison Keilor (the beginning of side B)
"Fields of Gold" by Sting
"Thank You" by Led Zeppelin
"Crash Into You" by Dave Matthews Band
"Sugar, Sugar" by The Archies
"Her First Mistake" by Lyle Lovett
"I've Been Loving You So Long" by Otis Redding
"East of the Sun" by Billie Holliday
"Lover Lay Down" by Dave Matthews Band
So many of those are specific memories for me...listening to A Prairie Home Companion on Saturday evenings in her apartment...her taking an entire three-credit class on the Beatles at IU... her introducing me to Lyle Lovett...her beginning to mix in older songs thanks to her two three-credit History of Rock courses...
Booster Gold...from me to her
"Since You Been Gone" by Weird Al Yankowicz
"Love Me Do" by the Beatles
"Nobody Like You To Me" by Harry Connick
"Stand By Your Man" by Lyle Lovett
"Killkelly" by Mick Moloney
"Memories are Made of This" by Johnny Cash
"Morning Song" by Jewel
"Emotionally Yours" by the O'Jays
"Tangled Up in You" by Bob Dylan
"Happy Christmas" by the Pogues
"Freakers' Ball" by Bunion
"Close to You" by Stevie Ray Vaughn
"Cruel Spell" by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (starting side 2)
"If God Sends His Angels" by U2
"Emotionally Yours/Winterlong" by Bob Dylan
"Where You Lead" by Carol King
"I'm a Believer" by the Monkees
"Save Your Kisses for Me" by the Brotherhood of Man
"Satellite" by Dave Matthews Band
"Meet You on Monday" by Carrie Newcomer
"Never Mind the Strangers" by the Saw Doctors
"Eight Days a Week" by the Beatles
Clearly - to me, anyway - this was made after I'd gotten back from Scotland...I first heard "Killkelly" with The Girl at a Celtic concert at Wabash and was in tears by the end of Mick Moloney's performance of the song, balling my eyes out in Wabash's new performing arts center...we saw Jewel opening for Neil Young in one of our first concerts together after my return...Bunion was a cover band that I heard a number of times when I was in Scotland...Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was one of the many nuvo-swing groups that were popular at the time...
I want to try to get all of these songs digitally so I can make a couple of 8tracks playlists for myself. Sometime, perhaps...
There was one other person with whom I traded mixtapes, a friend with whom I never had any romantic connection. This was the other Kristin that I met in Scotland, Kristin Reichow - now Kristin Butler. She and I became fast friends in Scotland and continued to correspond and visit each other while she was in the Midwest - at Kenyon College in initially and then visiting the flyover states a couple of times - but have since lost touch. While we were still in contact, however, she and I traded mixtapes back and forth.
These weren't quite so fraught with emotion as I was only trying to come up with music that I thought my friend would enjoy not music that would say that something. Here are the mixtapes that came my way from Kristin the Red...
The one in the bottom middle was a collection of U2 rarities that she made for me. The one to the left of that was a recording of the aforementioned Bunion, a band that played at our favorite bar in Scotland. I see three others there that were all Celtic music, a love that she had before going to Scotland and one that I developed while I was there. The other two are true mixtapes, jumbled and unsequenced in everyway. I love them all.
The Girl is in a book club which rotates book choices around among the various members. This month's choice is I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb, an Oprah book club choice in 1998.
The novel takes place in Three Rivers, Connecticut. Dominick Birdsey's identical twin, Thomas, suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. With medication, he can function properly and work at a coffee stand, but occasionally he has severe episodes of his illness. Thinking he is making a sacrificial protest that will stop the war in the Middle East, Thomas cuts off his own hand in a public library. Dominick sees him through the ensuing decision not to attempt to reattach the hand, and makes efforts on his behalf to free him from what he knows to be an inadequate and depressing hospital for the dangerous mentally ill.
In the process, Dominick reviews his own difficult life as Thomas's normal brother, his marriage to his ex-wife, which ended after their only child died of SIDS, and his ongoing hostility toward his stepfather. Dominick also displays classic symptoms of PTSD, as a result of stressors in his adult life. First in Thomas's interests, and then for his own sake, he sees a therapist, Dr. Rubina Patel, an Indian psychologist, employed by the hospital. She helps Dominick come to understand Thomas's illness better and the family's accommodations or reactions to it.
In the course of Thomas' treatment, Dominick is covertly informed of sexual abuse taking place in the hospital and helps to expose the perpetrators. He succeeds in getting Thomas released, but Thomas soon dies, apparently by suicide. After Thomas's death, Dominick discovers the identity of their birth father, who was part African American and part Native American--a secret their mother had shared with Thomas, but not with him.
During the midst of this, Dominick is also reading the autobiography of his grandfather, Italian/Sicilian-born Domenico Tempesta, which discloses details about the legacy of twins in their family. Dominick learns about himself and his mother through learning about his grandfather.
He also learns that his live-in girlfriend has been seeing a man on the side, as well as letting him watch her and Dominick during sexual intercourse. She is also HIV-positive, having contracted it from her secret lover. She asks Dominick to raise her baby if she dies. At first he resists, but later, after having found his way back into a relationship with his ex-wife, Dessa, they decide to remarry each other and adopt the child. The book ends with Dominick able to cope with the considerable loss, failure, and sadness in his personal and family history.
For the past couple of weeks, LeRoy - our elder dog, somewhere around a dozen years old now - has been desperate to head down to our lower level rather than to stay upstairs where we've been locking him for the past few years. It's not like we trap him in a cage; he gets the run of three rooms - with a couch, water, toys, two big windows that he can see out without even jumping. But that's not been good enough for him for the past couple of weeks - no idea why.
He's been knocking down the baby gate that we use to trap him and heading downstairs to lie on the couch and the carpet - rather than the laminate floors upstairs. No idea why. Maybe it's the warmer temperatures - it is cooler downstairs, after all, and he is getting older by the day.
On Monday we'd headed to Home Depot to order a new water heater - hoping to qualify for the Ohio Energy Efficient Appliance Rebate program. That meant we'd have to switch from our 80-gallon electric hot water heater (which has been slowly leaking for the past year or so while we hoped to avoid catastrophic failure through sheer blind faith) to a smaller 50-gallon gas model, something more in line with our two-person household.
We got to Home Depot, answered the needed questions, scheduled the delivery and installation for Tuesday morning while The Girl was home, and dropped a few bucks for an extended warranty meaning we'd not have to buy another water heater for a long time.
As I headed back to school on Tuesday after Spring Break, The Girl began her break by stinking up the house with paint and primer - the kitchen walls and trim on Tuesday before tackling the bedroom trim and doors for the next few days. She'd used up the sage green for the kitchen walls and headed to Sherwin Williams for a quick resupply.
She left the dogs upstairs.
I called to check in on the way home and found out that the conversion of our electric to the new gas hot water heater would take an extra six or seven hundred dollars - new piping, new venting, an expansion tank, a pressure release valve, a flux capacitor - and that we'd actually be better off to just buy a new, same-sized electric tank - both in the short run and the long run. Lucky us. So we needed to head back to Home Depot and change our order.
As I drove home through the neighborhood - our suburban, uneventful, white-bred niehgborhood - three police cars - one undercover - rolled to a stop, and the police ran out, chasing someone down the street. I've no idea who, no idea why. Just a little excitement to start the week.
When I got home, I found that LeRoy had broken into the barricaded kitchen, gotten into the wrapped up paint tray and tracked paint across the laminate floor after apparently trying to eat the plastic paint tray while The Girl was restocking and I was hearing the sirens. The Girl took the floor cleanup. I took the dog cleanup and hopped into the shower to scrub his feet and mouth.
Once everything was under control and as cleaned up as we could imagine, we headed to Home Depot to switch our gas for an electric hot water heater, our 50-gallon, energy efficient tank for an 80-gallon energy monster. No worries, they said, since we'd never actually gotten the gas model in the first place. All we had to do was call the installers back and tell them to change what they were bringing our way.
So homeward we headed.
To a dog that had been trapped upstairs. And who had ruined our upstairs couch.
He'd apparently gotten freaked out and peed all over the thing, urine dripping into places that we would never be able to clean. Admittedly, the couch had been through the wars, having been with us for a week longer than LeRoy had been. The cushions were ripped in various spots, and we'd extended its life by covering it in a rotating pair of king-sized sheets so the dogs and The Girl could still enjoy it.
So, out to the garage the couch went, replaced with what The Girl spent the next three days referring to as our doggy opium den, three separate palates of dog beds, piled so that the two dogs and the aged cat could enjoy them. Heck of a start to the week.
Thursday, more painting by The Girl. LeRoy again broke free to downstairs but without incident.
Friday, more painting and the installation of the $600, 80-gallon hot water heater - which, of course, cost $1200 after still-needed expansion tank and pressure release valve.
Friday evening then was a trip to Ikea to see the couch that The Girl wanted to replace the destroyed couch with. She'd sat down in every couch in the store and chosen the one that felt best and was also washable and relatively inexpensive - for a couch, anyway. I wasn't immediately sold on the couch but didn't see any better options at Ikea, so we headed onward to Ashley Furniture, Costco, and Value City Furnitue to see if there were any better options.
There weren't of course, so we headed back to Ikea to pick up the last Klippan four-seat sofa in the building along with two washable covers and head home with the flatpacked couch hanging a foot out of the back of the station wagon. An hour later, we were sitting on our new couch, long enough for both of us to lounge at the same time.
If LeRoy pees on this one, we might have a dog to offer around.
He did, of course, greet us when we got home with the couch with a thoroughly destroyed book that I'd borrowed from my principal. $38 plus $10 shipping to replace that one.
It's never boring to be a home owner.
Never...
In an only vaguely related note, we got our taxes finished this week and owe like $2500.
She can't walk barefoot around the house because of the plantar fascitis, and after every run she has to roll her feet back and forth across frozen water bottles to help decrease the swelling.
But she's running another marathon, folks.
And she's doing it for charity.
In September, The Girl will set off on Wright-Patterson Air Force base for the US Air Force Marathon and a 26.2 mile saunter through what looks the be some of the least thrilling marathon terrain around - including 3/4 of a mile on one of their runways.
Looks like I won't be driving around to see her at a half dozen locations on this course like I did when she ran The Pig a few years back.
She has asked that I make the offer to you folks to make a donation to her fund raising efforts via her online fundraising page - though I do warn you that if you click over there, you'll actually get to know her as something other than The Girl.
Of course, her name has been mentioned once or twice (my mistakes) on this blog and there was that one time I posted a bunch of pictures of her.
She's none the wiser, though, eh?
Oh, and if you want to make her a pledge, her personal best time for a full marathon is 5:04. Anybody wanna offer up some money if she breaks the 5:00 barrier?
Oh, and just so you know that we're doing our part in the fundraising, we spent Saturday night at Taste of Cincinnati selling Barefoot Wine for five and a half hours, earning about $300 between simply hourly wages and tips at the booth. Weirdly, I managed to see one current student, one former student (with family), two coworkers, and two identical twins of coworkers - neither of whom I knew had identical twins. And The Girl is crafty - she's just my type - and sewing headbands and keychains to sell. Plus there are the pleas being sent via snail mail (which some of you will probably be getting, too).
Consider yourself warned, folks.
Though you could head that off by making the donation in advance.
I would have easily bet money that if I were to be the owner of both a Nintendo Wii and - as of this afternoon - a Play Station 2...
...and if that Play Station 2 were to be currently receiving signals from one of the two wireless Guitar Hero controllers that I now own to go with Guitar Hero III...
...and if those guitars were going to make a visit to school sometime soon so that the kids could stop by during lunch to play them...
...that I would have been the one to initiate the purchase.
I would, clearly, then have been wrong.
Because The Girl went out today - after asking me (we tend to consult on any purchases of over $100) - and bought a refurbished PS2, two wireless Guitar Hero guitars, Guitar Hero III, and two wireless controllers from the local GameStop...
...so she could take the system in to school and let the kids play during their lunch hour for $1 per song ($3 if they want to duel)...
...with all proceeds going to her school's Pasta for Pennies campaign.
You know, boys and girl, I do believe that I'm in love...
The Girl is a hell of a cook. She's admittedly a little particular about how she wants thing to go in the kitchen so I tend ot steer clear of her when she's working, but the results are usually impressive so I'm good with stepping off.
She's also not always in the mood to cook, so she's smart enough to take a Sunday every now and again and make twenty burritos or a couple of batches of soup and throw them into the freezer so she can just pull stuff out, thaw it, and go.
Which is what made her choice a couple of weeks ago to go visit Dream Dinners a little odd. She already does pretty much what they were gonna do for her.
See, Dream Dinners is a place where they do all the prep work and you throw the stuff together, take it home, and freeze the meals until you're ready for a "homecooked" meal without a whole lot of work. It's marketed primarily to women (admittedly pretty much only to women) who fall into one of a few categories:
guilty about not cooking for their families
don't have time but want to eat family meals
can't cook worth a crap unless they've got the recipe and somebody to prep all the ingredients
need to impress somebody but don't know how to cook
wanna have a social afternoon with friends while throwing some food together
The Girl fell into the last category and went to the Bridgewater Falls branch a couple of weeks ago. She dropped about $130 to make thirty-some servings of food (she claimed it worked out to $3.50 a serving, but my math put it more at $3.75, but who's quibbling) in a couple of hours.
Her take on the layout is that it was incredibly well-planned. (Warning: all following descriptions are second hand from The Girl to me. Any innacuracies are entirely the fault of the blogger.) They had four large stainless steel tables with frozen cases set into the center of the tables (like you'd see at a pizza prep place - a bin for each ingredient). Each table was set up for a different dish (they have a set menu for the month from which you choose in advance what you'd like to make.) Customers/chefs moved from station to staion following recipes already typed out and nicely laminated.
The ingredients went into ziploc bags, disposable aluminum plans, or little plastic containers which were then labeled with specific instructions on pre-printed stickers with the Dream Dinner logo. Everything was ready to be grabbed and ended up ready to be taken from freezer to oven to plate to gullet.
With only a limited amount of data to back up my statement (one dinner in - pork chops with apples) I can say that they make for a pretty tasty product. Tonight's dinner is their stuffed pasta shells with red sauce, so I'll know more by tomorrow.
The Girl's general impression is that the business is an absolute genius move. I had visions of the workers chopping and slicing, measuring and sorting ingredients before the customer chefs got there, but it turns out they don't even do that. They crack open Sysco packages, pour them into prettier dispensers, and put the dispensers into the freezer tables. They make sure there are water bottles in each customer chef's refrigerator space. They print up the labels for the food packages, and that's about it. Everything's straight out of the Sysco package, and it's all measured by the customer chefs.
Overhead's minimal because they only order as much food as they're going to need for the week. The rent's a little pricey because they're primarily going into affluent areas, and they've got some money sunken into nicely appointed kitchens - but even those don't have ovens or stovetops to make anything. She reported that they've got a microwave in the place, but that's pretty much just to thaw things out (or warm up the enchelada wrappers to make them more pliable when she was there) as needed. There's some employee cost, but that's not even a lot because they're not open when they don't have reservations.
Genius!
The Girl did report that she think she could do as good a job for a slightly lower cost and with slightly higher quality ingredients from The Jungle, but that's because she knows what she's doing. Lots of other folks don't have a clue.
There is another place doing the same basic thing at My Girlfriend's Kitchen but aiming a little younger, a little hipper, a little more social with their styling. The Girl has promised a try through there and a report back (to me - she honestly doesn't pay any attention to my literary daliances here on what she refers to as The Blog - don't worry, it doesn't get jealous of her...much...)
So the overall review is a solid four stars out of five...probably five stars out of five if you can't do the stuff on your own...
The girl has chosen to strip the kitchen floor and tile the thing this week. She's been really working her tail off to get things done up there in time for us to take off for the weekend.
The weekend project now two weeks back - currently on hold for the floor - was a spiral quilt pattern that she happened upon on the web. She made a few practice blocks and was trying to figure out how to layout the various colors, so I helped with a few practice layouts digitally:
She thought this one was a little too bright...
Then this one as a tip of the hat to the Vikings and Bulldogs...
...and a tip for the sis...
This is what the back of the quilt will look like...
And the final choice for the front of the quilt...
I'm flying solo today because the girl has taken a weekend jaunt to the happiest place on Earth.
She's not just kicking back while she's down there, however, as she's instead taking a little twenty-six-point-two mile jaunt around the various parks while she's there.
She's also being kind enough to take a few pics of my class mascot while she wanders around and around.
I don't know if I've mentioned it yet or not, but I married a heck of a girl. Since I've known her she's...
Hiked the AT (having never camped overnight in her life)
Run two marathons (in spite of not liking to run)
Gotten her library master's degree
And put up with me a whole heck of a lot
She's pretty phenomenal, and I take this moment to give a little shout out her way.
But now faith, hope, and love remain-these three. The greatest of these is love. - 1 Corinthians 13:13
Love
There are so many different quotes about love out there, and most of them are basically cliche, adopted already by any of a hundred thousand cutie college coeds for use on their flashy, cutesy website.
But love is not something that should be summed up in one cutesy quote - sometimes it takes three:
Love is a many splendid thing. Love lifts us up where we belong. All you need is love! ~ Moulin Rouge
Love isn't something that can be summed up in any sort of quote or cliche or movie line; it's simply too much and too important for that.
If you have it [Love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have. ~ Sir James M. Barrie
But we struggle so much with attempting to define it and nail it down so that we can say just why we love who we love. So that we can help our friends to find the happiness and joy that we have in it, we search for the right words to do love the honor and justice that we feel that it deserves.
Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile. ~ Franklin P. Jones
But our words cannot do love justice. Love is too big, too wonderful, too much for us to do anything more than hint at its true essence. To capture even a snapshot of love is to do it a desservice by leaving out every other aspect of its being.
He loves but little who can say and count in words, how much he loves. ~ Dante Alighieri
Love is more many-faceted than a d30. Love is the most wonderful thing in the world, bringing us to greater heights and happinesses than we will ever experience otherwise, and love is the most hurtful thing possible - taking everything that we believed in and allowing it to be broken and twisted and hurt in ways we never thought imaginable. Love is laughter and tears, friendship and anger, calm and exciting.
Love is like pi -- natural, irrational, and very important. ~ Lisa Hoffman
And love is nothing that anyone can ever tell you about. No two loves are ever the same, because love is a combination of two people, each depending on and needing the other, and at times, each subsuming their individuality to the greater good of the combination. No matter how I or you or anyone attempts to describe their love, their lover, their joy to anyone else, the words are but a pale shadow of the truth.
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart. ~ Helen Keller
We are no more able to touch and grasp love, to hold it in our hands, to disects its being and number its parts than we are to hold onto the air, to freedom, to sunshine, to joy. Love is the ultimate failing of science because no matter how long we number the carbons and analyze the chemicals of our brains and our pelvises, we engage in the ultimate act of reductionist thinking, believing that we can put love to a board, pin its wings open, and allow every other member of the lab to coldly explore our finidings.
Love is a rose but you better not pick it It only grows when it's on the vine. A handful of thorns and you'll know you've missed it You lose your love when you say the word "mine". ~ Neil Young, "Love is a Rose"
This week's advice, then, is the simplest of all and the most impossible to give:
Love
Allow yourself it be open to love wherever you happen to find it.
Take care of love once you have it.
Do not take love for granted for their is nothing more important than it.
And cherish it with all your heart, soul, mind, body, money, and time - for there is nothing more important than it and nothing that is so horrible to waste or lose.
And remember to wish your wife a happy birthday as many times and in as many ways as you can manage. Happy birthday, cutie pie.
It's the whole Pasta for Pennies thing, you know. My school's campaign does really well, and I'm kinda in charge of it and all.
But more importantly today is the fact that my wife's school's campaign just finished up today (they'll probably clear about $5000 - awesome), and they had a big raffle going.
Instead of the way that we run our raffle (the coordinators aren't allowed to win), she put in tickets and let me drop my $20 for thirty tickets spread among various baskets.
I won, of course, and am now the proud owner of...
and a decently useful greeting card organizer from Barnes & Noble
Other than the time my name got pulled out twice to win mugs for having sold two whole magazine subscriptions when I was in third grade, this is the best day of my life.
Anybody know of any kids who like eating at Chili's?
Ok, so my wife has signed on to run the Flying Pig Marathon here in Cincinnati on May 7, 2006. It's going to be a first marathon for her is she does it, and that makes things a bit of a long shot. But she is a stubborn cuss - having walked the 2100+ miles of the Appalachian Trail in spite of having never hiked and backpacked more than a night in her life.
More impressive and close to my heart is that she's doing it as a part of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society'sTeam in Training fundraiser. It's a cause that's become an important part of my life in the past few years as my school does a major fund raiser for them called Pasta for Pennies.
Today, however, I've giving the shout out to her so that you folks can get an opportunity to donate to her via the interweb using the active.com site that she's set up. While you're there, feel free to donate to any of her Southern Ohio co-runners.
They way I figure it, last night Bonefish Grill bought us nearly a hundred dollars worth of free food and drinks.
We showed up for our 7:30 reservation for twelve at West Chester Bonefish about 7:35 - admittedly a few minutes late, but that's life. We were given a buzzer and told that the table would be ready in just a few minutes. No problem...so we headed outside to wait in the incredibly nice November evening.
Half an hour later, I went inside to see if our table was going to be ready anytime soon. "The party at the large table hasn't left yet, sir," I was assured by the hostess. So back to the outside with our group of friends.
Half an hour later I was back inside asking to speak to the manager and asking for free drinks for the crew. He pleasently acquiesced and added that we would be getting appetizers on them as well while we were waiting.
Back to the outside where I was greeted with minor cheering by the assembled crowd.
By the time we'd gotten our drinks and ordered our appetizers, the table was ready - an hour and a half after the reservation's time.
Another hour and a half later, we were full to near bursting and having a great time. The manager's pleasant and generous manner had turned the night into a great time and left us with a great feeling for Bonefish - especially for the bang bang shrimp, a fine appetizer.
And I felt good because I got to be the at least somewhat strong husband taking care of things and getting complimentary things without being a jerk. Probably the first time I've ever taken the direct route of "give us free stuff because you've done us wrong" instead of letting the other person offer. Kinda felt good...
And made for a great birthday dinner for my wife and our friends...
, but I'm hoping you folks can handle that. 
