To My Love, On Our Eighth Anniversary

Hello, my love,

Eight years ago today, I made the best decision of my life. I married you, and we ran away together half-way across the country. We made a life for ourselves, far from friends and family, and then created a family around us where we were. And then, this year, we made the next best decisions of our lives: we had a beautiful little girl, and ran away together half-way across the country, back to our friends and family. I'm so glad that I've had you, my love and my best friend, beside me this whole time.

This has been both one of the hardest and one of the best years of our marriage. We've been through some of our biggest struggles yet, and as you've particularly risen to meet those challenges, you've amazed me over and over. I love you so much more today than I did a year ago.

Last year's anniversary was very much our worst. I was in so much pain, mid-way through that pregnancy, with the fibroids degenerating and leaning on my sciatic nerve so hard that I woke up in the night screaming. And, when I couldn't sleep because of the pain, you would hold me and sing to me. I know you never sing for other people, because your tune's a little off, but that's the most beautiful music I've heard in my entire life. For months, you took care of me. You cooked every meal. You washed all our clothes. You did everything (along with our friends) to move us back home. And then E was born, and you continued on caring for us, through the challenging recovery. At the hospital, as you took on the role of E's and my primary caregiver, many members of the hospital staff told me how lucky I was to have someone like you. And, all that while, you slept for sixteen days on an uncomfortable pull-out couch, getting up with every feeding, and holding me and singing when I got scared.

And now, as we parent that hilarious, active and challenging child together, I fall in love with you more and more. E loves you so much, and is always braver when you hold her.

Because I feel the need to include a goofy picture of you every year, I included one from my birthday, when E was three days old. The doctor had just scared us with the possibility of head surgery, and I broke down and cried for quite a while. But then you returned, and rescued my birthday. We read together, and took silly and serious pictures of ourselves, and recorded video messages, telling E how much she aged us already.

And now I'll watch Doctor Who episodes with you, because you've made me nerdier since I married you.

From your wife

Five

As beautiful as ever

I

It doesn't seem that long ago that we moved to Victoria.  A new friend from my department found out that we had just gotten married two weeks before we moved there, and was amazed because we acted like we'd been married forever.  Recently, another friend from the department found out that we've been married for five years and responded, "I had no idea you guys have been married for so long!" 

II

Two weeks ago, Chris and I camped on our way to North Battleford.  Somehow, we seemed to bring rain everywhere we went, and so five minutes before we arrived at our campsite, it started pouring down rain, which didn't stop until half-way through the night.  Setting up a complicated tent in the pouring rain, with cold temperatures more suited to early winter than July: we kept joking that this was our anniversary trip.  It reminded us a little too much of the camping we did for our first anniversary. 

In the morning we were so amused by our horrific hair that we took a self-portrait (seen above), and I promised Chris I'd post it on my blog. 

III

Before we got married, I confess that I fairly regularly mocked the whole "On This Day I Marry My Best Friend" variety of wedding invitations.  My response was usually along the lines of "I wasn't aware that I was marrying Ky." We lived fairly separate lives, frequently lived in separate towns, and had such different interests.

But then Chris and I moved 2000km away from all of our friends and family.  Before we moved, we talked to a few different friends who had done the same, who said the same thing: "It was the best thing for our relationship, even if it was hard to live so far from our family."  And we found that to be true for us: Chris has become my best friend.  (A best friend with whom I have far too many inside jokes and sayings, the origins of which we can't always remember.)  I watch football as a result of him, and he grew his sideburns to look like Mr. Darcy's as a result of me.  The general consensus is that we've each gotten stranger and sillier as a result of marriage.   

IV

Upon reflection, most of our in-jokes are the result of the katrillions of hours we've spent in a car together on road trips, not to mentions All Those Years Before We Had Cable TV.  I keep wondering if I'll someday reach the point where I don't find Chris endlessly entertaining.  It hasn't happened yet.

V

We're going to have a funny anniversary today.  We've been helping Chris's mom with yard work, and now we're going to carve a helmet out of a watermelon for tomorrow's football game.  This evening, we're going to a neat restaurant that serves local and seasonal food, so that Chris can eat wild boar.  This promises to be a good day. 

The man I married

Chris was curious about how he'd score on the Beck Depression Inventory. We found an online version and he tried it out. His score: 0 -- "You are absolutely free of depression. Are you sure you answered each question honestly?"

And he did. It's amazing: I'm married to the most mentally stable man on earth. I appreciate that about him. (Even though sometimes I call him a robot. Absolutely no insomnia ever?)

How I look right now

Being married to Chris is fun.

And we've been celebrating for days already

Poor Christopher's birthday is only four days before Christmas, and so sometimes it gets a little lost in the Christmas rush. There have been a few years where I've already flown to Saskatchewan before his birthday (to take advantage of a seat sale), and he's had to be home alone. This year, I was determined to make a big event for him.

So, I asked him what he wanted, and here was his reply: 1.) rent a Wii, b.) make chicken wings, c.) have a fruit pizza as his birthday cake.

We then ended up buying an amazing deep fryer off of UsedVictoria.com, and so he'd added "deep fry everything we eat" to the list.

And then once he'd talked to Derek, he'd also added to that list: play Wii all night with Derek on the night of his birthday (Sunday), since they're off for Christmas vacation now and don't have to go to work the next day. And so Derek and Ariann are having a sleep-over at our house.

Yes, this does seem a bit like a 12-year-old party, other than the fact that we've got girls (well, Ari and me) staying over as well.

Even though he sometimes worries that he's being spoiled too much (as if I'm not ten times more spoiled than he is), he's been pretty cute and excited about it. It helps that we rented the Wii on Wednesday and have it until Monday, and he got a snow day on Thursday where he got to play games all day.

(Happy birthday, one day early, buddy!)

To my husband, on our third anniversary

Well, Mr. Husband, we've survived three whole years now. And to celebrate that fact, we managed to be in the same province and not to spend the day camping with my extended family. In fact, I think we celebrated this anniversary pretty well, and in a way that was pretty representative of our relationship.

First, you were kind enough to let me sleep in and to lazy about the house while I tried to get rid of this cold I have. You managed to look past the gross neti-pot usage and the snorting sounds I made all morning and even called me beautiful several times today.

Then you made me get out of the house. We went canoeing and flew kites. After running around like children for an afternoon, we rushed back to your parents' place, cleaned up and went to the city's best restaurant. We wore our best clothes and raved about the chèvre-stuffed chicken. (Okay, we also were secretly pretending to be Iron Chef judges. We awarded them high points for plating design.) Then we went to our church's prayer meeting. And then came to your parents' place, where we put together the little kite you got at the dollar store, and I watched as you ran around the street (and the dining room) trying to make it fly.

I don't know if we act like normal married people. I don't know anyone else whose report of how they spent their anniversary is "WE BOUGHT KITES! MINE IS BIGGER THAN ME!" You're good for me that way; sometimes you realise that it's been a while since you heard me laugh and you do every stupid thing you think of until I start laughing.

And so thank you for being better for me than I deserve, for keeping me alive through my exams, for making me leave the house every once in a while, and for putting my tea cozy on your head every time you think I need to smile more.

With love from your wife.

Life in the West Procrastination household

My beloved husband is walking around the house with a paper geodesic dome on his head.

Right.

Lesson Learned

This weekend, Chris took his students to Mt. Washington (which, it turns out, is not in Washington but is actually on The Island -- Up Island, in fact), leaving me home alone for the weekend. Okay, I could have gone if I wanted to. But: a.) I'm preparing for my exams; b.) it would have cost us a bunch of money for both of us to go; c.) I didn't think I could handle a full weekend of teenagers. And so it was my choice to stay home alone.

With Chris gone for the weekend, I learned a big lesson: I've become a big wienie. I was completely non-functional when Chris was gone. I was so lost without him. I couldn't even go to bed at a decent hour, because I didn't feel like it and there were half-interesting shows on the Food Network.

And apparently I'm a paranoid mess when I'm home alone at night. Okay, I knew that one already. I haven't had to do that much ever, because I've never lived completely alone. Every night, I had to check to make sure the windows were locked. And I couldn't watch scary things on TV, or else my brain would take that and run. (Which was a shame, because Turner Classic Movies was showing Hitchcock movies this weekend. At least I'd gotten over myself by Sunday afternoon and watched Rear Window, which I love.)

It's official: I'm a wienie.

You know?

Yesterday was actually really nice. We went to the video store first, on our way to the restaurant. We had also determined that we were going to rent some old movie. But we should have gone to Rogers Video instead of Blockbuster. The only black-and-white comedy in the whole store was Some Like It Hot, and it was already rented. We were having a lot of trouble figuring out what to rent, and then I found The Sting. On the day we started dating, we watched that movie with his brother Geoff. We used to have so many inside jokes based on that movie, but we hadn't seen it in six years.

The good thing about going to a restaurant like Kelsey's is that it's on the edge of town, and so most people from our city think that such a place is too "far away" (a 15 minute drive from our house). And so we just had a normal meal, where we even got a booth and weren't stuck out in the middle of the floor. Our spot was well-lit and it wasn't too loud. I'm glad that we went somewhere where we could order chicken wings as appetizers. As we ate, we joked as we tried to remember what we were like when we first started dating. We reminisced about how Chris used to interrupt our dates to go tuck his (then-high-school-aged) little brother in to bed.

It was really nice to get out of the house in the middle of the week, even if it was on such a busy and insane night. Remind me to leave the house more often.

Will you be my valentine?

Would you believe that Chris and I are going on a date tonight?

By certain people's definition of a "date," we've only ever gone out a handful of times. The first time we dressed up and "went out" to a restaurant was after we'd been "dating" for a whole year. (We went to a pasta restaurant where they turned our leftovers into a tin foil swan.) I'm more of a homebody, and Chris hates spending lots of money on those kinds of extras (especially when he was living on student loans). It was nice finding someone else who was also happy quietly spending time together.

I think the most "dates" that we went on was when we worked our way through the book Ten Great Dates Before You Say "I Do". We went to a steakhouse on our first "date" for the book. We laughed at how we were both reading through a book and filling out quizzes in a dimly-lit room full of awkward first-daters and power-broking men in polo shirts.

These days, we're more likely to budget any restaurant money for going out with friends occasionally. Our plan for Valentine's Day was to cook something special-ish and maybe rent an old movie. But then some certain punk friends of ours sent us a gift card for a restaurant. Enough for both of us to go out for dinner. And it arrived yesterday. And then it turned out that Kelsey's was still taking reservations for supper time today.

And so, we're going out tonight? On Valentine's Day? And then Chris suggested that we dress up? And maybe we'll rent some kind of black-and-white screwball comedy from the 1940s? It's pretty out of the ordinary for us, and I'm liable to totally be a big curmudgeon there and be complainy about the slow service and all the people everywhere, but it just might be fun because it's different from the usual. (Also: it's probably for the best if I leave the house. Says the woman who is still in her pyjamas.)

In other news: We booked my comps exams! They'll happen right after Easter. The end is in sight! (At least for this stage. Bring on the dissertation, because at least it will be different!)

Milestones lost in the rush

Last night, as Chris and I were falling asleep, we were sleepily making plans for how we could celebrate Valentine's Day. At some point, I realised that it was actually this week. And then realised it was February.

"That means that on Friday it'll be four years since we got engaged! Wait a minute: that means that I forgot about our dating anniversary last month! We've been a couple for six years!"

Chris was unsurprised by any of this. He had noticed these milestones but had just assumed that we had stopped celebrating all of these other milestones, now that we have a wedding anniversary to poorly celebrate. (He didn't mind that I'd forgotten about all these dates. I remember the important ones, like his birthday.)

Then, this morning, I realised that I've missed another milestone by almost a month: my third blogiversary was on January 15th! I just checked my archives to see what I even blogged that day, and I didn't blog at all, because I was laid so low by that awful cold I had in January. I spent the day using my neti pot, watching reruns of So You Think You Can Dance?, and finally making spectacular progress on my comps reading. I then got over my cold enough to go and spend far too much time with Meg and Karl. Maybe I haven't changed that much.

So, little blog with your 1110 posts (as of this one), I'm sorry that I'm nearly a month late, but happy birthday.

Meeting in the middle

You know, Chris and I used to marvel at how different we were. Our tastes were polar opposites; we used to joke that we covered the whole range of nerdery/geekery: I was Humanities and he was sciences. I was Jane Austen novels and musicals, while he was chemistry explosions and science fiction.

And then over Christmas I bought Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country for Chris and watched it with him. Okay, and I regularly request that we watch Galaxy Quest. And quote it frequently. ("By Grabthar's hammer...what a savings.")

And then today, Chris asked if he could borrow one of my comps books. He had started leafing through the introduction and now he's hooked.

(Okay, so it's a book called The Culture of Time and Space, and so it shouldn't be so much of a surprise, but still...)

Important Update

Chris and I are re-starting his blog!

It started when we were discussing some fun plans for his Robot Club at school. I asked him if I could start telling his stories on my blog, since he's not updating his.

"No!" he said. "I want it on my blog!"

"Then are you going to start updating your blog?"

"But I don't have time!"

I asked him to add me as a contributor to his blog, so that I could get things started. He'll give me the pictures, videos and stories, and I'll compile them for him. And I know what will happen: I'll won't tell something right or he'll want to tell things in his own words, and he'll start writing again. That's my scheme. I know that what's been keeping him from writing is actually the fact that he feels like there's so much work to be done on the template and on his website; it has nothing to do with the actual time it takes to write. And so this will help get things going.

So long that the Kindergarten to grade 3 branch of Robot Club actually does meet at lunch today, I'll be getting the first post up later today.

By Popular Demand

At least I'm not still posting photos of myself

Seriously, I wish I could show you all the clever presents I bought today. But that's not going to happen, because some of the presents are for people who read this here blog.

Instead, I will show you what we put together last night:

Isn't it cute? My friend Christina gave us a homemade gingerbread house kit (all the parts, the icing, and the candies) as a Christmas present, and Chris was just so excited. Now he wants to build a bunch of gingerbread houses. After he finished this, he proclaimed, "The next one I build will be a gingerbread geodesic dome! I'm going to do it at my Mom and Dad's house this Christmas!"

We've all been forewarned. After he built that robot, I've learned to take these claims seriously.

And now for something much more pleasant

In bullet form, our weekend thus far:

• We're in Vancouver! At Meg and Karl's!
• We had pretty much our pleasantest ferry ride over to date. We left early. We drove the speed limit on the Pat Bay Highway (I think we were the first drivers to ever do so), while compiling a list of everyone and everything that is "for chumps". There was only a small crowd on the ferry and had no one near us at our laptop spots. I completed most of another funding application. I listened to pleasant music.
  
• Our new favourite phrase is "for chumps."
  
• So far, the following have been proclaimed "for chumps": getting up in the morning, Victoria traffic laws, the city's drivers, funding applications, wearing socks, packing,
  
• Today, we had such a full day. We picked up the Bobby Jurasin jersey which Chris's mom had shipped here for Chris to wear to the CFL Western Final tomorrow. We took Chris to Science World (his early birthday present from Meg and Karl). We made Christmas-themed crème brûlée (peppermint in the custard and topped with crushed candy canes). We watched Edward Scissorhands.
  
• Chris is pretty much overwhelmed by the fabulousness of the weekend. We're doing all kinds of things that make him happy, and so he's been like a wiggley puppy constantly. Today it was Science World, where he got to play with all the exhibits and let out his science teacher/small child. Tomorrow, he gets to wear bright green and cheer for his team, in hopes that they get to go to the Grey Cup.
• When Chris is this happy, I am this happy.
• I am also happy when I manage to dust myself off and apply for more funding, putting together a really solid application in a matter of hours.
  
• Things are looking up.
• (Although I don't look forward to the ferry ride home. If the Lions win, the fans are going to be insufferable. If they lose, Chris in all his green might now be the most welcome sight.)
  

Conversations with Mr. QWP

(As I refer to Chris on these here blogs)

(Note: if you haven't watched this evening's Heroes and are the type to freak out about learning about minor details, uh, don't read this.)








QWP (after having hidden behind her fingers during the last scene, because it freaked her out): Well, Claire did cut off her pinkie toe after all.
Mr. QWP (who was working at the kitchen table and listening to the episode): And?
Q: And it grew back.
Mr.: Did her old pinkie toe grow a new Claire?
Q: ...?
Mr.: It rolled under the couch, and by the next morning there were two Claires!
Mr.: But one of them was evil!

His pencil crayons are all sharpened and labeled...

Today is my Christopher's first day of school! I woke up early to see him off, not really because I could do much to help him get out the door on time,* but more because this seemed momentous, and I wanted to be there to witness the occasion.

He's now out the door, wearing a nice shirt and his navy pants, and carrying my old laptop and our digital camera (to take a picture of his classroom before the kids arrive). All I can do is pray that he has a good day and drives safely.

* As it was, he was out the door by 7:00AM.

More changes are afoot

Today is Chris's last day at the Giant American Corporation!

That fact didn't really sink in for me until last night, as he was looking around for a cardboard box to bring his things home. Remembering how sad he was when he last left a job he enjoyed, I went into Concerned Wife mode and asked how he's feeling, seeing as he won't be there again.

It turns out that he's like a grade 3 kid on the last day of school. I think he even said "Wheeeeeee!" and high-fived me a bunch of times. And bounced around on the exercise ball, detailing all the new and stupid regulations that are about to be introduced at work, that he won't have to deal with. Good bye, corporate America and the reason why Chris relates too well to Office Space. (Seriously: don't give an idealistic teacher a desk job.)

Now he gets a week of vacation, and then he's into teacher mode. And that last fact is pretty much the happiest thing either of us can imagine right now.

If it wasn't for me...

Chris would still believe the following:
1. That "BYOB" means "Bring Your Own Beef" ("Chris, if I hadn't informed you otherwise, and you had received an invitation that said 'BYOB...'" "...I would have assumed we were barbequeing and brought a raw steak.");
2. That garbanzo beans are imaginary;
3. That Spanish musicians play "flamingo" guitar. ("I had a whole explanation about the word origin figured out in my head, involving South America and flamingos.")

*****

Now that I've mocked my husband sufficiently, I turn the mockery back to myself. Yesterday I went to the beach, and I was so diligent about the sunblock, except...I forgot my face. Until after we went swimming. I am about the colour of a tomato right now, on my face, my scalp, and the tops of my ears, except that I wore sunglasses while I was in the water. And so there are big white circles around my eyes.

Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch. I look ridiculous. And have no way to avoid being in public for the next few days.