We are the people the people we will become used to be
So .. I got married. Yup. Good fun.
No, seriously, MARRIED! heh. Sometimes it still creeps up on me and takes me by surprise. It does feel different, somewhat oddly. It feels completely the same.
The wedding was awesome. It was a terrible stress, silly amount of work and just plain dumb financially to get there, but it was good. It was worth it and it was the best day of my life. Mmm, taste the cliché.
As the wedding approached I kept citing Matt’s wedding as the best I had ever attended. It was small, personal and simple. Not Vegas, not elaborate, it was the goldilocks of weddings. I reccomended it to any couple to be I found, I still reccomend it. I also, have to change my tune a bit. My own has naturally risen to the front as my favorite wedding. All up to it I kept with that vein but once I was there, once we were in it and even more looking back I couldn’t have hoped for a better day.
Okay, I could have but those are minor details. A perfect day would have lacked character, and character I like.
Megan was beautiful, . Couldn’t take my eyes off her and unlike the day we met I let myself stare this time 
. We’ve been together six years now and I missed her like crazy after only a few minutes of separation @ the reception. I love my wife and I couldn’t be happier to be here in my life.
Second only to her was my friends. Having them all there with me, hangin out with everyone together, absolutely brilliant. And the bachelor party? Well, they could tell you better than I but good times. Thanks y’all. Ya rock.
There’s likely quite a bit more that I should cover but hey, I’m just glad that I got a post out at all, even sorta near Thursday 
. Hey, it was there when I started. It’s good to write. As for now, I have a wife that needs cuddling! ( Happy Birthday )
Sewing in the Floor
I was doing so well. I had posts done ahead of time, they came out on time, I was happy. Then, Megan bought me a wedding present. She got me a Kindle. This deserved it’s own post, it’s own long & thought out post, coupled with a reading update. The trouble? Well, that requires me actually spending time and sitting down and writing unlike just linking videos.
For those who don’t know, I’m getting married in just over a week. Between preparations for that and being backed up at work and the other work, I’ve not been able to gather the time/motivation to sit down and do it. This week is no different. My big happy post is still pending.
So in the interim, here’s more cool linkage and vidage.
Emily, my brother’s girl, works @ a sailmaker. I knew this and thought it was roughly cool but it was just that vague understanding that you have of other folk’s jobs that you can’t possible envision since you have no corollary experience. Apparently, she works in a freaking cool place. So cool, that a local newspaper did an article on the place. So cool, that the local Fox station did a three segment piece on it.
This may well be the only cool thing I’ve ever seen on Fox.
This is a copy of the AP article. Don’t figure that’s the original source but I didn’t know the paper and that’s what Google gave me
Here are the three vids of the place. Emily’s in the second two but they’re a great piece even if you don’t know her (and thus care about seeing someone you know on TV).
<the vids were supposed to embed here but wordpress didn’t like them because they came from Fox and not a ’supported’ site and I didn’t want to pony up $60 for an upgrade>
So .. check them out nicely embedded @ the Scott Alan Sailmakers website.
Much coolness M.
We’re thinking about canceling cable…
Do you know what we did for entertainment before we got cats? No, neither do we.
Why you should never raise a smart ass…
I’m a bit of a smart ass. Don’t believe me? Try me, by far my favorite game ever and so much my sort of game that soon to be family predicted my winning streak before I had any idea that such a game existed. Where did my Smart Assness come from. I’m sure it was in no way genetic, I certainly was not raised around any smart asses. If I was they would never have gotten this card.
Pretty good thank you
When did I get this? I’ve no bloody idea. 10? 15? Somewhere in there. Regardless, I’ve kept it. Through all the mess and loss over the years I’ve kept it. I managed to loose an in-table sewing machine once. Seriously, I have no idea where it is. But, not this card. In 6 years .. oh yeah .. it’s coming out 
At least my friends aren’t smart asses.
Don't ask .. don't tell .. 'cos if you ask, I'll totally tell.
On second thought .. let’s just leave that one as an easter egg for those who already know what it’s about.
So *twiddles thumbs* On to something else…
AH! At least any smart ass interaction is limited to my parents/friends. Maybe.
Seven years ago, in August if I do recall, I dreaded my hair. Best thing I ever did. First time I ever truly liked my hair, though the bluegreen ball of fuzz that immediately preceded it was a close second. It was such a good idea that here I am seven years later with those very same, albeit a bit longer, dreads. Dreadlocks, however, are not the favored hair style of everyone. While I have a long list of people who would be disappointed should I ever cut them, I have an equally long list of folk offering to cut them as a curtsey.
For the record, if I ever did I would almost certainly turn around and grow them back. Unless I’m going bald, if you don’t like them pull for baldness. Balding dreads is not a good look on anyone. Kinda like a combover only sillier.
Anyway, the first words out of my Father’s mouth when he first saw them was “Dreadlocks? You know your grandmother is going to kill you.” She didn’t. But that Christmas I got this in my stocking.
A check with the express purpose of covering my haircut (I believe that my brother got one as well, but he was just shaggy) She even gave me a coupon. Of course, I never cashed it. I kept it. A memento. It’s one of my most cherished gifts from her. Certainly better than the Michigan State Football book.
And I’m not just being a smart ass.
CALACANIS!!! (read KAHN!!!)
For one brief glorious second, I saw my first real live Tesla Roadster. *geekgasm* It looked just like Jason Calacanis’, orange with the black top ( hence tv Kahn like yell in the title ) though I doubt it was one and the same due to the 200 mile range and the quite larger distance from Ohio to California. More on the (the? wtf .. thank you iPhone autocorrect, lol) later…
Hey! It’s later! ( .. much .. much later)
Tastier than an orange creamsicle on a hot day in July
A little less staged, less water, not quite a sunset, only the backside, amidst traffic and for only a brief moment .. but that’s what it looked like.
Ahh .. Memories ..
Check out more pics of it by clicking the link or taste the rainbow.
Seeing as how it took me three months to finish this post you should probably take this next bit with a shaker of salt. In an effort to update on a regular basis I’m going to go from updating whenever I’ve got something and get to it (Ripley, I’ve actually got some backed up waiting) to scheduling a time to punch one out for each Thursday. We shall see how that goes. Yes, go ahead, laugh. I won’t tell you that I came up with that idea a month ago and have failed to implement it for four weeks consecutively. So there.
And so begins…
…the grand triumphant return of my Reverie.
On to important matters.
Many times in life we require an event to mark the beginning (or ending) of an endeavor, behavior, habit, state of being. There are the obvious, (new year’s resolutions, graduation, a wedding) those of necessity, (stopping smoking now that the new tax would require a second job) and the completely random (see below).
I’d always wanted to have a complete list of everything I’d read. ”Hey, did you ever read…?” I’d always be able to answer that. But, I was too OCD to actually do it. I couldn’t have a list because I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t forgetting something or misremembering — Did I read the Invisible Man by Wells or Ellison? — and so I never did it. I was young enough then that I wasn’t quite up to either but for the record it’s Wells, though Ellison is on my list.
Then one day I picked up Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged which weighs in at over 1000 pages and contains a 60 page philosophical rant masquerading as a character’s speech. So when I finished I felt so accomplished that I wrote it down. When I finished my next book I wrote it down next in the list. I had my event, finally I could have my list. I kept it up too, when it got to cumbersome in a text file I transfered it to a spreadsheet and I could really start to get some interesting stats.
All of this is a long way of introducing that I’ve had another event. I’ve been meaning to restart my personal site for years. I never got around to it for one reason or another, waiting to find the right service to host it or to get around to building one from scratch (and I wonder why it took so long…) Then I found it, a lovely, pretty service that offered just enough customization and just enough click and go to get me going. I tested it out by finally getting a wedding site up for Meggy and I. Check it out @ MeHeartYou.us — there’s basically no content there yet but I assure you there will be some soon, an angry bride will make sure .
Unfortunately some limitations with the service and multiple accounts — complicated by my budget — put off using it for my personal site. It would have been yet another excuse to put it off except it wasn’t my event, today was. When I’d been tracking my reading for about a year I figured back to when I’d read Atlas Shrugged and marked everything finished through April as year one and everything finished from the next May on as year two. Today marks the beginning of my seventh reading year, my best to date. Which, in my book obsessed mind, makes a lovely first post. So I found a new service to at least get the blog up and running and now I can get my post out on the appropriate date. The rest — hopefully — will come.
So, how did this past year in reading go? Pretty well in comparison but not nearly well enough. I’m got up to 86 books and I finally cleared 300 on the list — 303 is the current total — but I only made 22 print books down from a consistent 25 from the last few years. While I’m continuing to find more hours in the day to drive audiobooks to almost three times that and ebooks continue to make small progress my print book waiting list — which spills out of a dedicated bookcase — continues to taunt me. I need to pick it up this year. The same goes with the 1001 list, really dropped the ball there.
Highlights:
- Discovering Sherlock Holmes — He’s not a Twain defined classic.
- Randy Pausch — ‘nough said
- The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood — Sloooow and was unsure until the end but I loved it all in retrospect. Must come up for a reread someday.
- Memories of My Melancholy Whores — Must read more GGM
- Calculating God — SciFi Theology mmmmm…
- Cory Doctorow — Particularly Little Brother and a rereading of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
- Fight Club — The book has a better ending
- A Clockwork Orange — Masterpiece
- The Gospel of the FSM — May you be touched by his noodley appendage
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover — Beautiful
- Saga of the Seven Suns — Epic
- Kafka on the Shore — This one slipped in at the buzzer, one of the best 1001 books I’ve come across yet.
- Reading Sigler in print — Dude, the jersey?, dude.
- Non-fiction finding new life via audio — I get bogged down reading it in print.
- Watchmen — Amazing
- Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge — a fitting epilogue to the original birthright
Disapointments:
- Subpar Kundera — good but far from his best
- Followups in some series — Freedom by McCaffrey, Max Quick by Jeffrey
- E. M. Forester — *shudder*
- Time’s Eye by Clarke — seriously?
- Lord of the Rings — so far a bit too meandering and having trouble holding my interest, more importantly not finishing it in the year
On the board for this year we’ve got a couple carryovers to finish from last year — hate that –, highly anticipated Kundera and Marquez, some Rushdie, filling out some Anthony and Resnick, and with any luck get into Chabon and His Dark Materials. 1001 count stands at 63 – Me and 45 -Meggy but she’s gaining on me. We shall see
