Do or Do Not.

OK, let me start this off by saying: Kelsey and I are both just fine.

Now: We were in a one-car accident this morning.

Road conditions around here have been fairly consistently treacherous for the last week or so, and this morning Terry told me there were black ice warnings. I told her I’d be fine — I’m a very careful driver anyway, and I figured that most of the roads I’d be traveling on between the house and the office would have been traveled enough to have warmed them up.

Problem is, that didn’t apply to the road right outside our neighborhood.

Kelsey and I got in the Jeep and headed off for school, turning left out of our neighborhood. Fifty yards later, I hit a slick of ice and started sliding. My first thought was “Hey, y’know, no big deal, I’ll stop sliding here in a second.” But I didn’t. I fishtailed back and forth for a few seconds before shooting off the right shoulder, into a drainage ditch and headfirst into an embankment — given that the mud we drove through probably slowed us down a little, I’m guessing we hit the embankment at around thirty miles per hour.

As soon as we were stopped, I turned around immediately to check on Kelsey (all I could think once it became obvious an accident was coming was “Kelsey Kelsey Kelsey Kelsey”)… who was perfectly fine, and only upset because the impact made her drop the fuzzy little frog she was playing with.

I called Terry as soon as I was sure both Kelsey and I were physically okay, but I had to cut the call short because of some unexpected help (Terry has her own version of events which describe that far too short phone call, so I’ll let her tell that part of the story). I complain sometimes about where we live and talk about missing Boston, but I’m fairly sure what happened next wouldn’t have happened had this accident occured up north: not sixty seconds after the accident, a guy pulled off the side of the road in his ginormous Chevy truck and helped drag me out of the ditch. And the state trooper who showed up to check on us was my neighbor — who thankfully didn’t write us up for having expired out-of-state tags (a situation which was fixed this afternoon). Terry called a tow truck (thank you again, Beth, for the AAA membership you got Terry for her birthday)… and we waited for quite awhile, since the tow trucks around here were quite busy this morning. Supposedly there were numerous accidents all around our area; the tow guy had trouble navigating the roads himself to come get us.

The truck wasn’t really damaged, surprisingly, outside of a blown right front tire, and even that we were able to get re-inflated. I was so, so, so lucky: there was no one else on the road at the time I started skidding, and where I went off the road I managed to split right between a row of mailboxes and a telephone pole. Where I hit the embankment, I was two feet to the right of a cement drainage pipe. Even the fact that I was driving the Jeep and not my Mazda — the Mazda would have been severely damaged by the crash, and quite possibly so would Kelsey and I. All in all, if I’ve got to be in a car accident — especially with my kid in the car — this was a good one to have.

Yesterday morning, I read a news bite saying that an actor I liked was going to be in a movie that I’d likely be excited about.  I wrote up a quick post about it and scheduled it to publish in the afternoon since I wanted to give my legions of readers ample opportunity to laugh at the picture of 13-year-old me I’d posted yesterday morning.

In between the time I wrote that post and the time it was supposed to be published, more than 30 people were massacred at Virginia Tech.

I wrestled with whether or not posting such a piece of inconsequential fluff was appropriate given what was going on in Blacksburg; ultimately, as you can see, I decided to go ahead with it — if I tried to stop posting out of respect for every terrible thing that happened, I’d never write anything again.  In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter one way or the other whether I posted that article or not, I reasoned, so up it went.

But it did matter.  It mattered to me.

Much like I’d imagine most every other rational, feeling person reading the news yesterday, I felt positively nauseated by what happened.  It just made no sense to me.  I can wrap my head around reading news stories about dozens of civilians getting killed in Baghdad — horrendous though it is, Baghdad’s a war zone and I can understand the types of things that happen there.  It’s tragic, but it’s also expected (and possibly all the more tragic for it).

But what happened yesterday, the utter randomness of it… that I can’t wrap my head around.  I can’t understand why someone thinks they need to kill that many innocent people before taking their own life.  I simply do not get it.

And this particular incident has shaken me far more than any previous school shooting ever did.  I think that it’s because unlike when, say, Columbine happened, I’m now a parent.  It’s made me think more:  thinking of those kids who got shot for no other reason than being in the wrong classroom when some psychopath decided it was time to make his mark on the world… thinking of the parents of those kids, watching the news, terrified, then getting the call that their child had been senselessly murdered…

It made what I wrote yesterday insignificant.  It made the majority of what I ever write feel insignificant.

I know it’s not entirely so, of course; people need entertainment to help distract them from thinking too much of the likes of what happened yesterday, and I like to discuss that entertainment and to try occasionally to provide some of it myself.  But those pointless murders really helped put what I do in some sense of perspective, to remind me of what’s truly important and what isn’t.  Just because writing about pop culture isn’t “important” doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing it, but I’m reminded how lucky I am that I’m able to do think about the trivial so much, that my worries aren’t greater, than my family is safe and happy and healthy.

My most heartfelt sympathies to the families of the victims at Virginia Tech.

Back to the frivolities of pop culture tomorrow.  Tonight, I’m going to go home and give my family a few dozen extra hugs.

Because I just realized that I’ve never made the official announcement here on Do or Do Not, I’ll go ahead and do so:

Do or Do Not World Headquarters is relocating to beautiful Greensboro, North Carolina. Like, next week.

The impending move has been the single biggest reason behind the paucity of posting here over the last couple of weeks. Remember in my last post when I said I didn’t have the brainpower to actually put much in the way of coherent thoughts together? That’s why. I’ve had things to say yet neither the time nor the focus to say them. So sorry — I hope to find that condition rectified after we’re settled into the new digs. Things should be a little closer to normal around here come September.

I’m excited to be returning to my roots, in a sense, moving back to the South after our three-year sojourn to New England. The winters here have never sat well with me, and the cost of living has sat even less well. I’ll once again be in a cultural environment which, while incredibly problematic for me as a left-winger, feels comfortable in the way, say, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off does: I can see the problems and the inadequacies, but I’m still able to enjoy it anyway.

Still, the slow dismantling of the life Terry and I have built here over the last three years saddens me. More than I was expecting it to.

I know that we have much ahead to look forward to and much to be excited about, but while we’re in the middle of cutting ties (well, perhaps “loosening” ties would be a better way to put it) and divesting ourselves of extraneous crap, I can’t quite get to that excited-for-the-future place. Right now I’m just a little depressed, noting every time, for instance, I walk into a building I know I’ll likely never walk into again. I even felt a little twinge when I drove past Gilette Stadium this morning, and I’ve never ever seen a game there — but it’s part of the landscape of my life here, even if a small one, and I’ll miss it.

Two weeks from now we’ll be well and truly into our new lives, our new house, in North Carolina and we’ll have time to stop, to relax, to breathe, to enjoy the bright future we’re both so confident lies ahead. But for now, all we are is tired and stressed and already missing the people and the places that have come to mean so much to us.

As far as my little girls were concerned, Friday night was Father’s Day; I’d imagine it’s completely pointless to ask a four-year-old and a two-year-old to keep a secret for thirty-six hours. Especially when the secret involves a present they helped pick out.

“Daddy, daddy! We got you a present! It’s a secret, SSSSSSHHH!!! It’s a bear!!”

My girls (with more than a little assistance from their amazing mommy) got me the most rockin’ Father’s Day present I’ve gotten yet:

Kelsey picked out the bear (with approval from Laurel) — Kelsey chose this particular bear because it looks like Sleepy Bear, her friend who’s spent every night with her since she was 18 months old. Terry picked out the costume (again with approval from the girls), but I think that one was pretty much a no-brainer, don’t you?

Thank you, Laurel, Kelsey (who told me “Happy Father’s Day” no less than 300 times yesterday) and Terry, for the totally fantastic Father’s Day (which included breakfast in bed, a two-toddlers-on-one-Daddy wrestling match, and trips to an art supply store, a comic book store and a swing by our amazing local ice cream place). I certainly don’t need special days like this one to know how much you care, but I truly wasn’t going to complain about being showered with all of that love and affection.

Last October, I wrote a simply fantastic article about the flooding in my basement and the damage to my comic book collection. If you haven’t read it or don’t remember it, you should go read that post before reading this one. It’s OK, I’ll wait.

doop dee doo. doodle-eee-doo.

Done? OK, good.

As those of you readers living in New England are well aware, it has now rained for 517 consecutive days here in the northeastern U.S. We went from the gray of winter to the gray rain of spring, and I swear it feels like it’s just going to stay this way until it slides right back into winter again. The weather here has, to be quite frank, sucked of late.

And all that stuff I should’ve done to the basement to prepare for all of this rain? Yeah, that’s right — didn’t do a damn bit of it.

I came home early from work today to try to help Terry with the newest round of flooding, to move stuff away from the standing water areas and start getting rid of the crap in the basement we don’t need or has been damaged beyond repair. Unfortunately, that includes several thousand dollars worth of my comic books. (That’s the value I’ve paid for them over the years, not what I could get if I tried to sell them now. Especially given the fact that so many of them are, y’know, sopping wet.)

So I went through three longboxes of comics and threw out all of the ones that were sodden and stuck together — three garbage bags full. Luckily, there weren’t too many of those that I really felt all that bad about chucking out (a significant run of Uncanny X-Men from around 1989-91 excepted). Ninety percent of the rest of what was in those longboxes is now earmarked for donation. (Question for any of you, ’specially you New England folk: do you know of a literacy organization that might be willing to accept a gift of several hundred comic books?)

I kept maybe fifty comics out of probably pushing 1000 that I went through, either comics I plan to use for art or story reference or ones to which I had any kind of sentimental attachment. That I kept so few says to me I probably need to get rid of the comics I buy on a more regular basis, preferably by passing them on to other readers — and it also says something to me about the quality of most of those books. There was a large percentage of comics of which I had absolutely no memory past the cover, comics which clearly had made no lasting impression on me whatsoever, and a larger percentage of books I just didn’t care to re-read.

I threw out comics I’ve had with me for as long as twenty-five years. I threw out the issue of All-Star Squadron #3 I distinctly remember reading on the the flight I took from Pensacola to Birmingham by myself when I was eleven years old. I threw out books whose covers have been burned into my brain for msot of my life (even if their contents haven’t been). But it was time to let go — these relics of an earlier me were adding nothing to my life anymore except more boxes to be stored in my basement.

It seems like I should feel worse about throwing away and giving away these things that were so important to me when I was younger. But I don’t. One of the main tenets of Buddhist philosophy is that of non-attachment, and I’ve been violating the hell out of that dictum by keeping (amongst other things) hundreds of pounds of paper that are largely meaningless to me now. And that attachment stemmed mainly from the fact that I was just used to having these books around, not from any true sentimentality or appreciation of quality.

So farewell, my four-color friends. You’ve been a part of my life since before I even sprouted grass on the prairie, but it’s time to say goodbye. I hope those of you I can give away will live on in another basement after providing some entertainment and education to someone new.

I’ve never been good at role-playing games. Scratch that — I’ve never had much interest in role-playing games. Wait, scratch that, too — I’ve had interest in role-playing games, but not so much with the role playing itself.

Sure, like many introverted, awkward, socially inept teenagers in the 1980s, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons. I know lots of people of that sort who played RPGs as a method of getting some healthy and fun social interaction with people who didn’t want to torture and ridicule them for being introverted, awkward and socially inept, but for me… well, it wasn’t all that “social” since it was just me and my friend Mitch. We’d take turns being the Dungeon Master. Neither one of us played D&D for the game’s role-playing aspects; for us, it was just the combat and advancing our characters so they could kick more ass in combat.

(Mitch decided he’d had it with playing D&D with me when, at the very outset of an adventure, I ambushed his character he’d been playing for a few weeks and killed him…with a band of pixies. (No, not “the band The Pixies” — that would actually have been less embarrassing, I think. Getting whacked by a murderous Black Francis would have a certain angsty poetry to it.))

Anyway, my point was that even when I played role-playing games, I didn’t really role play. I was always too self-conscious to really get into that part of the game — even when it’s the friggin’ point of said game. Even the last time I tried, just a few years ago, in a game populated completely by people I trusted (including my wife), I still couldn’t let myself go enough to pretend to be someone else.

Every time I play a computer RPG where I get to design my character’s appearance, I always end up just making myself, trying to come as close as I can to putting myself into the game. Even in these games where The Real Me is completely hidden to the other players online, I still stick with being a pixelated version of me.

When I first started playing The Sims 2, I enthusiastially constructed my entire family, including the kids…and then horrified Terry when Sims Social Services came to take the girls away because I wasn’t feeding them. (The baby seat was sitting right in between the kitchen table and the refrigerator, situated just so my Sims couldn’t pull the baby chair out far enough to put the kids in. For all their bitching about hungry kids, “Allen” and “Terry” couldn’t tell me why they wouldn’t/couldn’t feed them. I’d have hoped that these simluated versions of me and my wife would be smart enough to move the friggin’ chair, but no. Of course, I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out until after my children had been placed in foster care, so maybe the game’s more realistic than I might think…?)

I usually tell myself that the reason I couldn’t get into role-playing was because I was just too happy being myself to want to be someone else. And while it’s true that I am damn glad to be me, it’s obvious that excuse is pure horse manure. What it is exactly, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s quite fear in this case; I have a feeling, though, that it’s connected at some fundamental level to my traditional lack of Deep Thoughts about the world around me. The term Terry likes to use for me is “solipsistic,” or self-referential — I get so wrapped up in my own head that I Am All There Is.

The funny thing, though, is that I feel like I can get into other people’s heads pretty well, both when trying to suss out people’s motivations for what they’re doing — or when writing fiction. So I know my solipsism isn’t for a lack of ability to understand or inhabit other roles or personas, but rather from a lack of desire or need to do so. And I think that’s something else that needs to change in my head. I think know that I need to expand my metaphorical wardrobe, to try some different outfits on, because I think know that doing so will help make me a better writer…and a better person.

I know that some many of you reading this post are veteran RPGers or otherwise into Being Someone Else, so clue me in: what do you get out of it? What do you put into it? Does Being Someone Else for awhile have any effect on Being Yourself?

The rational part of my brain by far dwarves that part of my brain which is open to things-not-easily-explained. I’m far more Scully than Mulder: my first reaction to hearing stories about phenomena which fall outside of the realm of the basic laws of the universe as laid down in high-school science textbooks is to scoff dismissvely at whatever out-there bit of New Age hooey is under discussion. I reailze that this isn’t the most open-minded attitude I could have (I attribute said attitude to my apparently very sheltered upbringing), and I’m working on being more open to that which isn’t considered part of “normal” science, especially since so many of my friends — incredibly intelligent people I admire and respect quite a bit — believe so strongly in some of this stuff. If these folks believe in $x, I say to myself, then there’s got to be something to it.

I’m saying all of that as a way into this: I’m not sure how much I believe in coincidence, and I’m trying to notice when it feels like the universe is attempting to tell me something… even if I can’t immediately suss out just what.

Case in point:

Friday night, Terry and I were watching a program on the Travel Channel about (coincidentally enough) places which are supposedly hotspots for mystical or paranormal energy. One of the mystically intense locales featured on the show was Sedona, Arizona, and there among the footage of Sedona was a very interesting-looking church, one that I believe had been built into the rocks in the mountains. (It was only mentioned and shown in passing, so I didn’t get the full story.) That church itself isn’t important to my story except in that it sparked some neurons in my brain: “Hmmm,” the thought generated by the firing of those neurons said, “your dad told you a story about some church out in the Southwest that had a spiral staircase that had some funky properties to it. I wonder if that’s it?”

And that was all I thought of the matter.

Until a few mintues ago, when I was listening to an Internet radio station I’d never listened to before.

Instead of listening to my usual MP3s while writing, I decided to listen to the radio instead, and pulled a station at random out of iTunes: iChannel, which plays all indie and unsigned bands, so I knew I’d hear some new stuff. Well, after the third song I heard, a DJ (female voice, cute and just slightly less-than-professional-sounding) came on to introduce the next song, which had been specially requested by Sarah from Santa Fe.

“Have you ever been to Santa Fe?” asks the DJ. “They’ve got this church there, and it’s got this spiral staircase in it that’s made without any nails at all. It’s just boards. Pretty cool… you should check it out if you’re ever in Santa Fe. Anyway, here’s the request for Sarah…”

That was the church and the staircase my dad had told me about.

Coinicdence that I should see a TV show about mystical energies and unexplainable pheomena that makes me think about something I hadn’t thought of in years, something about which I couldn’t quite remember the details, and then have those details filled in 48 hours later by a DJ on a radio station I’d never even heard of before? Most likely, yeah… but it also feeds into something else which had been on my mind since Thursday: opening my mind to these sorts of connections and letting either the universe or my subconcious, take your pick, send me messages or information it thinks I need.

(What message am I supposed to be taking from the story of the Loretto Chapel? I’m honestly not sure. Since I’m not a religious person, I’m going to ignore the “miraculous” apsects of the staircase’s construction. I’m thinking I should be getting a message about design or building, or perhaps about seeing a project through to completion. Possibly that I should become a nun, though that seems unlikely.)

These sorts of coincidences have happened to me many times in my life. I have no idea if they’re a more or less common occurrence for me than for other people, or even if I’m more of less aware of them. I know that as impressive as this most recent coincidence feels, it’s far from the biggest that’s ever popped up; sometime soon I’ll tell you about my friend Steve and how I knew he was supposed to be part of my life.

So what about all of you? I’d love to hear about any similar experiences you might have had and what, if any, meaning you ascribed to them.

According to CNN and Money magazine, I’ve got the best job in America. Well, not me personally — that job seems to belong to the Mark Dochtermann, the Director of Technology at Electronic Arts. But my job in general, software engineer — apparently, I could have no better job, according to the fine people at CNN and Money.

And honestly, I think I have to agree with them. Whether or not software engineering is empirically “the best job” or not (and I think we all know that these sorts of reports are all essentially horseshit), it’s the best job right now for me, which is really all I care about.

I’ve known this for awhile, of course. It’s one of the reasons why, for better or for worse, I haven’t been pursuing the writing thing with every fiber of my being: I like being a programmer, and I especially like being a web programmer. This isn’t something I’m doing until I find something better — programming is the “something better” that I came to following a lowly-paid and ill-respected stint as a web designer.

(This seems like a good place to discuss the difference between “web designer” or “web developer” and “software engineer,” at least as those words have pertained to my career. So many people, my family included (or perhaps “my familiy in particular”), have absolutely no idea what it is that I do. Everyone assumes I’m a designer or that I do, oh I dunno, data entry or something.

Technically speaking, I’m not an engineer in the most political sense of the word: I don’t have a degree in computer science, I have almost zero formal training in any programming disciplines, I don’t have any certifications to speak of. I’m all experience and no education. My current job title is “Senior Web Developer.” But I have a problem with that title — and haven’t been shy about letting my bosses know about it, for all the good it’s done — because “web developer” is what I did when I first started in this industry seven years ago. I developed websites: I did the design, I built out the HTML and maybe wrote a little JavaScript (or cribbed it from some other site). What I did as a “web developer” certainly wasn’t programming, and I don’t believe that title usually implies any sort of programming ability or background.

The problem, though, is that I’m not sure what a more appropriate titlewould be. The term “engineer” sounds so much better to my ears (and looks so much better on the resumé), but it’s not especially accurate, given the lack of credentials I mentioned above. My father was an electical engineer, and for that he was required to be licensed in whichever state he was employed. So no matter the kind of work I’m doing, I’m not sure there’s any way I’m qualified to use the word “engineer.”

But what I do now, whether my title indicates it or not beyond the fact that the word “senior” is in it, is software engineering. I’m not a designer (except on the side, just for fun). I’m not an HTML monkey, though I can monkey around with HTML like nobody’s business. What I do is work on — architect, design, document, code — the enormous application framework which powers all of our company’s websites as well as communicates with a number of our other back-end application servers. That includes code written in multiple programming languages (though primarily PHP) and a whole lot of MySQL database work.

It’s not all me, by any means (in fact, my good buddy Brian has been more responsible for the overall system architecture than I), but it’s certainly a whole lot me. And “web developer” just doesn’t feel like a fitting title for all of that. It’s kind of like calling an NFL wide reciever a “runner” — yeah, okay, that’s true, but it’s only part of it — a receiver does so much more than just run. (Well, most do, anyway.)

Okay. Rant over.)

Software engineering stretches my brain in happy-making ways — one of the things I like to think I’m best at is problem solving, and that’s what software engineering is all about. It’s overall a pretty low-pressure gig for me <knocks on all the wood he can find>. I get to work with people of a temperament similar to mine and who have interests similar to mine. And the job pays pretty damn well. I can’t think of very many jobs I’d rather have than the one I’ve already got; even those careers where I think I might better like the work itself don’t pay as well (or are phenomenally difficult to break into), and at this stage of my life, money’s still necessarily something of a priority. My job fits me well.

I love what I do. It’s nice to remember that sometimes.

So I’m 35 today. I have to say that so far, 35 doesn’t feel all that different from 34, but then again, it really doesn’t feel all that much different from 27.

Thirty-five seems like a good time to do some stock-taking, being that whole midpoint-of-the-decade thing. For me, unsurprisingly, this comes down to evaluating my career and creative pursuits — I mean, I’m extraordinarily happy; I’m pretty healthy (the diabetes is under control); I have a fantastic family and wonderful friends, both local and spread throughout the country; I have a job that I like well enough for now and has potential to make me even happier. There’s truly no point in my life previous to this that I would trade for right now.

So yeah, the future directions of the career and the writing are really the big things dominating my mid-decade thoughts. I’m not sure exactly where either is going, but I think I’ve finally made some peace with the fact that it’s doubtful I’ll be supporting myself with writing anytime soon — and honestly, I’m not sure I even want to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all saying that I don’t want to write anymore — in fact, I think I want to do it more than ever — but I’m releasing myself from the constricting notion that I had to A Writer. I’m okay with thinking of writing the same way I do drawing and photography and playing guitar and piano: it’s something I really enjoy doing and something I want to get better at, but it doesn’t have to be This Big Thing. Writing’s still sitting a few steps higher than those other pursuits (it certainly does have much more income and prestige potential than any of the others), but I’m just trying to take the pressure off — longtime readers and friends probably know I’ve always tended to put unreasonable expectations on myself with regards to the writing thing.

None of that is to say I’m not taking the writing seriously, or that I don’t want to publish. It’s just an acknowledgement that for the time being, it has to take second place to The Work What Pays and will do so for several more years. And that’s 100% OK.

I’ve realized that I’m pretty lucky: I have a current job and career that I like, one I’d like to pursue more seriously. I enjoy doing what I do and it pays pretty well (with the potential to pay really well if I get better and better at it). It takes care of my family and allows Terry to stay home with the kids. And it allows me to work on my writing and get a bi-weekly paycheck without feeling like my soul is being char-grilled. I’ve known (or know of) too many people for whom it’s an either-or situation.

Furthermore (and this might be the topic of future posts) — there’s potential there for me to combine the writing and the current career. More on that later, perhaps.

Anyway, that’s some of what’s going on in my head. I’m sorry I haven’t been posting more often lately — things have just been a little bit nutty, both at work and at home. (I’ve actually been — gasp — working while I’m at work. Well, not so much today, but hey, it’s my birthday.) Do you people know that I actually feel guilt when I go too long without posting? I do, I swear.

Seven years ago today, Terry and I were supposed to get our marriage license. Instead, we got married.

I left work at lunchtime so I could go pick Terry up and we could drive to the county courthouse and register for the license. As I was getting ready to leave, my friend Scott said to me: “I don’t want you to come back here tomorrow married or anything.”

“Heh, yeah, right–don’t worry, that’s not gonna happen,” I said.

But on the thirty-minute drive to downtown Pensacola to pick up Terry at work, I started to think about it. Why couldn’t we just get married? We were planning on eloping the following Saturday.anyway But surely there’s no way Terry would go for that, right? We had our ceremony all planned out: nice sunset ceremony on the beach, just us and the official and one witness, Terry in a beautiful white dress she’d bought for the occasion…

I proposed the idea anyway, though I didn’t seriously think she’d consider it. And at first, she didn’t. “We can’t do that!” she said. “We–we have plans! And a dress!”

The more she thought about it, though, and the more we talked about it, the better an idea it sounded. We drove around an extra hour discussing it and discussing it some more. And when we got to the courthouse and finally filled out the paperwork for the license, we told them we wanted to get married while we were there.

After waiting in the lobby for half-an-hour or so, a Justice of the Peace took us into a dim, empty stairwell. Terry and I held hands, she not in her white dress but in jeans and Birkenstocks, as the justice read the standard non-demoninatioal ceremonial vows, and then, just like that, we were married.

We left the courthouse a little stunned and a lot ecstatic. We had known we weren’t going to be able to have a big wedding–there was just no money to be had for a lavish ceremony (or even a not-so-lavish ceremony) and our parents were spread across the Eastern seaboard. We went over to my dad’s house and told him by subtly leaving our wedding-ringed fingers out for him to see; we called Terry’s mom and my mom. Everyone was happy for us, and if anyone was angry about out not having a big to-do, then they certainly hid it well.

I don’t regret the way we got married at all. Some people spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on their weddings, yet we’re every bit as married as they are. I don’t begrudge anyone their big weddings–if that’s what you want, that’s cool with me. But the ceremony itself wasn’t what was important to us; what the the ceremony meant was.

Terry, seven years and two beautiful children later, I’m still every bit as much in love with you as I was then. We’re on an amazing and occasionally challenging journey together, you and I, and while I don’t know exactly where it will lead, I do know that having you at my side (or above or under me or wherever) makes the journey worthwhile. These last seven years have gone by far more quickly than I would have imagined possible, but they’ve easily been the best seven years of my life. I love you, baby.