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Wedding pictures (and other stuff)

I had a dream the other night, that I got a computer virus. We went off to buy an anti-virus software program, but the salesman was being cagey. He was one of those over-eager sales clerks – young, tall, thin, and pimply – who kept extolling the virtues of the product, but he wouldn’t answer my question – which one will fix my computer? I woke up almost angry, to find myself eyeball to foot with a cat. I pet it, it purred, and I went back to sleep, computer safe for now.

********

One of the gifts we got for our wedding was a coffee maker – something entirely appropriate (and desired) for two caffeine-addicted computer nerds. This marvelous gift came from my little sister – a woman who is, herself, also extremely devoted to the Immortal Bean.

This is not just any old boring ordinary coffee maker. This is a Coffee Maker Deluxe. This thing grinds the coffee, brews it, times it all so it wakes you with the tantalizing smell of Vanilla Nut or Cinnamon Hazelnut (yes I drink flavored coffee. I also pollute it with cream and sugar. Got a problem with that?). And all this comes in a nifty little machine that is also fun to watch! Oh yes indeed. When we ran it the first time, Richard and I huddled over the counter, noses close to the top, peering through the clear plastic to watch not only the beans grind into powder, but the water itself blort through the little channels into the filter basket.

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Oh yeah, wedding pictures. Richard and I weeded through the 200+ shots (the photographer did both color and black and white) to choose just a few to post. Click on the picture below to see them. Enjoy!

Richard and Jenipurr's Wedding Album

Wedding: Postlude

Ever since Richard came back from his trip to Europe, I’ve been dying to go myself, so our honeymoon will be a trip to Ireland. However, what with building the house and planning the wedding, neither of us had any energy left to plan a honeymoon, so that’s tentatively planned for next spring. I say ‘tentatively’ because this depends on the job situation (for both of us). But regardless, we wanted to at least go *somewhere* after the wedding, just to get a chance to relax and be just ‘us’ for even a short while.

So when we left the reception, we went to Napa. Okay, if you want to get technical about it, actually, we went home first to change, stopping on the way to cut off the cans and pans and shoes our friends tied to the bumpers. There was a laughing battle with Azzie over who got to play with my veil (I won). The ‘Just Married’ sign blew off on the freeway halfway there, and it was so late and we were so incredibly tired and the stairs in the bed and breakfast were far too steep.

The day after was marvelously lazy and unplanned and slow and just what we needed. We slept in as long as we possibly could, snuggled under mounds of blankets because even though it was the middle of July, that room was incredibly cold. We poked through doors and drawers and cupboards, exclaiming over everything. Look, they left us robes! Any idea how to work the jacuzzi tub? Mmm, chocolate. Lots of it.

We were tired. Completely and insanely tired from everything that had gone on before. We walked, slowly, hand in hand around downtown Napa. We sat – in fact we did a lot of sitting. We watched a flock of baby ducks skitter around the mud bog down below us as we ate lunch. We lounged in a grassy park and listened to a duet play celtic music.

We did all the cutesy things, kissing on corners and swinging our clasped hands like two school kids in the beginning of a crush, and finding ways to refer to each other as husband and wife. We poked around in little shops and sipped coffee on the swing in the gazebo. We took a long nap and discovered each other in new ways all throughout that slow, spontaneous, lazy day.

The next morning we’d planned to eat breakfast there and then go home, slowly. It turned out a bit more rushed than we’d planned, because Richard’s asthma took a turn for the worse, and that cold and sore throat I’d been fighting off was kicking in with a vengeance.

But still, even though the word sounded foreign and odd to my tongue (and still sometimes does), it was wonderful to say “my husband” when we checked out that morning to someone else for the first time.

Immaterial girl

We’re driving, heading from breakfast to the recycling center to drop off the latest pile of packing boxes. Richard picks up one of the clear crystal-cut ring boxes that have been floating around in my car since the wedding.

“This looks like something I could use in a D&D game.” He adopts the voice of a wizened old mage. “Here, sonny. The Box of Ringing….except it’s empty. Because it’s invisible.”

And then a few seconds later. “That makes it immaterial.”

“Immaterial?”

“Yes.”

“And if you put it on?”

“Then you’re immaterial too.” He ponders for a moment. “Well. Except it’s hard to put on because you can’t really touch it.”

“So then you just think boring thoughts and it’ll slip right on, hmm?”

Luckily he wasn’t actually drinking when I said that. I’d have had coffee spewed all over the dashboard.

Things have a way of just ending up in my car. Every once in a while in a spurt of cleanliness guilt I empty out the back seat and try to figure out where everything goes, but the reason stuff often lives in my car is because I’m just not sure where to put it anyway. Okay, that and I’m lazy when it comes to bringing stuff in. The notebook I use for the two organizations for which I play secretary (never tell anyone you can type or you can spell. And never tell one group that you’re the secretary for another. It’s an endless loop, I tell ya!) pretty much lives in the car full-time – only coming inside when I’ve got to type up the minutes. Usually the day of the meeting. Sometimes only an hour or two beforehand. Luckily I can type really really fast. Heh.

********

I loaded up my car with stuff to take to the thrift store earlier this week, and found a dead frog. It wasn’t squashed – it was perfectly formed. Just dead. I don’t recall ever hearing a frog in the garage. I’m not sure how it even got there. But there it was, and there it still is. Our own little mummified dead frog. I hope it died of natural causes (whatever that might be in frog-ese). I’d hate to think of this poor little frog being trapped in the garage…although it certainly couldn’t have died from starvation. We’ve got quite the little population of daddy-long-leg spiders going up in one corner. I hadn’t noticed the smaller ones til this morning. Heh. I think someone just had babies.

Just in case you were wondering

Because I really want out of consulting, and because if I go off of vacation they will stick me on a project as soon as they can, and because all the projects they could stick me on would require me to get on a plane to somewhere, I’m on vacation. Still. And I’ve got enough vacation saved up that I could quite conceivably stay lazy until the end of August. It’s not as pretty a picture as it sounds, since I’m trying to find a new job – one that won’t require me to get on a plane more than every few months instead of every week – and with my perfect sense of timing, I couldn’t have picked a worse time to go job hunting in the computer techno-geek field.

But anyway, I’m off from work, home. So here’s a list of things I’ve been doing:

  • Laundry: I can finally keep up with the laundry, and there’s just something about the smell of line-dried clothes and sheets that makes you want to clean them more often. Oh, and by the way, the socks are still there. I think it’s a point of honor now. Heh.
  • Unpacking Yes, there’s still a bit to be done, but in the first few weeks of my freedom, I managed to plow through a lot of boxes, to the point where what remains fits neatly in either the corner of the guest room, or the corner of the dining room – both rooms that are rarely seen by other people, and so can afford to be left corner-cluttered for the time being.
  • Organizing: And boy did I need to do this. Lots of paperwork to be filed, and things to move around now that we’ve got the new office, and drawers and shelves and cupboards to fill. I’ve still got empty drawers and cupboards in my kitchen. The mind boggles.
  • Discovering the joys (ha!) of cleaning house: With the cats, we really have to vacuum a lot more often, so I’ve been trying to keep up with it, since I’m home and Richard isn’t. We also got a Swiffer mop, just to see what all the fuss was about. I’m not all that impressed. Oh, granted, it cleans nicely, but the mop handle is just a bit too short, so that when cleaning the floors (and boy do we have a lot of floors!), I have to bend at an unnatural angle for longer than my back thinks is necessary. The day someone comes up with self-cleaning floors is the day Jennifer is a happy, happy girl.
  • Coming up with lots of nifty ideas for how to ‘do’ the house: I dragged Richard off to the fabric store and we picked out some patterns for curtains. I’m going to make curtains. Really I am. I just need to open the pattern and figure out how much fabric I need and take in something the right color to match it with and then drag out the sewing machine and I’ve finally got a sewing room, by golly, so I’d better get to it.
  • Being lazy: Gloriously so, I might add. It’s been a wonderful treat to be able to just plop down and read a book or do a logic puzzle or even drag out my sewing any time I want.
  • Wondering just how long it’s been since I actually took a vacation: The fact that I had more than 200 hours saved up in vacation is kind of a scary thought, when it comes right down to it. I’ve got to be better at taking time off.
  • Oh yeah. Job hunting: No, I really am doing this – firing off resumes right and left and searching madly for anything that looks as if I might be remotely qualified. No luck so far (sigh), but I’m trying to be hopeful.

And there you have it. The exciting, thrill-a-minute life of a computer nerd on vacation. Just about knocks your socks off, doesn’t it?

You can put your socks back on now, though. And if you weren’t wearing any to begin with and you’d like some, we’ve got a few extra, still on the line. I’ve got to hang new laundry out there today, but just to be ornery, I might just leave the dry socks there, just to see how long they really will stay.

Whee! There I go again!

Attack of the dried fruit

When planning where to go after the wedding, I let Richard know that he was not to tell anyone where we were going. I wasn’t too worried that someone might try to follow us or track us down, but several people invited were people to whom I and others had done things to (short-sheeting the bed, for example) and I wasn’t willing to take any chances. So when asked, Richard told people we were going to Fresno. Yes, lovely scenic Fresno, whose only claim to fame seems to be the existence of a raisin museum.

We didn’t go to Fresno. We went to Napa instead because who, after all, really wants to go to Fresno for their honeymoon.

Silly me. To think what we missed by not going to Fresno after all! Imagine my chagrin when I opened the newspaper this afternoon to see the headlines “Raisin Growers Launch Revolt!”, followed closely by the starting words “A group of rebellious raisin growers…”

Revolt? Rebellion? Strife amongst those who provide America with cute little boxes of shriveled up grapes? Seems there’s more brewing in Fresno than we’d thought!

My mind was instantly filled with images. I pictured those life-size raisins that used to show up in California Raisin commercials, boogieing along to ‘Heard it Through the Grapevine’, attired this time not with sunglasses and microphones, but with camoflauge pants and shoulder straps of machine gun ammunition that wouldn’t be bullets, but instead, strings of prunes. ‘Heard it Through the Grapevine’ would be playing in the background still, but deeper, and somehow more ominous. In the distance, the sound of gunfire would be heard, and occasionally the squelching bellow as some poor post-grape gave up its life, all in the name of freedom. To think, we chose Napa over this – this hot bed of brewing, seething rebellion! The mind simply reels.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), realism won out. No giant person-sized dried fruits were creeping around on cartoon-shoed tip-toe, rat-a-tat-tatting their dried fruit cannons. The revolt in question has to do with price wars and, while highly critical to the raisin farmers (although technically they’d be grape farmers because raisins don’t really *grow*, they *shrink* when exposed to heat, but where was I?), nowhere near as colorful and exciting as I was happily imagining.

“Raisin Revolt…” the back page continued. “Tease!” I muttered back at it. Ah well.

Never a dull moment

We sit in the our office, one on either side of the wide double desks in the middle of the room, checking email before heading off to bed. That is, checking email and surreptitiously glancing off to one side, toward the cat tree that is swaying and creaking by the door. Sebastian is inside – nearly 11 years old and usually one more prone to sitting and napping (when he isn’t yowling aimlessly down the halls) – but tonight, he is happily ensconced in the little box at the top of the tree, chasing his tail. I am willing to bet that if I walked over and placed my hand on his chest, I would feel the steady rumble of a purr. He does not often break into kitten mode these days, not at his age, and so this is too much fun to not watch. He stops briefly, to wash his face and pretend that he’s being perfectly mature and dignified…before that tail taunts him again and he’s flopping down, pink toes peeking over the side of the box edges, paws swiping at that sleek white rope that taunts him, never quite within reach, but always with a death grip on his furry butt.

********

We go to the local bakery for lunch with my parents. The talk turns to the wedding – the issue of the seamstress, favorable comments on friends involved or attending.

“Now that we don’t have anything to plan,” my mother notes to Richard, “I think it would be nice to have your parents up here to play.”

At the reception, when he was to dance with his mother, and I with my father, we started out like that – me trying desperately to find the three-beat for the waltz in the music from the fiddler – but then when it came time to switch, without any planning, I paired with his mother, and he with my father, and we waltzed on. Shortly thereafter, our mothers were doing a dramatic tango step across the floor, arms outstretched.

Too bad our families don’t know how to have fun. Even worse that the two families don’t get along (grin).

********

We’re sitting at the table, eating breakfast. I happen to glance outside.

“Oh, there’s four socks left on the line. They weren’t dry before.”

Richard pauses in eating and assumes a dramatic look.

“I could write an ode to socks. Four lonely socks hanging on a line.”

“Mmm hmm.”

“It’s the sort of poem that should be read at poetry readings in clubs.”

“I see.”

And he says I’m the weird one.

Pretty talk

We somehow got onto the subject of wearing makeup, probably due to the fact that one or the other of us pointed out to the other some group of women who were wearing far too much of it. It seems to be a common affliction in the younger female set, but eventually most of them grow to realize that the whole point of makeup is to enhance with subtlety, not to create a glaring mask.

Most guys I know admit, if asked directly, that they really prefer women who look natural. I’m sure there are guys out there who think the painted Tammy Faye look is simply gorgeous, but I have a sneaky feeling that those men are few and far between.

My mom doesn’t wear makeup. Ever. Oh, granted every once in a long while she’ll put on lipstick, and then it looks so very odd that it seems to stand out on her face, just because we’re all not used to seeing it on her. But except for those rare occasions, she just doesn’t bother. Consequently, my sisters and I did not grow up learning how to paint our faces from our mom. We had to pick up any random tips on the stuff from friends at school. I remember going to the mall to get a make-over for the sole purpose of hoping to finally learn how to put on eye shadow without making it look as if I’d been punched. No such luck. I’ve got my dad’s deep-set eyes, and any color at all on my lids looks as if I really ought to be pressing ice packs to my face. I could never get the hang of blush either, despite the fact that in the winter I tend to look like death warmed over and could probably use a dab or too.

Neither of my sisters is particularly into the stuff either. My older sister did figure out that whole eye shadow business and sometimes wears it, quite successfully. My younger sister was blessed not only with perfect hair, but also with naturally blushed cheeks, and thick dark lashes. As for me, I only wear eyeliner and mascara, and that’s simply for my own self-preservation, to hide when the trichotillomania has gotten too bad.

Someone asked me if I was going to get my face ‘done’ for the wedding, and I had to laugh. I got my hair done, simply because none of my friends or sisters are expert enough at braiding to do what I wanted, and I didn’t have the practice to do it on my own head (although I actually did consider it). But I wanted to look like *me* at the wedding. My only concession was that I wore lipstick (because, like my mom, I do break that stuff out for special occasions), but other than that, I wore exactly what I wear every other day of my life.

But the discussion on makeup (wearing it or not) really started me thinking. What if my mom *had* really been into wearing the stuff. What if my sisters and I had grown up thinking it was essential, like so many other women I know. How much of this stuff is part of our own nature to be comfortable in our own skin, and how much is taught to us when we’re too young to even be aware of it? And I realize how lucky we were, to not buy into that insane and expensive world of pencils and brushes and compacts.

Hey, all that money can be so much better spent! Just think of all the cat toys and computer stuff I’d never have been able to buy.

Black and ivory

Ha! I complain about the ants and they think they have the upper hand! Little do they know I’m armed with my trusty can o’ Raid. I got to slaughter two trails of the creepy little suckers this morning – one swarming all over one of the cat food bowls, and the other making tracks for my wastebasket. I’m not sure quite what was in the wastebasket to attract them, but I emptied it anyway, just to be sure.

The trail to the cat food stretched from the closet, which is right next to the bathroom. I can only hope that this might also have taken care of that lone toilet ant experience I’ve had so much fun with these past few weeks. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

*****

For my wedding gift to Richard I spent the past few months conspiring with Bil-1 to build him a computer. Basically, I knew some of the parts I wanted him to have (rewritable CD-drive, for instance. I told Richard it’s nice to share!), and Bil-1 supplied the rest, complete with emails chock full of questions to which I mostly had blank ‘huh?’ replies. However, we done good, since Richard has been merrily playing with his new toy ever since we got back from our mini-honeymoon (yes I’ll post an entry about that at some point. No it wasn’t our real honeymoon – that’ll be next summer, in Ireland).

My wedding gift was a pick-it-yourself sort of affair, which was actually a good thing because as anyone who tinkles the ivories knows, you have a certain feel and pressure you expect and like on the keys. Yep, my incredibly wonderful new husband got me a piano, and after we picked it out earlier this week, it was delivered this morning!

The poor piano guy wasn’t too happy to see our front steps, but with his assistant and Richard’s help, they managed to get it up the three steps and through the front door into the living room.

The sound in this house is amazing. That echo factor we noticed with Sebastian-the-foghorn-cat works beautifully for a piano – the music comes out so rich! I plopped on the piano lamp Richard got me, dug out my folders of sheet music, and sat down to discover just how rusty I’ve gotten without access to a piano of my own lo these past many years.

It feels so good to play, and know that I can play any time I want! The cats aren’t too sure what to do with this new thing. On the one hand they can lounge on the top (it’s an upright. I’ve never seen any use for grand pianos – they’re lovely in concert halls but they take up far too much space in a house), but on the other hand, it makes a lot of noise. Azrael jumped up and tried to ‘help’ me play by batting at the higher keys. The others are eying it from a safe distance with a modicum of suspicion.

They’ll get used to it. I’m already looking forward to family gatherings at our house with the whole group gravitating toward the piano as we so often do at my parents’ place.

We’ve got each other. We’ve got our office and our computers. We’ve got our cats. And now I finally have a piano of my own. Who needs furniture (grin)? I’ve got all I need to make this ‘home’.

Little things

I’m really getting tired of these ants. They’re everywhere, randomly. There’s not enough to trace – just a few scrambling around on the kitchen counter, or wandering aimlessly over to poke at the bits of food the cats are so found of flinging from their bowl, or my personal favorite – the one lone ant that waits for me somewhere on the toilet seat each morning as I stagger half-awake from the bed to greet them.

It’s only ants, I tell myself, and really, that’s not so bad. There’s a rather large and healthy-looking daddy long leg spider who’s spun himself a web right behind the door from house to garage, and I’m perfectly happy to let him stay there, since inside the garage does not actually count as ‘in the house’. Any spider actually stupid enough to come inside is either really confused, or else suicidal, because there are seven little spider-hunters just waiting to chitter some poor unsuspecting bug down from the safety of the ceiling to be dismembered and then devoured with a great quantity of lip smacking.

But still, I can’t help but get a bit tired of the sheer monotony of them. If they’d only come in force I would feel as if I could do something, but no, we’re stuck with these little lone scouts. Ah well.

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With gift certificates we received for a wedding gift, we purchased some toys for ourselves this past week. Richard’s been happily slaying odd ugly creatures in his game that comes complete with really creepy and disturbing music, and I’ve been fretting over my Sims. I’ve got a couple that actually really hated each other and they were supposed to be married. I’m discovering that a whole host of flaws can simply be wiped away just by evicting the poor suckers from their house and then moving them in again. They may still hate each other, but the flaming oven goes away, and all those other little problems like depression and poor hygiene are kaput.

It’s a deceptive little game, this one. I have spent hours poking and prodding at these little simulated people, trying to get them to be responsible and go to work on a regular basis and stuff like that. There are additions one can buy for this game, I’ve seen, but I’m a little afraid to add on. I know myself too well, see. This is a woman who still fosters a healthy addiction to Civilization. I don’t think I need to get any more involved.

Still, the House Party pack does look pretty cool.

Hmmm. This may have been a very bad idea…

To snaggle-toothed friends

When we gave the two littlest members of our bridal party their gifts the reaction was about the same for both. My neice looked at the silly stuffed purple dragon (NOT Barney!) and was decidely unimpressed, although she later discovered that the dragon’s ears and horns made marvelous things to hold onto when the dragon needed to be dragged from room to room. My nephew opened his box and exclaimed “It’s just a dragon!”, which was about the reaction I was expecting, even though I was quickly reassured that ‘just’ was a fairly new and well-liked word these days.

So it was with great amusment when I heard today that my nephew’s dragon has taken on a much larger role than any of us anticipated. It seems that Bil-1 came downstairs a bit earlier than usual last night after trying to put my nephew to bed, noting that it appeared he was no longer needed. Apparently little Aaron calmly told his father that he didn’t need to stay there with him because the dragon would take care of him. The dragon (whose name, I gather, is Dante) and Aaron hold lively conversations together, and he’ll do what the dragon tells him to do (such as ‘you should eat another bite of dinner, Aaron!’ ‘Okay dragon!’). And it’s not one of his parents ‘talking’ for the dragon – no, this is Aaron who does both sides of the conversations.

I apologized, between giggles, for inadvertantly giving my nephew a toy that has usurped some of their parental privileges. My older sister assured me (laughing herself) that actually they were relieved, and so the arrival of the ‘talking’ dragon was a good thing after all.