23 Years

"Our wedding was many years ago. The celebration continues to this day."

     ~Gene Perret

Twenty-three years ago, on a night very much like this one, I was filled with anticipation, trepidation, excitement, and joy and I did not know where my pants were.

If that's not the start of a damn good love story, I don't know what is. 

On the morrow of that night of worry about my missing pants I was to marry the woman of my dreams.

Twenty-three years of marriage. That sounds like a long time. In some ways it is. Yet I think it's relative. A 23-year car ride would be a very, very long time. Twenty-three years in this marriage? A heartbeat.

For me, that is. She might consider this to be a long car ride. She's stayed with me though. That says something.

But the truth is, our story goes back farther than 23 years.

It actually started 29 years ago when I met the most intriguing, breathtaking, amazing person I had ever come across. Beautiful. Funny. Clever. Beautiful. Witty. Beautiful. Kind. Smart. Frustratingly beautiful. Oh, and beautiful.

You see? I am not exaggerating.

I'm not going to be trite and say it was love at first sight. Nah. Actually, I am totally going to say exactly that. It was love at first sight. The crush that hit 19-year-old me was so hard that 48-year-old me is still forgetting my own name and where I put my keys. (All her fault.)

I'm not certain I believe in fate, but there was such a confluence of circumstances that led to our meeting at the particular time and place and under just the right set of conditions that William of Occam ordered an electric razor and sat down to watch Synchronicity. 

But this is not the story of how we met nor a treatise on her adorable white socks...

...this is just a declaration that I am a damn lucky man to have met, fallen in love with, and married this woman.

Almost three decades of twists and turns and surprises. 

We met. We became friends. We became pen pals. We started a long-distance relationship. We spent all our money on long-distance phone calls. We became frequent transatlantic travelers. We promised ourselves to each other. We got engaged. We got married. Twice. We made a home. We made a family. We renewed our promises and made new vows. We grew our family. Twice more. We again renewed our promises and affirmed our love. It's complicated. I made a helpful timeline.

Over the last 23 years we have said "I do" to each other before God and family and friends four times. She is so amazing, in fact, that not only did I marry her in multiple ceremonies of more than one denomination and on two continents, but I went all SCA nerdy to win the fair maiden's favour.

She's my kind of nerd. But also very cool. I like it.

Twenty-three years of marriage. Twenty-six years of commitment. Almost three decades of friendship. And you know what? She gets smarter, funnier, and more amazingly beautiful every single day. I am not kidding.

Whew! Am I right?

OK, so back to the matter at hand. On June 29, 2019, she and I will have been married 23 years. And that is amazing for a whole lot of reasons. I'm a lucky guy. And I thank this woman, from the bottom of my heart, for 23 years (actually 29 years as explained above, but you know...) of love, bliss, adventure, learning, laughter, and companionship. 

Happy anniversary, Eppu! Rakastan sinua kaikesta sydämestäni! Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for being my partner. Thank you for being my wife. Thank you.

“So it's not gonna be easy. It's going to be really hard; we're gonna have to work at this everyday, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, everyday. You and me... everyday.”

     ~Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

Where Does the Time Go?

Each minute bursts in the burning room, 

The great globe reels in the solar fire, 

Spinning the trivial and unique away. 

(How all things flash! How all things flare!) 

What am I now that I was then? 

May memory restore again and again 

The smallest color of the smallest day: 

Time is the school in which we learn, 

Time is the fire in which we burn.

~ Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day"

MMIXI? Wait, what?!?

That's right. Two thousand nineteen.

2019.

Where does the time go?

Actually, I know exactly where it went. Building dreams. Big dreams. And making pancakes.

Let's a take a step back. A few steps. In fact, let's use the Wayback Machine.

When my wife and I moved from Eldamar -- sorry, Finland -- to the good ol' US of A, we didn't know how long we'd stay or what we were going to do. When it became clear that a Finn, whose only experience with "big mountains" was a summer trip to Haltitunturi, was completely enchanted (See what I did there?) with actual big mountains and loved country music more than a girl from that state over to the right of us, that big one...you know? Anyway, when it became clear that she loved it here and, despite an absence of what she called "actual green" (New Mexico's colours lacking a middle initial and simply going by ROY), wanted to stay longer than the expiration of her temporary permanent residence permit, we started to look at a place to live.

Simple stuff at first. We got an apartment.

Some time passed and things happened.

We decided to go big and started looking for land to build a house and have horses.

Southfork Ranch. The famous one. From that TV show (which my wife loved...)

We immediately discovered two things. First, the Southfork Ranch was way out of our price range and in the wrong state. (Again, that one to the right of us...) Second, when you're looking for a country property it necessitates going to the country. Which is not in the city. And we both had city jobs and did city things that made that not so easy. Basically, it was not the right time for us to make the life choices that would legitimize the wearing of Ropers on a daily basis. (OK, we still wore the Ropers.)

So we stayed city mice.

We traded in our city apartment for a city house and even added a kid to mix things up.

Also, we got a horse.

Cody, our Morgan-Quarter Horse mix.

Owning and riding a horse lends quite a lot of farm cred, even if you don't live on the Southfork Ranch.

More time passed. More things happened.

We looked around again at options, possibilities, and potential. But the peg was still square and the hole was still round. The myriad complications of a connected life, the things that make life worth living -- family and friends, relationships -- required hard choices.

We traded one city address for another. I don't think either of us regret making those choices and doing what we did. Taking care of family and being responsible adults meant we stayed city mice.

Life changed. Our family grew.

And we got chickens.

Backyard chickens

Again, farm cred is earned by owning animals that are not dogs or cats or fish in a bowl or small fuzzy animals in a cage with a wheel.

We built a wonderful life in a beautiful house. We made what we had ours. Life was good. But it was still city life. And that longing for what we both wanted was never far from our thoughts.

You didn't realise 20 years could go by so fast, did you? Yeah, neither did we.

Two thousand seventeen and 2018 were filled with changes. There was joy (much joy) and grief (much grief), gain and loss. And when the dust from raining debris settled we found ourselves with a much more round peg.

Again we wanted to go big. But realistic big. No Southfork Ranch, perhaps, but no city either. Maybe a small farm property? A home on the range? Neither of us was tied by work to living in the city. The skein of threads connecting us to one place was much less complicated. Painful loss also brought a kind of freedom. It felt like it was time.

The excruciating, slow wait of two decades suddenly felt like a mad dash, out of control and dizzying at times because it seemed that if we did not grasp the chance it would somehow slip away and we'd be right back at the beginning.

We looked high and low (literally so, with elevations ranging from 4,000 to 8,000 feet). And we found possibilities. We got excited. We did adult-y things involving banks and real estate agents. We confidently told our horse, Cody, that soon he would live on the same side of the river as we did. We examined and evaluated and rejected. Because this wasn't going to be a temporary thing, this was forever.

After what felt like another 20 years we found property with the things we wanted and needed. Not perfect, but a start to perfect. And we did the hoop jumping and made an offer. It felt like champagne time.

You know where this is going.

Life can be complicated. And disappointing.

But sometimes, often times in fact, what you think you want is not actually what you want. You just feel that way because of circumstance or an incomplete picture or misapprehension or the passage of time. It becomes easy to think that just reaching the stated words of a goal is what's important and you lose sight of the why behind you trying to get there in the first place. The point, the purpose, was not actually to move away from something. That's just what it began to feel like over so long of a time. The actual impetus, the inducement for us, was to move toward something. Our aim was additive, not subtractive.

Big, deep breath.

We were not at square one. In the game of Shoots and Ladders (Yes, I know it is Chutes and Ladders, but think about it for a moment...) we actually only slid down a few levels. We talked about what we really wanted. What was important. And what we had learned in the latest attempt. Alexander Graham Bell said,"When one door closes another door opens, but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us." We did spend perhaps a little more time than we should have looking at that closed door. But there were other doors. And we began examining all of them.

Sometimes waiting is a good thing. And sometimes when you are unwilling to wait the Universe steps in and makes you wait. God has a sense of humour, but always with our best interests at heart. Our joy distraction in finding what was to turn out to be a not-the-right-fit sidetracked us enough to let time march on and circumstances to change. Enough time passed, in fact, to allow a previously locked barn door to quietly unlatch.

Step back in time again, just under a year when we had started our search. A drive to visit friends in the mountains and a quick trip past a property that looked intriguing, at least on paper (on screen). Iron fences and gates and a two storey house and lots of land. And a price tag that made us both choke.

Now step forward in time. That unattainable property? Still had the beautiful fences, still had the gorgeous house, still had all that land. But while we were distracted chasing a phantasmagoria, other circumstances changed. Dramatically so. And another, more serious visit out to the property revealed a beautiful horse barn, a coop, and a pond.

Disappointment turned into relief turned into elation turned into determination.

More adulting. More hoop jumping. Lots of creative thinking. And mucho help from family and friends.

Up a bumpy, private dirt road, on the slopes of the mountains my wife loves so dearly ...

Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,

And the deer and the antelope play,

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word

And the skies are not cloudy all day

Where the air is so pure, the zephyrs so free,

The breezes so balmy and light,

That I would not exchange my home on the range

For all of the cities so bright

How often at night when the heavens are bright

With the light from the glittering stars

Have I stood here amazed and asked as I gazed

If their glory exceeds that of ours

Oh, I love these wild prairies where I roam

The curlew I love to hear scream,

And I love the white rocks and the antelope flocks

That graze on the mountain-tops green

                                                                           ~Dr. Brewster M. Higley

Truly a home on the range.

What followed was hard work. There's been lots of it. In a year we've taken the incredible potential of this place and turned it into a reality. We've cleaned and repaired. We've built and torn down. We've shaped and sculpted and created. It's not without frustration. It's not without cost. But the rewards?

We traded in our city shoes for boots.

We kept our promise to Cody.

We got Cody a friend, Strider.

We increased the flock.

We got a hinny.

We got goats.

We got barn cats.

We got our dogs, Otso and AmiBrown, a new friend, Finn.

For every bit of effort we've put into this dream we've gotten so much more in return. We're blessed. We're truly blessed to have this opportunity.

So where does the time go?

Building dreams. Big dreams. 

And making pancakes.

You Got Cthulhu In My Scooby Snacks! A book review...

(I need to get my toes wet again in the pond that is my blog. I've neglected it. Ignored it. And I need to give it some love.)

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."

~Mark Twain, 1898

My taste in literature is eclectic - OK, my taste in books is actually better described as indiscriminate and promiscuous, but eclectic sounds much more cultured - but I do tend to read in themes. One book leads to another, and they incline to be relatives of a sort, sharing a taste, a flavour. Some sunny afternoons find me walking alongside detectives like Marple, Spade, Qwilleran, Millhone... Some evenings I am fighting (or running away from) zombies, werewolves, and other supernatural baddies that share a world with Dresden, Cabal, Yellowrock, Crowe... Of late I've been swimming in a horror motif. It's broad enough to encompass mystery and adventure and fantasy and historical fiction. And that makes me cosmopolitan, yes?

Seshat, Egyptian goddess

of record-keeping and 

measurement by Jeff Dahl.

I consume rabidly from the shelves of the library, which I feel contributes to the general stability of society and proves I'm an adult. (Seriously, I'm an adult. I am.) While giving me access to more books than I can ever possibly read - this being both a happy and a sad thought - getting books from the library also creates a reading fingerprint of sorts that allows Seshat, with her mystical, magical powers, to provide suggestions of books I might like.

I'll be honest, Seshat is wrong 80% of the time. Mostly she doesn't get me.

But occasionally she'll throw out a book that does peak my interest. With a surfeit of horror titles - and the ineluctable link to the Lovecraft mythos - it was perhaps inevitable that this book should pop up like a giant albino penguin.

Enter Meddling Kids. Seshat got it right. I did enjoy it. A lot. 

Meddling Kids (A Blyton Summer Detective Club Adventure)

by Edgar Cantero

A solid four stars - plus one for sheer wit!

★★★★ + ★

Did you love Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! as a kid? (And do you still love it?) Did your literary journey inevitably lead you to the (sadly opuscular) works of H.P. Lovecraft and the (happily ubiquitary) mythos he created? Did you ever wonder what it would be like if your childhood scoobiphilia and your penchant for lovecraftian horror had an 80s Reese's Peanut Butter Cups "Hey, You Got Peanut Butter in My Chocolate" moment? Well, wonder no more! Cantero took your favourite Saturday morning cartoon sleuths and your beloved, cherished, madness-inducing non-Euclidean geometry and made a tasty treat!

It's not a two-pony show. Peppered in with the million Scooby Doo and Lovecraft references are nods to Enid Blyton (Duh!) and Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown and the Goonies and lots of stuff-from-my-childhood things.

There's even a circumlocutory reference to Neil Simon if you pay attention:

"Tim curled up in a corner of the backseat, sheltering his penguin from the storm, all tensed up in 'scandalized Maggie Smith' pose."

Or maybe that's a Paul Rudnick reference?

Er, maybe a J.K. Rowling reference?

Anyway...

Part mashup, part homage, part lark, Meddling Kids explores how our beloved gang of sleuths (under copyright-infringement-free pseudonyms, of course) made the transition from kid detectives to adults. Turns out it was a rough ride for all of them.

The two boys, two girls, and big dog (Ringing any bells?) of the Blyton Summer Detective Club spent their summers solving zany mysteries in and around Blyton Hills, Oregon. It was a fun and exciting way to spend their vacation together. But their final, laureate case had a profound effect on them and after they unmasked the Sleepy Lake Monster and the media frenzy died away they went their separate ways and lost contact with one another. Thirteen years later, when Thomas X. Wickley, the Sleepy Lake Monster, is released from prison it sets off a series of events that brings each of the surviving gang members back to Blyton Hills. The case, they realise, had never really been solved and each of them was changed in ways that they are only now beginning to recognize.

It's not perfect. Far from it. The writing isn't the best (or maybe not my cup of tea), with run-on sentences finding a far too comfortable home in this novel and Cantero inventing new words when really he shouldn't as (a) there are already perfectly serviceable words in English for what he is trying to communicate and (b) he isn't that great at coming up with the new words. Cantero also seems unsure if he is writing a book or a screen play. The narration shifts from one format to the other and, whether intentional or unintentional, the result is a jarring read through the transitions that completely break you out of any suspension of disbelief.

Even with the sometimes-enervated writing style, this book remains aware that it is a piece of tribute and is, throughout, a very entertaining read if your nostalgia is littered with Scooby snacks and Elder Gods. With both sly and glaring pop culture references, a tongue-in-cheek sensibility, and the bravery to confront child-cum-adult issues (mental illness, drug abuse, suicide, addiction to black magic...) this is a fun and entertaining adventure.

As Cantero states:

"No book is dangerous in and of itself you know, but historically reading a book in the wrong way has lead to terrible consequences."

Ashley Joanna "Ash" Williams knows. And Cantero knows we know.

Again, a solid four stars - with that extra star for Cantero doing something that I really wanted somebody to do but didn't realise I wanted it.

For Your Eyes Only. Or a few things I learned on my morning run.

"Goodbye Mr. Bond, I trust you had a pleasant... fright."

~Ernst Stavro Blofeld

OK, this post really isn't about James Bond. It's about running. Something I love to do.

I run with Zombies, Run! (ZR), a fitness/running app. (I talked about it back in 2014 in my post, Zombies, Run! Comes to Google Glass.) I've had my ups and downs with the app, both for technology reasons (What app doesn't occasionally get buggy with updates?) and content reasons (I personally like my zombie-themed fitness app to have actually zombies in it so I took exception to one of the seasons - you know who you are, bad, bad season!). But the folks who put together ZR have been on their game lately and I have been enjoying a most definite UP in running to Season 5.

The missions (as they are called) are usually named after song titles and Season 5, Mission 27 took it's name from a song from Bond. As in James Bond! Namely, For Your Eyes Only. (See? It makes sense now, right?!?)

I have no idea why this got me fired up for my run, but there it is.

Sure, For Your Eyes Only featured Carole Bouquet as Melina Havelock.

And Lynn-Holly Johnson as Bibi Dahl.

But neither of them is very zombie-like. So...

There was some running in For Your Eyes Only. But not in a significant way. But when I saw the title of the mission I got really excited. Maybe it just resonated with the 10-year-old me. The 10-year-old me really, really liked Lynn-Holly Johnson.

I decided a Bond-themed mission deserved a Bond-themed playlist. So between the juicy story and while running away from zombies I listened to "Goldfinger" by Shirley Bassey, "Thunderball" by Tom Jones, "You Only Live Twice" by Nancy Sinatra, "We Have All The Time In The World" by Louis Armstrong, "Diamonds Are Forever" by Shirley Bassey, "Live And Let Die" by Paul McCartney & Wings, "The Man With The Golden Gun" by Lulu, "Nobody Does It Better" by Carly Simon, "Moonraker" by Shirley Bassey, "For Your Eyes Only" by Sheena Easton (of course!), "All Time High" by Rita Coolidge, "Never Say Never Again" by Lani Hall, "A View To A Kill" by Duran Duran, and "The Living Daylights" by a-ha. (BTW, Shirley Bassey knows someone, you know?)

All-in-all it was a great run. And I learned a few things that I thought I would share:

1) Even though running through the golf course may seem like a fabulous spur-of-the-moment idea at 5 AM - Because, hey! no golfers at 5 AM! - you have to keep in mind that there are also no frickin' lights at 5 AM. And golf courses are dark. Very dark. Staring as hard as you can at the ground to keep on the path is fraught with perils, including low hanging tree branches.

It looked kind of like this:

Although the darkness does add a realistic ambiance to the whole running away from zombies in a post-apocalyptic world feel, the effort required to keep from falling on your face is just over the tipping point into "too much".

Also, thinking that it will be easier to see on the side of the course where you'll get light from the cars on the freeway is a very false assumption. Glaring, moving headlights cast weird, disorienting shadows on the hilly landscape of a golf course that make you feel like you are going to fall into black chasms and never be heard from again.

2) In the dark and semi-dark of predawn, you may discover that the adorable cat and her kittens are actually an adorable skunk and her kittens. Moving off the path to give them a wide berth is wisest.

Going home smelling like a skunk, which could be analogous to smelling like a rotting corpse (eg, zombie), is not a proper way to start off a busy day.

3) Apparently 5:28 AM is a great time to turn on the sprinklers in the park. And there is nothing you can do about it when you are equidistant from all the sides.

Trying to find the silver lining, had you been skunked, a brisk morning shower might have helped, although unless you packed tomato juice I think you'd be stuck with the skunk funk. (We don't ever find canned tomato juice on the missions...weird...)

4) Telling a cyclist, "Sorry, running away from a horde of zombies" does not, apparently, ease the sting of having a runner pass them on the trail. And they are bitter. Oh so bitter.

5) All zombie chases will commence right as you hit that bridge or hill. And, oddly enough, right after ZR informs you that you have just picked up a car battery or a tool chest.

6) My supposition that a James Bond-themed ZR mission would be best done to a soundtrack of Bond theme music - especially the Connery and Moore years - was 100% correct.