…spending several hours of the evening giving a pretty girl a massage while watching The Muppet Show on DVD.
Life is good.
Tag: life Page 7 of 15
We’ve got a life here
We’ve made a home here
We’ve struggled for this peace
We’ve reached beyond our reach
And no one can ever take that away
I know that I love you
I know I was meant to
You lead I will follow
You speak and I’ll know
To me the truth was always very clear
‘Cause we’ve got a life here.”
–Ben Wakeman, “We’ve Got A Life Here”
One year ago today, we stood in a crowded courtroom, in front of friends and lovers and total strangers, and made public and legal the committment we’d already made to one another.
Happy anniversary, love, this first of many.
When last we left our intrepid ACat, it was the week before Christmas (and all through the house…) and I had intended to write another post within 24 hours that caught everything up to the current day. Having failed to do that then, I shall endeavor to do it now. Isn’t this so much better than six geese-a-laying?
Wow, i really did disappear. I didn’t mean to, honest. And for once, I can’t say that the reason I haven’t been writing is because things have been boring and nothings going on. Rather the opposite, in fact. So, rather than try to write six weeks worth of LJ in a couple of hours, which would probably bore us both to tears, let me explain.
No, there is no time. Let me sum up…
- OVFF was all kinds of fun. By this point, most of my enduring memories are going to be rather dull to the majority of you (and tend to fall mostly in the category of “Mmmm, she’s snuggly”), but I did have a marvelous time surrounding myself with the music, and even played a little more during the weekend than I usually find myself. The pirate hallway circle alymid, joecoustic and I started was an especial highlight.
There were some people I had wanted to spend a little more time with, and didn’t get to for a variety of reasons, but on the whole I had a marvelous time and miss everyone terribly already.
- kitanzi and I attended the first meeting of a proposed monthly Atlanta poly discussion/support group, which was both entertaining and interesting. We’ve really enjoyed getting to know some of the people in the local poly community ever since we discovered there actually was such a thing. New friends are always a blessing, and and many of these folks are just plain fun to be around. I’m glad we’ve met them, and look forward to getting to know them even better as time goes by.
- khaosworks came over to spend the weekend with us over Thanksgiving. kitanzi prepared a rather impressive spread of food, including a delightful Chicken Roulade stuffed with apricots and cranberries, ginger sweet potatoes, broccoli and cheese, chestnut stuffing with gravy, and yeast rolls. There was easily enough for 6-8 people, so we had leftovers for a few days. It was all kinds of yummy. We played a lot of City of Heroes, watched a lot of Sex and the City and Dead Like Me on DVD (we’re only just watching both series, the former thanks to Netflix, the latter because I bought it after many recommendations).
khaosworks also brought along several of his Dr. Who DVDs, giving me the chance to see “Tomb of the Cyberman” for the very first time. I always was a big fan of Troughton’s Doctor, and this is one of his finer stories, only recently restored after being recovered in 1992. Great fun.
- Went to a party at the home of baiku and celticmoni, which was a lot of fun. The invitation asked us to bring Christmas music, so I burned my entire Christmas music folder of mp3s to a DVD-R — slightly over 2 gb of songs. I hope they get some use of it, since we never did get around to playing any of it at the time, but there was good food and company, so it was well worthwhile.
- We made it to the first Atlanta housefilk since before Worldcon in December. (Not that there haven’t BEEN any…we just hadn’t made it to any. Well, we tried to attend in November, but no one else showed up. But I digress….) Had a lot of fun swapping songs with mrpsyklops and hilfy and everyone else who managed to show up for a wonderful evening of food and music at Dave and Signe’s.
- JediMUD’s coder retired on us in November, leading us to search for a new one. In the course of trying to work my own friends network to find possibly interested people, I asked a good buddy of mine if he knew anyone who might be interested in a coder position on a mud. Turns out, he was. So bardiclug is now in charge of the 1s and 0s at Jedi.
We’ve been having some very interesting talks about the future, and what we want out of the game. The next 2 years should be quite an interesting time for us all, but I’m very excited about some of the things we’re thinking of doing.
- Work has variably stressy through this entire period. We finally got in some new equipment to alleviate some performance issues in one of our systems, which has resulted in my working 3rd shift for the last week and a half, as we transfer data to the new equipment in stages after hours when customers are busy sleeping and dreaming.
It’s funny, because I enjoy this sort of thing in small doses. It’s quiet, I get to work from home, and I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot. But nearly 2 solid weeks of it gets tiring, and I feel disconnected from everyone. I’m hoping that tomorrow will be the last batch of this project, so that I can go back to normal hours on Monday. Especially since…
- eloren had her baby on Saturday, and we all welcomed Rachel Shea into the world. When I talked to her on Sunday, both mom and daughter were doing well, and I got to have the fun of telling everyone at work on Monday when I went in for our department meeting, but it DOES means I’m going to miss her for the next few weeks while she is on leave and doing the whole new mom thing.
And that catches us up on the really big stuff, I guess, up to last week, and I think I’ll break off here and try to start some more regular entries from this point forward. 🙂
Sorry to vanish for so long. I’ll try not to do that again.
I’ve been hermiting lately. Lots of reasons, and things I just don’t much feel like talking much about, so instead, I think I’ll talk about last weekend.
Thursday, we managed to recover kitanzi‘s car from the dealership, where they were repairing the flood damage caused by Ivan two weeks earlier. Total damage to the car was about $2600, all but $200 thankfully covered by insurance. But the car seems no worse for wear after all that, so I guess we got lucky.
kitanzi‘s mom came to visit us for a brief time before she gets ready to pack up and move to Arizona. She’s taking a permanent job working at the Grand Canyon, which just sounds to me like one of the cooler places in the world you can possibly pick to live, aside from that whole desert thing. 🙂
We all spent most of Friday night after she arrived talking and catching up and watching the recap of the presidential debates on The Daily Show. Saturday morning, we trooped over to the Alpharetta Public Library’s monthly book sale, where we managed to escape with only $21 worth of books this time (a paltry amount for us, to be honest!), and then came home and basically lazed about all day. For dinner, i fried up a mess of catfish and we watched one of my favourite movies, The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain, which Kit’s mom hadn’t ever seen.
Sunday, we went for lunch at Jason’s Deli, and then trekked down to ZooAtlanta to look at all the cute critters. I took my camera along and got some really nice shots. (plaid_dragon: note especially some really good otter photos!)
We got back from six hours of the zoo foot-sore and good-tired, so we kicked back with some dinner, and watched Chicago on DVD, since Kit’s mom hadn’t seen that either. A good time seemed to be had by all.
By the time I got up for work on Monday morning, she’d already left on her way back to Little Rock, but it was nice to have her visiting. I have a cool mother-in-law.:)
The rest of the week has been eh. But I might feel like a human being again by OVFF.
This week has been much quieter than the last two, which is good for my sanity. While I tend to go on vacation to try and relax, I didn’t to show up at WorldCon so frazzled I couldn’t enjoy it right away.
For those of you who keep track of these things, We’ll be arriving in Boston at about 3:30pm Thursday. I’m not sure what time we’ll actually be to the con itself, because we have plans to meet up with tigerbright when she gets off work and do a little shopping. But I will be reachable on my mobile (and so will kitanzi), so feel free to give us a call.
Speaking of my mobile, I lost it the other day, so I finally went to T-Mobile and bought a new one. I’d been wanting to get a triband phone before the next time we went to the UK anyway, and since we’ll be over there in February, now is as good at time as any. I ended up choosing the Seimans CF62T, which reviews suggested that it was very good at making phone calls and didn’t have all the extra bells and whistles that apparently mobile users demand these days, but for which I have little use for. Still working on getting all the numbers put back in it.
Today I managed to finally get the pictures from the weekends Three Weird Sisters CD Release party posted.
Had a lovely conversation on the phone with D., whose family has finally found a house in Lexington to rent, and are now in the process of trying to buy land on which to build a permenant residence. It was good to hear her voice again. I wish they didn’t live so far away.
Not much else going on.
Thanks for all of the well-wishes the other day. I had quite seriously run out of cope, but it was all work-related stress which seems to have abated. This is a short week, as on Thursday we will fly to Boston for my first-ever Worldcon!
Did you ever watch the Smurfs as a kid? Remember how they always used some varient of the word “Smurf” as a generic adjective/adverb/verb/whatever?
Are you familiar with Murphy’s Law? Good.
I am having an absolutely murphtastic day.
So, there I went disappearin’ again. Sometimes, I don’t update often because I haven’t got anything to say. Other times, not so much. The longer I let things go, the more I feel like I have to write a book to catch up, which triggers my avoidant tendancies. So I’m not gonna write about the family reunion trip way back in July, or going up to the North Georgia Celtic Festival on August 1. Those links have pictures go, so that’s worth a few thousand words.
August 6th is the day most of you want to hear about. That’s the day that kitanzi and I went down to the Fulton County courthouse to get married, with maedbh7 and telynor along to witness the affair.
The ceremony itself was a bit surreal. We wanted this to be as low-key as possible, in order to avoid the various headaches that proper weddings would entail, but even so, I was bemused at the process. We arrived downtown at a bit after noon, and well before the 2:30pm start time, so we wandered down into Underground Atlanta for some lunch at Mick’s. Fed and fortified, we made our way over to Pryor Street and up to the second floor. There was almost a problem over my camera, since it could be used as a recording device, which aren’t allowed in the courthouse as a rule, but they let me keep it.
We waited outside the courtroom with a few other couples who had shown up. there were only about 8 folks waiting outside, so at first I thought this was going to be a small and quick affair. But once the doors opened, people kept filing in. And filing in. And filing in. They eventually moved the spectators over to the Jury box as all the benches were full up with folks wanting to get married. Once everyone was seated, the Dour Bailiff and the Court Clerk went over the rules, and then had us all shuffle up to sign the register. kitanzi and I were couple 25, and somewhere in the middle, so there must have been 40-50 couples there.
Once we were all resituated, the judge came out and said a few words. At first, I was a bit alarmed that the couples themselves were going to be asked to say some words of their own, but thankfully, that wasn’t the case, or we might still be there. It still took a while, but kept ourselves entertained, between people watching, making faces at maedbh7 and telynor over in the jury box, and idle conversation. (Amusement for the polyfolk reading: While waiting to be called up, Kit turns to me and says, “So, are you and X ever going to have that date you keep getting put off?” “Dunno, depends on her schedule, doesn’t it?”)
At last, it was our turn. Being a civil ceremony, the vows were nice and simple: Do you, person1, take person2 to be your lawfully wedded husband|wife? I answered “Without hesitation”, and she said “absolutely”, and we went back to sit down. Once everyone had gone through this, rings were exchanged (though I still don’t have one…hard to find them in my size “off the rack”, and we can’t budget permenant custom rings until after Worldcon, but the ring we found for Kit looks wonderful on her finger.
And so we walked out into the Atlanta sun as husband and wife.
We had a thought to walk over to the Westin Peachtree for a drink in the skylounge, but telynor didn’t want to walk that far, so we headed instead up to Sandy Springs to browse about the Phoenix and Dragon bookstore, and then back up to the apartment briefly before heading out to dinner at Ichiban for habachi and sushi with maedbh7, telynor, tarkrai and his kids. T. and the kids were passing through town on the way back to Michigan from Florida, and unfortunately had to spend far more time here than they intended, due to some car troubles. But it was nice to see them the brief period that we did.
So there you have it, the tale of kitanzi and autographedcat and how they went and got themselves married on a Friday afternoon. Here’s some pictures. Y’all enjoy.
That’s what I seem to have done this month. I had mean to write a bit about the family reunion back on July 4th, and about playing City Of Heroes and about myriad other things that have been going on, but I really just have been in “avoidance” mode lately, and I’m not sure why.
Not just avoiding here, either. I was politely informed by a mutual friend that someone I love deeply thought I was neglecting her becuase I had been so out of touch. The last two weeks, especially, I’ve been in a bit of a funk, and mostly being antisocial.
So, apologies on the absense. I’ll try and be here more.
Yesterday turned into an unexpectedly busy day. I was on my way back from our data centre where I was reinstalling the OS on a server, when I got a call from kitanzi indicating that she found out if we wanted to get married next friday at the courthouse, we had to have our license arranged at least 24 hours *before*. So I took a long lunch and we ran down to the courthouse to file for that. We now have a marriage license, and on August 6th, at approximately 2:30pm, we will officially be married.
Picked up telynor from the train station after work, and got her safely to our home. We’ll have her as a guest for a few days. It’s really lovely to see her.
I started this entry with a notion to say something or another, but I appear to just be rambling, so I’ll sign off now. Hope all of you are wonderful!