The honeymoon was lovely and there are (literally) over 1,600 photographs awaiting sorting and categorizing and titling and descripterizing and posting. I know my Rebel shoots large files (especially in RAW+JPG mode), but there’s still something to be said about capturing 20gb worth of photos in two weeks. Something like “Holy crap! Sorting these is going to take forever!”. I will, one day, finish them. I promise.

Since The Girl (Mrs. Girl?) and I absolutely HATE having any downtime in which we might, say, relax and and do nothing, we picked up the wibble shopping almost immediately upon our return. There are a lot of wibbles in this town (a shit tonne, as the mrs. might say — or is that ton? It’s so hard to say now that they’re at parity). We have seen but a few of the wibbles on offer, but I can say that we are roundly unimpressed. Advice to wibble vendors and their agents: we don’t want to see your dirty laundry, full recycling bins, or very friendly and personable selves. Get the hell out of your wibble and take your damn trash with you and we’ll let you know when we’re done criticizing it and then not buying it. Thank you.

In other news which I am not fully at liberty to reveal, but which relates in many ways to this here blog, an exciting development has occurred in my Fabulous Writing Career. You’ll all just have to sit tight and wait a bit to hear what it is (and let’s all cross our fingers and collectively hope that it turns out, despite all of you not knowing what you’re hoping for!). I will certainly share more information as it becomes available. Just keep crossing, m’kay?

More to (possibly) come!

Given that we’re now married up and all adult and mature and whatnot, we figured it was about time we made a serious investment in some fine luggage. Gone are the days when we would sling our few belongings in a kerchief tied to a pole and head off on the roof of a train boxcar for untold adventures. Since we’re drowning a delightful avalanche of wedding booty that would require at least eight or nine kerchiefs to carry – and you all know how hard it is to find that number of reliable poles – we paid a visit to our local Luggage and Leather Goods Shoppe to purchase the latest in travel technology. We’re now the proud owners of a selection of Samsonite Silhouette 10 Hardside cases, including the 29″ Spinner, the 26″ Spinner, and the Beauty Case (for The Girl, natch). We also picked up the Silhouette 10 Softside Expandable Upright 21″, a smashing little carry-on for business trips and the like. It’s mighty handsome, if I do say so myself:

Five days until we leave!

Slick Rick released The Great Adventures of Slick Rick on May 2, 1988, nearly twenty years ago. I was a wee and impressionable tyke and was enraptured by the smooth flow of the greatest storytelling MC of all time. When I got turntables and started DJing, one of the first records I bought was The Great Adventures…, and I wore a groove through my favourite track: Mona Lisa, featuring a sample of Walk On By by Dionne Warwick. The haunting singing of the Walk On By section of the song became part of every mix set I built and I became a collector of Walk On By on vinyl. It’s originally a Burt Bacharach track, covered famously by Isaac Hayes in a dark, smoky version which would one day be sampled by Portishead on Cowboys from 1997’s Portishead. This iMix includes my favourite versions of the track, ranging from the original Bacharach, through Isaac and Dionne, to the Stranglers rock, to Cyndi Lauper’s pop. The iMix ends on Mona Lisa, the song that start this whole journey for me.

At any rate, lacking a Guru with whom I might study, I have devised my own coping method: I no longer sleep. It’s quite brilliant really. I only wish I’d thought of it sooner. I used to squander five to eight hours a night, hours in which I could have been printing menus or wireframing client websites, simply lying still and doing nothing. What sloth! I have gladly traded my soul away so that I can, instead, sit here on this couch, eyes pried open, and write blog posts. Sure, I’m irritable all the time and punt puppies whole city blocks for merely looking at me funny, but think of all the extra hours I’ve discovered! I feel like Vasco De Gama, landing in India for the very first time! All this… land!

Sigh. The natives are restless. Anyone have any sleep magic they want to share?

We were told by everyone who had planned a wedding before that it would be stressful and make us cry and thrash about and feel helpless and we’d be so glad by the time it came along to just be done with it. Maybe we missed something, but it’s been a pretty painless experience (short of a few expectations that needed managing), and we’re down to the last week with nothing major left to do and an ever shrinking list of minoralities to be dealt with. Some might say this post is just asking for trouble :)

At any rate, today’s big lesson: watch out for Time. It’ll sneak right up and pants you when you’re not looking (note to self: hopefully not in front of your wedding guests).

Life is a funny beast, really. Without going into detail, we got really excited about the possibility of something earlier this week - something we hadn’t planned on and were pleasantly surprised to discover last weekend - and are now both irrationally disappointed to have lost (for the record, I’m not talking babies here). It’s a wonderful thing to have a someone upon whom to lean and to admit to feelings and to encourage when they’re falling short, but to have both been so taken by something so fleeting is honestly kind of embarrassing. You’d think we’d both have learned not to set ourselves up for heartbreak so easily, but maybe our thirty-odd years have only really shown us how to appreciate the finer things in life. So, maybe this wibble slipped away from us, and maybe it is the universe telling us to relax and enjoy our nuptials, undistracted by other complexities. And I’m sure that there are many wibbles out there waiting for us - big ones and little ones and ones that fit in your shoe - but from where I sit on this so far sleepless night, it all looks like a giant wibble-free emptiness. At any rate, there’s no point dwelling on what could have been and I’ve so far avoided the sudden temptation to drop to my knees and beg the powers that be to somehow intervene and restore OUR wibble to its clearly rightful new owners. If you’ve got some strings to pull and you weren’t planning to use them for yourself (or maybe, I don’t know, world peace), give ‘em a little tug for me, okay?

In other news, this week has been a particularly avalanche prone one at work and much upward digging has been required to just keep even - we were approached with seven new jobs just today! - and so there is some balance to restore perspective. The other we (the we that doesn’t involve marriage but has been around almost as long) have been working towards the point we’re now at for four long and sometimes quite painful years, and the temptation to rest on one’s laurels is only avoided by the fact that one is simply to busy to remove said laurels from one’s head and place them upon the chair before collapsing. There’s not much crossover between THERE and HERE, but if you’re interested in THERE and you’re the type who would rather write code than English, maybe you want to take a peek at this here page, replete as it is with offers for your employment. We’re looking for a few good men or women to join the cause and to act as virtual water wings, helping to keep our heads above water. Come and join us! We’re the best thing going :)