Happy Birthday to The Queen

Today is a very important day in the history of my world. On this day a certain number of years ago (law enforcement can be assured it was at least 18), the Queen was born. The heavens opened and the spirit of the Lord descended upon a hospital not far from where I work, looked upon an unassuming family, and said it was good. She would become the favorite of a being who was very old and very kind (when he wasn't a complete jerk) and a raving lunatic of a genius whose talents would someday be known far and wide. She would be the only one to understand him completely, and the only one that he trusted with his life and secrets. Without her, he would be utterly alone.

No, this isn't a guessing game.

That is how I feel about The Queen. I met her in high school (and possibly knew of her before then), and really became acquainted with her on a band trip to the Fiesta Bowl in Arizona. I spent a lot of time with her during our Washington DC trip when she was sort of fawning over the guy I refer to as Crackhead, but never had the courage to say anything at the time. Fast forward four years.

My brother asked if I wanted to go to the homecoming football game. I am not a fan of football, but I had nothing better to do, so I went. Best decision ever, because that's where I met her again. I recognized her immediately, of course, and had to negotiate my way across a locked gate (something that lasted exactly one game). Metaphorically, I was told that if I crossed that gate, I could never come back. She was waiting on the other side, and I wanted to be with her, so I agreed to never come back, and I passed through the gate.

I still don't regret it.

Happy birthday, gorgeous. Love you forever.

Sonnet VI

Wow, how lazy am I? I write these, but never post them. Talk about easy posting fodder. Here is the sixth sonnet I wrote for the Queen.

VI:
You know regarding sports I'm not a fan
I'd really rather watch a diff'rent show
Still I cannot forget where we began
To be together all those years ago
Yes, it was at a high school football game
Though both of us were four years out of school
I saw your face and still I knew your name
And soon we were to learn about a rule
It seems that for this game they made a fence
Because in last week's game there was a fight
So now a guard stood by a gate immense
Creating then a most poetic night
Because to sit with you, we soon would learn,
I had to cross the point of no return

Sonnet V

V:
The darkness wraps itself around the house
Again it comes, the sanctity of night
The quiet comes now for the man and spouse
The breathing slows and all the world is right
And then to sleep she wants to hear his voice
She says she finds it soothing and sublime
And long ago she found her tale of choice
It always starts with once upon a time
Though she prefers romance, this story's not
Instead it is a tale of elves and rings
Of hobbits, dwarves and men and lots of plot
Of towers, councils, orcs, and missing kings
Why should she wish to hear a tale so deep?
Cause every time, it puts her right to sleep.

Sonnet IV

IV:
Oh what a joyous feeling to be loved
To find myself in someone's realm of need
To think by me someone could be improved
And in a marriage I'd somehow succeed
Sometimes it's hard for me to understand
That I'd be so important to your soul
And still you know your wish is my command
So I can be the part that makes you whole
I'd always heard the two would become one
I never really thought of what that means
But what our God has made can't be undone
Which means we are a pair like geeks and queens
The world can run while we are standing still
I find I need you too and always will

Sonnet III

III:
What can I do without you in my life?
I find the stars above don't shine as bright.
What can I do without you in my life?
The day descends too quickly into night.
How could I live without you in my world?
The colors fade to grey before my eyes.
How could I live without you in my world?
The beauty all around me slowly dies.
For you within my arms I'll always hold
I'll never let you stray, I'll keep you close
I'll gaze into your eyes till we are old
So that you'll know it's only you I chose
I'll always keep you here and still repeat
That only within you am I complete

Sonnet II

II:

I do not need to write another song

I do not need to write another book

Because I've never want to take that long

And those things always need a second look

So what I want is something I can give

To you before the moment passes by

And also something that you can relive

And that you know I never will deny

For all of time and space cannot compare

To what within our world that we have made

The world cannot dissolve the love we share

Like time itself can never be delayed

No matter what the future has in store

Together we will stand forevermore

Sonnet I

I've taken to writing some sonnets for the Queen. As I rarely post anything interesting, I figure I'll share these for anyone who happens to drop by. It'll give a more consistent update pattern while I do it. I'm a Geek of many things, and I've found this form of writing is very refreshing and mentally stimulating, and I know the Queen doesn't mind being my muse at all.

I:

I have to think about the things to say
For all the things, they rest within my heart
For when I write, I tend to lose my way
And it's so hard to find a place to start
Is it just love that keeps us moving on
A simple feeling and a simple thought
I know sometimes I can be so withdrawn
And never tell you everything I ought
I know the things I feel within my soul
What more could I say that has not been said
And I could say that these are things you know
And that I've meant them since before we wed
Still you can know that all my words are true
I always have and always will love you

Ten Years

Today is my tenth anniversary of being married to the Queen and as such, I took the day off of work. It's the right thing to do to spend some time with her. We did what we could to find some time together, and managed to have family watch Sassy Pants, the only one not in school already, so we could go out to lunch. 

Our original plan was to drop off Sassy Pants, eat lunch, and then come back for her, but when we dropped her off, we were informed by the Queen's grandparents that they had lots planned and we had better not come back soon. Ok, so we went to the Spaghetti Warehouse, a restaurant in West Tulsa where we had our rehearsal dinner ten years ago. That location was chosen at the time due to its proximity to the majority of the wedding party and where the church was in Sand Springs.

We had a very pleasant lunch, but were left with a lot of time, and since we were in West Tulsa, we were a bit too far from home to head back to Broken Arrow before going back to pick up Sassy Pants. So the Queen had the idea to go by Ann's Bakery where we had gotten our wedding cake. She thought maybe we could get a donut or pastry or something there, just because of where it was.

We walked in and they had cookies and pastries that looked really good. I asked out of curiosity if they had slices of wedding cake or something to buy since we'd gotten our wedding cake there and wanted to get a piece of cake. To our surprise, they have what they call bar cakes that are just two layer cake in a thin bar shape (hence the name, huh?). But they were reasonably priced so we got one for our evening. We also asked for a couple of chocolate dipped, peanut butter cookies. The girl behind the counter gave us a half dozen for the two we paid for. That was nice too.

There honestly wasn't much else for us to do, so we wasted a little more time wandering a local Wal-mart before we headed back to pick up the 4 year old. We did get fussed at since they weren't quite done making their cookies (which, by coincidence, were peanut butter cookies, but not dipped in chocolate). So we hung out for a little bit so they could finish their cookies, and we were also "encouraged" to bring her and the others back at some point so they could play again. Grandparents are funny that way.

We ended our evening with champagne, some wedding cake, some soft jazz, and talking about the last ten years (or twelve, if you count our courting). It's been a good ten years, and we look forward to many more. In an era of marriages crashing and burning, we're a testament to the solidity a marriage can actually be if you want it to be good. We've had our ups and downs; our agreements and disagreements; and what we've learned is that if two people are committed to each other and have a true desire to make their marriage work, it will. It's when people stop caring and have no desire to be together that it's over. 

But that caring has to be about the other person. One element you have to let go of is yourself. This isn't to say that you can't be yourself, and it also isn't to say that you lose your sense of self either. What it amounts to is a desire to make someone else happy. It's soret of like that saying that your parents and teachers drill into your head: if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. 

When it comes to marriage, that's about all it takes.

Another Job Slump

So, it was 2001, and we'd successfully moved into a house. While we didn't own it, the guy had mentioned the possibility of a rent to own situation after the lease was up in a year. It was somewhat encouraging, so that maybe we wouldn't just be throwing money away completely. 

That summer, the Queen did her teacher outings and such. She had gone through her first year, but the (insert unkind word) of a principal she had gave her a heck of a hard time that year. We're not sure why this was, since the Queen took her suggestions, and then she retracted her suggestions to make some different ones. No kidding. It was a very frustrating time for her.

As the Queen got more pregnant through the summer, we hit the end of another job for me. Suncraft decided that they wanted someone in the office who could do more stuff. I had seen this woman come in and talk to the boss for a little while one day, and I could feel that something was going on that I was kept out of. Later that day, I was told that they were going to let me go, not because I'd done a bad job, but because this other person could do more.

Now let me iterate here that they hadn't actually asked me to do anything else, nor did they indicate that anything more needed to be done. I basically wasn't given a chance to learn anything additional or do anything else before they judged that someone else would be more capable. They simply knew who this other person was, and rather than chance whether I could do the same thing, they got rid of the temp and hired her on to do my job and whatever else they needed. They did this on a Thursday, and the boss did graciously tell me that he would pay me for Friday as well. That was kind of him.

I returned to the temp service, but nothing else of this nature was available, so I was on my own. It was high time for another mistake, so while job hunting, I came across a vacuum cleaner sales place that did in home demonstrations of vacuum cleaners to sell them to individuals. I should have walked out, but the pay rate per sale was incredible. I thought that if I could pull off selling these things, we'd do pretty well. Besides, if you did a minimum number of demonstrations, they'd pay a decent wage.

Then I learned the reality. These overpriced vacuums were impossible to sell. Sure, they were cool beyond words, but at a whopping $2600 per unit, no one was willing to buy them. They were too expensive. I found some on eBay later for half that or less. The demonstration minimum was also impossible to hit. After all, you had to have somewhere to go, and though they promised that they had a small cold calling center that set up appointments with good leads, there weren't often enough appointments to justify the 2 per business day minimum to achieve the minimum wage requirement. Even if you did have 2 appointments, actually making them both would be hard enough, and if someone didn't qualify once you got in the door (i.e. general feeling, the decision maker wasn't there), that one didn't count. 

I tried. I really did. I tried for 3 months, but ended up with bupkas for my efforts. The Queen was supporting us solely over that time, and she was getting a bit fed up that I wasn't bringing anything home. She let me try the cleaner thing, but after so long without progress, she was done. I was too. I finally gave back my demo model and I was out. That was a hard time for us, and probably the most stressful. It's about as close as we ever came to losing each other. It was our two year hump (though more like two and a half years), and it was hard.

She was our sole provider, pregnant, and I was turning into a deadbeat, no matter if I was trying or not. We had a baby coming within a month and struggling to make our payments. Something had to give.

Darth Vader at the time was working for a teleservices company, and it was a company I'd applied to work at right after RadioShack, but I'd turned it down because I didn't want to work nights. It was $9 an hour, though, and that was as much as I'd made before. I also knew they hired in at 30 hours, but it had been four months since I'd had any income and anything is always better than nothing.

And so began my time in customer service. I went to work for a cell phone provider called Cricket in their customer service area. It was the beginning of a whole new career path for me, since customer service pays more than I'd done before, and all the customers come to me to solve problems. For a Geek, problem solving is second nature, so it was destined to work out fine.

Suncraft and a House

Moving on with the love story portion (feel free to catch up by selecting the Love Story link there on the right), after turning down the bank, I crawled back to the temp agency and asked them what they had available that might pay about the same as the bank and be 8 to 5 Monday thru Friday. It took a week or so, but they found a position for an Office Manager at a builder in Broken Arrow: one Suncraft Homes. This amused me...a lot. Why would it amuse me? The post from May 16th, 2007 details an incident following a tornado where I destroyed a garage door. Yeah, that builder was Suncraft Homes. So, I was to basically apply to work at a place where I'd destroyed the garage door of one of their new houses. Fun.

I went in and interviewed and to my surprise, I got the job. Just like the bank, this job was very, very easy. My job was to answer the phone, file bills, prepare bills to mail, type when they wanted stuff type, make copies, and some other miscellaneous stuff that those front office people do. It was a couple weeks before I saw the superintendant for the first time, and indeed, he recognized me. That gave him a good laugh too, and I found there were definitely no hard feelings involved in my destruction of this door.

Now, a lot of stuff happened during this time beyond my job there at Suncraft. On the creative front, I was in constant contact with these guys from Sweden, and we were working together on a musical that they were looking to produce at their college over there. I assisted not only in the music area, where they had intended me to be, but I also worked on the script and story itself and even delved into the lyrics to make sure they were perfectly coherent. We worked on this whole thing in English before they translated it all into Swedish. I was also working closely with the guy who was going to direct the production, and he was about the most demanding little bugger I've ever met. Talk about fussy! But he did have a knack for tearing things apart and putting them back together better than they were the first time. I honestly learned a lot from him.

That production was slated for May of 2001, so round about April, they started in on rapidly translating it into Swedish for the local production. Well, during this, they needed some music done, and I was also responsible for listening to and extracting the music from their recordings, since none of them wrote music (well, they could write music, but not write or read musical notation, which I had been extensively trained in reading and writing). You see, they'd all done their music on sequencers and tape recorders while playing piano or something, so they didn't actually read music nor write any of it down. I had the fun of listening, extracting, and then creating sheet music in the Cakewalk program for their people to look at. I had a good enough grasp of Swedish at that point in time to be able to include the Swedish lyrics on the music.

But before that production went down, the Queen and I had other things going on. Rock Girl was going to be two in June and we'd been considering cutting off the birth control and having a second child. We knew we'd have to get an actual house before she gave birth, but we also figured that there'd be a month or so before the absence of the pills got her system going again, etc., before anything happened. So fun and fancy free, we hit Spring Break, and she got immediately pregnant. All we have to do is consider doing something without birth control, and we get another child. So that was March, and now we really need to find a house.

We'd been looking for a house for months, trying to get a rent house together so we could move out of the apartments into something more conducive to rearing a child, especially now that a second one was on the way. We didn't feel that we could buy a house, and thought renting one was a natural next step. We know better now, but that was then. After paying a monthly fee with a house hunting service to peruse rental houses, her parents told us about one that was caddy-corner to their house. We called the number and were informed that that house had already been rented to someone. This was the kind of luck we'd been having, but the guy then told us that there was another one in that same neighborhood we could look at. He said it was unlocked and we could just go right in and look around. Great!

We drove right over with Rock Girl in tow and pulled into the driveway of a red brick house with three bedrooms and an enclosed garage (which I particularly liked). A huge tree dominated the front yard, and we thought it would provide some nice shade in the summers (and it did). We walked into the modest living room that opened into the dining room that went on into the kitchen. The back door was missing its dead bolt and had a plastic bag stuffed in the hole. Not major, really. We walked down the hall checking out the bedrooms as we went back. We passed the bathroom, which was also modest in size to find ourselves in what would be considered the master bedroom. We figured it was since it has a half bath attached to it.

We went back down the hall through the dining room and into the kitchen, which was decently sized with a peninsula counter dividing it from the dining room. The Queen was happy with the size of the kitchen since our apartment had a short hallway masquerading as a kitchen. There was no refrigerator, but that was to be expected. Can't have everything. 

We turned down the short hall into what would have been the garage. To one side there was a closet that housed the water heater, heat/air unit, and short ladder to the attic. On the other side was a laundry room where we'd clearly be storing our clothes before running them to the laundromat to wash them as we had no washer or dryer.

Then we passed into the enclosed, carpeted garage area that we referred to as the "den." It was a huge room since it was apparently a two car garage. I was excited, and the Queen seemed to like it too. We called the guy back and asked about getting it, but that we couldn't do anything until the next month since we were part way through the month in our rent at the apartment. He said he couldn't keep it on the market that long. The deposit was a month of rent, and I said we'd take it as is and just fix whatever was broken ourselves. Probably stupid, but we'd been looking for awhile. He accepted, and we gave our 30 day notice at the apartments.

We had a little party with that friend of the Queen's, who we'll call the Teacher since she had some teaching classes in college with the Queen and still teaches to this day, and her husband, who we'll just call Eagle, to take take advantage of his maintenance knowledge to fix the issues in the house. It didn't take long and we were even allowed to paint, which we did. And so, in May of 2001, we moved out of the apartments and into this rent house that thanks to its enclosed garage, had an enormous amount of square footage, though we only really used the den for storage for awhile.

But Rock Girl took the front bedroom, and we painted the back bedroom in a pale yellow (it turned out to be the brightest room in the entire house thanks to the color and the rooms placement in the house in relation to where the sun lives in the sky throughout the day. Rock Girl was still using the crib at the time, though, so the yellow room was rather devoid of furniture for while, but we knew Rock Girl would move into a "big girl bed" before the Queen's due date in December, so we'd be ready. 

Add to the baby craze that the Queen's friend, Wendy, from the apartments got pregnant about a month earlier, and there was even a teacher at the school the Queen was teaching at at the time that got pregnant a month or so later. It was baby crazy around us for awhile.

But we had a house. And we were happy.

Time At The Bank

This part of the story last left off in May 2000 with my being sacked from my fireplace tech job, and moving into another summer of renewal. The first job I ended up with was via another friend of the Queen's who hasn't come into the story too much, which is odd because they're really good friends (have been since college). Her husband (who normally doesn't command our respect) was working at an apartment complex, and he let us know they were in need of a person to perform "make ready" duties. A Make-Ready person goes through empty apartments and ensures that they have all their light bulbs, hinges, window locks, etc. before someone moves in.

He was on maintenance there and taught me a variety of things regarding maintenance, which actually impressed me, since we didn't know he was capable of doing anything up to that point. Unfortunately, the work bored me to tears, and as the job also entailed picking up people's trash, the occasional cleaning, and a bunch of other miscellanous duties that geeks just aren't cut out for, I quit at about the same time they were going to fire me...but not before I managed to pick up pink eye from someone else who worked there. Super fun.

The plus during this period, though, was actually a boon for the Queen. She was offered a teaching position and was to start as a first grade teacher come August. She was super excited about it, and I was very happy for her. She had to leave town post-haste to get to a teacher retreat or something at Shangri-La, which is a resort in Oklahoma. I was left with Rock Girl in her absence. We were still more than a year before The Socialite would come onto the scene.

After the Make Ready job, I found my way into a temp agency where I got on at a bank working with a guy who had injured in hand. How did he do this wonder? Well, in the basement of this bank, there is this room where a bunch of equipment lives, and among them are (I believe) some air conditioning units. Now these units suck in a lot of air, and when the door is open, they pull in a lot of air from the hallway, and in the process, try to pull the door closed...hard. He had left that room one day, and the door slammed onto his fingers, bending them backwards (possibly breaking them, I don't remember). They could have either tried to train someone else in his position, or get a helper to do the heavy lifting.

Enter me for the heavy lifting. The job was a total cakewalk. Drive around a couple times a day. Climb some ladders. Carry some boxes. But mostly sit around in his office and do nothing until the next time we had to do something.

While there, I made a mistake, though. You see, they recognized my propensity to work on computers and make them talk. It was easy for me. So when my term as a temp employee was up because they guy with the broken hand was all healed and could handle it on his own again, they offered me a job baby-sitting their servers from 2pm to 10pm. It would have been a great position for me, but at the time, I was narrow enough to only want to work during the day: a 9 to 5 job. I said no. Stupid...stupid...stupid. It would only be a matter of time before I'd be landing a night job, and this would have paid so much better and been so much more fun.

This isn't the only time I did this either. Maybe I mentioned this one before, but I don't remember the time frame in which it happened. You see, when the Queen was a teacher, they also recognized my propensity to make computers do what I wanted, and suggested I apply at Tulsa Public Schools as a computer tech. I was between jobs at the time, and actually applied for the Queen's old library assistant position when the principal suggested that the computer tech would be better.

Well, when I interviewed, and they told me about hardware and networking (which would have been awesome to learn), I said I was better with software and walked away. I really must stop doing stupid things...

The Fire Burns Out

Every time I listen to my iPod, I wish I'd gotten one of these things a long time ago. I had a 64Mb MP3 player that I'd gotten from the Queen's parents for Christmas back in 2001 (I think), but having 80Gb is so much better. I'd kept filling up and switching out 32kbps songs, so it didn't hold but 60-odd songs at that bit rate, and they weren't stereo. I've got 5500 songs on this thing and nary a 32kbps one in the bunch. If I'd gone that small, I'd never fill it up.

Anyway, back to Sawmill, which is the name of the complex we lived in when we were first married. It's in Tulsa, and it's a little lower end, so we weren't spending much on housing, to be sure. When we moved across the complex to an apartment on the first floor with two bedrooms, it felt like a palace compared to the dinky little one bedroom we started in.

Another significant development happened in this October of moving. As I've said, I worked for a fireplace company, while the Queen worked for a bank in their counting dungeon. Well, she'd heard from a relative who worked at a school that there was an opening as a library assistant, and this position might provide a bit of a better 'in' to her being a teacher (which she has a degree for) than working at the bank. We talked about it, and although it was a pay cut to work at the school for 10+ hours less a week and $2 less an hour, it would be better in the long run.

So she quit the bank and went to work as a library assistant, and this experience really changed her for the better. I don't know how interested she was in working a school library before this, but after doing this, she now prefers it to teaching (which is why I'm going to encourage her to get the 30-hour master's for school librarian so she can do this eventually). It also helped that the librarian there became a good friend to her and a real source of encouragement for her to move on to the teaching position.

As for me, I was working toward something a bit different. I was getting frustrated with no one in Tulsa wanting to do anything original when it comes to stage productions, particularly the musical(s) I'd written. I'd gotten some feedback from a playwrights' group I was a part of and refined one show rather well, so I was looking forward to seeing if anyone would be willing...no one was. They were more interested in "butts in the seat" than taking any kind of chance on something new (never mind the novelty of a locally written work). So I was going to attempt to produce it myself.

I'd already impressed a small group of people with this show a year before when I played through and sang the entire show to demonstrate it in full to them. This is where the comments I used to rewrite it came from, but since they'd seen it already and enjoyed it, they were interested in helping however they could.

It was also during the rehearsals for this that Rock Girl did her infamous spit-up in The Engineer's hair. This has never been forgotten.

Well, there was one thing I failed to anticipate having trouble with. There was potential I could lose my shirt, sure, but there was another, far bigger, issue. You see, a show needs a cast. I held an audition every week for three months (had it advertised in the local paper with all the other audition info), and out of three months, I only managed to get a cast of 5...and none of them came from the ad in the paper.

As a result, my rehearsals were a joke. My show never got off the ground. No one ever saw it. I had booked the theatre, so I had to call them about a month before the performance and cancel it. I had scheduled it in the Chapman Music Hall of the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, and I still have the Intermission magazine that shows it on their schedule for January (which also contains in the magazine's introduction a curious note that they don't produce shows, but that they're done by outside people). I also asked for one single ticket to the show so I could have some kind of memento from the production that never happened.

I attempted over the following months to do something else, but nothing ever panned out, and I disbanded everyone. I hadn't written anything else really to show for myself, so I didn't have anything else to produce. Nothing, at least, for a small cast. I have some stuff now that would work fine, but back then, I just hadn't done enough to have anything worth doing.

It wasn't much after all this that The Queen and Rock Girl met some friends at the apartment complex. For some time, we'd heard a child screaming bloody murder on a regular basis from the apartment above ours. We weren't sure why a kid would scream like that, but it was very loud. We learned we just screamed to hear his head rattle after we met the parents. The wife, Wendy, became good friends with the Queen, and they had a son who we'll call Noah that befriended Rock Girl.

Noah is a year older, but they got along really well. And while Wendy is younger than the Queen, she and her husband were at a similar stage of life to us, so they related very well to each other. Granted, that's where most of the similarities end, but we all got along really well. Her husband, Kristoff, doesn't play into this too much, since we didn't see him as often, but they were a solid couple as the Queen and I are.

This served to give someone for Rock Girl to play with, as the apartment complex wasn't exactly teeming with youngsters, nor did it have any kind of real play area for kids to congregate. Well, not a playground anyway. Outside our apartment, on the other hand, was a huge open area, that occasionally served as a commons where kids did play, and that is where the Queen and Wendy got acquainted during the summer months as the kids played together out in the field.

This part of the story ends at the end of the school year and the end of a job for me. At the fireplace company, I was treated most of the time like an errant child, and when you're treated a certain way, you can choose to blow it off or be a self-fulfilling prophecy and act accordingly. At the time, I was acting exactly as they wished, mainly because the way they treated me irritated the fire out of me. I was accused of wasting all kinds of time, and although I didn't exactly do everything as fast as they might want, there also wasn't an enormous amount of work to fill eight hours, so I wasn't going as fast as I could.

I would say there were two events that did me in. The first occurred right after some tornado weather when I pulled up to a house and it threatened to pour down rain on me. The house was for a builder that I respected at the time because they always had the fireplace perfect for the log installation. It showed some quality. Well, on this day, I thought it would be a swell idea to pull into the garage, so I went into the house, opened the garage door and proceeded on in. Well, apparently, the construct for the ladder on the top of the van I drove was too tall for the garage, and I heard it hit. Not wanting to damage the house, I pulled the van back out...and took the garage door with me.

I got out and surveyed the damage. Oh, crap, says I. I'd worked a number on that garage door, and although I was completely alone, there was no way I was going to be able to just leave and come back, acting all innocent. I just don't have it in me -- too afraid of being found out, which is worse than just telling the truth. It wasn't 5 minutes later that the superintendent for the builder came driving up, as if he'd heard the thing break. He asked what happened, and I came clean. He suggested I tell my boss before he did because it would reflect better on me.

I did, and my employment continued.

The one that did me in I maintain to this day didn't happen. I mean, I'm on a blog now where it doesn't matter at all whether I did it or not, but I am certain the story was constructed by them to be rid of me. It could have been a story by the builder, too, to blame someone for what they said happened.

The claim was that the builder for the house I'd been in that morning said I'd tracked mud all over the house, ruined the carpet which will force them to re-carpet THE ENTIRE HOUSE! Whoa... the entire house? I didn't go into the entire house. In fact, I came in through a bedroom window, crawled through the house on my hands and knees to keep my feet off the carpet and wiped the mud off my shoes on the carpet scraps laid for that very purpose. I urged them to go look at it to see if it was true, but like an idiot, I didn't go with them. They probably went for coffee, and just came back to accuse me of lying before firing me.

But they were quite tired of me. After all, we were coming into the summer months where my services were not really needed for several months, and I guess the previous summer they felt it was all pointless. The only thing for me to do over the summer are new construction installations, where over the winter, we were swamped with the new construction and people buying the logs for heat. One person can do the summer, so I was out.

So began a trend, almost, where I would meet the end of a job at the beginning of a summer. It happens far too often for me to think about, really. It happened in 2000, 2001, 2003, and 2007 -- sacked in May or June. If I can survive May or June at a job, I'm good to go for another year, it seems. The funny thing is that every time I've lost one job, I end up with one that is better with the opportunity to be much, much better.

But like so many things, you only get one shot at that open door before it closes and God has to turn you life upside to try and get you to the next available opportunity.

Three People, One Bedroom

Getting back to this story of the past, we left off with the surprise, Polaroidal birth of Rock Girl. Her real name was given by both the Queen and I collectively in that we each gave her one of her names. We actually did this for all three girls, in that we thoroughly discussed what we would call them, and test each name prior to actually giving it.

Her birth went very smoothly, and she came out perfect despite the fact that the Queen had no idea she was pregnant until she was eight months along. A lot of people don't believe this, but you have to remember that she was working to lose weight while she was pregnant and first children tend to be a bit more compact than their subsequent siblings. So the worst experience during this time was frustration over not being able to lose the weight she wanted to ... guess we know what was going on with that now. Now when the baby came out, that's when the fruit of her labors truly showed through, and she dropped down to a size she hadn't been in since high school. 

Of course, since we hadn't planned on this little surprise when we'd gotten the apartment, we had to figure out where to put a baby in a one bedroom apartment large enough for newlyweds, but that's about it. We are very, very fortunate to have the support structure we have, since the Queen's parents were kind enough to help us out with baby furniture, but where to put it? I don't know if you have ever seen the size of the bedroom in a one bedroom apartment, but I can tell you there's just enough room at the foot of a queen sized bed to fit a crib sideways between it and the wall.

Our one bedroom had a queen sized bed, dresser and hutch, chest of drawers, crib and changing table in it, and let me tell you, it was cramped. The accompanying cradle we decided to place in the living room along with the swing and rocking chair. We ran out of room really quickly, but it made quieting the baby in the middle of the night with the pacifier (once she was around 3 months old) very easy since it was as difficult as leaning to the end of the bed to take care of her.

We were under a six month lease in this apartment, so we knew we were stuck for a few months, but we asked about moving to a two bedroom in the same complex as soon as our lease was up. We figured that would be the easiest move to make with a veritable newborn rather than head off somewhere else, and we were sure to request a first floor apartment since we hated the stair climb (and I have yet to meet anyone who actually liked the stair climb).

Now, we weren't without incident during our tenure on the second floor. We were able to look out our window straight down a sidewalk to the parking lot on the far side, and on one night, we heard a loud pop. It didn't take long for us to figure out this was a gunshot, and the appearance of the red and blue flashing lights helped to solidify this theory that night. The news the following day, I believe, had a short blurb on it, and that was the end of it. I don't think much of anything happened in the end, but it was the only excitement we had there from the actual complex.

Most of our excitement came from the fact that we were both working and trying to make a life while handling an infant. Our support structure came into play again as we had grandparents watching Rock Girl during the week while we worked, and we learned just how hard that could be since we both rarely saw Rock Girl during the week. The Queen's job at the bank tended to keep her as late as 6 or 7 on some nights, and while I got off at 5 or 6, I occasionally was later as well. This left the weekends to do anything, and we made the most of what we had with her.

The period at the one bedroom was very short, though, so there isn't much else that can be said about it except that it provided a starting place for us. In retrospect, we've found several things we could have done better to set us in a better direction and gotten us to where we are now a little quicker, but that's the benefit of hindsight. At the time, we did the best we knew how to, and it all did work out in the end. Once we hit the two bedroom, life got a little more interesting, since both The Queen and Rock Girl met friends.

A Rock Girl Is Born

So we returned from Colorado after our blissful first week of marriage to get down to real life. We had our apartment. We both had jobs. We were actually doing real well, though we didn't know it at the time. The Queen worked in the dungeon at a bank counting money. I worked at the Fireplace job that cost me an eye.

I would say it was a nice and quiet life that allowed us plenty of time to get to know each other, but the thing is that that particualr period of time was so short, that I barely remember it. You see, things were about to change, and while we couldn't really decipher at the time whether the change was positive or negative, suffice to say, it was one big huge change that rocked not only our world, but came as very little surprise to several people.

The Queen complained a few weeks after the wedding about her stomach feeling very hard, and she didn't know why. It had been going on for several days, so we made a doctor's appointment for her and went in for her to be checked out. I went with her to drive just in case any kind of tests were done that might affect her drivability. She was examined and the doctor set us down to give us the results of the tests. The reason her stomach was getting hard was...

...she's pregnant. Not just a little pregnant; eight months pregnant! You'd never guess from the wedding pictures -- she looked good.

We were in shock. The doctor caught from our reactions that this was not in the plans, and given how far along she was and that we hadn't seen a doctor yet, he called the OB/GYN and setup an appointment ASAP to have her checked out. He added that we were not expecting this and to be gentle. Heh. We're expecting it now, aren't we?

So now comes the even funner task -- we've got to tell our families that we did, indeed, fool around prior to the wedding and produce a little something. Now, don't misunderstand me. One thing about the Queen and I is that we are somehow so darn fertile that it only takes once. All three children were produced without "trying", per se. Remove birth control, and bam! Insert child here.

So we went to her parents. We went in with something to tell and sat on the couch for a while. Finally, The Queen Mother says, "out with it, child." So we laid it out there, and there was silence for what felt like a week and a day. I got the lecture of a lifetime from her father, and he was right. You see, both of us are from traditional backgrounds, and this incident amounted to a dishonor upon him, so he was quite understandably upset.

My parents, by contrast were momentarily silent, and my father was more silent on the matter than my mother. She was cheerful right away about the prospect...and then we mentioned the whole "eight months" thing. That's when my dad did the "exhale." I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure of this non-verbalization of upsettedness, but basically, the lips are pursed and air flows through them producing a solid wind sound.

For both of us, that was probably the hardest day of our entire marriage. We've had all kinds of disagreements since, but as a couple, there was not much that could top revealing our indiscretion to our parents. It was not a fun day, but had to be done and once it was done, we could set our sights on dealing with this little surprise coming up.

A visit to the OB/GYN got her a battery of tests to make sure everything was going the way it sure. They were making up for missing the other seven months that they would normally be observing her, and she was already in the time frame where the women go in weekly. We got the works and after the ultrasound (which was not the first appointment, but fairly soon), a due date was determined.

I'd heard before that to figure a due date, you take the date of conception and add nine months plus a week. My due date was three weeks prior to the doctor's. Since I'm no surgeon, mine basically stayed in my mind, and the official one was passed around to the (still somewhat upset) relatives.

Family being family, though, the incident was placed behind us, and they also began to look forward to the impending delivery. We got lots of help from everyone including baby furniture from her parents to get us started with this little surprise. Only Darth Vader held out for a little bit as angry until he was reminded that family is always family and no matter what, we stand by each other.

We are in no way an Italian Mafia, but family is very important to us. We are very lucky to have a strong support structure around us that is willing to help at the drop of a hat, and they've been invaluable to our survival. On the one hand, it's been good, but on the other, it also spoils me quite a bit because I know in the back of my head I don't have to be fully self-sufficient. It's a habit I'm working to break since I actually do need to be self-sufficient, since it isn't fair to anyone else to depend on them very heavily for more than just moral support.

By the time my birthday rolled around, The Queen was looking very pregnant. She had gotten some maternity clothes and the baby gratefully took the additional room to grow. Our lives had settled down a little bit, though the fun of a pregnancy before we'd gotten a chance to really get to know each other living together presented a bump here and there. I supported her as well as I knew how, though, and we got on fairly well still.

One Saturday night, we decided to go out to a movie, and the Engineer was with us for reasons I don't remember. We started with a healthy dinner at none other than Arby's. The Queen generally did not like Arby's at the time, and it's a wonder we ended up there at all. She's better with it now that they've expanded their menu quite a bit, but at the time, she wasn't too hot on it.

I know when we were driving around, we ended up having to turn around on the expressway, and at the junction of Hwy 51 and 169 in Tulsa, there is a cloverleaf that allows you to take several of the leaves and circle around to whatever direction you want to go. This little action made the very pregnant Queen ill. From there, we went to see The Matrix, which was just awesome. It had a great plot, some downright clever cinematography and special effects, and lots of action.

We weren't going out with The Engineer regularly at that point, and we also really didn't have much to do at home, so after the movie, we parted company and went home.

She woke up around 2 the next morning with some odd feelings in her abdominal area. She said it felt like a pain moving from her back to her front. She said she'd walked around already, but they didn't subside. We got out the documentation they'd given us to see what labor pains were supposed to feel like and one of the descriptions matched what she was feeling, so we leisurely got everything together and drove to the hospital.

That's right, it was a leisurely drive. We didn't speed or otherwise break any traffic rules. Now, we weren't just putting along either; I mean, we were going the speed limit, but the nonsense you see in movies where they rush as fast as possible because "the baby is coming" is complete nonsense.

Now, on the way in, we did have an important thing to discuss that had never been settled. You may be wondering what could be so darn important to chat about during such an important drive. Well, we never decided on a name. Several were thrown around, but we never sat down and said "here it is." We did this with the other two, but for the first, we hadn't yet picked a name. I had one that I really liked, and The Queen had some that she was fond of. We each got a piece of the name and it was settled. We knew from the ultrasound that it was most likely a girl, so that's what we fixed on was a girl name.

We got to the hospital and got checked in. We had signed up for some class through the OB/GYN office, and got so far as the hospital tour the day before. That was lucky because it was fresh in our minds exactly where to go and what to do. We weren't prepared by any stretch of the imagination, but at the same time, we didn't have a prayer of being prepared. Let's face it; we had no idea what we were getting into.

Another discussion we had was when to call everyone. It was early in the morning and a Sunday, so we knew everyone would be resting or going to church, and we didn't want to bother them. Yeah, we got in so much trouble for that. Apparently, people want to be contacted at any hour for something like the birth of a child. Who knew?

Inside the delivery room, The Queen was in pain, and had previously asked for an epidural to ease it. They waited and waited and waited and by the time they planned on doing it, she was very dialated, so they tried to talk her out of it. Well, if you've ever had the pleasure of experiencing a pregnant woman in pain, you might know what an impossible task that is, so yeah, she got her drugs and she was much more pleasant after that.

Me? Oh, I'm not the important one in this story. My job was to be a rock of encouragement to the Queen who was enduring the experience of a lifetime. I held her hand and provided kind words. Isn't that nice? Well, the dad doesn't do anything in the delivery room but stand there. Again, unlike the movies, we don't run around like idiots performing crazy antics with the attending physician.

At one point, the baby's heart rate elevated, and mommy's went with it. I laid my hand on the Queen's tummy (on top of the baby) and spoke softly to her. Like a magic touch, both heart rates went down, so I guess it was stress.

This wasn't the first time I had interacted with the baby. I had read that the baby can hear you and your voice and the reason they get attached to mommy is recognizing the voice. Well, I spoke to her in the womb as well as playing music for her through a tape recorder. She was actually the only one I did this with for some reason; she's also currently the only one interested to any extent in music. Interesting. The Socialite, by contrast, is on the verge of being Art Girl.

Anyway, the time came for the doctor to come in and prepare to catch the baby. The room got very busy very quickly and preparations were made with their magic table of birthing goodies. And then it died down again. It was actually a very leisurely process where there was plenty of time for the doctor to talk to the Queen and I about what was going to happen. Some time later, dialation was checked and declared ready, the doctor got into position, so it was time to push.

But it wasn't long until the precious load dropped and we got ourselves one Rock Girl. We didn't know anything. As I looked into that face, I didn't understand the kind of attachment I'd have to that little person. I didn't know the level of commitment she would require. I didn't know how much I would want to give to her. I had no idea the level of unconditional love I would have for her.

At that moment, I was a father, and I quickly found that that position was something that could only be experienced. No one can begin to teach it. No one can tell you how it all works. The only thing you need to start is the commitment to follow through with it. You've got to want it bad enough, because God knows, if you don't want it, you won't make it.

At that time, I was so clueless, all I had was the devotion to try, and you know...that was good enough for the moment.

Sometimes, There Are No Words

So we had survived the wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony, the reception was great, and we were officially married and ready to start our lives together. We had stayed the night at a Day's Inn in Sand Springs, and our intent was to leave from there to go on our honeymoon, which was going to be in Colorado. But early the next morning when we were going to leave, we hit a snag of some kind, and had to head back into Tulsa briefly to retrieve something from our apartment.

I don't remember what it was, but it did give me the opportunity to give the Queen her wedding present. She loves the Cherished Teddies figurines, and I had found a newlywed couple on top of a wedding cake music box that played the wedding recessional. She loved it.

She had given me a pair of cuff links that had built in watches; I loved those, but they met with an unfortunate end. You see, at the time and for several years, I had the unfortunate habit of leaving stuff on the roof of the car. Lost several drinks, some to-go boxes, and even my CD player hit the road at one point (but it was retrieved). These cuff links were left on top of the car outside a hotel when I drove off, thunking them on the ground in the parking lot. Didn't notice this until a couple hours later, and when I ran back, the front desk had the studs that went with the cuff links, but whoever had turned them in had stolen the cuff links themselves. These were somewhat unique, and I've never seen another set like them. I was rather upset at myself for losing them, and my setting of things on the car subsided considerably after that time. Anyway...

Once we got whatever it was I'd left, we set off to Colorado Springs in April of 1999. I give the date because it will be very shortly revealed exactly the time frame we're in here. You see, we were married on the 17th, and left town on the 18th. We got to Colorado Springs that evening, and drove around looking for a place to stay, eventually ending up at a Motel 6 or something.

Once we got settled, the Queen went in for a shower, and I was chilling out when the power went out in the hotel. Never heard of this happening before, but it sure enough did. Everyone was looking out of their rooms to see if there was any word of what was going on, but not much was known. About this time, the Queen thought the joke was so funny, and it was time to turn the light on (she was still in the shower). I let her know about the situation, and our only answer was to open the curtains to let in what moonlight existed and shut the door, so she could at least get out of the shower.

We endeavored to do as much as possible in Colorado Springs during the week we planned to be there, but the first thing we wanted to do was get into a different hotel. We tracked down a Howard Johnson that was more centralized and still reasonably priced, and ended up staying there the rest of the week. One added bonus to this place was that we got a copy of the newspaper every morning, so we actually knew what was going on in the area.

One thing I had wanted to do, but turned out to be not possible was see Les Miserables, which was playing in Denver the week we were there. Unfortunately, when I called the month before for tickets, they were already sold out completely. Oh well.

I showed the Queen around town for the most part on the first day. We hit some tourist places, but it was mostly just driving around. She loved the town. What's not to love? It's got great scenery. The air is pristine.

I took her onto Fort Carson, where I'd been stationed nearly five years before. It had changed a bit. The band room was gone completely. It looked like it had been demolished recently. It was a fairly quick trip on and off base. After all, you can't do anything on a military base without a military ID, so it was a tour and little more, but it was enough.

One thing I wish I could remember clearly was the sequence in which we did things, because we did a lot of stuff that week. We rode the tram up Pike's Peak, but couldn't get to the top due to there still begin snow at the top. We went through Garden of the Gods and marveled at the natural beauty. We went to Seven Falls. We went thru Cave of the Winds, where we got to experience the classic of cave tours: total darkness. I know the Cave of the Winds happened on Friday before we left because it snowed our last day there, and I do remember snow coming back to the hotel from there.

But there was one event that overshadowed us for a little while, and caused a few extra calls on my cell phone. It was Tuesday, and we had gone to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo followed by a drive through the zoo (which was wild) up to the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun. When we got up there, there was a news report on about an incident in Littleton, CO, which is outside of Denver, some 70 miles North of us. The police were out at Columbine High School because of a shooting incident.

Yup. April 20, 1999 brought us the worst school shooting in American history, and forever changed the way we look at school security. We wanted to have children, and the thought of something like that happening at a school was horrifying. Twelve students, one teacher, and the two gunmen themselves died that day, and twenty-four others who were injured in the attack. You may recall I mentioned that we got the newspaper at the Howard Johnson we stayed at, so our honeymoon newspapers (which were the Denver Morning News) were plastered with the incident for the rest of our stay there.

We still have these newspapers, and they paint a grim picture of introversion and pent-up anger gone horribly wrong. Today, schools have a lock-down policy because of this. The school where the princesses go (and will go) had an incident just recently with a BB gun where the kids were rapidly shuffled in from recess and locked in the rooms. Some foolish kid from the school next door thought it would be a good idea to take that to school.

But it's still very scary, and don't misunderstand me, we had a blast on our honeymoon. We want to head back up there at some point so the girls can see the wonders of God's creation for themselves, but events like that don't leave you. It lets us know that we must be ever vigilant in paying attention to what goes on around, and teach our children how to watch for these frightening things as well.

We keep ours quite sheltered for their young lives, but we know that at some point, we'll have to open that last door and let them see just how bad things can get. When do you show them that the world isn't all castles and unicorns? When do you take that dream away and introduce them to the darkness that's really out there? I know for Rock Girl, the time is coming soon, and while I want to procrastinate on it, that won't do her any good at all.

When we left Colorado on Saturday, the blanket of snow from Friday was still on the ground, and while we didn't want to return to reality, we were also starting a hopeful new life. One with many thoughts from the previous week, but also one that we knew we would face together. No one has clear sailing, but so far, we're doing quite awesome.

Someday, we'll go back up there with the princesses. But we''ll make sure it's over the summer, so next time, we can go all the way up Pike's Peak and see what the world looks like from God's point of view.

A Whirlwind of Events

Preparations were all in place. The month prior to the weeding, we'd got a lease on a one bedroom apartment in Tulsa. We got some furniture moved in so we had a place to sit and a place to sleep. I'd been living there since we'd gotten the apartment, so I was acclimated to the environment a little bit anyway. Not that it still didn't take a little while to get used to all the noise in an apartment complex anyway.

For my part of the wedding, I had the male role of "stay out of the way," so I don't really have any fascinating stories of the preparations or much of anything because I did my job so well. We had a couple of showers that I was able to attend: one held by my parents' church and another held by the Queen's family. She had her own personal shower where she got a myriad of pretty little things I've seen her in now and then.

She did have me make a couple of mix tapes for the reception (that we didn't use) as well as one for the pre-wedding music (that we hardly used), but that was my big responsibility: the music. Apparently she fell for the impressive size of my collection. It's pretty big.

Some might say I had the most boring bachelor party in the world, but you know, everyone has a party that's for them, and mine worked perfectly for me. We stayed up all night watching bad movies and then played Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, and let me tell you, when getting a question right gets you another turn, playing that game with the people I played with made for some very, very, very long turns. Anyone who knows Star Wars well enough to know what an Ugnaught is is bound to know the basic stuff inside-out.

The Queen indicated that she thought it was incredibly boring, and even though Darth Vader did bring beer, no one ended up drinking it. Welcome to Geek Central. Now, he should have brought Mountain Dew or Bawls or something else caffeinated. THAT would have been completely finished off.

I took off the day before the wedding as well as the week after. The day before the ceremony, we set up the church and did a rehearsal so we all knew what was going on. I remember it being very exciting that it was actually going to happen, but even that close, it still seemed like something we were only toying with, maybe because it wasn't REALLY happening during the rehearsal.

That night, we had the rehearsal dinner at the Spaghetti Warehouse in Tulsa, which is a pretty good Italian restaurant in the downtown area that had a room large enough to hold EVERYONE. It makes for one of the very, very few times that both families have been together, and other than the wedding (and the birth of three little girls for which most turned out), I don't believe it has happened since.

The day of the wedding I was actually scared to death that I would oversleep even thought the wedding was scheduled for 2 in the afternoon. Fortunately, I never oversleep for things I'm excited about, so I was up in plenty of time to shower, brush my teeth, comb my hair, and...well, I'm the guy, that's about it for me. Oh yeah, I shaved. Ta-da!

I heard the Queen got up about 2 or 3 hours before I did to start getting ready, but women take a lot of time to get themselves ready. Now, the Queen starts with a hot palette to begin with, so the more time she spends on herself, the more the boys go gaga over her because she just keeps looking better, so the fact that she spend all morning getting ready made her the brightest star in the building, which is naturally appropriate since she was the star of the show.

I got to the church at 11, which is when I was told to be there to ensure everything was completely ready...or rather, that I and my guys were completely ready. We ended up changing in the choir room, which was an odd choice for a changing room, since there is a glass door to the outside. Anyone who chose to be on the backside of the building would have gotten a brief, yet boring, show of a few guys changing.

After the change, we were waiting around....and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. Well, I found my way to the drum set and announced my new song..."Baby." Now this was a joke I'd made up some months before, but I'd never found my way to an actual drum set to play it. The gist of it is that I played a basic R&B beat on the set, and every 4 bars I would sing out "Baby..." Repeat ad nauseum.

It wasn't too long before someone showed up in the doorway and said we were being too loud. Oh well. So I moved over to the piano, and started in on a simple rock beat and chord progression that I made up as I went along. Farmer, who was one of my groomsmen, tooled around on the organ after I told him the progression I was playing. Engineer played quietly on the drums for awhile. It was fun.

Then it was time. We got off the instruments and got our game faces on. We went out and stood by the minister to watch the girls come in one by one. The Engineer was my best man, with Farmer and Darth Vader as the other two groomsmen. In reverse order, my sister, who I've discovered hasn't been named yet so I'll call her Vaughn (it's a thing with her, and God bless her, she is a geek), came in first because she was 12 at the time, and Darth Vader is short. She was followed by The Queen's friend for years who does CG special effects for movies (you've seen her work in the first Harry Potter movie, Star Wars II, Stuart Little, and the list goes on and on), and finally the Queen's best friend since college who was the maid of honor.

Finally, the Queen came in with her father shining bright as the sun and lighting up the whole room. This was when it all became very exciting because until that time, it wasn't REALLY happening. Now she was here in that dress looking so beautiful, and I knew it was really going down right then. Her father gave her away, and I walked down to take to the pastor to conduct the ceremony.

Emotions ran very, very high on the ceremony. Everyone said they did all right until The Engineer lost it and started sniffling through the whole ceremony. I could hear him behind me, but the poor girls had to watch him. You have to understand that he and I are only 18 months in age, so for all intents and purposes, we grew up like twins. When I got married, and for the first time, I was really leaving home, it meant he was actually on his own. Well, not really. We remain very, very close and see him a couple times a week.

The excitement, though, was incredible. I was very happy to have the Queen as my wife (a term that took a little time to get used to), and I've never regretted it. We were announced and it was done. Time to go to the reception...well, no, that was everyone else. We had pictures to do.

So we got pictures of us, the parents, each section of the family, the wedding party, and while it took a little while, we were still high on the moment, so it really didn't matter.

We went to the reception and greeted everyone as they passed on their congratulations. We took a little bit of time to cut the cake, which was awesome. It was white with Italian creme and tasted like a dream from (I believe it is (or was) called) Anne's Bakery -- the Queen will undoubtedly correct if I'm wrong.

Then I learned something about being the groom at a reception. You see, one reason going to weddings is cool is all the food they serve as well as the incomparable cake. I knew about the food that was going to be there, and I was very much looking forward to eating some of it. Well, as the groom of the wedding, sitting down is not an option. There were so many people there that our task was move among them and be the guests of honor that we were. Obviously, I have no problem being the center of attention, but part of me was bummed that I didn't get to chill much there and nibble a bit. All right, I did nibble as we walked about, but I didn't get a plate.

The Queen said I could have with no problem, but to me, it seemed to be rather odd to have done so to be walking about with a plate talking to everyone with a mouth full of food.

Before we knew it, it was time to go. Everything moved like a whirlwind since the ceremony began from getting up in the morning to the playing with my buddies to the ceremony, the reception and now, onward to some quiet time. We went into a room away from everyone and changed into our traveling clothes. The Queen had a suitcase she was going to take on the honeymoon to put in my car, which we were taking to Colorado to spend a week.

My car had been tagged by the over-zealous party guests, so we drove off to stay the night at a local Day's Inn. Everyone else was going to help clean up and take whatever gifts we had gotten to our apartment. But it was over. We had done it. We were married, and the happiest pair of campers in town.

So we got to the Day's Inn, and (I'll be honest) completely passed out. Who knew the day was so hard on both of us, but we were both dead tired. We woke up a few hours later and finally ate a meal. Neither of us had had anything that entire day but a little cake, and whatever snacks I swiped from the tables at the reception.

But the rest of the night is none of anyone else's business.

Into the Fireplace

The opportunity was there. I was injured on the job and physically unable to return to the same position. I got a note from Goldfinger saying I couldn't go aboe 15 feet and I couldn't go on rooftops. This is reasonable as I had no depth perception, and having that is critical to, say, catching yourself so you don't fall off a roof.

I took this info to the Fireboss, and he read the restriction. He made a serious of weird faces as he looked at it...for probably five or ten minutes he did this. He probably wanted to say "go away," but he legally couldn't. He apparently didn't know what to do with me. He should have said, "we don't have a place for you," and I would have been free in my mind to go onto the retraining...but he didn't.

No, instead he waffled around for a week, talking on his phone to his wife (the other half of the business) and generally wasting time. I finally called the lawyer I'd gotten to deal with the whole matter to see what he thought, and he put pressure on the insurance people to put pressure on the Fireboss to make a decision. So a decision was made.

I became a technician under the guy who installed the gas logs. My job became going to houses, both new and old, to install and repair gas logs of all varieties. It was highly technical and mechanical type work, but perfect for my sensibilities, so for a time, I enjoyed it.

I'd say one of the most amusing times I had (and saddest) was when I'd gone out to a house to find out why their remote wasn't working. First thing I did: change the battery. It worked. That'll be $45. They fussed, but I deferred to the office, and that it was a service call. That was about the only time I ever dealt with cash of any kind, too. Most of the time, the service was already paid for.

The Queen, at that time, was employed at a bank working in the cash vault in the dungeon. She has this thing for money. Now don't misunderstand me, she's not one of those weird greedy chicks, but she likes the smell of the paper money, especially when it's brand new. When she was growing up, she always went for the paper rather than coins like most kids, because she thought it was "pretty." Smart kid.

So to date, she's the only one of us who's actually seen what a million dollars in cash looks like since she had occasion to deal with that much down there counting in the dungeon.

Once I was installing the logs, though, we were back on track as much as we were before. The wedding had been scheduled for the coming April, and preparations were well underway. She is far more qualified to speak of all that than I am, because you have to remember what a guy's job is in the preparation of a wedding: stay out of the way when not requested, provide input only when requested, and show up on time.

That's not a chauvinistic approach. It's just that a wedding is what women plan for, and they want to shoot for as close to their dream as they can. The groom is just a part of that process that they have to include in the overall plans. And after I went back to work, there was about 5 months until the magic day.

The basics were covered at this point. It was going to be at a church that her grandmother still attends in her family's original hometown as opposed to Broken Arrow. The Queen was going crazy getting all the little details put together and for me, I haven't a clue, which is where they wanted me. After all, my job is to show up. I'm sure she could go on for a year writing just about the wedding and all that went into it.

Me? I was just happy to with her. The wedding was exciting, and I had my own bits of things to take care of as well. After all, we had to live somewhere, so I was taking care of my duties by seeking out an apartment to get us started in. A place where the two of us were going to begin a new life together as a family.

It seems so long ago, and it's nothing short of amazing as to how much can happen in only a few years. Next month, we hit nine years of being married, and those nine years were probably the most eventful I've ever had. Learning doesn't stop after you get out of school. Every day something happens to add to your knowledge and experiences of life. You learn to depend on yourself and depend on others and learning to find the balance of when to rely on each of those.

One thing I know is that you can't live your life alone. It's just not possible. Hermits manage to get by alone, but they miss a lot that this world has to offer. Everyone survives symbiotically reliant on others around them, and through those relationships we grow and change and continue to become a little bit better (or worse) every day. My life is what I've made of it, and in retrospect, I can see how every decision has lead me to different ends, and I reflect on what I might do different should individual occasions arise again.

Sometimes, I wonder if I would want to change how things played out over my life. Would I try to hook up with the Queen in high school? Would I go to college? Would I have taken the chance to hit West Point? But with each change, there would have been changes to everything else that happened. What about all the good things that have occurred in my life? Would I want those good things to change? Rock Girl is the way she is because of when she was born, how we were when she was growing up, and the experiences she was given based on our experiences at the time, and she is a wonderful child. I wouldn't want her to change at all, but changing my past would change her.

Same would go for the other two as well. Changing anything about our pasts would alter their makeup and personalities, and even the circumstances under which they were conceived which would change their entire being. Would I want them to change? No, I wouldn't. I would want a better life for them, but I want them just the way they are. That means that I can't change anything.

Life is a delicate balance of everything that happens. No, I'm not a Zen master or anything, but that seems to me to be a basic truth. But no, I don't subscribe to the idea that when a butterfly dies in central Africa that it affects me over here or there is some all powerful force of microscopic beings that holds the universe together. But we do make a life for ourselves that means something to us and those around us. It's that very idea that makes the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" so powerful.

Anyway, such are the thoughts that occur to me now after nine years, where at the time, I was just excited to be getting married to the girl I loved more than anything in the world. And although people have trouble believing it, we had no idea we were only a few months away from having another girl drop into our lives and rock our world in ways we never thought possible.

It's all fun and games... Part 2

Darkness.

Something was over my eye. A bandage?

Movement.

My mother is sitting in a chair to my left. She noticed I'm awake.

I'm not.

I wake up again. It's lighter now. That day is very, very fuzzy in my memory.

I don't deal well with anesthesia. In fact, it makes me sick afterwards. But I learned that I was under for about 5 hours and I spent the next day drifting in and out of consciousness. Everyone came in at one time or another to see how I was doing. The Queen had gone into work, and they told her to go home.

It was probably 10 that evening before I was cognizant enough to talk to anyone. I ate something light that the hospital gave me. I hadn't eaten, you may recall, in almost two days by this point, as the last time I'd eaten was Sunday night, and it was now Tuesday evening, but they urged me not to eat very fast since I'd gotten sick off the anesthetic. I know I talked to the Queen for awhile that evening, and while I don't remember everything we talked about, I imagine it centered around what happened.

I was in the hospital through that Friday, and in my typical fashion, I bounced back fairly quickly. By Wednesday, I was very coherent, and while I was getting drops in my eye every 4 hours, I didn't feel bad. I didn't know the true state of my eye because it was swollen shut, so trying to see if I could see was out of the question. They had to pry it open to get the drops in.

There were a couple of highly amusing incidents while I was in the hospital involving the Queen and I. While I was interred there, they loved to take my blood pressure. Seemed like they did the blood pressure more than they did the eye drops. Anyway, I probably became known for faulty readings now and then because of The Queen.

On one occasion, I was hooked up to the blood pressure deal and they had the pulse and everything going. Well, the Queen walked in, and all the readings changed. The nurse freaked for a moment, and then figured out what happened. She walked in and my heart rate jumped, so there's medical proof of her effect on me.

On another occasion, she was already in there, and they barged on in to do the blood pressure thing. Well, we'd been kissing and when they did the blood pressure, the nurse freaked again since my readings were way off. Again, though, she assessed the situation and figured it out. The Queen was no longer allowed to be around when they did blood pressure. I guess they wanted my resting rate.

After the hospital stay things move a bit quicker. There are times in a relationship where its strength is put to the test, and these next few months tested us to the limit. I had gone home, and since my bed was the top bunk of a bunk bed (yes, I was engaged and slept in a bunk bed), my parents made up the day bed in the living room so I didn't have to climb to sleep, and they could do my eye drops more easily.

I was ordered to sleep on my stomach because of something having do to with my eye, which is not normal for me. I sleep very much like a corpse -- flat on my back. Not that I stay that way on most nights, but I have been comfortable like that for quite some time.

During that first month, I went to see another doctor who was a retina specialist of some kind. He had examined me and wanted to put a gel bubble in my eye to try and re-attach the retina or at least keep it in place. I was set for another surgery at the end of the month to not only do that procedure but to do a cornea transplant, since mine was still damaged with stitches across the middle of it (yeah, how many people do you know that have had stitches in their eye?).

So under the anesthesia I went again, but in a more prepared manner this time. Got there in the morning and 10...9...8...

I woke up in I guess some kind of post-operating room in that little cramped bed. I remained semi-conscious until I was in a room with a more comfortable bed, since the only way I was able to lie on that bed was to cross my arms on my chest, which I didn't want to do. However, that wasn't the most unpleasant part of that experience...you see, I don't react well to anesthesia, and this is where I found that out with a vengeance.

I woke up, and immediately threw up. A nurse in the room got something for me to puke into, but since I hadn't eaten the previous evening, I didn't have much to throw up. This retching continued to occur until I was able to rest comfortably.

This stay was shorter than the last one. I was still getting drops every four hours or so twenty-four hours a day, and both doctors checked me out thoroughly over my brief return to the hospital, but I was quickly discharged with another bandage over my eye and a fair supply to keep it bandaged.

My eye actually stayed bandaged for most of that first three months starting with a shell over the bandages taped to my head, moving to having a patch over the bandages. When the bandages came off, I wore a patch to keep the light out of my eye so it could continue to heal.

Right after that surgery, when I was able to open my eye (it was still very swollen) I could make out some blurry objects, so I felt there was hope, but only time would tell since I really couldn't open it that well. I could perceive light differences without a problem, but without a lens and iris, would I be able to see anything?

The Queen visited as much as she could, but I was quite homebound for a little while. It's amazing how much the eyes work together so that when one of them is damaged, the other will respond sympathetically. I was actually very, very light-sensitive for 3 months after the accident and couldn't drive or anything during that time. The Queen and I never ventured far, and she always drove during that time, so our wild dates were on hold for a bit.

But she stuck with me. Some people said they wouldn't have been able to deal with such a traumatic event, especially since we were only engaged, and she could have gone at any time. We continued to talk about the coming wedding and tossed around possible dates from November of that year to the date we'd discussed earlier which was April of the next year.

An amusing aside to these three months was that Allison (bless her warped little heart) called my parents house while I was sleeping in the living room...at 1:00 in the morning. This was fortunately the last time I actually spoke with her because she was going on about how she was working in Dallas or something and knew people and told them about my work and was helping me get my stuff going (can't help but notice nothing ever came of that...oh wait, I expected that). The best part of that whole conversation was when she spouted, "if I help you with this, I'll be damned if I can't come up to you, shake your hand, and say 'good job'." So I told her, "Ok, you can come up to me, shake my hand, and say 'good job'." The conversation ended quickly after that since I wasn't very communicative with her to begin with (after all, my father was a bit miffed about being awakened at 1:00 in the morning by a phone call). And my life has been Allison free ever since...well, there were a handful of emails later, but those are another completely pointless story.

I started trying to drive after about 3 months, and it was hard to both adjust to my light sensitivity, which was getting better, and driving with one eye. My eye hadn't healed enough to know for sure whether there was any hope for it, so I was still working to do everything with monocular vision. You never really appreciate depth perception until it's gone, and with my eyesight, I had some killer depth perception. But I learned that depth perception is only good up to about ten feet. After that, everything looks about the same to everyone.

One of the changes to my behavior due to my loss of depth perception was how I pick things up. Most people just reach for something and lift it. Mine is a subtle change that most people won't notice unless I tell them outright what I'm doing. It's easier to perceive height than distance, so I lower my hand to the height of the object I want to pick up, and then move my hand towards it until I touch it. I've gotten to the point now (ten years later) that that action is imperceptable to anyone watching, but I still have to pick up things that way.

After two more months, I was getting weary of my 70% Worker's Comp pay and felt it was time to be getting back to a real job again. Now this is where I really screwed up more than just whacking my eye to begin with. You see, without depth perception, I could not reasonably work on a rooftop, so I could have and should have taken the option to be trained in something else. Should have, should have, should have.

I would have taken whatever computer classes they deemed necessary to bring myself up to speed and gotten into the industry I'm in now ten years ago. And it's not like I didn't know or wasn't told either. The Queen and her family were all suggesting it, but I felt some level of warped obligation to the fireplace boss that definitely didn't pay off at all. Oh well.

It's all fun and games...

Surely, you've heard the phrase before. It's all fun and games until somebody puts an eye out...then hey, free eyeball! Seriously, though, all the threats and warnings roll around in the heads of most people every time they start running with scissors or juggling pencils (which everyone does sometimes, right?). But in all honesty, how many people have actually done it? Can you think of any? Even one?

Let's face it, most people probably can't. They've heard the warnings and yet, there is no living proof for most people that someone would actually put their eye out doing some mundane activity such as chipping rocks or drilling holes in random objects. Well, if you are reading these words (and if you are comprehending them, then there is really no other way you could be receiving this message unless someone is reading them to you, but that totally counts), then you have on the other end of this keyboard the living proof you've been looking for your entire life.

We'd been engaged one week. About a month prior, I'd left my job at RadioShack to work for a fireplace company in town installing fireplaces in new construction homes. It paid more than RadioShack, and was actually a lot less work than sales, so I went for it. The guy I worked with was a little harsh sometimes, and in the few days prior to this incident, he was being really, really hard on me and threatening to have me fired if I didn't step up the speed a bit.

The Friday before, I'd managed to mess up two sheet metal covers by misfiguring the dimensions...twice. My doing so, I used up both sheets we'd brought to make the covers with. This had upset the guy I was with considerably, but since he lived out that way anyway, he said he'd get it on the way home.

That morning, we'd gone out to a house with a really high chase on it (a chase, if you don't know, is the industry term for the chimney, but while the word chimney only refers to the part that sticks out of the house, chase refers to the entire internal run from the fireplace to the outside), and some extra accessories which were my responsibility to make sure I'd grabbed them all. Well, once we got the cover on the chase (which I'd made correctly that time), we needed to put the vent on the unit. Well, guess what? I hadn't grabbed the tube stuff we use to run the vent to the outside of the house, so I had to run back into the shop to get it. Again, he was not happy.

After that fiasco, we did another house which went well, and finally came to a job so big that it works perfectly as a final scene in this mini-movie. Not only were my partner and I out there but the boss and another guy were there too. It took four of us to get this one taken care of.

To place some perspective on this, I'll give you the precise location where we were. In Tulsa, there is a museum called Philbrook Art Museum. It is located in a very high end neighborhood where the houses near it are comparable to the museum house. The house were working on was across the street from Philbrook's exit, so if you are driving out of Philbrook and look directly across the street, you will find a three story house that was stucco at the time. That's the place.

The run of the pipe through the chase wound through the walls of this house in probably the craziest manner possible until it finally came out the top. I was wearing some jean shorts that day and actually tore a hole in the butt, so I was showing off my underpants most of the day as well, not to mention this job came up right before lunch so I hadn't eaten anything all day. But the time came to make the cover, and since the boss was there, I was motivated to show that I could get this thing done correctly and quickly the first time.

I took the measurements of the top of the chase, measured where the pipe was coming out so I could offset it properly and ran down the ladder balanced on the balcony and down the stairs in the house out to the truck. I measured and snipped that cover quicker than such a cover has been snipped and toted it upstairs and up the ladder to the roof.

The other three were up there waiting for me. It was my time to shine. I slid the cover over the pipe and it fit perfectly. All four sides lined up without a hitch -- it was just a matter of getting it around the screen wire the stucco had been plastered on. We had a standard way of doing this, and while improper, we used a screwdriver as a pry bar to pop the cover off of the screen wire, so it could slide right down and we could screw it into the sides of the chase.

I took the screwdriver out of my tool belt and popped one side of it, but there was another side also caught on the screen wire. Quick as a whip, I jumped over to that side, lowering myself inline with the side of the cover so I had a good view of what I was doing. I slipped the screwdriver between the lip of the cover and the screen wire and gave it a tug.

Next thing I knew, the screwdriver had hit me in the eye. I dropped it with a yell and covered my eye. Fortunately, the tiles on the roof were fake ceramic. If they were real, I'd have had some bigger problems related to a three story drop, but since they were fake, my shoes still gripped the roof, so when I went to my knees, I didn't slip. I knew I couldn't see out the eye, and I was panicked.

You see, my eye sight has always been a source of pride for me. I had 20/15 vision in both eyes. I could read stuff from a distance to make people sick. But now, I looked like a victim in a horror movie. Blood ran down the side of my face, and my shirt was covered in it. The other three helped me down the ladder, and got me to the boss's truck where he took over and drove me to the emergency clinic where worker's comp issues begin.

I was told I was going to see a Dr. Goldfinger (yeah, that's my Bond obsession showing through), so I called The Queen and in the calmest voice mentioned to her that I rammed a screwdriver into my eye and going to see Dr. Goldfinger. She initially thought I was joking since I was so calm, but once she realized I was serious about what had happened, she told her co-workers that she had to leave immediately...and they let her.

From here, things get a little fuzzy for me because I'd lost a lot of blood and was in a lot of pain. Don't let anyone fool you, poking your eye out is very, very painful. Goldfinger had a look at me and determined they needed to operate that evening to sew up the damage to buy time to do what really needed to be done. At this point, we knew I'd sent the screwdriver through my cornea, iris, lens, and probably hit the retina, detaching it. Ouch.

From there, I was allowed to lay down in a dark room with a trash can since I'd felt like vomiting more than once, but unfortunately, since my stomach was still empty, I had nothing to throw up. I was still in my bloody t-shirt and ripped shorts, so I was also quite cold, and probably going into shock from the pain, but still I waited. The Queen was allowed into the room, and she cleaned up my face. I don't know if I said anything worthwhile or not; I was passing into deliriousness.

The last thing I remember from that day was my being placed on a wheeled bed and stripped. They were shoving paper after paper in my face to get me to sign away all their responsibility. In a fit of frustration I told them that my father (who, I think, was nearby) could sign all the papers for me. He would have been in a much saner state of mind at that point.

So the paper pushers left me alone as I was wheeled into a room I would never be able to describe at that point. They put a mask over my face and told me to count down from ten to one.

10...9...

An Engaging Night

Most relationships have a defining moment; something that marks whether that relationship will ultimately succeed or fail. It will be something that also defines the strength of the people involved to the point that when they emerge from it, respect is no longer just a word, but something that has been bestowed and earned. In the drama that followed in our lives, we both earned respect from nearly everyone in how we both were able to handle our individual parts of what was to ensue.

June was to own two very defining moments, exactly one week apart. The first was the defining moment of a commitment to each other; the first step to spending the rest of our lives together. The second tested that commitment to a greater degree than any thought either of us were capable of.

Early in the month, the Queen and I had done some serious shopping for an engagement ring. Being that I wanted her to get what she wanted, we went together. Once we were set, I held onto it until the most opportune time. After all, there was one very important thing that needed to be done before the official question could be popped: I had to talk to her father.

As much fun as I tend to have with the names on here, I pondered a very long time as to what to call the Queen's father. There was no single name I could create that could convey the respect I have for him, nor the position that he holds in both our lives. I honestly tried, too, but in the end, I have to simply call him the Queen's father, and leave it at that. I don't want to risk being either inappropriate or disrespectful to him, because both he and the Queen Mother have been very good to us throughout our lives.

Of course, my most vivid memory of that day when I asked for his permission to take his daughter away from him was him eating the remaining ice cream out of a blue bell half gallon tub. I was very nervous, and let's face it, he's a big guy. Big, as in power lifter big. Inotherwords, he could benchpress me with very little effort. The Queen was out of the room, so I spouted my question: "Can I marry your daughter?" His response: "I don't know. Can you?" The joke ended there. He was deadly serious going forward.

What is the most important thing to a father? That his little girl is cared for. That who she ends up with not only respect her but respect the family as well. He told me he would always be there for us and to never screw him over or take advantage of his goodwill. Then he called the Queen in and asked if she knew about this. She said we'd talked about it, but that was it. He spoke to both of us briefly about responsibility and what we were getting into.

I did promise to take care of her, and I have always tried to. I cannot say I've always done right by them, but I can say I never intended to do anything wrong. As we were leaving, Darth Vader, who was 19 at the time, came running out. He also urged me to take care of his sister, or he would be most displeased. Ok, he didn't say it quite like that, but it fits my character name for him.

So we went out. We went to the pool hall where we'd gone so many times before. I remember she was wearing these Tigger overalls she had. I liked them for a variety of reasons, but mostly because she just looked cute in them. Don't ask me about shirt color -- be happy I remembered the overalls.

Anyway, we played a few games of pool and were going to head of to eat something. I had given a lot of thought as to how I would ultimately "pop" the question. I figured I'd have a little personality about me, but still try to maintain the romantic positioning that she seemed to want. I figured I'd do it after playing pool and before dinner...while walking to the car.

In line with my personality, as I walked around the car to let her in (the way I had to open my doors was to open the driver's side door first, and then reach across and unlock the passenger side door), I tripped over my own feet, landing quite conveniently on one knee. I dipped into my pocket for the ring. It took a moment to do this, apparently, because she asked if I was ok.

I popped back up, box open and asked her to marry me. Her hands went to her face. She was smiling behind them. She said yes. I rose to my feet and put the ring on her finger. She threw her arms around my neck, giving me another yes for good measure.

While I don't remember for certain where we ate after that, I would surmise that we ended up at the Olive Garden, since that's where we went for the special occasion. My memory leads me through the nervous tension that lead up to the moment, and then fades quickly once it happened. While I've worked through this, I've found that to happen with remarkable consistency. Isn't it odd that we vividly remember the trials of our lives, but seems to stop the movie as soon as the triumph happens? That's probably why stories end so quickly after the climax -- nothing interesting happens afterward.

But we know that interesting things did happen afterward. The trials were destined to continue, and even now, so many years later, are the trials starting to turn into more triumphs. It's been a long time since that boy and that girl promised themselves to each other, and thinking of their faces etched with hopefulness makes me think about how much I had to learn about so many things since then. Life changes so quickly, and memories disappear into the past so easily, and yet, when I picture that couple -- the couple that the Queen and I were on that June day -- I cannot help but smile. For even though we're not the people that we were then, I also know that those people are still inside of us, and every once in awhile, we still feel the euphoria of that day -- that day when everything was right, hopeful, and the world was at our feet.