October is an incredibly popular month for weddings so it seems. Two of our couple friends chose this month to tie the knot here in California, and this past weekend was the first.

Our friends Dave and John chose a perfect spot (the 15th floor of the Hyatt overlooking the Capital) for their wedding ceremony, dinner, and reception. I like weddings that are all inclusive like that, especially the hosted bar for the first hour ;-).

The service was performed by the former minster of the local MCC, and it was a blend of Christian and contemporary readings (including poetry from Robert Frost, and some Native American writings).

After the service they served dinner while guests socialized and hit the bar before it switched to no-host. We had a great time at our table - laughing, drinking, having fun with the wait staff, and generally goofing off like you do at a wedding reception. And then the fun started.

After numerous champagne toasts, lots of red wine, and a few screwdrivers/dirty martini’s/vodka cran’s, we were ready to dance. The DJ took requests, and after the obligatory slow songs to start the night off with, things got going.

It got so crazy at one point that all the groomsmen took their pants off (no worries, they had VERY long tux coats) and did a conga line around the dance floor to “I’m too sexy” by Right Said Fred. Hilarious. As soon as I figure out how to get the video off of my phone I’ll try to post it.

Anyway - thank you California for letting these types of ceremonies be possible for couples who love each other.

And a reminder to everyone who can, vote NO on 8. Don’t allow hate to be written into our constitution.

And finally, congratulations to Dave and John!!! Many years of joy to both of you!

If you have a lot of tea, you might be someone I’d like to know.

You might even call yourself a Person of Tea.

Background: when David first moved in, oh so many years ago, he was rummaging around through the kitchen cabinets and discovered boxes and boxes (and when I repeat that, I really do mean to imply that you need to be picturing a LOT of boxes) of tea. It was then that he knew that all would be right in the world, because I “had a lot of tea”.

I was intrigued. I’ve always had a lot of tea in the house - many varieties, many blends, many textures, many flavours. Some in bags, some loose leaf, but I’d definitely say I have a veritable cornucopia of teas. The predominant tea in the cupboard is Tazo brand. Their Passion tea is quite possibly one of my favourite teas, second only to Earl Grey. But again you might ask, what does it mean to have “a lot of tea” other than you went to the store and bought more?

Having a lot of tea implies a worldly aura, an essence if you will, that most people don’t have. It means that you are open minded, introspective, thoughtful, big-picture, and many other adjectives that all mean the same thing. It means that your ness is worldly, that your ness is a Ness of Tea. It’s a good thing - it’s an up thing - it’s a tea thing.

Coffee does not count. You can not be a Person of Coffee. You can be a person who drinks coffee, but drinking coffee does not put you at the same level as being a Person of Tea. Sorry.

Are you a person of tea? Do you find that drinking tea opens your mind to new places, new things, new levels of existence? Is it a spiritual journey to partake of the tea? Perhaps…what do you think?

* Tea image from Wikimedia Commons

It’s been several days since I’ve thrilled and entertained you. This post, however, is neither. We had a pretty exciting weekend, and by exciting I mean scary and stressful.

Here’s what happened, in a nutshell.

David went to the city (San Francisco for those of you who aren’t Californians) for the weekend to visit some friends. He took the train down on Saturday afternoon, checked into his hotel, chatted with me for a while, then got ready to go out to a party. He left on Muni at around 10:38pm Saturday night.

At 3:03am, Sunday morning, I get a text message from him that says “Im beat up pretty bad”, which I didn’t get since I was asleep. However, I did get the subsequent phone call from him. The muggers took his wallet but didn’t notice his cell phone in his front pocket.

He was somewhere in San Fran, and had just been mugged and his wallet stolen. He was trying to get back to his hotel. While I was on the phone with him, someone came up to him and told him to go into a nearby club and they would call the police.

That was the last I heard from him for the moment. I tried calling over and over, sent multiple text messages asking him to let me know he was safe, but I did not get any response. At approximately 4am, I got dressed and put a few things together at the house and set out for the city with my plan to go to his hotel and get him - assuming that’s where he wound up.

30 minutes into the trip I realized that if he had been mugged and his wallet stolen then he had no ID - but we have spare drivers licenses and passports at home, so I turned around, drove back home and got the ID. Before I left, however, I called the hotel to see if he had arrived.

He had not. I started googling hospitals in the area and called four before I found him. He had been admitted to the ER, but they could not provide any more details. At least I knew where he was at that point, so I once again set out for the city.

I arrived close to 7am and they let me right in…to the trauma ward. David (Trauma Tango) was alert and stable and the nurse (who we came to adore during the course of the day) arrived shortly to fill me in on what was going on. At that point the information was limited - he was fine, no internal injuries (revealed by the CT scan). He was very drowsy and dizzy, and they were not going to release him until he was able to stand up and walk himself down the hall and back…that didn’t happen until about 3 in the afternoon.

So I’ll skip forward to then - the detective showed up to do an interview in the middle of the trauma ward. David was still groggy from the morphine and dizziness, but we got through it and he was finally able to get up, get dressed and walk out to the car. In the mean time I had gone over to the hotel and checked him out, gotten his things and returned with change of clothes. The clothes he’d been wearing at the time of the mugging were with CSI (and still are), so it was either a hospital gown (which as we all know is not the best fashion statement) or the spare shorts he’d packed before leaving.

We got home and he went right to bed and has been steadily improving over the last two days.

All in all he was beaten, kicked, robbed, oh, and stabbed seven times in the back. I’ll spare you the pictures.

That’s as much detail as I can share right now since the investigation is still going on, but thank you to everyone who has sent well wishes and good vibes (especially to Stef/Spike/V who took care of the kids, cleaned our kitchen, and brought food while we were in SFO). I’ll share more details as I’m able but for now suffice it to say he’s doing ok and we’re just watching for infection in the wounds and making sure the swelling on his face and head goes away.

Here’s hoping for a quiet week.

First, a joke:

How many ADD kids does it take to change a lightbulb?

I don’t know, how many.

Hey, let’s go ride bikes!

I don’t think that’s exactly how it went when I first heard the joke but it’s pretty darn similar. Anyway…over the weekend we went bike shopping for David. I already have a bike (Specialized Hardrock - similar to this picture), and have had one for about 10 years now. For the better part of those 10 years it’s either been sitting in a closet or hanging in the garage waiting for someone to do something with it.

I think I rode it exactly two times after I first bought it, and then never rode it again. Not because I can’t, or because I don’t like to, I just lost the motivation.

A month or so ago, David pulled it down from the garage hook, filled the tires with air, and took it for a test spin around the block. But then again it got hung back up and wasn’t talked about - until last Friday.

We’ve been trying to come up with some active things we can do together, to lose weight, that doesn’t require the gym. I can’t stand going to the gym and David has been paying for a membership for the last year without ever going. We needed to find something we could do right from the house. So I said, “why don’t we go out on Saturday morning and head over to the bike shop and buy you a bike?”

And thus the idea was born. We went to East Sac Bikes first, because we’d never been there and they seemed to have a wide selection of bikes. A wide selection of $600 bikes is more like it. We were in the store for less than 5 minutes before I was pestering David to leave. Then off we went to Target. Target had a pretty good selection of men’s mountain bikes, and after test driving 3 of them along the aisle, we found a very nice one.

David is now the proud owner of a Schwinn Clearcreek, and it’s a pretty sassy looking bike as you can see here.

So we’ve gone on three rides already, and we’re going to try to keep the momentum up and see how much weight we can lose. So far it’s been a lot of fun riding around town, but we’re working up to longer rides and tougher rides. I’ll let you all know how it goes, and how much my waist line shrinks!

Cheers!

As most of you know I’m terribly fond of words and language. Rachelle knows this, and she gave me a Forgotten English Page-A-Day Calendar way back at the beginning of the year.

I am pleased to share with you the calendar footnote for June 25, because I think it’s topical and an interesting concept that is still practiced today in Neopaganism.

Guid Nychburris,

a fair whose name meant “good neighbors” was held in late June in Dumfries, Scotland. Its medieval origin is steeped in a tradition of helping quarreling citizens reconcile their differences. John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland (1791) alluded to this gathering as a venue for another friendly custom: “At that fair, it was the custom for the unmarried persons to choose a companion with whom they were to live till that time next year. This was called handfasting. If they were pleased they continued together for life. If not, they separated and were free to make another choice.”

Let’s talk about the upsides:

• Imagine how this could solve many of our societal marriage challenges (and I’m not referring to gay marriage - I’m referring to divorce rates, sham marriages, Las Vegas marriages, 24 hour annulments, Pam Anderson’s marriages, domestic violence, etc.).
• It’s basically like a trial marriage…you have a boyfriend/girlfriend for a year, live together, see how it all works out, and then openly and honestly determine if it’s for the long-term. If not, no hard feelings, just move on to the next hottie in town.
• Many relationships fail after people move in together, because that’s when you’re really put to the test of being able to tolerate another person in your space. This handfasting process would give you the test, and if you fail, you’ve only got to wait until the next festival to try again until you pass.
• Handfasting provides the ability to have same gender coupling, or even multi-partner coupling for those who wish to have more than two people in their family (reference) - very progressive

So what are the downsides?

• You’ve got to wait a year, even if you know after a few days, or a month, that it’s not going to be a long term relationship.
• If you fool around on your chosen handfaster, that’s likely not going to bode well the next time you go to the party :-).
• Constant moving! I don’t know about you, but I hate moving. I don’t even like moving offices at work. Boxing up your life every year and moving to someone else’s house, or having them move into yours would be disastrous if it’s only for a year. Bring on the U-Haul.

I’m sure there are many more upsides and downsides, but I’m interested in what YOU think about this interesting festival…

* Image from Wikipedia

This weekend we were treated to the births of hundreds of Praying Mantis’. We have egg sacks all over the back yard, but this was the first time we had actually seen the birthing process in progress.

Starting at about mid-morning, the mantis’ burst forth from their birthing chamber and took over the cabana. Here you can see the ones that stuck around near their home for the past several months.

While it may look like there are a lot of little critters coming out of that small egg container - this isn’t even the half of it. All across the beam of the cabana we counted approximately 120 new baby mantis’. Within about 4 hours, they had all but scattered and only a few remained close to home.

This morning, there isn’t a single mantis inside the cabana. They made their way to the various plants around the yard, climbing up on the grape vines, sneaking their way underneath the basil and rosemary, and generally hanging upside down under any leaf they can find.

We’re very excited to see what happens with them this year - last year we had quite a number of large and beautiful creatures in the yard. As you can see here, the male and female are in the midst of creating a new batch of kids…

Isn’t nature magnificent

Let’s all bow our heads in prayer.

Some days ago, I was embroiled in an interesting conversation with a coworker about the stress and life-sucking that goes on because of work and life distractions. I was also noticing the volume of grey hair I’m developing above my ears. It might have been that which concerned me more than the other stuff, but regardless, it prompted a question, which I’ll get to in a moment.

In the last six months I have gone from having 3-5 grey hairs above my ears to over 20. Ok, maybe 30.

Six months! Granted, there have been some very stressful situations at work, but come on. I’m really not that old, and yet there they are…and they aren’t from age, they are 100% confirmed, from stress. I’ve had them tested. But that’s not the point. The point is, the thought that occurred was, could I sue for damages because my life has been sucked away from me not unlike the Pit of Despair scene in The Princess Bride? And if I could, how much is a year of life worth?

What is the value of one year of your life?

It’s got to be more than your annual salary, because that’s just an artificial valuation of your contributions (hopefully) based on measurements, statistics, averages, and other nonsensical stuff. Even if you determined an hourly rate of your life and multiplied it by the number of hours in a typical year (1 year = 8765.81277 hours) would that still really give you the true value of you living for a year?

How would you value the influence you have on others, or the changes you make that might cause something to happen a year from now that would never have happened had you not done the original thing? And realistically, COULD you even put a value on all the possible outcomes? Unlikely. So really what it comes down to is what would a jury of your peers award you for damages.

That’s where the numbers become fun. You can get billions of dollars from tobacco companies because you failed to heed the warnings about smoking (or the nasty smell that your friends constantly complained about). You can get millions upon millions in wrongful death lawsuits. So let’s say an entire life lost is worth, let’s find a recent one in the news, $25 million (that’s the supposed estimate for John Ritter).

If you average 85 years, that works out to about $294,117.65 a year. I think we know there are a heck of a lot of people who make more than that in their annual salary. Should those people be valued more than a famous actor who made us laugh and smile for so many years? Should those of us with significantly lower salaries or job glamour be devalued? Is there something like an adjustable rate mortgage on a year of your life than can wax and wane based on your annual accomplishments? If you influenced more people this year, are you worth more?

It’s completely philosophical I suppose, and I’m not really interested in finding THE answer…but I am interested in what YOU think the value of one year of your life is, and why.