Losing Me

I used to love Major League Baseball... even way back in the 80s when the Pirates were bad.  When I was in college I would jump on a bus to downtown Pittsburgh and take in a game by myself.  I watched every game on TV that I could.

Once, I even wrote a letter to the owners of the Cleveland Indians (David and Richard Jacobs) and told them to hire me as the team's manager.  At that time, the Indians were one of the worst teams in baseball year after year. My main selling point was that they couldn't do any worse.  I never heard from them.

But then 1994 happened.  1994 is the year that they played almost all of the regular season and then went on strike; ending the season and canceling the playoffs.  It was the year without a World Series.  It was also the last year I ever watched Major League Baseball.  It was at least 10 years before I ever went to another game.  Since then I have been to less than 10 games... and I haven paid to go to a single one.  Every game that I have seen was because I was given free tickets.  I haven't bought a single MLB licensed product.  Major League Baseball absolutely lost a fan in 1994.  And who knows... my kids aren't baseball fans now.  Maybe they would be if I still was.

Now there's the National Football League.  My current favorite sport.  I will spend the entire day on Sundays watching games.  Now they're on strike.  Strike/lockout I don't care what you call it.  It's a bunch of millionaires arguing with billionaires over how much they should get paid to play a game.

Keep it up NFL.  You're losing me.

Summer Is Upon Us

Today is the second day of summer.  Summer is, by far, my absolute favorite season of the year.  I want to say that it is the busiest time of the year, but it isn't entirely true.  Sure, there's grass cutting (which I haven't done in almost 2 weeks) and other things to take up all the time.  But my busy summer seems to be taking the theme of spending entire afternoons and evenings in the pool - yay!

Problem is... spending so much time in the pool leads to not getting much done.  As already mentioned, I'm behind on the grass cutting, though I plan to cut it tomorrow night.  But it has taken me away from spending time on the computer (not a bad thing) and blogging (again, not a bad thing).  Chilling in the pool also has me behind a bit some of the outside tasks that need to get done to get the house ready for sale next year.  And finally, just hanging in the pool isn't quite the exercise that I need to be getting to continue to my goal of losing 10 pounds.  Guess I need to spend more time throwing Paige and Nate across the pool to get my exercise in.

Maybe the exercise that I really need is throwing Jacob across the pool... ya, that doesn't go so well.

Different...

Today is the day that we celebrate our 17th anniversary.  There were a bunch of different things that we did in our ceremony that I don't think I've seen anything like them in any other ceremony.  I thought I'd list a few of them out.

As I already mentioned in my previous post, we responded with "Yes" when others normally respond "I do."

Unity Candle - We had a unity candle.  But we did something neat with it.  I took my candle and Tammie took her candle.  Together we lit the unity candle at the same time.  But then, after we blew out our individual candles, I gave mine to her mom and dad and Tammie gave hers to my mom and dad.

Vows - We wrote our own vows, but we used a passage from Ruth 1:16-17 to write them.  Here's the inspiration for our vows, "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.  Your people will be my people and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me."

Rings - We copied a scene from the movie, The Scarlet Pimpernel, for our ring ceremony.  Too much to explain, you'll just have to rent the movie.

I Will Be Here - My brother, Pete, played my 12 string guitar and sang this song by Steven Curtis Chapman in our wedding.

Reception - I refused to kiss on demand when people clanged their spoons on their glasses.  In fact, at one spot when the clanging was especially loud, I excused myself to the restroom.  Oh, and there was my friend, Will, who clanged so loudly/hard that he broke his glass.

One other interesting fact - It was a sunny, hot and humid day.  It did not rain at all that day... except for about 10 minutes during the ceremony.  It was just perfect enough to ease the humidity.  And honestly, if someone didn't tell me that it rained, we never would have known.  It was sunny otherwise.

A Drop in the Bucket

Over 18 years ago, I struck it rich; not in money.  Somehow, I convinced Tammie that it would be a good thing for her if she agreed to marry me.  And 17 years ago this Saturday, June 11, I convinced her that saying "Yes" was the right thing to do.  Apparently I was a much better liar or a budding used car salesman back then ;)

An interesting fact about our wedding: we didn't use the phrase, "I do."  Instead, when prompted by the pastor with the question, we gave the response, "Yes."  We took the Biblical passage in Matthew 5:37 literally.

Matthew 5:37 New International Version 1984 (NIV1984)
37 Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

17 years is something to be proud of these days.  But it is just a drop in the bucket for what we've committed to.  We committed to 'until death do we part' and we mean that.  I got the better end of the deal on that one.  Tammie is by far and away easier to live with than me.

When it comes to our marriage, I like to think of it in terms of a football analogy.  I often tell others that I out kicked my coverage on this one.  For some reason she has chosen to run slow enough for me to stay in the game. I love her for that, among many other reasons.

Happy anniversary, Babe!