Life has changed as we know it.

I'm married. The knot was tied on October 2, 2010, to a beatiful young lady named Christine C., whom I have written about before. I'll let you find her in this blog. Why should I have all the fun, right?

Oh, and we took a 10-day honeymoon in Savannah, GA.

Anyway, so after our wedding, we attended the wedding of John E. (aka, Jay) and Breana H. (both about whom have also written). Their wedding was in NH, on October 9, 2010. I was the goon in a tuxedo: a goonsman, as it were. The rest of the men in tuxedos were gentlemen.

After that, we went to St. Louis and sang at the wedding of Emma F. (whom I have also written about here) and Andy K. (whom I have never mentioned before now, but is such an awesome dude that I feel powerful bad saying those words). I got the honor of DJ'ing the wedding reception. This wedding occurred on October 16, 2010.

My honeymoon started on Thursday, October 21, in the evening, when Christine and I flew to GA. We landed in Altanta, visitied with her family until Saturday, drove to Savannah, and stayed there until Monday morning, November 1. We did a lot of sight-seeing, and Christine took lots of pictures. Savannah is a beautiful city, and pictures don't do it justice, but you'll get a hint of the granduer when we post them.

If we ever get around to posting them... :-D

I'm a wine snob

Darn it all. I've become a wine snob. I went to the Bistrot du Coin yesterday with some of the guys from work. I tried 3 of their 5 white wines (one was a rose), and I did not care for any of them. I was expected much better from a French bistro, especially since the French are known for their wines.

But the sad thing about all of this is that I've become a snob about it if I don't care for the wine. Seriously, that's bad. I couldn't simply enjoy a glass of wine that was not what I expected. I was expecting a better Chardonnay or Rosé, but I was so sold on what I expected that I couldn't appreciate the differences.

Again, this is BAD. Next time, no snobbishness!

A mouse in the house

So that was fun! We had a mouse in the house yesterday! I was sitting upstairs working late at night in Eric's office (I've practically confiscated it), when I saw what looked like a large piece of lint drift across the floor.

"My, that's a large piece of lint," I thought to myself.

Turning to see this wonder, I noticed that it was not your average piece of lint. It was much thicker, and looked somehow fuller.

And it was looking at me.

In a flash, I realized that this was no ordinary, household piece of lint. It was an ordinary household mouse.

Now, I like rodents. I think they're cute. So when I saw him, I had a flash of fascination with seeing a third mammal occupying space within the two-mammal abode. Then when I blinked, he bolted.

He bolted so fast that I was honestly startled. I didn't react immediately: in fact, it took me a second to realize that I was startled, and I only realized it when I felt the cool-water-dumped-on-your-head chemical that usually follows a startled/all functions on high alert/adrenaline chemical.

Does anyone else have that feeling, or am I just wierd?

Anyway, so I sat staring at the empty floor space, trying to figure out what just happened, when my mind came back to me in a rush. There was a mouse in the house, and no matter how much I liked him, he had to go.

"Eric!" I hollered.

"What?" he responded.

"........There's a mouse in the house." I hesitated to say it, because I was still fascinated by the Mus musculus.

".....What?" He then turned to his cell phone. "Hold on, baby, I'll call you back."

He came walking into the office. "What?"

"There's a mouse in the house."

He broke into a smile. "Really?"

"Yeah, he just ran under the desk." I started to trace his path with my eyes, and moved a box. Turns out, he was hiding right behind it, so he bolted again. Giggles followed as the chase was on. Eric grabbed a shoebox, and since I was the one wearing shoes, I also was the one to come close to him. He was a fast little guy; he zipped around the box and hopped over my foot as deftly as if he was born to do just this.

He probably had been born to do just this.

Eric got a shoebox. When he came back in with the box, I took my eyes off the mouse, and he darted off, except this time, I didn't see where he went. We figured that he went straight into the closet. Sure enough, that is exactly where he went. We pulled stuff out and managed to corner the little rascal, but he zipped out and around again. We cornered him again and trapped him, but couldn't get him into the box, so Eric got some gloves, and I reached over and picked him up and put him into the box.

In the shoebox, he started jumping around, and was pretty close to jumping out. We decided to move him from the shoebox to a bigger box where he couldn't hop out as easily. Eric took the picture on his iPhone and I put him outside, in the woods right behind the house.

Not 20 minutes later, another mouse came sauntering up the stairs to the living room where Eric was. There was a moment of hesitation, and then I heard, "Smitha!"

"What?"

"We've got another mouse in the house!"

This time, he ran behind the entertainment system, which is fortunately open. I grabbed the gloves and the box, and we ran around the entertainment system to the opposite corner of the living/dining room, where we trapped him. He cleverly ran underneath a small bookshelf (which Eric and I had to move twice to get him). We finally managed to snag him again, and put him in the box. We speculated that he was the same mouse, because he looked identical. Eric marked his tail with a black marker, so we'd know if he came back.

This time, I took him to the other side of the townhouse complex and let him go. I've not seen him since.

Quick prayer request for Christine

Anyone who knows my wonderful girlfriend also know that she is a workaholic to a fault. With that said, she twisted out both of her knees terribly in shovelling snow a couple days ago. They now pop with practically every move, they are swollen, and her motions are all very stiff and cause her a good deal of discomfort, if not just straight-up pain.

On this past Saturday, after the first 20+ inches of snow that fell, there was a 48-hour lull in the storm. At about 2PM, Tony, her landlord, was out shovelling snow on his tractor with a front-end loader on it. I went outside at about 4PM, which is when I noticed that the snow had stopped and that people were already digging themselves out. I borrowed Tony's snow shovel, and cleared out around Christine's car and shovelled out paths from both doors to her car. Tony's plan was to get the tractor out to the street: in so doing he would clear out the driveway. From there, he could widen it out to get the vehicles out.

At about 5:30, Christine felt guilty for doing her own work indoors while the two of us were outside working, so she grabbed the only shovel left, a spade. We shovelled the path to Tony's house and around his truck, to make room for the tractor to move the majority of the snow without hitting the truck. Christine used the snow shovel that I had while I took breathers, but overall, she ended up using a spade most of the time, so she was at a serious disadvantage. Her whole body was sore, but in particular, her knees were really bothering her. Tony suggested that she stop, because he noticed that she was limping -- I was being my usual unobservant self, so I didn't notice until much later. However, she felt guilty for stopping, because she hadn't shovelled as much or as long as we had (at least, I think that was her rationale). She also felt bad since Tony's wife Veronica wasn't there to help him (Veronica was stuck at her office, snowed in), and thus Christine had to work extra hard to make up for her not being there.

At the end of it all, she hobbled inside in serious amounts of pain in both her legs and her back. A few days later, her knees are still really bothering her, but her back is better. Her knees are actually swollen -- I think she overexerted herself and just pulled something, but she might have actually done some serious damage.

The only benefit to all this is that now I know where she is. If she moves, her position is given away by the sound of cracking knees. Thus she can never sneak up on me.

If that last paragraph sounded morbid, I apologize. I was simply trying to find the humor in this post: there's not much to work with, and I hope that Christine doesn't kill me for posting this.