Once there was a dream known as The Wedding Website.

It began in the waning days of aught four. When i returned from our honeymoon full of emotion and the idle time of the annual xmas slowdown at work. I wanted to post all our magnificent memories, but neither my slapdash current Wedding Website, nor any of my humble or profound attempts at web design thus far seemed worthy of such weighty and precious content. So began The Cruel Tutelage of CSS.

Its first test was here in the Big Crack.

and here again, programatically better and with bugs killed, in Moab.

Until finally a year later the code was perfect, the style honed, and V. 1.0: Bryce & Zion looked quite nice if i may say so. All that was left was to upload some photos.

ahem…

…about those photos.

See, our photographer was a really good guy. And this was when digital was just blowing up. And somewhere between us saying “we want digital copies” and him hearing “we want some digital cam pics” the really sweet photos he took on his film camera with all his artistry and training were developed to print. It is way way way way way easier and cheaper to develop film to digital files off the roll. Alas, we do have the negatives. So we borrowed a scanner from my buddy Eric, and we scanned, and filtered, and filtered in other programs, and resized, and re-filtered, and removed chip’n’scratch, and refiltered, and manually touched up. Beckie did this for weeks and I am to this day not sure if she quite had a sound methodology since I never could follow it, then I was left with finishing it. Nice! And about 400 hours and one tinyHuman later, we had some not-so-bad pics.

What would this post be without a few.

The Wedding Website will not be. i must finally accept the inevitable and most of all my fundamental loss-of-interst in the project. Photo albums and the like have always been a means for me to keep my skills sharp and learn new things, not produce anything commerical. Cripes the logo on this blog is my 80×80 mtbr avatar, and has not changed in a year since I learned how to achieve the photo effect (feathering) I wanted; the actual production of it became a tedious chore i have yet to complete. The wedding photos i have on the computer, and I have a dvd burner – the web is not needed here, or more appropriately, it would be lots of work with no payoff. There are some stories to tell, there will be another post, my epic toast will be logged, other memories will be captured. Think of this post as The Story of the Wedding Website: a story of a story yet to come.

Great day today! Filled with my favorite things!

it started with the Squealer.

I had carefully noted on the way out in the morning our dire beer siteeation consisting solely of a few cans of Beast, and knew i wanted to have some for when i got home. Beckie gladly traded off 30 minutes of me watching G for me to run to Trader Joe’s on the way home from the race, and I cleared them out of all their $5 Stockyard Stout. all of it. every 6-pack.

some quality time with everyone, a shower, a nap, and G and me and Kila rode off to the park for some typical park goodness. i was so tired and faded and willing to do just about anything other than work hard at resisting my tinyDemon that the 3 of us had a jolly time. G got up on top of a 5 foot boulder – this felt sketchy, but i made her hold my hand, and while it would have saved her life it still would not have been pretty had she fell. But G definitely respected the threat in her surroundings, so it was a good sampler of baby gnar; I’m highly optimistic. The roll up the hill from the park sucked and only my new-found commitment to not being a slow fatass kept me from rolling in the little ring. that, and some power-assist from the dog. G ate while I cooked in case we decided not to do dinner, then a bath. Excellent times. Did I mention i was carrying a really good buzz?

We rallied to go to dinner at Red, White and Brew. Its been about 6 months since we tried a nice dinner with G – just not worth the effort to fight against her and ruin an evening. But she was in a good mood, and I wanted some basil pesto tortellini for my birthday, and we brought crayons. Things went surprisingly well, G was a monster, but she was our monster. And she mostly kept her voice down and her spills to a minimum. Her shirt may need to be burned, but food is meant to be played with if it keeps her quiet.

Back home and it was time for cake and presents. Well mostly a present to myself (which does not work with many Shimano pedals, another reason to hate Shimano), and a safe (yes, a small safe) that beckie wanted for herself.

present to myself

cake with very tiny gauges left from very tiny fingers

G wanted to open my presents. She doesn’t understand that sometimes presents are given to others and not t her, but since i bought myself my own gift i was not going to split hairs and argue. So she did me the favor of unwrapping, while I had cake and ice cream to look forward to. G wanted to blow out my candles too, which i was slightly irked by until i realized that candles are effectively an infinite resource, and wishes are bullshit anyway. So we lit the candles, and she blew them out. And we lit the candles, and she blew them out. And we lit the candles, and she said “blow Daddy.” and we lit the candles, and she said “blow Mommy.” and we lit the candles and took turns blowing them out one by one.

birthday.

a few days ago, on my work from home day, i got distracted and spent much of the day on projects in and about my Man Cave. Beckie’s response upon arriving home: “so instead of making $50\hr as a computer programmer, you decided to earn $9\hr as a bike mechanic.”

twas an interesting point.

beckie further said that my attraction to the garage is like a woman’s attraction to the closet. and i wanted to dispute this with all the reasons that i am fundamentally not attracted to the garage, but rather drawn there by duty and need and obligation. what lives in the garage if angered can trap us in our house, or enable our escapes from it; it can augment our living space, and relieve pressures upon it. And point-of-fact: I spent a significant portion of the day replacing the derailleur Beckie bashed in the McDowells, and truing her tacoey wheels with my new truing stand and rotor gauge, and replacing the shifter pod that she broke. along with other assorted cleaning, sorting, storing and fixing-up of things bike and non-bike, for which she was quite appropriately grateful.

but in the end she was right it was just that simple. however much i try to avoid it, it is on the chromosome.

improved Man Cave, with truing stand

improved Man Cave, part II

and something for the Wo-closet

Jo, choosing an M&M over freedom. Don’t overthink it.

Slim died finally about 2 weeks ago. we found her in the backyard. I never liked Evil Slim. she was surly, loud, dirty, smelly, bony, shed, puked, disrupted the existing balance of cat-power in our house, and required a litter box. G probably helped push Slim over the edge since she was always grabbing and manhandling her. it might have been me that finally did her in. about 2 days before she died, Kila, G and I were crowded around the front door and i noticed Slim at the bottom of the pile on the welcome mat — not sure if I was stepping on her or if it was G. i have mixed feelings about this — i would never want to hurt an animal even one as horrible as Slim, but at the same time, she was a cat and if she cant manage to get out of the way of G and everyone else it is time for her to move on. she was certainly one animal i did not want to keep alive with expensive treatment and vet bills. So i’ve preferred not to think about the possible guilt or blame specifically affiliated with her last few days, and just assume she was failing and it would have happened one way or another soon enough.

Here is how Slim cat came to us:
http://www.drin.org/jason/foundcat/cat.htm

she lived almost 3 years with us, our best guess is she was 15 when she died. vaya con dios Slim, but i am glad you are gone.

while painting the nursery…only Michael would come up with this!

Seems like a long time to live with anyone. Jason alleges that I have forgotten our anniversary, which is partly true. In reality, I did not forget the anniversary, I merely forgot what the current date was; how could it be December 11 ALREADY? Does this mitigate the sin? Probably not, but frankly, if I don’t have time to figure out what day it is, I definitely don’t have time to ponder that question. Bottom line, I remembered eventually, and have secured a gift. Sure it was free, and I would have gotten it anyway, and it required no work on my part, etc., etc., etc., but it’s still……

FOOTBALL!!! Sure its the Cards and Falcons, but hey, it’s the suite and jason’s off the next day!

That tops flowers in my book. Take that, chollaball.

On a sad commentary on our lives, Jason will likely learn of this fabulous present through the blog before I get to tell him in person. How romantic.