Marriage Day One: Sooooode Tired

Sunday, after a long wedding weekend filled with more wonderful moments and emotions than we could possibly recall, Lib settled on to the couch completely exhausted, and fell fast asleep. At eleven, when I tried to wake her for bed, she kept mumbling nonsense; all I could make out in her tired voice was "is everyone tying them in the front or just the bride?" My little wife, tuckered out from her long weekend had settled in to a deep slumber dreaming of more weddings.

A Wet Knot Is Harder to Untie

Seconds before the overcast let loose on the forest, just before we ducked into a small potting shed at Rutgers Gardens, there is a picture of Lib, only minutes my wife, in the mist, standing expectantly beneath a tree on a circle of stone by the coy pond, floating in her dress between ferns with a red sash tied around her waist--a picture that no one will ever get to see, but is preserved perfectly and forever for me.

Carpet Diem

After a long winter of Annie dragging her dog blankets around the house combined with those early puppy months last year, the house started to smell like dog as the weather began to warm up. We decided, since we didn't want our house to smell like animals, to rent the carpet shampooer, two weeks before the wedding, and get to work, last Saturday. Not that our house smelled like piss or anything, it just smelled like dog. It worked like a charm; we moved all the furniture and gave everything the once over. By the time it dried, the carpet smelled fresh and new.

A few days later, however, the house began to smell like acrid piss! Had we stirred up some ancient smell, or had one of the animals thought the place smelled too clean and left her mark? Either way, it reeked of piss. It made no sense, so I got on my hands and knees, put my nose to the ground and began to sniff out the stain. I noticed a slightly darker spot in front of the couch, and when I hound-dogged it, the smell of piss sent me reeling. A whole two days after slaving away on the carpet and we were way worse off than when the whole thing began. Not only that, but the piss smell was also at the top of the stairs leading from the sun room to the basement. It was an all out shock and awe-ful piss war!

I suspected there were hardwood floors beneath, and casually suggested that we rip up the carpet, but Lib would have nothing of it. I even peeked beneath the edge and saw the hardwood; Lib would not even look. I have always wanted hard wood, real hard wood, not this fake crap on the DIY channel, so was a little disappointed. Besides, the old woman who lived here before us carpeted the entire house with the same carpet; it would be nice to have some variety.

We soaked the stain, dried it, tried Spot Shot repeatedly, and nothing. So it was back to the grocery to get the Rug Doctor...again. I had to work, but Lib went over the carpet a number of times, but to no avail. Dumbfounded by the tenacity of the stench, Lib, in the little white dress she had worn to work, then proceeded to hound-dog the entire room searching for another piss stain, but could find nothing. The Seinfeldian stench would not leave the room, and even seemed to grow stronger with each day.

By Thursday, our spirits were broken. There was no getting rid of it. And then Lib said something about just wanting to rip out the carpet. I wasn't sure if she was kidding or not, but the switch in my brain, the same switch that flicks on when regular kissing might turn in to sex, told me that if I played this just right, we would rip out the carpet and expose the hard wood beneath. I walked over to the spot where I had peeled back the carpet a few days before in front of the hearth, and once again exposed just a bit of the shining hard wood beneath, and as Lib approached to give a peek, I pulled back just slightly more carpet so she could get a good look. That's all it took. Lib went down to the basement and emerged with two crowbars, a hammer and selection of small pliers--she was ravenous. She grabbed a corner of the room and went to town on it. Carpet and foam were flying out the front door; the neighbors must have thought we were tearing the whole place down. She couldn't wait till after the wedding. It had to be done now, and we both went at it for a couple of hours until there was nothing left to do but clean up and lie supine on the floor as the diminuendo of our hearts brought us back to earth.

The floor needs work, but Lib has decided, that it is probably too big of a project to sand and refinish this week, so we are going to show some restraint and wait till after the wedding, but I couldn't be happier.

Fair is Foul and Foul is Funny.

Ever since I have started dating Lib, I have been surprised at what she thinks is funny, and not just funny, but hysterical. For such an intelligent girl, she merely nods with a curt recognition at the wittiest of comments, and says, "funny;" case in point:

In our first year of dating, I had drawn a couple of tapeworms desegmenting on my dry erase board in order to explain how they reproduce for some unknown reason, especially since I teach English. Lib came in and added an entire army of them at the end of the day, all in different colors, all raining down their segments on the eraser ledge like multicolored confetti. I, entirely off the cuff, made a comment about her "ticker tapeworm parade," and she grinned and said, "funny." Fast forward a couple of months to Route 18 where I referred to the traffic jam as "C#^t-lick traffic," and Lib laughed uncontrollably for ten minutes. I guess that's why she loves me: my propensity to swear like a poet.

Case in point:

Just after I was explaining this to coworkers the other day, Lib was riffling through some ancient vocabulary flashcards, asking us to define words like "insouciance", "prolix", and "promulgate." When she got to "bathos" we were stumped, until she said I was a master of this, to which I replied that I was a "master-batho." Lib ejaculated a short burst of laughter, but immediately composed herself, and commented on how perfect my comment was because bathos, it turns out is defined as " a sudden and ludicrous decent from the lofty to the absurd; profound to profane," which evidently tickled her penchant for profanity, but also satisfied her reserved and decorous appreciation for the witty.

Blood on the Rocks

Today, I expanded my rock climbing experience to actually climbing on real rocks as opposed to the fake rocks that I climb at the gym on a regular basis. Is it harder? Yes. Is it more fun? Yes. Is it scarier? Yes.

When I fall at the gym, I know that a six-inch-thick mat about eight feet long and four to five feet wide will catch me, and if I fall off that, I will fall on the floor beneath which is made up entirely of six inch mats...and, if I am upside-down on the overhang, I will land on an eighteen-inch mat. Outside, depending on how many people are around with pads, I have to fall on a three by five foot mat, six inches thick, that is on top of the hard, unforgiving earth, and often a rock jutting out of the ground just for spite. Granted, I have a spotter, but it is the spotters job to control the fall onto the mat, the hard slab of earth beneath. Since I was only climbing with my friend Tim today, we only had once crash pad; if we missed iy, we were screwed.

I started on an easy V2 called "Lazy Mayzie" and flashed it. No problem. Then I went to "The Lorax" a low but tricky and fun V4, and did pretty well for my first climb, but even after numerous attempts, could not stick the last hold; I was feeling confident, maybe even a bit elated, so we moved on.

We came across a creepy looking V2 called "Dislocator Roof,"which sounds very ominous, and it seemed easy enough, but the top out(where you climb to the top of the boulder to finish) seemed kind of tough because there was nothing to grab. But we set up shop to give it a whirl. Tim went first, and except for the last move topping out had no problem, so he just dropped to the crash pad to try again later.

I was next, and sent the climb easily...except for topping out of course. I breezed through the climb, found a great hold on the ledge, heal-hooked the top, and had most of my weight over, but had shifted to the right of the pad over a craggy outcropping of stone, and when I reached to use the texture of the rock, my body jolted, I heard a girl scream, my hands raked across the granite as a crystal sliced trough my thumb from the tip to the meaty lower half near the wrist, and I fell the twelve feet, fully expecting to land on a slab of granite, but Tim, the best spotter in the universe, guided my falling body directly onto the center of the mat; when I landed hard in the center of the pad, my first reaction was to pat him on the back and tell him what a great spotter he was, followed immediately by checking my blood-covered hand that was dripping all over the ground.

So I taped it up so I could climb the second half of the day. After trying another V4, "Andrew's Boulder Problem" to no avail, I was relegated to easier climbs, because I was tired, injured, and a little freaked out; I can't wait to go back...but maybe I'll invest in a crash pad to at least double our security or maybe I will buy five crash pads just to be safe.

These guys make it look easy and I wish I had thought to use the foot on "Dislocator Roof" like this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDCqL9_lpI8

Stamp of Disapproval (FUSPS)

When Lib and I began planning our wedding, we decided to save money anyway we could: use friends for photography and video, get a nice but affordable venue, and not only use an email for RSVPs, but also make our own invitations.

Lib did an amazing job on the invitations. After a few different incarnations, she settled on a nice grocery baggish paper and vellum with a cute dragonfly motif. She typed and retyped everything so it would be perfect, she maximized the use of each sheet of paper, and she slaved, feeding each envelope individually into a persnickety printer--not to mention her slow-ass computer--but she did it. Then she patiently cut out the different cards with a paper cutter borrowed from school, mounted the printed sheets on the background, and tied them all by hand with raffia (a light hay-like ribbon) and sealed them for shipping. Not to mention she had to hand type each address and format the dragonfly into each address label for the thank you cards. My assistance was negligible in this process. Oh, and did I mention that she stopped at the post office with a completed invite to make sure that she got the appropriate stamps?

Well, she did. The woman told her that standard postage would not do, and she would have to buy 64-cent stamps, but that was to be expected; a minor miscalculation on our budget--no big deal. The only catch, according to the woman, was that the envelope shape was abnormal, so we would have to hand deliver them to the post office because of some special handling. Again, no biggie. So, Lib went online, and after much deliberation and some half-hearted input from me, settled on an elegant monarch butterfly stamp. When they finally arrived in the mail today, she rushed them onto the envelopes, and she rushed into the post office at ten till twelve to hand them to the lady personally.

BUT. This was a different lady (I was in the car so this is second-hand) who immediately said that the envelope was too big and would be 88 cents, to which Lib replied something along the lines of "No, I came in the other day with a completed invite and the lady said I needed the 64-cent stamp." To which the lady replied, "No the envelope is too big," to which Lib replied something about how ridiculous the whole situation was, etc. And if you know Lib, at this point, since she had done everything responsible on her end and had been mislead by an imbecile who obviously didn't know her postage, then you know the exact tone she was using, to which the lady replied, thumbing the envelope, "oh this had a ribbon inside so it is a parcel. That means it will be $1.71 for the postage." Things got a little blurry here in her retelling, but I know she took the envelopes back from the lady and we drove the five minutes to another post office to reconcile the issue there.

At the next post office, the lady also seemed incompetent because a man who was asking her legitimate postage questions which she should have known was told repeatedly to just go check online. Little did she know, she would earn her money when Lib approached the counter. To the postal worker's credit, she did immediately say the postage would be $1.71 cents, even though it weighed less than the requirement for a standard stamp. It turns out, that the envelope was one centimeter too tall, and she kept showing us this on a template that showed it would take at least an 88-cent stamp, that plus the tiny raffia ribbon, so light that it would be carried aloft in a gentle breeze, meant that it would be $1.71.

This is where the supervisor was called in, and as much as she explained that it did not ruin our wedding, Lib would not be mollified--and who can blame her--$171!!! So Lib, raised her voice, and cried, and the lady tried to explain how the raffia creates and uneven surface, albeit one millimeter, so it would have to be handled by a special machine, and that machine is what was costing money, and Lib was upset because now her invitations would look dumb with three stamps, totaling $1.92, and the lady tried to placate her with a story of how she put a regular stamp on her invitations and they were all sent back, and then another supervisor came out and said that if the envelope were thicker but even, it would be cheaper than the raffia, and then another lady said something about opening each one very carefully and removing the raffia, and there was some crying, then someone else suggested adding tacky "celebration" stamps to the monarch stamps, and I made a sarcastic comment about boxing the invitations and shipping them flat-rate, and nothing got solved and we left, but not until after the original supervisor said that even the correct shipping would not guarantee their delivery in mint condition, so I got Lib the hell out of there.

Then we had to drive around to three different post offices to find the 64-cent monarch, and I shelled out the extra $120 to have the whole experience over with. We then sat in the car, and Lib and I put two more giant stamps on the envelopes, which are not even that big, and I took them back in, since she was done with post offices for the day, and hand delivered them as instructed by the USPS, to which the lady replied, "These are beautiful, but they are only 88-cent envelopes, who told you to use three stamps?" to which I replied, "There is a ribbon which makes them a parcel, so they are a dollar seventy-one." She then quietly took them from my box and transferred them to a postal crate quietly. But I couldn't leave it at that: "They are definitely a dollar seventy-one though right?" to which she replied with a not-so-convincing, "yeah." I did not tell Lib this part; I drove home.

The Memoirs of Remus Turlington III: Page 1

It is at a great crossroads in my life that I have decided, not only for my personal satisfaction, but at the behest of certain members of my family, and by family, I mean those closest to me through great joys and tragedies; I don’t limit relations to genealogy for the very reason that I have known drunkards, saints, highwaymen, philanthropists, carpetbaggers, and yankees, and have shared a drink with all of them on one occasion or another, especially the cork pullers; however, they don’t need an occasion to drink, merely a libation put in front of them paired with their predisposition; my predilections are more anecdotal and, I would like to believe, philosophical: the love of wisdom, a concupiscence for understanding, if you will, but I digress—It is with great reminiscence, more of the nostalgic than that of regret, with a fond remembrance that I look back at my life at my ripe, old age: the age I am, not that I act; the truth being that only my dear mother and father, God rest their souls, know the true date of my nascence, and because of the subjectivity of age and the ephemeral nature of life, I have decided that such subjects are irrelevant to these memoirs, which is why I have excluded, for the most part, any sentimental reveries of childhood, which are inevitably obscured not by what we, as grown adults, would have liked them to be, rather, what we think really happened seen through the limited vision of adolescence; nonetheless, I will begin at what I believe is the pinnacle of my younger days, while although I was still full of pith and vinegar, I had settled into a tranquil contemplative time in my life: the halcyon days, as I have titled them here, the time just before all the salt of life stirred me from my naïve stupor: the era of heartbreak, funerals, disappointments, failures, and broken trust: years I wouldn’t trade for all the riches of the Spanish kings of old; heretofore unmentioned in this anthology, for I merely used them for an allusion, not to be treated as their own subject of discussion, so it is with some perspicacity that I dip my quill, figuratively that is, in order to recapitulate, not adumbrate, for what greater tragedy is there than to truncate when a detailed account will only do justice to a life lived in anticipation of the every moment and savored like crawfish and cherry wine; do not mistake this for a mere trumpet blast, but rather a sonata that rhythmically excites yet sooths the reader, so with out further ado, I would like to dedicate this to my father: Arlo Turlington, a man of many words, but few of them articulated, on account he lost his tongue in the war; to my mother, Louisa May Sanders-Turlington, a woman of inexplicable beauty; to Eloise Apache Druthers-Turlington, my little wife who is, I might add, the reason for my very existence and the mother of my next dedication—to my thirteen daughters: Chloe, Eloise, Ophelia, Margarete, Kimberly, Allison, Faye, Gail, Jane, Cynthia, Clarise, Desdamona, and Dixie; the most important women in my life who are, without a doubt, as precious as they are pernicious, which is why I feel obliged to honor them, even Desdamona, who ran of with that colored boy from Yale, by committing every minute detail in these chicken tracks that follow the page much as our lives follow the footprints in the sand toward the inevitable passing of each precious petal of the late summer mums, that wilt like northern folk in the Mississippi sun, which blazes hotter than the fires of hell, a hell which can only be circumvented by true understanding of the manifestation of all virtue, which, in its purest form is the paragon of what the good Lord intended: charity, by which I mean not giving egregiously from excess for accolades and stature, but charity in the sense the we, as decent human beings attempt to find the one true meaning to our existence: