that ring of confidence

So I'm married now

I got married yesterday. Neither Lydia nor myself have had a chance to blog about it, but I'm sure one of us will do a fully report soon. What I do have instead is the video shown at our wedding about our lives and relationship.

Rejected wedding invitation ideas

We've been working on the wording on our save-the-date cards and our wedding invitations, but yet oddly enough every suggestion I come up with gets rejected. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, so I'm throwing it out to the masses. Below are some of my rejected wedding invitation pitches, phrases and slogans. Read through them and leave a comment supporting my vision for what really ought to go on the invitations.  With the overwhelming support of the public, she'll have no choice but to let me write the invitations my way.

• "Yo we're having a wedding, why don't you come?"
• "Neither of us are preggers & we're still getting married. It must be love."
• "We have so few friends, so please come or it'll be sad."
• "If you're planning on taking your own life, hold off until after August Ninth."
• "If you promise not to eat much we'd love to have you at our special day."
• "No babies."
• "No Homers."
• "Yes I'll probably look fat in the suit, deal with it."
• "Star Trek Themed."
• "Marriage FTW."
• "No MC Hammer Rap Pants."
• "BYOB"
• "Admission $45"
• "With special guests The Mighty Mighty Bosstones"

The ring is the thing and other terrible titles

Lydia was away for the last two weeks at her parents.  They've recently sold their motel in Bracebridge Ontario which served as both their home and business for the last five years and so that meant moving homes.  With Lydia's mother going to Mexico to visit family for a week they needed Lydia's help to get everything packed up and ready for the move.

While she was away I lived the bachalor life, which mainly consisted of being less tidy and staying up all night to play Grand Theft Auto IV and Mario Kart.  With her back today I dragged Nathan down to Bellingham to pick up the engagement ring [ial] that she had picked out a few weeks ago.  We had not been able to take it at the time, because it was off getting resized, and I wanted to have it for when she got back.

Having picked the ring (pictured above) yesterday, I picked her up from the airport today.  I had debated pretending to not have already proposed and doing a big showy thing where I got down on one knee in the arrivals area of Vancouver Airport, but decided instead to give it to her in private.

Less romantic perhaps, but also less chance of airport security deciding that we were acting suspicious and roughing us up.

What else I'm getting aside from a puppy

If you've known me for awhile you probably remember the single days.  The long, long, single days.  In fact you just have to take a look at this blog's "Being Single / Dating" category [jks] to see the last few single years.  In fact back in university I had thought that I could somehow spin my single-dom into a career, since people seemed to enjoy reading articles of my disastrous romantic adventures [teotw].

Lydia and I have been going out pretty much since we first met after she responded to an ad that I put up on Craigslist.  The ad was put up very much in the spirit of, "Well if this doesn't work out at least I'll have something to write about" and so that it actually worked and I've gotten a long term relationship out of it is very surprising to me.  Delightfully surprising.

Last week the two of us went down to Seattle for her birthday and had dinner at The Dahlia Lounge [td], where after the "Cougar Gold, fried green tomatoes, Bavarian beer vinegar, mustard" appetizer was cleared I asked her to marry me and much to my relief she said yes.  So we are now officially, though currently ring-lessly, engaged.

It's been just over a week, but I've wanted to keep it quiet because my parents were on a cruise in Asia and I wanted to tell our folks before we let anyone else into the secret.  Last night I surprised the family with it, and Lydia told her mother over the phone, so now that all the one degrees know, we're letting other people in on it.

So yeah, I'm getting married.  On April 21st. 

Just kidding.  Probably next spring or summer depending on a few factors. 

Photo credit

• Photo by: Jeffery Simpson
• What: Lydia at home
• Date Taken: October 19th, 2007
• Camera: Canon EOS Rebel XTi [fkr]

A late night and an early morning

Marvel Civil War, originally uploaded by ZacharyTirrell.

After a day off double feature (Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth) with Lydia I went home late last night. I was anxious to get home from about three o'clock on because when we stopped by Golden Age so that I could get my weekly comics I saw that Civil War 7 had arrived and after like a million months I wanted to find out what happened and how it all wrapped up.

Getting home about ten in the evening I read all of my books and then went to bed. I've been up since 5:30 am so that I could write my article for the magazine before work. I'm tired and now once I've posted this I'm going to do the math to see how much time I can spend in bed.

Let's see if it takes half an hour to walk to work, add to that the forty minutes it takes to get ready....

Going down to Seattle: friends, food and fun

Lydia's done and gone blogged about our trip down to Seattle last week [dp].  She beat me to the punch, and left me with not a lot else to add for anyone whose taken a look at her site.  Still I'll try to drop a few words about the subject.

I had two days off from work, my weekend falls on a mid-week Tues/Wed combo as opposed to the more traditional Sat/Sun, and Lydia had gotten three off so we decided to head down to Seattle.  I had been wanting to see Jeff for a bit, and just fancied a drive.

Leaving Tuesday in the early afternoon we had lunch at Jack-in-the-Box in Bellingham.  Jack-in-the-Box is a wonderful example of good fast food.  Okay so the portions are too big, a medium there is the equivalent to a Canadian large or super-sized, but the food is actually really nice.  The Sourdough Jack that I had was really yum. 

Next we headed to Redmond which is the home of Microsoft.  There was a bit of tension in the car as I had a hard time finding it and went in the wrong direction down the highway at one point for about twenty minutes or so.  However thanks to some over the phone guidance from Jeff we managed to find Microsoft and Jeff.  He gave us a tour of his work, a tour which I've taken a few times now.  We got Halloween candy from some of his co-workers and then went to the employee store and museum.

To Seattle and the end of newspapers

The Peace Arch
Originally uploaded by Jeffery Simpson.

Tomorrow Lydia and I are going to go to Seattle. I haven't alerted Jeffrey Weston yet, which I should do as soon as I blog this. The plot is that we're going to stay at a hostel because Lydia can get us a discount because she works at the one in Vancouver. What we're going to do there I'm not sure, though she wants to go to a store called Trader Joe's.

I'll probably make my way to the Apple Store. I like the Apple Store even if I'm short on cash and probably shouldn't go in there because it'll bankrupt me. Still those red iPod nanos are so very cool. I want a new iPod, oh do I ever.

The next week I'm planning on going to Kelowna. I need to hit up The Kelowna Daily Courier [kdc] for money and I like to do my begging in person. I should also start trying to drum up some ideas for articles because I haven't written a feature in quite some time.

This week I had to write two articles because they wouldn't run my first. I'll admit I shouldn't have been surprised that a newspaper wouldn't run an article where I claimed that newspapers would be obsolute in ten years and only a few would be able to survive the loss of readers that the internet is creating, but there you go I'm naive.

All in all it was more about the industry and my only comments about the DC was that they shouldn't keep their columnists and all their premier content hidden inside the paper and they should add it to their website. Oh, I also said they should add RSS feeds to their site. With the Kelowna website Castanet.net [cn] doing a really good job of news and having that premier content like columnists it's hard to see why The Courier wouldn't want to compete in the online space.

The real problem of course is that they get their money both from ads and subscriptions. If they offer too much online then they lose their subscription business. The fact is though that aside from the specific Kelowna columnists and local news there is nothing in the paper that you can't get off of the internet. With Castanet doing local news, why would you buy the paper?

The A&E supplement that I write for called eVent! [ep] puts my column online, and after a bit so do I [teotw], so it's not like it's unheard of around the newsroom. Still apparently I was a bit too radical, so I had to send in another article.

What the girlfriend thinks of my blog layout and more

Lydia at coffee
Originally uploaded by Jeffery Simpson.

The girlfriend [dp] didn't like the colours of the blog that I had up since the weekend, and so we've changed that around, to please the adoring public.  However she also wanted me to take down the ad content on the side, saying it looked cheap (or cheesy I can't remember which) but I've kept them up.  I need what little cash I can squeeze from the Google ads and other online revenue streams to be able to pay for Typepad, which while a very awesome service is also kind of expensive for a non-professional like me.

Today after work I've got to run from Seymour and Robson down to Stanley Park's third beach for the Metroblogging Vancouver Meetup [mbv].  Lydia's going to meet me at work, we'll bus down to my apartment and grab the Mini and then after a stop at Safeway to pick something up for the potluck.  Maybe a nice cheesecake.

More on our trip to Kelowna

Lydia's blogged a bit about our trip to Kelowna [iatl] so you might want to check that out.  That's about all I've got to say, other than I'm still fighting off dating blog death.

No relationship blog death

Lydia at coffee
Originally uploaded by Jeffery Simpson.

Travis on Metroblogging Vancouver used my blog as an example of how blogs begin to die out when the blogger gets into a new relationship [mbv]. So today I'm determined to prove him wrong and blog about something. Of course longtime readers know that there have been periods of quiet before this one, so Lydia isn't fully to blame. I mean she's managed to start a blog since we've been going out [iatl].

The pair of us headed to Kelowna my weekend, which unlike most weekends is Tue-Wed, where we stayed in my parents place and did some typical Kelowna touristy things. So that means no hanging out at the Sev to see if the Rutland boys are going to come down for a fight, but rather going to the Mission Hill wine tour, and going to the local newspaper to extort them for my paycheck.

Okay so the last thing isn't that typical of a tourist experiance.

Tuesday night we went to Mama Rosa with Chad and Kara [ttin] where we had wonderful pasta and chatted with yet another one of my now married friends.

Afterwars we walked along the lake walk that runs from the Fintery Queen to the Grand. It was windy so Lydia's ears started to hurt, so we made our way back to my car double quick and didn't get a chance to blow all of our money at the Casino.

The next day we slept in, then headed to the Kelowna Daily Courier's office for money making. Then it was off to Mission Hill [mh] for the tour and then back home for rest and full cable fun.

Lydia's so impressed by full cable, I think if I get it when I move into my new apartment she might keep going out with me. We watched Iron Chef America and were amazed when the other chef (not the iron chef) only finished two out of five of his courses and totally lost. Who did he think he was? Me during a math quiz? You can't suck like that and be on Iron Chef.

Lydia wanted to find a German resturant and because I kept saying that there were a lot of Germans in Kelowna, there are totally, she expected me to produce one. However I don't know of one, and after asking both Chad and my mother I still couldn't find one. So instead we went to East Side Marios, which is an Italian chain sort of like Montana's is a western chain.

Lydia consented to go to the chain resturant because she used to eat there back in Ontario and felt all nostelgic about it. Now if only I could get her to be nostelgic about White Spot...

Anyway that night I had to write another article and when I was done we made out like bandits, and sadly had to wake up at 6 am the next day. I'm still exhausted because I drove back to Vancouver and had about five minutes at the apartment before I had to hop in my Skytrain and go to work until 9 pm.

Right now I should be leaving for work again. I'm behind because I'm blogging... but at least the blog is not dead.

No phone day

I forgot my cellular phone at home today, so I feel naked.  I have no idea if people have been trying to call me, and I don't even have most people's telephone numbers.  So if you're trying to get in touch with me, or waiting for me to phone you I'm sorry.

In other news I changed my Flickr profile [flk] to reflect my new relationship status with Lydia.  If that doesn't say dorky affection I don't know what does.

A mole, digging in a hole

Georgia Street
Originally uploaded by Jeffery Simpson.

With my schedual all mixed around I've had no days off for awhile and I'm starting to get punchy at work. Today a woman asked to see a widget, took all the plastic protective wrap off of it and then deciding to buy it asked me to take another from the back so she could get "a new one".

I explained that the only difference between the widget in the back and the one on the counter was that she had yet to remove all the plastic covering from the widget in the back.

She replied that she could simply go buy the widget from a store further down the mall, so since I needed to sell more widgets today I relented.

So that's my life now, being a widget whore. A widget whore without a protective pimp.

I'm also starting to freak out because between work, sleep and girlfriend I haven't been able to do laundry or clean my room so there's now a pile of clothing ready to envelop my bed and there could very well be ninjas hiding in there preparing to karate chop me in the balls.

For my lunch break today I had shitty Chinese food, then bought a bag of popcorn, walked to the rootop parking lot that's at Oakridge and stood there blinking dumbly for about ten minutes trying to see if my eyes still worked in the sun.

They didn't.

How Microsoft Word tried to kill me

Sorry for not posting for a bit.  I've been busy with work, having a girlfriend and buying the complete series of Star Trek: Enterprise on DVD [bg].  Girlfriend-wise Lydia and I hung out on Tuesday which was my day off.  She made me banana bread, which she brought over and we ate a bit of that.  Then she freaked out after taking a look at my cupboards and fridgewhich contained:

• one box of Kellog's Mini-Wheats
• one box of Kraft Dinner w/white cheese
• one jar of four cheese pasta sauce
• Kraft cheese slices
• one package of beef jerky
• one container of Brita filtered water
• five cans of Coke Zero

She made me go to Capers, the natural foods supermarket a block down from the Safeway that I usually shop at.  There we looked at hippie soaps and I picked up some juice, some nuts and carrots to appease her.  We then returned to my apartment to watch the Forty Year Old Virgin before going out for dinner at the Mill.

Last night I went to my parents' apartment and watched hours upon hours of 24 with them, as we're trying to rush through the season on DVD.  One more night of watching should do it, so sometime next week I'll be done.

This morning I woke up early to finish up an article I was writing for eVent! magazine in Kelowna.  Happily Microsoft Word ended up eating the entire document and now won't do anything of any use for me.  All the words are so very tiny and very invisible, the only way I can tell that there is anything there is because the word count is still the same.  I fired off an angry missive to Jeffrey Weston at Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit and accused him of trying to tank my journalism career by his spotty work on the MS Office 10 for Mac.  I then wrote an article about being screwed over by Microsoft using Apple's Pages program.

So if you're in the Kelowna area this week that'll give you something to read.

Elevator go down the hole

7:33 pm - Sunday January 22nd

So right now I'm trapped in an elevator.  It's been over an hour and I'm still trapped in here waiting for someone to come and let us out. Thankfully I just watched the Six Feet Under Episode where the guy gets cut in half trying to escape from an elevator so I'm not going to be going to try any of that Die Hard shit.

Now there's a guy who I think is on the roof trying to free us.  Or he was, now he's telling us he can't and that we'll be trapped for awhile longer.

There's no cell phone reception in the elevator, so this post won't get out until I'm freed.  However if I starve in here then hopefully when they exhume my corpse they'll send this email out.

I'm not quite sure how this is going to affect my planned date with Lydia, since I was supposed to be picking her up in less than ten minutes from now.

7:50 pm

Lydia is going to take me to boyfriend divorce court.

7:53 pm

Neal observed that, "This would never had happened to Jon Voight."

7:56 pm

Neal is dividing up the elevator into rooms since it's our new home. The left back corner is the bathroom, and I'm standing in the den now.

8:00 pm

Neal has to go to the washroom. He's wanting them to pass a tube down to us so that he can use it for urine until the building manager gets here with whatever magic tool he needs to use to free us.

8:05 pm

Officially and for reals late for picking up Lydia, we're now arguing over how Jon Voight died in Anaconda. Neal insists he winked at the camera just as the giant CGI snake was about to eat him and I call bullshit on that.

Sounds now of men at work above us.  Is this our rescue?  I've broken out the breath mints in place of dinner at the Rugby Club that I should be sitting down to.

Now freedom.

The date night plan

I think I've nailed down what my date with Lydia is going to be like, though we're still in the final round of negotiations.  We are going to dine at the Rugby Beach Club Grille [rcg] at around 8, after I get home from work and shower and take my work teeth out and my wooing teeth in.

Where the controversy is occuring is that I thought we should go see the new musical version of The Producers [re] after dinner, while she's wanting to go home and cuddle.  I'm all for cuddling but I think we as a couple need hobbies and interests outside of that and board games.  Well we'll see how it shakes down.

As for working at Oakridge, I'm bored.  It's busy enough but not as busy as one would hope.  I want to go home and go to bed, though luckily my days off have shifted a bit meaning that they occur tomorrow and Tuesday as opposed to Tue/Wed.

Sunday night is date night

Lydia and I are going on a proper date tomorrow, since we've only really had two of those so far.  Our first was when we first met on New Year's Eve and the second one was the night we decided to go steady (to use the 1950s words).  Other than that we've just sort of been doing the hanging out thing, either playing Trivial Pursuit with my friends or her roommate or playing other random board games with her BCIT pals.

So we've had three nights of board games versus two nights of dates.  By any standard that's a bit sad.  So as I said we're going out for a real date.  She had some resturant she wanted to go to as part of Eat Out Vancouver, but it was all booked up.  I suggested the Rugby Beach Club [fv] (since I was such good friends with rugby players in high school I'd love to try their cusine) which I've heard Neal and MC speak highly of.  I was hoping she wouldn't have been to it, so it would have been a novel surprise the way our last date was.  Anyway I plan to have it be a novel surprise for me, even if she's board stiff by the Rugby Club.*

*She says she won't be, but she'll know where the bathrooms are, which puts her at an advantage to me.

I'm such a trooper

I'm tired, really tired.  I'm not sure why, though staying up late could have something to do with it, but I'm just really tired.  I've got plans to go to Lydia's house tonight after work but I was so tired I called her up to cancel.  However after she told me how much of a bad mood she was in I changed my mind, since I've already reached the maximum allowed bad boyfriend points when I was sick this weekend and missed her favorite local band's show leaving her to go alone (or with a group of friends) and then I had to tell her I was busy with a Canucks game on her birthday.

So I'm being a trooper, heading out tonight even though I'm going to be about as interesting as a chi pet tonight.  Still I'm being a trooper.

Snow day, with no snow

I stayed home sick from work today.  I've been feeling like crap and since there was enough warm bodies at work they weren't going to miss me.  I woke up early though and dealt with a lot of the crap that had been lying around my room since Christmas and before, getting rid of gift packaging and getting things sorted a bit.  It'll be nice to move to my new place and have some space to breath [jsf].

While I stayed home sick Lydia came over.  We watched a taped copy of The Office from last night and then the Canucks versus Devils game.  After that we talked, and played video games in my room while I tried not to say totally wrong things like that I enjoyed being along as much as I enjoyed being with her.  I managed to say that stupid thing, but I was able to explain that what I mean is that I enjoy both. 

Hopefully my feet weren't too far into my mouth on that one.

What I meant was that I have become accustomed to being alone, and so I do enjoy that.  Plus I'm not a great entertainer and we're still at the point where I need to entertain her when we're together as opposed to just being me.  Which isn't to say I'm fake around her, but if she's over I don't want to be rude and just watch the television shows that I want to watch, or read a book or something, I need to do something that we can all enjoy.  I don't know if that makes sense, I just am used to only have to worry about myself, and so it's not always easy to focus on two.

Hopefully I cleared that up after she got home and we started chatting on MSN, which we're still doing as I type this.  She's telling me her friends are all very interested in when the two of us are going to have sex.  That's something I'm a bit nervous about seeing as since Lydia is my first real girlfriend I'm a virgin.

I have a joke that I was saving for if I ever did standup and it goes like this:

I'm a virgin and I'm a bit worried about being able to perform well sexually.  You know sometimes when I'm masturbating I find that I have to fake an orgasm.  I moan, and roll over tell myself that I'm the greatest and have a smoke.

Now I'm sleepy, and I want to go to bed.  I'm going to say goodnight to you, then I'm going to say goodnight to Lyida and then it's time to go to bed.

One foot in front of the other, two steps back

Skytrain
Originally uploaded by Jeffery Simpson.

I got back from Seattle [mbs] last night after spending a two days with Jeff. After our pool night [jks] we spent the next day going for breakfast and to the Science Fiction Museum which is by the Space Needle. After that we tooled around downtown for a bit before I drove home.

Once I got home I had enough time to change before I went out and played some Trivial Pursuit at Ryan and Ashley's place. Lydia came and it was the first time that anyone other than my brother and his girlfriend got to meet her. Though I haven't recieved her report cards from everyone I think she did okay.

She did alright by me anyway, especially when the pair of us teamed up to play one of the most dominating games of Trivial Pursuit I have ever seen. We started off a bit shaky but we managed to string together a wonderful run that included knowing what software company was named after a lacross cap (Red Hat) and the name of Iman's makeup line (Iman).

Today though has been less triumphant. I've been fluish all day, and got to work to find that while I was in Seattle I'd had a customer return two phones so I started the day two phones down. I quickly made that up, but then had one of those phones come back but then sold another one, so I'm sort of at a stalemate for the day where I haven't actually done anything but I've been working all day.

Urg and I have to take the Skytrain home.

The whole thing is a load of crap, and if I feel like this tomorrow I'm staying in bed. I also have no clean laundry because I used my laundry days to go to Seattle.

I also registered for Northern Voice 2006 [nv] a blogging conference being put on in Vancouver. There was some talk of me speaking on a panel discussion about city blogs based on my work with Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv] but that's just talk at this point.

Northern Voice seems a lot like a Canadian University Press [cup] conference but with less vomitting.  Should be fun.

MetrobloggingVancouver Vancouver Seattle NorthernVoice2006 CanadianUniversityPress blog blogging

Girlfriend

It's late and I'm watching a recorded episode of The Daily Show.   I realize I haven't been blogging as much this New Year at least not here.  I've been busy at Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv] but since I've had some news that required a longer post to bring the good word to the peoples I waited, biding my time until I had a few moments to write in detail.

I have been single for a long time.  Back in high school when every one learned more about dating, girls, boys and that aspect of life I sort of missed out.  I certainly wasn't asexual, but the few crushes I did have never seemed to reciprocate my feelings causing me to write bleakly depressing short stories [eotw].

Aside from a collection of somewhat amusing dating stories, I really didn't gain a lot of experiance in university and so it's this odd weird thing that I find myself catching up on some of what I'd been missing out on [js] now that I find myself with a girlfriend [mbv].

I put an ad up on Craigslist [clv], which is a sort of online newspaper classified section, because I'd found it hard to meet new people in town.  Lydia emailed me back and after a few tentative emails back and forth she asked me to meet her for New Year's Eve at the Railway Club [mbv].  We met outside the club, but she hadn't managed to get tickets, eventually we ended up at a faux-Newfie bar downtown and I rang in the New Year as one of her friends poured a full beer into my lap.  The night ended fine though and after another date we decided since we both seemed to like each other we should try being a couple.

It feels odd, to have a girlfriend and in a rather quick manner.  She's coming over to Ryan's house this week to join our latest Trivial Pursuit match [js] and other than Aaron who knows a very little bit about her, nobody knows anything about her other than what I said about her in my email setting the game up which was:

...We'll whip it together, bring your own beers and then you can all meet Lydia who I'll bring and who happens to be my girlfriend.  I'll also bring the TPS board, we'll play until someone (me) wins and other people (you all) cry.

So you see they know not a whole lot.  I'll try to tell you more dear reader, but it's late and my eyeballs are sore and I'm planning on driving down to Seattle tomorrow to see Jeff [mbv].  Take care you all, and don't let me news rock your world too much.