I always say that I'll update the blog regularly, but do I? Nope. I'm still tugged back towards the completist narrative from a decade ago, when I kept voluminous journals and carefully maintained sequential 'diary' files on my Powerbook 1400c. In those days, everything was a crazy narrative, and I played with language and played with the stories of the things that friends and I had done in a day, a week, a weekend.

I don't have the energy for that now, I think. Or maybe I just don't have the heart to do it here on a blog that's semi-public. I only get traffic when I mention Drupal, but surely some of you click around after reading about FormAPI, right? So I tinker and I code and I work on new ways to structure the thing, ways to feed in my Twitter tweets as an ongoing sideblog, or my musings about books as a realtime catalog, and along the way I don't actually update it with the basic stuff.

Well. Tonight, I will. Why? It's the Fourth of July. And three years ago today -- right about this time at night -- I was calling my friends and taling to them about the best and most startling date I'd ever had. I'd met a girl via a chance snarky email, and our conversations had led to coffee, which led to lunch, which led to walking and talking, which led to dinner... By the time night fell and fireworks were boomfing in the distance, we'd been talking and laughing and nodding to each other's ideas for eight hours.

Three years ago today I met Catherine, who would eventually say 'yes' when I asked her to marry me. We parted ways that night reluctantly, driving off in opposite directions and passing each towns' fireworks as we went. Flags and picnics and parades are OK. For us, though, the Fourth of July will always be about the night we each knew that there was something different and special and curiously swanky about this new person.

And fireworks, God bless 'em, will always be something special. Tonight we walked down the street from our new and spiffy apartment (with its sunroom and many windows). We followed families and teenagers and geeky older guys on recumbent bikes and sat down in the field outside the local high school and watched the city's fireworks and we smiled together. And it was good.