Saturday, Catherine and I hopped over to Big Rock for a crafting class at a local wool and textiles shop. I learned how to make felt. How awesome is that?

I had some free time last night after work, and decided to finish up some design work I'd done on Catherine's blog. Sh humors my occasional bursts of geekery on her 'home turf', with occasional 500 errors and muttered comments about testing new code. I'm pretty happy with the results, though -- a modified OSWD design and the addition of the WebSnapr module gave the boost of New Spiffiness that it had been lacking.

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.

Since getting the Wii, I've been spending a lot of fun time in the Virtual Console, downloading and playing old favorites like Zelda, Super Mario Brothers (the original!) and Tecmo Bowl (ahh, the memories.) Last week, Iexpressed excitement over the recent release of Super Mario World, but at the time Catherine's reaction was negative. I discovered last night that my wife, when she said, "I never want to see Super Mario World on our TV, EVER," was not expressing distaste for classic gaming. Rather, like a samurai who has no taste for needless violence after a lifetime of war, she was simply explaining that she wanted no more koopa blood on her hands.

Because holy crap, once I convinced her to play it was obvious she had been down this road a few times before. I didn't even know there was a purple Yoshi, but she had him flying around and spitting fireballs at bosses while I was still trying to get back into the swing of jumping on turtles. "Oh," she said while I scrambled past a few hammer brothers. "No, you want to double back and fly up until you find the vine. There's a secret there." My wife is a Super Mario World shark. It's awesome.

Once, she dodged a roomful of ghosts and flew up into the sky to steal a secret key from a vengeful God, a sort of 16-bit Prometheus. "I think I must have been home sick from school a lot the year this came out," she said obliquely. I think I saw Lakitu weep.

Catherine and I really love our house. I say house because it feels like one, though technically it's a duplex. Originally built in the 1800s, it's been kept up nicely and has beautiful wooden trim. The only problem is George.

George is a cute little dog, full of tail-wiggling and good intentions. He belongs to the woman who lives in the other half of the house. When she's out, George is lonely. And when George is lonely, he yips. She's handled things well and has tried to keep George quiet, with varying degrees of success. Still, Catherine has had to sit through some hours-long yipping sessions, and it gets a bit maddening.

Last week, I came home from work to find Catherine grinning victoriously. On the other side of the house's shared door, George was yipping madly.

"Guess what I figured out."

After a few fruitless guesses involving pineapples and elephants, I gave up. The yipping continued. Catherine walked over to the door and spoke, firmly but not unkindly.

"George? Be quiet."

The yipping stopped. Silence, blessed silence. Catherine turned to me, still grinning.

"Good dog, George."

Sometimes, the simplest solution is the best one.

After we arrived home from our honeymoon, Catherine and I have been playing our way through Prince of Persia. It is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of the best games I've ever played in my life. Beautiful and fluid and fanciful and fun, with enough narrative woven into it that things matter, without turning into a FMV dog and pony show. The perspective character -- a cocky prince with his eye on fame and fortune -- is flawed but likable, a Persian Indiana Jones with l33t ninja skillz. The mechanics of the gameplay -- controlling time itself as you jump and slash and leap your way through swashbuckling Arabian Nights stuff -- was inspired. The idea that the entire game was a story told to a curious listener? Cherry on top.

It's a work of art, this game. To the development team that created it, I salute you. There's a fascinating story behind the game's creation, tracing its way back to the old Broderbund-powered days of sidescrolling platform adventures. And there are also a number of amusing webcomics honoring the game. Sadly, the jaunty adventurer of the first game was replaced by a "darker" hero in the sequel, intended to be a "more mature" game. Sigh. Even Penny Arcade mocked the scantily-clad-time-empress goofiness of PoP2.

As I sit and reflect on the fact that I have the coolest, most awesomest wife in the world (based in small part on her ability to best numerous undead warriors in acrobatic, time-distorting combat), I hear that Prince of Persia 3 is chugging toward release. Apparently there is a lighter, happier prince -- but there's a dark prince trying to take over his body. Or something. I've seen the video clips, and it looks appropriately thrilling, but the pure charm of the original will be difficult to recapture. I'm hoping.

The photos, you see, they are posted. At least, some of them. Not much in the way of description or annotation, but the assorted wedding and honeymoon pics are at jeffandcathereinegetmarried.com for your edification and amusement. Whee!

So Catherine and I are married. I plink repeatedly when I say that, because it's so wild and crazy. I'm married! To her! Catherine! Zow!

The wedding itself was crazy, beautiful, and amazing. Last minute stresses cropped up (as they always do) with the combination of tiny ceremony and friends who we weren't able to invite, weather worries, and so on and so forth. But it came together, happily, and everyone in attendance said that the ceremony (with flowers everywhere, in a small secluded spot on Catherine's parents' farm) was beautiful and moving. We had our honeymoon on Mackinac Island, a strange place full of wonder and spiffiness -- I'll surely be posting some of the hundreds of photos I took there. I purchased cheesy souvenirs and pounds upon pounds of fresh fudge. Catherine and I biked and read and relaxed and laughed and also had rich scrumptious food until we passed out and groaned and begged for unseasoned vegetables with nothing even resembling "rich sauce." The food is good there, let me tell you.

We road-tripped home and began remaking the apartment. It's on its way to becoming a nice little place to live, as opposed to a chaotic sprawl of bachelor-mess. We watched old movies and recuperated and (again) laughed a lot. Life is good. Both of us are back to work today (sigh!) and getting into the swing of life with each other. It's good, this life, with my dear friend and love, my wife. Crazy crazy times!

Well... in 24 hours I'll be standing under the branches of an old oak tree to be married to Catherine, the woman I love and will spend my life with. It's pretty big stuff for me (understatement!) and it's been a real adventure so far. I'll be gone for a week or two while we're off on our honeymoon. In the meantime, I'll toss out this thought on love and commitment:

The Blue Robe
by Wendell Berry

How joyful to be together,
alone as when we first were joined
in our little house by the river long ago
except now we know each other
as we did not then.
and now instead of two stories
jumbling to meet,
we belong to one story
that the two, joining, made.
And now we touch each other,
with the tenderness or mortals,
who know themselves how joyful
to feel the heart quake
at the sight of a grandmother,
old friend in the morning light,
beautiful in her blue robe.

I'll see everyone soon, when we're back from our honeymoon. Hooray!

In geek news, the blog is moved over to A new hosting provider. I've had really good luck with them so far and their service is good. I've cut my monthly hosting in half and I'm in the process of hammering on my Movable Type templates and styles and plugins and... and... well, you know how it goes. I'm geeking out heavily. I'm just trying to get things up and running such that I have equivalent functionality to the TypeLists feature from TypePad. I liked that a lot, but I'm digging the greater control I have over things with my own installation.

Work goes well; I'm pulling together a white paper on some of the more obscure sections of the database framework we use for our projects and presenting it to the rest of the team. I'm enjoying it a lot, and it reminds me of the days when I did more technical writing. After tweaking it yesterday, I toddled off from work to see Catherine.

Going to her house involves a nice manageable 30 minute drive. Unfortunately, the off-ramp for her city is the last one for twenty miles on the highway. If I miss it, I'm taking a loooooooong leisurely drive. As one might guess, I checked my voice mail and cruised right past it. Conveniently, the gas light immediately went on. When I managed to make it twenty miles on fumes to the next gas station for gas, I discovered that it had just suffered a power failure and its pumps were out of order. Things finally got sorted out after a lot of hoping and praying and calling Catherine to double-check directions, thankfully. And when I finally found a gas station, they had "Krispy Kremes":http://www.krispykreme.com . Rarrrr.

When things settled down and donuts had been consumed, we ended up watching a rented copy of "Garden State":imdb:Garden+State. I've heard a lot about it (who hasn't?) but we never managed ot catch it in theaters. It's really, really good. That good. Catherine loved it to, but I don't think she shares the deep affection for early "John Hughes":imdb:John+Hughes movies and later "Cameron Crowe":imdb:Cameron+Crowe films that I do... Garden State didn't share their style so much as it, like those earlier movies, perfectly captured the heart of my generation's existential dilemma at a given moment. The Breakfast Club? All about authority figures being not-what-we-thought-them and the confusion that results. Say Anything? Post-school ennui and the need for meaning beyond the Baby Boomer career path. Garden State pauses and dwells on the hearts and souls of its genx post-boom middle class twentysomethings. Everyone's treading water -- hurting, a little confused, surviving, broken but functioning. The main character is off his meds for the first time since childhood, navigating strange and confusing waters as emotions seep back in. It's a gentle movie in so many ways, hopeful without cutting anyone slack. No one is beyond redemption, and the first steps are honesty and desire.

You know, this necklace makes me think of this totally random memory of my mother. I was a little kid, and I was crying for whatever reason. And she was cradling me, rocking me back and forth, and I can just remember the silver balls rolling around. And there was snot dripping all over my face. She offered me her sleeve and told me to blow my nose. I can can remember, even as a little kid, thinking to myself, "This is love... this is love."

Good. Very.