Mild Amusement

So, I attended a wedding for some family recently. Unfortunately, the Mild Fiancée was out of town for a previous engagement, so she couldn't make it. Luckily for me, I was at a table with my siblings, cousins, and family friends. Basically, people I've known for a while and around whom I am very comfortable.  Better yet, these are also folks who are around the same age. So, to recap: similar age, very comfortable around each other, happy occasion, gathered to celebrate. I knew it was going to be an interesting night based on the beverages alone. For starters, there was a bottle of soda at every table, and this is how someone at our table decided that they were going to drink said soda: That's Coca Cola in a tea cup. Yup, table 6 was fancy like that Yes, rather than use a glass, or find a glass, the solution was to use a tea cup. Note the unused wine glass sitting next to the open soda bottle. Now I'm not sure that I would've used the wine glass for soda, eit...

This year, for my birthday, the Mild Fiancée got me an honest-to-God CrossFit class at a local gym. For all that I've done CrossFit-like work outs all these years, I've never actually made it out to one of the local boxes. And since the Mild Fiancée knows that I enjoy this activity, she worked it out so that I could give it a shot. That's when the fun began. First of all, it was supposed to be a surprise. Remember, I have friends who own a CrossFit gym, so this seemed like a pretty good way to make this happen. She emailed back and forth with them secretly, so as to surprise me. However, an unrelated scheduling quirk inadvertently tipped me off. We needed to reschedule a dance class, and the lady offered up a Saturday morning. I checked our calendar and noted that we didn't have anything planned at that time, but the Mild Fiancée immediately replied that we couldn't make that morning. Apparently she noticed the actual arching of my eye brows at that point. When we...

Do you remember when I learned to crochet a baby beanie ? I was happy to pick up a new skill, but it almost felt like a parlor trick. I mean, it's not like I was going to start making beanies left and right. Right? Heck, I even finished that blog post with a joking recommendation for people I know to have more babies precisely because I figured it was a one-off type occurrence. Well, the universe has a quirky sense of humor. As it turns out, I now have FOUR close friends and family who are all pregnant. What's more, they are all due around the same time. What are the odds? I can understand four such people being pregnant at the same time, or even being pregnant in the same year (I'm at that age). But four people all due within a month or so of each other? What are the odds? One of those people just so happens to be my sister. She is the first of us siblings to have a kid, so it's an extra special big deal. It wasn't a matter of whether I was going to make her ki...

When the Mild Fiancée and I moved in together, we started buying groceries together. Sure, that sounds like an obvious statement, but it has led to some very interesting consequences. To quote one of my all-time favorite stories ("The Quiet Man" by Maurice Walsh), that one small statement "holds the risk of tragedy, the chance of happiness, the probability of endurance - choices wide as the world." One of the interesting parts of this was figuring out where we found value. For example, did we want the name-brand mouth wash or was a generic version of this okay? Did we want to opt in to a community supported agriculture (CSA) outfit or did we want to buy our own groceries week to week? For that matter, where did we want to buy said groceries? Did Safeway have a better deal on chicken or did Costco? Decisions, decisions. We did eventually start to make decisions and settle into a pattern, so things started to make sense. However, that's not to say that we did...