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...

So, I recently got engaged . We're both pretty happy about this turn of events, but this now means that we have to plan a Mild Wedding. I think we've both heard a lot of the advice from people (it goes by very quickly, enjoy the day, don't worry so much about details, people will always find something to complain about), but the planning process has already yielded some laughs. We have a rough idea of what we're after, so that helps. Still, we only got engaged recently, so we're just starting our search. We've yet to nail down the major details. So, I'm going to keep those details close to the vest in case any of them have to change. I wouldn't want to promise red napkins only to be forced to put blue napkins on a table because of a logistics problem, you know? However, the one piece of information that I will divulge is one of the funniest bits. Somehow or other, I convinced the Mild Fiancée that I am allowed to put one song on the DJ's play...

I've mentioned before that things get interesting when it comes to late night dreams and work at 3AM . Like I joked about in those posts, 3AM Sam is all sorts of interesting. Well, this isn't a post about 3AM Sam being a jerk, but I have one more example of things getting all sorts of goofy when I'm up late. I should also mention that the Mild Fiancée can usually tell when I'm tired. I tend to be up pretty early, so it's not exactly hard to guess that I'm going to feel tired earlier than most folks. She's also sharp enough to notice if my eyes start to droop, and that's kind of an obvious tell. However, she can also tell just from my mannerisms. Even if she was around a corner, or if we were talking over the phone, she could probably tell you if I was tired (or annoyed). I have my tells, apparently. So, it's not like I could sneak it past her that I was starting to feel sleepy even if I wanted to try. She'll notice. Ultimately, that means th...

The Mild Fiancée and I thoroughly enjoyed our time in New York, but all good things must come to an end. Ultimately, that meant we had to fly home. Oh, and what a day it would be. Now, I'm going to tell this story differently than I usually do (you'll see why in a little bit). So, I'll start with what the intended plan was. We wanted to have dinner at one of our favorite restaurants and have a nice evening at home. Also, I wanted to propose to the then-Mild Girlfriend somewhere in the course of all that. I've been thinking about it for a little while, and it seemed like a good time. Alas, the best laid schemes of mice and men go often askew . Somehow, we managed to have the screwiest day of travel on precisely the day we were planning on coming back. First of all, we got waved through to the priority part of the security check, for no apparent reason. I was actually concerned that we were going to get patted down, but it was actually the opposite. They let us waltz ...