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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jun 12, 2020 15:24:13 GMT -5
Yay!!! A beautiful and moving story, told in just eight lines! Congratulations to you and your Lady, Prince Hal! (What is it with cake and romance, though? My cheesecake recipe played no small part in my wooing strategy, too...) |
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Post by The Captain on Jun 15, 2020 10:41:51 GMT -5
On the heels of the anniversary of my first date with my wife 20 years ago, today is our 18th wedding anniversary. We were engaged within 11 months of our first meeting and set this date so that she would be finished with her Master's degree before we got married.
We planned the entire wedding ourselves on a relative shoestring budget (less than $8K, which was 1/4 of the amount her best friend spent on a SECOND wedding), as we wanted full creative control of the process without feeling obligated to do things that her or my parents wanted because they were footing any part of the bill. Mid-morning ceremony is the historic chapel of the church where I grew up, brunch reception (no bar, no DJ), and everyone was on their merry way by 3:00 PM.
While we got some additional photos taken, our wedding party got all of our gifts and stuff back to our apartment (she had moved in two weeks prior by herself, while I stayed at my parents following an ill-fated trip to California to look for a job in IT shortly after the dot-com bubble burst). We got home, ate some leftovers from the reception, and went to bed early because we had a 6:30 AM flight the following morning to St. Lucia for our honeymoon (courtesy of my mother, who wanted us to go somewhere nice to start our life together).
While things aren't always perfect, I'll take it over any other potential future that I could have imagined at the age of 26 when we first met. She's an incredible person in her own right, my partner in hijinks, and my best friend, and I have been incredibly blessed by her presence in my life, making me a better man than I ever thought I could be.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jun 17, 2020 7:46:08 GMT -5
There must be something romantic about the month of June, because like many of our compatriots here it is in June that Mrs. Raider and I walked down the aisle, 31 years ago on this day!
I still can't believe how lucky I am to have her in my life. To paraphrase Vaughan and Staples' comic Saga, she's the most beautiful person I know... and I'm not even talking about her looks. (That she looks stunning as well is just icing on the cake, naturally)!
In 31 years, I can't think of a single fight we might have had. And we're honestly as happy today as we were back then. Probably even more so, come to think of it, because we know each other even better.
It is something of a cosmic joke that I found my soul mate not on the other side of the world, but exactly two street corners away from my parents' house. (The wooing part took some effort, I'll grant you that, and is actually something of a Homeric epic, but that's something for another day.)
Anyway... Thank you, universe, for having created such a wonderful being and for putting her on my path!
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Post by Prince Hal on Jun 17, 2020 14:45:33 GMT -5
Roquefort Raider, it's nice to know that there is someone else in this world as lucky as I am! Now, you didn't reveal the baked goods part of the story that each of us apparently has in common, but you mentioned something else astonishingly similar to my "origin" tale that I hadn't. My future wife and I, though we never met till that fateful day at the Esso station, also lived exactly two street corners way from each other. No wonder these relationships work so well! Bonne anniversaire to you and Mme. Roquefort!
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jun 19, 2020 13:29:06 GMT -5
June 19th is Juneteenth specifically commemorating General George Granger's reading of the Federal proclamations in Galveston, TX that slaves held in Texas were free, and more generally the freeing of slaves in the U.S. This is not something that was ever taught in any of my history classes at any level (though to be fair most of my university history classes were not in American history). I'm spending at least part of my morning listening to Dom Flemons' 2018 album Black Cowboys. Flemons was a co-founder of "The Carolina Chocolate Drops" and is a historian of roots music. This album is of traditional western music focusing on the experience of black cowboys.
I grew up in Idaho with horses in the pasture, western movies and TV shows on the television and a Dad who constantly read western novels and a fair bit of western history. But it wasn't until I was an adult that I realized that around a quarter of all cowboys in the "Old West" were black and that between a quarter and a third were Hispanic. The West was not nearly as lily-white as TV and movies would lead us to believe.
Flemons' is a great musician and a great historian. Highly recommend his work both solo and with the Chocolate Drops.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Jun 19, 2020 14:41:12 GMT -5
June 19th is Juneteenth specifically commemorating General George Granger's reading of the Federal proclamations in Galveston, TX that slaves held in Texas were free, and more generally the freeing of slaves in the U.S. I had never heard of it before this year, but it is definitely a cause for celebration!!! |
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