as good as it gets

**Spoiler alert!***

[Marriage is a lot of work. It requires a phenomenal quantities of prayer, work, time, effort, selflessness, and more prayer to be the spouse that makes your spouse be the best they can be. Enviable marriages do not fall out of cereal boxes.]

One year down, and on to the next! Andrew and I crossed the milestone in the comfort of the 4-star Montréal Hilton (the 'Ilton) Bonaventure downtown. We spent our elongated weekend traipsing from restaurant to restaurant, aimlessly strolling in and out of shops "with no particular destination in mind". The weather lingered in the mid-20s, didn't rain, and provided a breeze enough to prevent us exerting ourselves in any way. Bliss.

More blissfull still was spending time with La. We did all the things that give us a particular sense of joy, including a few hours of Arthur Burk's audio teaching on financial curses, playing "Would You Rather"*, picnicking, watching multiple episodes of Heroes and SNL, dreaming about the future, and people watching.

It's a long way from that first spring when things started to bloom, but it feels similar. I could spend a lifetime learning more about him and there would still be more to learn.

He's easily the hottest man I know, he's my best friend, he's the continuity my life had been missing, and he's still the best thing to wake up to in the morning.


* a variation of the game "Which Is Worse" popularized by the film So I Married An Axe Murderer:

Harriet: "What's worse?  You go to your favourite
restaurant order your favourite meal, take a bite and
under the steak is a scabby Band-Aid.  Or...."
Susan: "Or being electrocuted.
Tony: "And?"
Susan: "That's it. I was electrocuted once. It was horrible."

the truth about cats and dogs

We recently had, as Kate Graham aptly put it, twins. An eight week old chocolate lab named Solomon:

and an eight week old tabby named Oberon:

Yes, that means that one is the king of wisdom and the other is the king of shadows and fairies. On purpose.

They're both pretty much the cutest and best behaved pets in the world (considering their eight week long state of existence) and they provide much more entertainment than cable. I've noticed certain similarities between them and their caregivers, namely, Andrew and me.

1. They both can fall asleep in a room filled with people. Like me. (although Oberon seems to wake up easily and be fully alert, like Andrew, and Solomon takes a while to operate basic movements once "awake", like me)
   
2. They act cranky if they're hungry. Like Andrew.
3. Oberon is a fan of provoking Solomon and gleefully staying out of reach. Like me.
   
4. They have green eyes. Like Andrew.
   
5. They want to be in the middle of the action. Like both of us.

the way we were

Recently my old Hotmail account was hacked and The Spaminator sent a grammatically errored message to everyone I've known since I was eighteen (my husband fault's my easy-to-figure-out passwords: "A computer figured it out."). While using my crack skills to change my password to another noun I disovered my old MSN profile, including this saavy shot:

and this telling profile:
Things I enjoy about this discovery:

• I look goth. I was, in fact, never a goth.
  
• The photo taken at the Oakvillian home of my university friend, Nik, probably in 2001. Back in the age of land lines.
  
• I owned leather pants. I remember submitting this picture to "Hot or Not" around the same time, and a separate photo of a close-up of my face, as a social experiment. The leather pants scored supremely "hotter" even though my face is barely visible. What that thin shine will do to boys...
• I just remembered what inspired the purchase of leather pants.
• This is one of the few shots of my short hair phase. It was shorter than this at one point, but nearly all proof has been lost.
  
• I think I'm opening some sort of chocolate snack. Since I'm at Nik's house, not my own, I was allowed.
• Chances are, I'm on the phone with my mother which means that I was keeping the chocolate snack a secret.
• Although my profile seems scattered (was I 25? was I 23?) it probably has something to do with the dates that I updated it. "Suffering from acute joy and hope"? Really?
• The Keats quote is from La Belle Dame sans Merci. I was studying Romantic Poetry in university and had fallen quite madly in love with Keats. Which was nothing compared to my love of Longfellow.
• La Belle Dame inspired famous paintings by Sir Frank Dicsee and John William Waterhouse. Incidentally, Waterhouse's painting is a fairly accurate depiction of how I try to kiss Andrew.
• I still have many of the same interests.
• I feel much older and much happier now than I did then.