When I met my boyfriend Chris, he wasn’t what I thought of as my “type.” He skateboarded and went to punk shows, didn’t like the Magnetic Fields or Yo La Tengo (I listened to them heavily back then), and would never wear a sweater. I thought that if I could expect anything of a boyfriend, it’d be what I considered obvious: he’d wear wool, and jam to Stephin Merritt. Still, I adored Chris the first time I met him—and every time after—because he was just the “type” of person I wanted to know. He was funny and kind, soft-spoken and clever; plus, he had the most adorable dimples.

It turns out that Chris and I have nearly identical personalities, yet there’s a big enough wedge between our interests to make it so we’re not like the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry meets Janeane Garofalo and everything about them is so much the same that they end up hating each other. We’re both shy introverts and we both like The Office, but Chris hates my olives and I hate his bologna.

Our first real date was to the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro because we both love animals, and we went there again the next year for our anniversary. We moved into an apartment seven months later, and are still here after three years and five months. That brings us to five exact years of growing older and more ridiculous together. When it’s chilly in the morning, Chris reminds me to take a sweater. When he fell skateboarding and sprained his wrist, I fed him shreds of ginger root “to help with inflammation” and he didn’t even protest. When I get sick, he brings me medicine. When he gets sick, I won’t even know what to do because I have never seen him sick. (He had a runny nose, once.) We make dinner together and share trash duty. He likes to vacuum. I like… not having to vacuum.

Soooo, I bring you exciting news item #1!

On October 13th, my skater-dude boyfriend became my brand-new husband. We had a very small ceremony to please all six guests who attended, and spent our honeymoon in a little cabin near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was a wonderful wedding and vacation. I don’t really talk much about relationship stuff, but I think it’d be appropriate to use the word “perfect” to describe how things have been going.

In order to avoid descending into name-tattoo territory, let me just show you pictures.

There’s a little cabin at the top of an autumn-speckled mountain that is calling my name! I plan to eat a lot of steak and s’mores while I’m out there in the middle of nowhere, where hallucinations of purple squirrels are not only possible but encouraged.

Here’s a fun thing if you’re a color freak who collects paint swatches from Home Depot: Drag and drop the colors in each row to arrange them by hue order. The rows combine to make a spectrum of color.

0 is the best score, out of 99. I got a 4, with each of my errors occurring in the blue-green portion of the spectrum. I want to try again but I have stuff to do, so I’ll go ahead and accept my imperfections.

Link from Schmutzie’s Linkblog.

It’s 4 AM and I’m still awake for no reason, which is very high school of me. I can’t say it’s very college of me, because if I was awake at 4 AM then I was usually stressfully completing some kind of project—the most legitimate reason ever to be awake so early in the morning. I will never forget the way it feels to still be stooped over the same webdesign project, or calligraphy project, or metalsmithing project, or relief printing project, when the sun comes up. I’ll forever be a student of deadlines.

I have some exciting news to share but I’m just waiting for things to come together. My calendar’s been fun, though! Here’s February:

I do have more months done than just January and February. The end of next month is when I plan to be done with all of them, which is just another deadline to meet that I’ll probably be staying up for.