Yesterday, my wife and I went out to our favorite christmas tree farm and picked out three lovely trees.  Yes, I said three.  We do this. 

The farmer was nice enough to let my wife cut down the smallest of them.



Exhilarating! Her first confirmed kill.



After all that hard work, here she is in her "pose" under a warm cup of Peet's Coffee.

I recently installed Google Deskbar and the image rotator went and indexed my pictures directory (Vista's toolbar did not).  Today, while working, I looked up and smiled because I saw my wife looking at me. 



Isn't she adorable?

My wife just sent me pictures of newly delivered furniture today to my phone, which I forwarded to my gmail account, which I used to populate this entry.

The chaise lounge for the library (my fav)



Dining room table and chairs (the wifes fav)



Buffet that accompanies the dining room table

Technology.  I just can't remember life without the internet... and web enabled cell phones.

Last night was Last Thursday here in Portland and both my wife and I were there.  This marks our second Last Thursday in a row and we're still surprised how many people show up.  It's a wonderful thing.

I had to "drag" my wife out of the house to go because she wanted a sarong that we saw last time and she really wanted to go back to get it.  I say drag because I had to work late that night and we both didn't think that we'd have time to go.  Also, she wasn't having the best of days, so getting her out of the house was beneficial to both her and my sanity.  

So we're there.  Looking for the sarong lady.  And looking.  Until we found her!  Low and behold, the one sarong my wife wanted was gone.  In the car ride over, I told her that if it wasn't there that she'd find another one that she'd just HAVE TO HAVE.  Well, she found it.  It looked great after the sarong lady helped her strap it on but the fun started when my wife looked in the mirror next to the booth and said "Oh my god, I look like a hippie".  Well, for those of you who've been to Last Thursday know that it's kind of a hippie thing.  With that said, there were quite a few hippie-esque people walking around.  Hell, when I say few I really mean the majority.  So when my wife says this, who do you think is standing right next to her?  That's right, a little hippie girl.

My wife, embarrassed and not wanting to offend, grabbed the girls shoulder and promptly apologized.  She was not offended and laughed along with my wife and said that she herself often wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror and says "boy, do I look like a hippie today".

We all had a good laugh and nobody was offended.  The only casualty was my wife’s embarrassment which I'm sure wore off a little while later.

As for the sarong, it looks great and like my wife mentioned on the way home; "I'll wear it every day this week... until I put it in my closet, never to be worn again".  Or something along those lines.  Did it brighten her day?  Yes.  Was it worth it? Hell yes!

It's been a busy holiday season and my lovely wife has summed it up very nicely on her blog.  We're both looking ahead and see 2007 as being a very good year; we've dubbed it the "year of abundance". 

My wife always has a color scheme for her tree each year for Christmas... yes, we get his and her trees.  Mine has no scheme.  Gaudy is the word for that.

This year, my wife has a red and white tree, which turned out very lovely this year.  My one contribution; one green light in the midst of red and white that adorn the tree.  It drives her crazy but it's my way of letting her know that I love her.

Merry Christmas Honey

What my wife and I were for Halloween.

I've updated the image to include my name... Rupert.

My wife went out and got another chihuahua, Prada, and she's adorable. 

me: "The thing that concerns me about buying that house, putting a new coat of paint on it, then selling it again is; it's been on the market for so long, why hasn't it sold?"
wife: "Because it's fucking ugly!"

Happy Birthday Honey!

I hope you have a fabulous day to match your fabulous life.

It finally happened.  Yesterday the new Barnes & Noble in the Clackamas Town Center opened and my wife and I were there to take it all in.  

<tangent>
For the record, our favorite book store in Portland, hands down, is the downtown Powell’s; they have everything and the kitchen sink.  Unfortunately though, we live out in the suburbs and can’t always trek into town to go to Powell’s.  This is why the new Barnes & Noble opening is so great, it’s right in our backyard and it takes us just minutes to get to.

The Clackamas Town Center is currently going thru and extensive remodel with Barnes & Noble being the first of many new additions.  Like Washington Square Mall, it’s increasing in size and introducing an outdoor/indoor shopping experience.  The artist’s representations they have plastered about the mall of the new look tease us to no end.  One of these additions is going to be a new movie theater which my wife and I are also looking forward to opening and will no doubt be there opening day as well.
</tangent>

But I digress.  Barnes & Noble was everything we had hoped for and better.  The Starbucks inside, which is a short jaunt to the malls Starbucks –always odd how that works, was very nice and offered cheesecake from the Cheese Cake Factory.  Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.  So we got a piece along with our coffee (iced tea for me).  The store itself was a bit overwhelming for the both of us because we didn’t know the layout.  We basically wandered around going into almost every section saving (rather finding) the fiction section for last.  There we each found a new book:

“Paris Hangover” by Kirsten Lobe for my wife



and

“Running with Scissors: A Memoir” by Augusten Burroughs for myself.  



After our find and sitting down to read a few pages we decided to leave knowing full well that we’ll not only be back but that it may just turn into our “home” away from home.

My horoscope for today (from my wife):

Success is also about the long run, not just the immediate payoff. Remind yourself of that when you start getting impatient and are tempted to take shortcuts. You want the real thing, and you want it to last, remember?

Sometimes I need to remember that, especially when it comes to my side projects.  I get discouraged easily.

We had some friends over for dinner and drinks last night (Ty and Bernie).  My lovely wife cooked up broiled breaded chicken with whole roasted garlic, a side of polenta stuffed with cheese, tomatoes and mushrooms, caesar salad and tortellini soup; it was to die for.  She even got the approval from Ty who’s a chef.  That’s a big thing, like a restaurant getting a good review from a food critic.  No, we are not open to the general public.

Before dinner, Ty and Bernie helped me move the pool table that has been hibernating in the back of my truck since the weekend to a corner of the garage (read full story).  No, it’s not set up yet.  We still need to determine where it’ll go.  For now, we just propped it up against the wall until we clean the garage and figure out where it’s going to live.  Once we find a home for the pool table, we’ll have Ty and Bernie back over for dinner and drinks again … hint, hint (read, “I can’t move a 500lb pool table by myself”).

After dinner we all decided to play Yahtzee.  Both Nikki and I thought we had the game but it turns out that we have Word Yahtzee, circa 1978 (purchased at an estate sale a while back).  We all had fun and it was an interesting game but I think we all like regular Yahtzee better.  After a few beers and some wine, we could barely spell “IF” from the letters “YEFOSID”.  Although when you’re a bit tipsy, the good words come out; “CUM WADS”, “CUNT” and “ME IDIOT” just to name a few.  Not to brag, but I did manage to win.  Which brought back a vivid thought from the depths of my alcohol soaked mind: I’ve never lost at Monopoly!

Yup, I’m undefeated in that popular game of real-estate.  Albeit, I’ve only played about 4 or 5 times in my entire life and the first time I played was only about 3 years ago but that doesn’t change the fact that I have yet to lose.  So perhaps the next dinner, drinks and game outing we all have, Monopoly will have to be played instead of Yahtzee.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be toppled as the Monopoly Grand Champion… or maybe I’ll win again.

To make a short story long, Ty and Bernie are good friends that we need to see more of.  Maybe I’ll just keep moving the pool table to get them to come over more often.  Hell, I just need to answer my phone and return messages in all honesty.  They try to get together with us but my lazy-no-message-returning-ass keeps it from happening more often than not.  In the immortal words of almost everybody on News Years Eve; “I’m going to make more of an effort to get together with friends”.  There, I said it.  Happy New Year.

My wife is home sick for Paris. We went there for our honey moon in the summer of 2005 but unfortunately lost our camera during our trip back home. Since she's home sick and needed to see Paris again, I thought I'd help. I sent a "friend", we'll call him Google, to Paris to take some pictures of our time there in that great city. Enjoy!

Here's the hotel we stayed at; Les Trois Poussins at 15 Rue Clauzel

The reception desk where we met the lovely unforgetable staff

Our room

The little cafe in the hotel where we ate breakfast every morning

The bistro we ate in our first night; ham and cheese sandwhiches -yum

Gard Du Nord, we walked there the first day to get our metro passes

Sacre Cur, we walked there next

More Sacre Cur

A map of the metro

Another mapWe

found the metro a few blocks away from our hotel

One of the many bistros we ate at, the patio chairs always faced the street

The Louvre

The Louvre again

The upside down triangle in the Louvre, NOW I know what it means

My wifes favorite piece in the lourve, The winged goddess of victory

The crowd in front of the Mona List, about as close as we got

The Arch De Triumph on Champs Elysées

ManRay, the BEST restaurant in Paris; the owner gave us a gift before we left

Notre Dame

The Eiffel Tower

Beneath the Eiffel Tower, we ate lunch there

Another

A view from the Eiffel Tower

And last but not least, Starbucks; we found it on our last day... we both nearly shat!

A view from inside Starbucks

Honey, I love you... I hoped this little montage helped make you feel like Paris isn't that far away.

My wife has been behind me and Pytheus from the very beginning.  If it wasn't for her delicate pushing and total support, I don't know if Pytheus would have ever made it this far.  More to the point, with her continued support, I feel that Pytheus can and will succeed.

She wrote a nice congratulatory entry on her blog concerning the launch of Pytheus, I emplore everyone to read it.  She truly is amazing!

Thank you for your support honey!

Happy Valentines Day Honey

<rant>
First off I’d like to thank all the spammers out there that have thought to themselves, “Hmm, I bet I’ll get a bigger response if I blindly send out as many emails as I can to people… hehe, I’ll be rich!” –greedy bastards!  It’s these fuck-nuts that have basically ruined email for the rest of us.
</rant>

Well I can’t blame them but man, ISPs have basically throttled down email so much that I cannot for the life of me send a legitimate email to a legitimate company without it either getting bounced back or filtered out of existence.  Honestly, it’s my wife who’s having the problem, but still… what the fuck?  

So we have this cleaning service (not pronounced maids) that was great their first visit.  My wife and I were basically in awe over the job they did (Team B rocks!).  Then, their next visit (not Team B) left us wondering what they actually did.  At first glance things looked good but we later discovered that too much was left dirty.  And for what we pay them, that’s unacceptable.

Because of this, my wife writes up a nice email stating that we were less than pleased.  Once it’s complete, she tries to send it from her me-nikk.com account (an email server I administer) and it immediately bounces back.  Eh, this happens because my mail server uses a dynamic IP and we’re used to it.  She then tries to send it from hotmail.com… no luck.  Then our last option, our ISPs email… and wouldn’t you know it, it can’t get thru either.  Yahoo has locked down their email so much, that we cannot get thru to this company.  

Now I’m left wondering, what good is email if I can’t email anybody?  Unless of course I’m on your super-happy-fun-list of acceptable users!

My wife did it!

A few minutes ago, the receptionist brought in a bunch of balloons sent by my wife.  Why, you may be asking yourself, did she do this?  Valentines Day perhaps?  Nope!  This Sunday, February 12th, is "the anniversary of the day I was born", as my father likes to put it.  Yup, it's my birthday.  I'll be old enough to drink... plus 8... plus 3... damn, I'm getting old.

Any who, thank you honey for EMBARASSING the HELL out of me here at work.  Deep down, I love it! 

<sappy intensity="90%" tears="false">
Fellas, you need to find a wife like mine, she's like no other and I LOVE HER dearly for it.
</sappy>

Ok, back to work.

Well the wifey is up in Seattle this weekend, hi sweetie and I have the whole weekend to myself.  What do I do now though?  Honestly, I'm fucking bored. 

I do have things to do today and I'm actually quite busy (take the dog to the vet to have stitches removed, mail some things, etc) so I'll be out and about but when I get home it'll be quite.  Of course I'll turn on some radios, one upstairs and one down, to make it less empty... feeling. 

Then later on today it's computer time!  No shameless plug this time, if you haven't heard of my side project too bad.  I talk about it enough so you avid readers should be in the know.  I'm hoping to get the free (Basic) version live this weekend but that might be asking a bit much.  It will be coming soon, I assure you.

Looking at my log files, I notice one person in particular in Redondo Beach, CA, who's been checking the site out waiting for it to go live.  Fadere, you know who you are.  And incase you read this send me an email and I'll hook you up with the Premium version free for life.  Before you ask, Fader is a friend of mine from L.A. so don't get your panties in a wad about having to pay for the Extended or Premium version.  Be my friend and then we'll see.

Damn, that non-plug went longer than I thought.  Honey, I miss you and I'll see you online later on today.

Love ya!

Today marks the first day of many in which our house will be professionally cleaned.  I dislike the term "maid" because it won't be just one person, rather a small group of cleaners.  Good lord, it sounds even worse now... we don't have just a maid, we have maids -plural.  Does this make my wife and I a bit snobbish?  Personally I don't think it's a bad thing nor do I think it makes us elitist in any way, shape or form.

We have a fairly big house with 7 cats and 3 dogs... and 2 birds... and 2 aquariums, so keeping up the cleaning is not an easy task.  We do our best with maintaining but with me working full-time and her going to school full-time we don't seem to have time to really clean.  Example; we've lived in this house going on 2 years now and we've mopped the kitchen floors a handful of times.  Don't ask my wife how many times we've dusted, she'll give you an exact number and believe me, you'll be able to count it on one hand and it doesn't make her happy that she can do that. 

So... let the cleaning begin.  Cleaners, start your vacuums; it's time to suck!

That's right.  One year ago, my wife and I were married in the fabulous downtown court house.  The ceremony was short but SWEET.  We had more people there than either of us thought would.  I love her now just as I did then... perhaps even more.

Honey, I love you... Happy Anniversary.

It may be a first, but man, am I glad it's Monday.  My wife, who attends PNCA, is in finals and I've been her assistant all weekend helping with her projects.  Out of 4 finals, 3 are complete -the fourth is a debate set for Wednesday. 

She kicked butt and my butt got kicked. 

Congrats honey... and good luck!  A's across the board

Well the holiday season is upon us and with it come the Christmas tree.  In our case though, it’s more like Christmas trees –plural.  Our first Christmas as a couple, 3 years ago, my wife and I discovered that we decorate our trees VERY differently.  She likes her tree to be very elegant, sticking to no more than 2 colors (the first year it was silver and white, the next it was red and white) while mine has to be gaudy with as many colors, shapes and blinking lights as I can.  I shit you not, you stare at one of my decorated trees long enough you run the risk of going into a seizure.

So that first Christmas (we weren’t living together at the time) we vowed to always get 2 trees; my big gaudy one and her petite classy one.  Low and behold, our first Christmas in our first house together last year we fulfilled that promise.  She got a cute, petite noble fir and I got the Griswold family tree big enough to bend at the ceiling when fully erect.  I loved my tree, although I didn’t have it blink as much as I wanted to (her father was here for the holidays and I didn’t want him go insane from all the flashing) but it did have a lot of color and garland.  Her tree was very lovely and elegant.  She has the red and white look going on with a bit of silver.

This year I opted out of getting the XXXL tree for something that was a mere 7-8 feet; that’s small for me.  But before we even went to the tree farm, Newmans Nobles, we were at New Seasons Market downtown for a quick snack after perusing Powells for a bit.  There they had LIVE trees… hehehehe.  You must know, I love pine trees (noble firs, blue spruces, you name it) and I want one for our yard which is lacking in that department.  About a year and a half ago I did get a red wood but that’s another story.  So, being the marketing suckers that we are, we bought a little 4 foot live noble fir.  We’ll put it on our porch for now and hopefully find a home for it in our yard… at the very least we’ll keep it in the pot and put it on one of our balconies.  So, that was our first tree of the season.  

Today, without really planning to do it this weekend, we decided to go to the tree farm we went to last year and pick out 2 trees.  We take the dogs of course because they’re part of our family and you pick out trees with your family, right?  So they run around marking their territory (Brian alone pee’d on well over a dozen trees –my apologies to the family(ies) who will be smelling noble fir scented with urine this year in their homes).  After they ran around, we put them back in the truck and finally started looking for our trees.  Fairly quickly we had cornered and marked our trees, albeit without urine.  Rather we tied little blue doggie poop bags (minus any poop) to our respective trees and called for somebody with a chainsaw.  

In the end, my tree came out to about 7 and a half feet while Nikki’s came it at a little over 6 feet.  They’re in the garage and we’ll move them in sometime this week, both in the living room together, for the decorating.  Hers elegant, mine gaudy both lovely… an opposite attraction that makes the holidays grand for us.  

My wife is getting in the habit of waking up when I do (which is damn near the butt crack of dawn).  A couple days this week, she's been up when I get out of the shower.  For those of you who don't know my wife... this is a rare treat indeed.  Now, if I could just some how get her to dress up like me and pose as me at work.  Seriously, it's not like I do that much anyway -a frickin monkey could do my job.  Actually, a monkey could probably communicate with management a LOT better than I could.

My wife had to read a few articles last night for her Art & Design in Contemporary Society class last night when she came across a great quote on life, I thought I'd share.

"To live' means to proceed towards death.  On the way, one came across things that blocked one's path.  These things called 'problems' had therefore to be removed.

'To live' then meant: to resolve problems in order to be able to die."

--Vilém Flusser, The Non-Thing

This weekend was a hard weekend for me.  Without going into detail, I'll just say that I'm so glad that my wife is understanding, caring, and most of all loving.  Her weekend was no picnic either; she has her own stresses so my incident didn't help her at all.  We got thru it, and I learned that what I thought was controllable is not and I'm going to make an effort to control it -I have to, and I will.  It won't be easy but I need to put forth effort to show her that I care and that we mean the world to me.

This should make perfect sense to my wife, not so much anybody else.

Honey, I love you more than you'll ever know.

Aint't she a cutey?

wife: "You're quick"
me:   "That's what they tell me"
wife: "Sometimes that's not a good thing"
me:   "That's what they tell me"

After much talk and procrastination, my wife and I decided to start our own blogs.  We're both fans of dooce (she introduced me to her) and I'm a fan of computerZEN.  Now, at first she was into it but school keeps her busy so I was worried that she'd lose interest.  Oh no.  All day today, she's playing with her blog between her painting and writing homework assignments.  I'm now finding myself yelling (I say that lightly) at her to get back to doing homework. 

In all seriousness, I'm so happy that she's getting involved and picking it up all so quickly.  She's absolutely impressing me and I couldn't be more proud of my little new-found blogger. 

Now, if she could only learn HTML so I wouldn't have to update her site