RIP, Dr. George Tiller

This makes me absolutely sick to my stomach with anger and grief. And he was AT CHURCH, for chrissakes. There are just no words.

Newlyweds no longer

Well, our two years is up. No longer would J-P and I qualify to go on television and squirm while Bob Eubanks asks us impertinent questions about making whoopee. (Wow, I bet that reference dates me.) Not that I secretly harbored any interest in appearing on The Newlywed Game, mind you, but the point is that, until today, we could have. I guess we'll just have to settle for couples' week on Wheel of Fortune.

But, all joking aside, the past year has served as a rude reminder that marriage is not all mini calla lilies and champagne, but can be freaking hard for even the most solid-seeming couples. (Newsflash: Those divorce statistics have to come from somewhere.) We've stood by as friends, family, friends of friends, family friends, and friends' families struggled in the face of infidelity, addiction, physical or mental illness, the loss of a parent, or the loss of a baby. We've stood by as others faced challenges that were more intangible, but no less real -- the loss of trust, a lack of communication, or a growing apart.

Weathering any of this seems impossibly difficult, and weathering it with an intact relationship even more so. But, after two years, I'm more certain that ever that there is no one with whom I'd rather weather whatever life has to offer than J-P.

Two years!

Because that's how we roll

I know this is a little delinquent, but just a few lessons to share from our Easter dinner last month:

1. You will rightly get called a geek if you emblazon your egg with the Fibonacci sequence.



2. You know that story about how if you put a lighted match in an empty wine bottle, it will create a vacuum and suck down a peeled hard-boiled egg that's sitting on top of the bottle? Total bullshit. And it doesn't work with a plastic soda bottle either.



3. Grown adults will do anything you want if you offer them chocolate and the homemade championship belt of the erstwhile East Nashville Egg Federation.

Singing the praises

I so love Columbia Outerwear. Can I tell you about it? (Oh yes. I can. I have a blog for exactly this purpose.)

I've had this Columbia ski jacket for ages -- it predates J-P, so it's at least six or seven years old, if not more. It's one of those 2-in-1 jackets with a fleece inside and a water proof shell outside that you can zip together or wear separately. It's a work horse, nothing fancy, but it keeps me warm. I'm especially fond of the fleece, which I tend wear alone as a lightweight jacket during the fall and spring.

This past fall, I was wearing the fleece as I watched the Jets whoop up on the Titans. But when I tried to zip it -- lo, much to my dismay -- the zipper pull just fell off in my hand. The zipper was kaput. The fleece would no longer zip up, and it certainly would no longer zip into the outer shell.

Tragic.

Unwilling to accept the apparent fate of my beloved jacket, I looked into Columbia's warranty and found that I could send them my jacket, a letter describing the problem, and maybe (hopefully, fingers crossed) they would be able to fix it.

So I did, and they did. Just this week, I got my jacket back, clean and newly-re-zippered, for all of the $7 that it cost me to ship Columbia the jacket, plus a 4-6 week turnaround time. Not bad at all.

But! That's not even the best part! Because, the last time I was skiing, I somehow (being an idiot and all) managed to cut the elastic drawcord thingy on the hood. (Like, cut with a pair of scissors. By accident.) I didn't even think about pointing this out in the letter I sent with my jacket, because it was clearly my fault because I am an idiot, rather than a flaw with the jacket or anything like that.

When I got my jacket back this week though, I noticed right away that they had fixed the drawcord in addition to replacing the zipper. Which means they had taken the time inspect the whole jacket, noticed the cut cord, and gone ahead and fixed it even though I hadn't even complained about it.

That, right there, is one sure-fire way to make a reasonably happy customer into a crazy evangelical one.