What a Life!

Today is our fifth anniversary. I went through all of my digital pictures and this is the only picture I could find of the two of us – just the two of us, you know, without a herd of family standing around us like those pictures you take when the entire family gets together at weddings and funerals. Seems as though I’m the one who is always holding the camera so I have lots of pictures of Steve, a few someone else took of me, but slim pickin’s for the two of us together. That’s okay. Being seen together in lots of pictures is not requisite to a happy marriage.

This picture was actually taken soon after we started dating. We met during the first part of December and that picture was taken after the turn of the year but still during the winter. A great aunt of mine had died and I wanted to go to her funeral since I lived close enough to drive there. Dad was also going to be there, so he was the first person in my immediate family to meet Steve. That picture was taken out at the cemetery after the funeral. It was cold and windy…which should explain the looks on our faces.

It was so funny…apparently I have this habit that Steve had picked up on where I chew my food mostly with my mouth closed but I open my mouth to breath for the last few chews before I swallowed. At one point while we were up in South Dakota, Steve was sitting between me and my dad…and he said it was that same chewing thing except it was in stereo! Oh my! The things we learn about ourselves when we date someone…

We dated for about a year and a half and then we got married. We eloped. Our wedding budget for everything including the honeymoon was less than $500. We went to Geneva for our honeymoon. Geneva, Nebraska, that is. There’s a quaint bed and breakfast there that we stayed at. Ah, the memories!

Before we got married, I was living in a house that I owned and Steve was living in an apartment. The week before we got married, since we were going to be rearranging all the funiture anyway to make room for his things, we decided it was the perfect opportunity to pull back the carpet and refinish the wood floors underneath. We got married on a Tuesday, and the weekend before (ten days before our wedding), we pulled back the carpet and started working on the floor. According to what we’d read on the internet, it would be a weekend project with sanding the floors down, staining them, and then polishing them with polyurethane, including the drying time between each step.

Yeah, according to what we’d read on the internet… We spent our entire weekend trying to sand it down to get it even. We had asked for the belt sander at Home Depot but they told us it was more sander than we needed so they rented us the other sander. Turns out the belt sander really was what we needed. After a weekend of getting nowhere, I complained and got them to credit what we’d spent toward the correct machine we’d asked for in the first place. So then all week long, we worked every evening until midnight as well as the entire next weekend as well in order to get it done. Oh, there was this asphalt tile in one of the bedrooms that had literally melted into the floor so we had to dissolve it with whatever chemicals like dissolving nail polish. That took most of the afternoon on Saturday, including more than one trip to Home Depot to buy something that might work better. I’m telling you, it was the project from hell! But he still married me.

So last night we celebrated our anniversary. When Steve went to open the bottle of wine, the corkscrew broke. We had to use a pliers to grab onto what was left of the corkscrew imbedded in the cork and twist and pull and mess around in order to get the cork out. He used his locking pliers. Ah, yes! Another simple task gone haywire. Our first five years of marriage have been very good, but based on those two simple tasks gone haywire, the next five years are sure to be glorious!