They Just Fly By, Don't They?

The years, I mean. Tomorrow DH and I will celebrate 16 years of marriage. In October we marked the 20th year of being a couple. I am married to the nicest guy on the planet; I am so damned lucky!

1991 was so different from now, in so many ways. We'd bought the house that April, a major fixer-upper and were learning the trials of commuting from Burbank to West LA - there's no good or quick or public-transit way to get from here to there. After only 4 years, my relatively high-powered job as tax manager for a formerly huge national corporation was vanishing, a victim of the late-80s wave of over-leveraged corporate debts. I was working very long hours, but I didn't have a new job lined up for the day the pink slip showed up. Everything we had saved had gone into the house purchase, so our finances were shaky in spite of good salaries.

So we decided on a very financially prudent, small-scale wedding. We went to Lost Wages and to a little chapel, where the wedding party was just the two of us. It was nice; the minister had Really Big Hair, since her night-time job was Country-Western Singer. But the words she said were touching and appropriate, and the bride cried happy tears.

Midnight and her sister Shadow were new members of our feline community, about 10 weeks old. Now as I write, Middy lies in front of the monitor, an elderly kitty at age 16; we lost Shadow in January and still miss her. The other two cats we had at that time have been gone for some years, both at age 11, our beautiful, feisty long-haired calico Chanel to cancer and our timid tiger, Tigger, to kidney failure. DH and I are closer to 60 than we like to acknowledge. Sixty? Huh?? Us? Can't be.


Fast forward to 2007.
I'm suffering some pre-holiday letdown. My belated gift boxes left yesterday, to Missouri and Illinois, Alaska and Washington State and Vancouver. I'm wrapping my little gifties to my seniors and a couple of other knitting pals. Only the outdoor decorations are up, due to the missing key to our storage space and DH's extreme overtime hours. He promises to take off time to get the tree and so forth on Saturday. Tomorrow I have to go get the manager of the storage facility to cut off the lock and put on a new one, complete with key.

My Friday night knitting group is having a potluck and yarn swap tomorrow, which will be fun. I have several projects fighting it out for first-up in my Ravelry knitting Queue - an entrelac vest for DH done in Patons SWS in Natural Slate, a lovely yarn that stripes slowly from silver-grey to charcoal; a cardigan for me in Cascade's Di.Vé Autunno, a lovely single-ply merino in deep blue-green; the lacy Branching Out scarf in Elann's Super Kydd in the pale blue/grey Pewter, etc. Tuesday night I finished the beautiful Liesel scarf, 2 skeins of KFI's Cashmereno in teal, and wore it yesterday; I craved the feel of the incredibly soft yarn around my neck, blocked or not.

Middy has been hanging out here at the computer all day. She's consented to having her tummy scratched, though the picture shows the difficulty in taking photos of all-black cats. She was very interested earlier in a little video from Cute Overload, a most tuneful and talented feline piano player.


DH's anniversary gift is wrapped, his Christmas prezzies are stashed here and there, waiting for wrappings and boxes and bows. I'm working at cheering up as I write, listening to Josh Groban's holiday album, hoping for some upbeatness. So I leave you with a bit of year-end color, one of our Schlumbergias, a vividly red Christmas cactus.

Happy holidays!!