Today is my anniversary. The RLA and I have been married for thirteen years.

Thirteen years ago, right about this time of day, we stood under a chuppah, held up by our friends, in the courtyard of the temple where the RLA had grown up, and pledged our troth. It was a magnificent summer Sunday morning in Rochester, New York. There were little birds chirping, and the grass was soft and green. The sky was blue. The RLA's hands were cold as ice, and I thought "Better you than me, being scared as shit."
The chuppah we used, I had made in graduate school, before I was kicked out. It was woven on an antique loom, with pearls and tea-dyed lace and all sorts of ivory and white threads. I was at the nadir of my life, and I imbued that piece with all the hopes for love and happiness that I could muster. The temple in Miami shipped it up to Rochester. The poles were lost in transit, so the RLA and I went off the local Home Depot equivalent and bought poles. The only things we could find that fit the holes in the corner grommets were tomato stakes. Metal, coated in green rubber, and with thorns, to help the tomatoes cling.

We had a reception at the Faculty Club on the University of Rochester campus, where the incomparable Father-In-Law had been a professor. The wedding cake was chocolate, with a dark chocolate ganache icing, and mocha buttercream swiss dots. I wanted the baker to put silver non-parielles, like chrome studs, on the dots, but there wasn't enough time (or money, one suspects) for her to do that. Our little cake topper was a pair of old gnarly gnomes, so dark and brown that people thought they were also chocolate.

Of all the people there, only one was a friend and not a relative, of mine. There were friends of ours, but only Andy was there for me, alone. He (Andy) immediately figured that out, and went around all day introducing himself thusly:

"Hello. I'm Andy. I'm L's ONLY friend." This is still how we refer to each other. Even the secretaries at his office know who I am when I say I'm Andy's only friend.

Tonight we'll go out to a French restaurant. It was all part of my plan, when I chose this date. Bastille Day. I always get a decent French meal, once a year. There's usually champagne flowing like water, and a few times during the evening I get to stand up and pretend to know the words to La Marseillaise. Depending on where you are, there may be fireworks. Sooner or later, I'll even get to spend an anniversary in France.

Magic happens. Happy anniversary.

I just got a call from the department secretary to rag on me about how the page containing the cafeteria menu isn't updated. Or, at least, it wasn't when she checked it yesterday.

I asked if she'd checked it today before she called me. No, she hadn't. Of course she hadn't, because if she had, she would have seen an updated menu. Which I posted yesterday, but after the only time she looked, apparently.

She also wanted to let me know that some volunteer had looked at the page and it wasn't right. Fine. So you both looked at it yesterday morning, and waited until lunch time today to bitch at me.

The PR department (of course) does this all the time. They call and ask me if I've posted crap, rather than looking at the web site.

Why? Why is it easier to call me than to click once? Do they love to hear the tone in my voice implying that they don't have sufficient brain cells to rub together? Are they laying odds that I'll crack and actually call them an idiot to their face? Or ear, as the case may be.

Or is it that they are just truly and monumentally stupid?

PHB: "We have all these pages and they don't have anything on them."

Me: "Uh-huh, and?"

PHB: "Well, Loogie (not her real name) in PR wanted to know what those pages were and I didn't know."

Me: "Those are blank pages. Those are the pages that need content. Those are the pages that Loogie has to write content for."
PHB: "They aren't blank on the existing site."

Me: "No, they aren't. They have a photo and a block of graphic links. But the new system creates dynamic links in the sidebar, so we need a paragraph to explain what each section contains. Otherwise, we have a blank page."

Really. A page with nothing on it is: Anyone? Anyone? A blank page, you fucking moron.

So, for the last three months? when I've been flapping my pie hole at you? telling you that there's all these blank pages with no fucking content? Yeah. That's what I've been talking about.

That. A page with nothing on it. That would be the definition of a blank page, a page with no content.

Repeat after me: There is just not enough alcohol in the world.

P.S. Just in case you guessed, yes, Loogie is the person who keeps sending me PDFs, even after I have explained, requested, begged, pleaded and stamped my little foot and pouted that I cannot use them on my site. I cannot use a PDF. I cannot use them here or there. I cannot use them anywhere. I do not like them in a file, I do not like them in a pile. I do not like them on a floppy, I do not like them as a copy.

Sorry. Got a little carried away.

The office I'm in has four walls and a door. These are real walls, not wall-ettes: they go all the way to the ceiling, not nose level. There isn't a window, but hell, I have the real walls and the door.

Today, and for the last month or so, I've been particularly thankful for the door. I've mentioned before that my team shares office space with another team. Their work habits require me to use my door as a sound baffle.

The woman across the hall leaves her door open, and only uses speaker phone. All day. She also listens to particularly bad radio and sings, but that's a walk in the park compared to her speaker phone abuse.

The Toxic Manager manages by standing over his employees, way too close, and watching them work. And sits behind them and tells them what to click on with their mouses. And just hangs around pontificating in an unidentifiable accent that makes everything he says sound like Laurence of Arabia talking to his camel "hut hut hut".

I had a dream the other night. I was forced to go on a date with President George Bush. We were going to the opera. It was black tie. I didn't want to go with him, and kept protesting that he was already married, and so was I, and we were not wed to each other.
To no avail. I had to put on an evening gown and go. I was in my parent's house, but it had been appropriated as a temporary White House. The Bush women were ridiculing my mother's decorating. They stuck their heads in my bedroom and made loud noises about how this room certainly was NOT part of the official residence.

I told them that it was my childhood bedroom and off limits. Then I had to go into their area to put my makeup on in their bathroom. They didn't know how to turn the lights on and were only barely polite when I showed them where the switches were.

We (the President and I) finally got into the limo to go to the opera. Only it wasn't a limo, it was a Lincoln, and the POTUS was driving it himself. I was pissed because we were late and they were holding the curtain until we arrived. I felt that he was taking advantage of his position, and that the curtain shouldn't have been held.

When we finally got to the opera house, the POTUS had someone take off his overcoat, and I saw that he was only wearing a tux jacket, shirt and tie, and that from the waist down, he was dressed in jeans, boots and leather chaps. He then left me in the lobby to tip the help and pay for my own program.

I thought he was a major ass hole. By the time the opera was over, I had organized a demonstration in the lobby, and the crowd was chanting "Defeat Bush" when he came out.

End of dream.

This weekend was just tits, man.*

It started on Friday, with the RLA and I meeting up with my friend, The Coolest Person In the World TM, who has been in the area for a while.

After seeing the two of us slam back the (first) vodka, the RLA decided not to even try to keep up with us. It was wise. It would have been wiser for me to remember that I can't keep up with her. Nevertheless, I gave it my best shot, and didn't get sick. I'm pretty sure that the end of the night saw me promising to meet her and her husband in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, as the spouse will be riding with one of the big Krewes this year, and so would entail hanging around with a much higher caliber of riff raff than would other wise be available to the likes of me.
I did sleep for half the night in the bathtub, but I never puked. The RLA says that when he went in to check on me, I was lying in the tub with a shit-eating grin on my face, and the hot water trickling over my toes, and he figured that it was some kind of sauna cure, and I was fine.

I was. And had only the teensiest of hangovers. But he still made me pay the next day by dragging my sorry ass all over Miami to grocery stores, shoe stores, book stores... oh, it was an ordeal, I'll tell you.

There was some heavy lifting in the kitchen on Saturday, as I prepped for a Fourth of July party. Tabouli, fruit salad, my mom's cole slaw (the recipe for which she stole from the Pink Pony circa 1948) and which is just to die for, a mango upside down cake. Burgers. Chips. Beer. Mango daquiris. More beer.

Our guests were two couples, one from San Francisco in town for a visit, and the other newly-made friends from across town. All six of us are artists of one stripe or another, and aside from hanging in the pool drinking, the major activity of the day was doing a jam painting on the wall around the koi pond. It isn't finished, but it is way cool. There's a fish, a mer-man, leaves, and swirls, and bubbles, and color. Photos will follow.

We also indulged in fire works (shhhhhh). The noble dog Nails proved his worth by attacking the tanks. This caused much consternation among the adults who had to tackle him, pry the still sparking fireworks out of his mouth and toss them away before the actual fire crackers exploded. What a dog. Not afraid of anything, and he should be.

Yesterday was a day of cleaning, resting and recuperation. And painting and swimming. Tonight there are vague rumors of getting together with The Coolest Person In the World TM again. I only hope my liver will one day forgive me.

* for reasons I cannot remember, back in college, this was the highest accolade my buddy Andy could bestow on something.