Queer by Choice

Although I've put it off for an entire year, I really do want to get around to writing about getting married last year. And also about our honeymoon, but that will have to wait still longer, for a separate entry. Here's hoping I can get through it all fairly soon, finally, after a year of delay. It is a little strange looking back at this biggest and fanciest event of our lives now that large events like this are no longer allowed, and now that our incomes are in extreme jeopardy from the economic crash, and so on. A year ago was a happier, easier, more innocent time. But I'm very glad we had it, very glad we got married at a time when all of this was still possible. A bit sad that we didn't also manage to sell my house back when house-selling was still easy and brought in more money - but hey, you can only do so much at a time, and getting married was what we managed to do. Selling my house, not so much. But we'll figure something out. For now, it's time to reminisce about getting married!

Barry and I were married on Saturday, April 13, 2019, near Santa Rosa, California, at the house of some friends of ours. These friends were originally Barry's friends, whom he got to know just months before his first wife dumped him, and thus about a year before I met him. They friends are rather wealthy and own three houses; the one we were married at is the one they bought most recently, in 2017, and is not their primary residence; they use it primarily for entertaining large groups, although their daughter and her fiancée live full time in an in-law apartment on the property. It has many bedrooms that just stand empty until there are guests staying the night; it's a little like a hotel, and they've seemed to really enjoy opening it up for any big party we wanted to organize there, even before we got married there. So they were among the very first people we told about our engagement. They immediately asked where we were getting married, and we responded by asking if we could get married at their house. They got so excited over the prospect and started asking so eagerly about what else they could do to help that I felt obliged to assure them that providing a venue was plenty of help already and that they should not feel a need to overexert themselves by offering even more than that. In the event, however, they also provided (and fully funded!) our rehearsal dinner, taking our immediate families and some of our wedding party out to dinner at the exclusive country club near their house. It was hugely expensive, I'm sure; I'm rather glad I never have to know exactly how hugely expensive.

We sent invitations to 57 people; 39 of them accepted, so when adding the two of us and the photographer, we planned for 42 people. One of the guests was unexpectedly delayed and then canceled entirely after our wedding was already underway, so we ended up with 41 people and one empty place setting.

Barry and I both poured a huge amount of planning into our wedding, and it was all extremely collaborative and extremely personalized to represent the identities of both of us. We designed and created the invitations ourselves; Barry created a design based on my ideas (a paper gatefold, with a lupine blue butterfly on a lupine flower in front of the gate, and a wooden insert inside the gate with the text of our invitation engraved on one side and a lupine flower engraved on the other side) and lasercut the paper and the wood for both the invitations and the envelopes we sent them in, while I composed the text printed on the invitations and hand-addressed the envelopes in calligraphy, using a postage stamp we found that had a closely related blue butterfly on it. The invitations contained a link to our wedding website, which told our story as a couple, which we wrote very collaboratively, trading edits back and forth for weeks. After the invitations went out, we also co-wrote the entire ceremony, not just our vows; we traded edits to this back and forth for weeks as well, and after we finally agreed on a draft, our officiant (an old friend of Barry's, who is a "reverend" in the Universal Life Church and also an atheist) added still more suggestions, comments, and questions, so we traded additional edits back and forth with him for a few more weeks after that. And then we also collaboratively co-wrote the program and other paper items handed out in gift bags.

And of course, we also collaboratively planned all the details of our clothes, the food, the drinks, the cake, the tables and chairs, the tablecloths and other décor, the dishes and silverware, the schedule, the entertainment, the song selection, and even our choice of last name. Barry lasercut wooden place markers with people's names on them to go on the tables at the reception, as well as wooden table numbers, wooden food labels for the buffet table, name stickers for our favor/program bags, engraved wooden dice box wedding favors, and wooden plant labels for my table centerpieces. I planted nine different white ceramic pots with native plants to be our table centerpieces, created custom native seed packets for each guest's specific neighborhood, and printed out the details of each seed packet's contents and some botanical trivia about each guest's neighborhood.




I made a three-piece posterboard display listing things we had done together: 1 plane trip, 1 garden tour hosted, 3 camping trips, 4 inns and AirBnBs, 5 parades attended or participated in, 5 books read together, 6 theatrical performances attended, 6 swimming trips, 11 movies watched, 11 computer games played together, 16 plant-shopping trips, 23 hiking trips, 23 counties traveled to, 24 cats fostered, 26 television shows watched, and 56 tabletop games played together. And I listed them all, in each case.






Oh, and we also collaboratively compiled a list of love songs to be played during our wedding! I compiled a first draft, Barry added a few more songs, we listened to it on various drives to and from the wedding venue while planning and setting up the wedding, we deleted a few songs we didn't like as much as the others, and then we were done! And now we have not just one song that is "our song" but a whole bunch of them.

All in all, our wedding was a massive joint project that was in every way very evenly shared between us, and it performed exactly the function that I had always thought wedding planning should ideally aspire to do: it demonstrated beyond all doubt our ability to collaborate with each other fairly and equitably while forging and expressing to our social circles a joint sense of identity that is satisfying to both of us.

And it was more exciting than stressful! But there was definitely stress involved at various moments along the way too. The stress was mostly a matter of the impending and rather short deadlines we had set for ourselves (we were engaged for only five and a half months!), but there were a few moments of mild friction between us when deciding how to handle some of the details. Barry initially wanted a titanium or other modern-material wedding ring, and I was bothered by that because I didn't have confidence that the materials would last (titanium is incredibly scratch-resistant but also far more brittle than gold and thus more prone to snapping in half). Barry gave in and chose a 14K yellow-and-rose-gold wedding ring, which he seems very happy with now, and I'm so happy with it that some part of my mind is occasionally weirdly jealous and wishes it were my ring, even though my own 18K rose gold wedding ring with a rose design and a diamond in the middle is really more my style.




Then there was also some stress about the program and accompanying papers; I wanted to give the guests a bunch of pages of text for entertainment and discussion value, with trivia questions about us and such, and Barry wanted just the actual one-page program. Also there were some details of the program's layout that he objected to, though I've forgotten what exactly. He ended up tweaking the program's design until we were both happy with it, and I think I reduced my extra papers slightly but not much, and Barry ended up saying after the wedding was over that he had decided it was for the best that people had more to read if they happened to want something to do.

Oh, and there was stress about my hairstyle! I didn't want professional hair or makeup, because it was important to me to look like myself. But I was slightly surprised to realize that I did want to look a little fancier than usual, so I started researching crown braids and tried to get Barry help me braid my hair into a crown braid. This did not go well, and Barry wanted me to hire a professional hairstylist for our wedding day. I refused this, but I did agree to consult a professional hairstylist for advice a month ahead of our wedding day. This hairstylist was a black woman and had a lot of advice for me about curly hair. She slightly despaired of my refusal to use hair products, but she settled for advising me to put a lot of conditioner in my hair and not wash it out, so as to make my hair hold its curls and not deteriorate into frizz. She supported her point by showing my photographs of her toddler-aged son with and without leave-in conditioner, with curls versus frizz. I was convinced. She also convinced me to show off my curls by doing only a partial crown braid, with some hair left down loose. She showed me several ways of braiding a partial crown braid that were much easier for me to do by myself than my original idea had been. I practiced various ideas for the remaining month before the wedding until I settled on a final plan. I chose to create a twist (two pieces of hair wound around one another, rather than three pieces interwoven as in a standard braid) starting at each of my temples. On the advice of the hairstylist, I omitted a chunk of hair from the middle of my head from these braids so as to avoid having a parted-down the middle look. I tied the end of each twist with a small clear rubber band, then twisted the two twists around one another where they met at the back of my head. I did them as twists rather than braids because I liked the symbolism: marriage is about a union of two, not of three, and each of us also originated from a union of two, so we are two twists being twisted together. I held the whole thing in place with a whole bunch of bobby pins (color-matched to my hair and arranged in opposing pairs, one facing upward for each one facing downward). Then I added a fancy metal flower-and-leaf ornament I'd bought for our wedding and held that in place with even more bobby pins. I did the actual hairstyling myself, but on our actual wedding day, I asked my former housemate/lodger to help put in the bobby pins so she could make them as invisible as possible, since I couldn't see the back of my own head to make sure of how invisible they were. She did a good job.




I also, technically speaking, wore makeup at the wedding. But not such that anybody would notice. Only a little bit of translucent foundation, called Nudestix, to even out my complexion slightly. No other makeup – no lipstick or eyeshadow or nail polish or anything like that.

I wore flats instead of high heels. Shiny silver flats with shiny silver stocking socks. A white tulle cape instead of a veil, pinned at the neck with a blue butterfly pin that matched the blue butterflies on my dress. No traditional jewelry types like necklaces or bracelets, just the pin and my wedding ring and the hair ornament.




All of these things felt important to achieving the perfect balance between feeling that I was dressed fancier than usual and yet feeling that I was still myself. And my dress: it was long enough to touch the ground but not long enough to trip on or get dirty, which seemed to me the perfect balance between formality and practicality. It was custom-ordered from eShakti, like every dress I've bought in the last several years, but it was a little more customized than any other dress I've ever ordered from them, because I made a special request for them to use a neckline from one dress pattern while using the rest of a different dress pattern. They accommodated my request, and I was delighted with how it came out. And of course it had pockets. And of course it was primarily white, yet not entirely white - another way it felt important to me to break with tradition while also using it as a starting point to work against and respond to.

I dyed my hair for the first time in my entire life! Well, sort of, slightly. I used henna instead of a traditional permanent hair dye. Actually, I used henna mixed with Cassia obovata, which is another plant similar to henna but much lighter in color. Both henna and cassia are translucent temporary dyes, so they only produce visible results on hair that is lighter in color to begin with than they are. Henna is pretty close in color to my natural original color, but Cassia is more of a platinum blond color, so a mix of the two creates a temporary dye that is distinctly lighter than my natural non-gray hairs, and thus (because it's translucent) totally invisible on my natural non-gray hairs. All it did was darken my gray hairs (or really my white hairs; my hair doesn't seem to have any actual gray stage but just goes directly to white) to a paler version of my natural color. I liked that it preserved plenty of variation in the colors of my hair, including leaving it clear that I do have some white in my hair; this looked so much more natural than uniform one-color hair dyes ever do. I also liked that it was temporary, so it didn't give me obvious roots when it grew out. It just faded away unobtrusively. Also it was far safer than traditional hair dyes, which tend to be remarkably toxic.

But mostly, I didn't want to try to look 21 again. I wanted to have some white hairs here and there. I just didn't want so much white hair that it would be obvious in all our wedding photographs. I wanted to be able to look back at our wedding photographs in future years and have the common, traditional experience of thinking how young I looked back then, instead of thinking how old I already looked by then. I had never really intended to remain single until I was 42, and I wanted my wedding pictures not to remind me too much of how old 42 was.

Barry also has some white hair and did not feel a need to dye his, even with temporary hair dye. But he was my hot young 37-year-old husband, and I was glad for him to look 37. He mostly dressed to coordinate his outfit with mine, which is actually very much the same way he usually dresses on far more ordinary days. We coordinae the colors of our outfits a lot. For our wedding, he wore blue to coordinate with the blue butterflies on my dress, and I gave him blue butterfly cuff links to coordinate with my blue butterfly pin. I didn't realize that cuff links required special unusual shirts, and it turned out that Barry had been planning to wear a shirt that was not compatible with cuff links. He decided to have the shirt tailored to make it compatible.




Barry was a big fan of my wedding cape and has kept saying ever since then that I should wear more capes. He also sometimes says I should wear more hats or scarves. I think his fashion ideal for me might be for me to join the Red Hat Society. This is good, because that's pretty much my fashion ideal also.

But back to our wedding preparations! We arrived at our friends' house (the wedding venue) a few days early to get things set up. I think I drove from my house to Barry's house on Tuesday evening after work, and then we drove together to the wedding venue on Wednesday evening after work. We claimed the "maid's room" (there is no actual maid, but this room is positioned behind the kitchen in a way that is clearly designed for a live-in maid) for ourselves, but we had also planned in advance how to allocate the other guest bedrooms to our other guests who were coming from out of town and could be spared from needing hotel reservations. My parents, arriving the day before the wedding, got the "presidential suite." My brother was allocated an air mattress in the wine cellar, although he didn't end up staying overnight at all. The best man and his then-girlfriend (now wife) were allocated a room across the hall from the "presidential suite," and our officiant was allocated another room next to them. But Barry and I were the only ones to arrive several nights before the wedding.

I had only the day before the wedding off from work, because I was going to be using up a full week of vacation time for our honeymoon the following week. So I did wedding setup on Wednesday evening and Thursday evening, but I telecommuted during the day Thursday. I had bought a bunch of new dresses from eShakti over the course of the preceding year that I'd been saving up to wear for the first time during our honeymoon, and I ended up also allocating certain dresses to be worn for the first time in the days just before the wedding. On the Thursday before our wedding, I wore a red and purple crepe dress printed with the pattern of giant butterfly wings (butterflies were a big theme of our wedding). On the Friday before our wedding, for our rehearsal dinner, I wore a sky-blue silk dress with a border of hummingbirds and white flowers.

But let's go back to the day of the butterfly-wing-print dress. Thursday, I suppose. We had a lot of setup tasks to take care of. With permission, during the preceding months I had replaced all the plants in all the pots and some of the in-ground flowerbeds in our friends' front courtyard with California native plants for the occasion. So I checked on my plantings, pulling a few weeds and disposing of them.




I unpacked and watered the six little white ceramic pots I had planted for use as table centerpieces. Also, we had packed our wedding favor/program bags flat to bring them to the venue, with Barry's lasercut name tags on each bag. At the wedding venue, I put the programs and my personalized seed packets into the bags, put dice into the wooden dice boxes Barry had lasercut, put the dice boxes into the bags, and set up the bags alphabetically so that people could easily find and claim their bags.




The lupine flower engraved on the lid of each dice box matched the lupine flower engraved on the back of each (wooden) wedding invitation we had sent out.




We also had a board game to play at our wedding. This was important because board games are an important part of Barry's life! The game hadn't officially been released quite yet, but Barry had met the game designers at a convention and they had arranged for him to get eight advance copies of the game, one for each table at our wedding and one extra. (The winner at each table got to take home their copy of the game.) We weren't playing separately at each table, though; it was a Bingo-style game with one caller for the entire room and all the people at individual tables playing along. That was the reason Barry chose this particular game, because we could all play it together. The game was called Tiny Towns. A few days before the wedding, Barry pulled all the small pieces out of all seven boxes and redistributed them into little plastic cups for each table. The distribution calculations were not simple, because we had different numbers of people at different tables (just Barry and me at one table, five or six people at each of three medium-size tables, and eight people at each of three longer tables). It was important to make sure everyone had enough pieces within easy reach to be able to play the game. I saw Barry dividing up the pieces and wanted to help, so I asked him to instruct me in what to do. But this stressed him out, and he asked me to just go away and let him do it by himself. This, in turn, stressed me out and made me feel like he didn't think I was capable of understanding what to do and helping him do it. So I insisted on helping, because I wanted to prove that I could understand and be helpful. Meanwhile, Barry felt further stressed out and offended because I wasn't willing to leave him alone when he had politely asked me to go away and let him do it himself. We didn't sort out the causes of the argument or reach any particular understanding of what it was about until June, but in the meantime, we did muddle our way through it well enough to get the pieces properly sorted and the immediate, essential task accomplished.




We had delegated to Barry's family and friends the tasks of bringing rented chairs and tables and borrowed dishes. We had purchased the silverware and the tablecloths. Barry and his parents and our hosts and the best man all owned square Corelle dinner plate sets that were identical except for the patterns on them, so we had all the owners of those matching plate sets bring their plates and loan them to us for the duration of the wedding. Most of the tables were also ones we owned or borrowed from friends who owned matching ones, but we had to rent a couple of longer tables, and we rented all 42 chairs so they would match each other well. Barry's brother Jeremy, and Jeremy's girlfriend Stephanie, flew in from Austin, Texas, picked up the rental furniture the day before the wedding, and brought it to us at the wedding venue, along with Barry's parents.

And then it was time for our "rehearsal" dinner. In quotes because we had no actual rehearsal that day. (We did have a slight, abbreviated rehearsal on the morning of our actual wedding day, after the matrons of honor arrived at the venue.) But on the night before our wedding, our immediate families were there (except for my brother, Paul), and our hosts took us all out to dinner at the local private country club – us, nine of our closest family members, three members of our wedding party, and the five members of our hosts' family. There were several tables; Barry and I sat at the center of a long rectangular table or set of tables pushed together. To the left of us were my parents, and across from my parents were Barry's brother Jeremy and Jeremy's girlfriend Stephanie. To the right of us were our hosts, and across from our hosts were Barry's parents. At a separate, round-shaped table were Barry's half-sister Kim and her two daughters, along with our hosts' daughter, son, and daughter's fiancée.

My brother, Paul, was also invited to the "rehearsal" dinner, but when informed of the dress code for the country club, he decided not to go. He arrived the next day instead, a few hours before our wedding. Barry's half-brother Shayne opted not to attend our wedding at all (which seemed quite reasonable to me, since Shayne had been the only one of Barry's half and full siblings who had attended Barry's previous wedding).

My main memory of the night is of my father trying to make conversation with Jeremy and Stephanie, who live in Austin, by launching into his standard tales of being drafted into the army during the Vietnam War and serving the entire war in El Paso. Having heard these tales a hundred times before, I was somewhat inclined to pity Jeremy and Stephanie for having to hear them, but of course Jeremy and Stephanie had never heard them before. My parents and Barry's parents had met on several previous occasions, but this was the first and likely only occasion for my parents to meet Jeremy and Stephanie, so my father was gamely attempting to make conversation about this tenuous commonality between them, that they had both spent some amount of time living somewhere in Texas. And Jeremy and Stephanie were at least polite enough to act vaguely interested, so it was a good show of civility on both sides, if perhaps largely for Barry's and my benefit. I don't remember any noteworthy tidbits of the conversation on the other side of us, but I remember that Barry and I didn't and couldn't participate all that much in conversation with anyone other than each other, because it was too hard for us to hear the bits of conversation from either end of the table, and everyone except us was closer to one end of the table or the other. So the way I remember it, we mostly just talked to each other the whole night, and listened in periodically to whatever scraps of conversation we could pick out from either end of our table. And that was fine; we were both about to get married, and everything felt important to take note of, so I think we were both just trying to take in the entire experience quietly, with each other.

Both of us had a very hard time trying to remember now, a year later, whether our officiant, the best man, and the best man's girlfriend (now wife) were at our "rehearsal" dinner or not. We have text-message records indicating we planned to have 17 people there, but we're unsure whether that number included my brother (who canceled plans to attend) and/or our hosts' entire family (who were there more as their guests than as ours). But Barry and I both remember being seated next to each other at the center of that long table, and that would seem to imply that someone was sitting across from us. And we both remember our officiant and the best man and his girlfriend all being in their pajamas the next morning, which implies that they spent the night at the venue, which implies that they were probably there the previous evening around dinnertime. So it would have been awfully weirdly rude if our hosts, who already had well-established friendships with all three of these people, had invited everyone else present out to dinner but told these three of their and our friends to just stay at the house and fend for themselves. So they must have been there. The best man and his girlfriend (my former housemate/lodger, who is now our best man's wife) must have been sitting across from us at the dinner, and our officiant would have been seated at the round table, because I have a dim impression of him being on that end of the room. Barry and I both remember our host wandering between the tables at various points during the meal, joining in the conversation at both tables in the way that a good host and an extrovert does. Barry and I, being introverts, did not wander or join in conversations much at all. My impression is that we mostly listened, or tried to listen to whatever we could pick out from the jumble of words around us, and talked to each other.

And that was the end of my day in the sky-blue dress with the hummingbirds.

The next day was our wedding day. We woke up around 8:00 a.m. and took a shower together. We had until 1:30 p.m. to prepare for our wedding. I think we actually stuck pretty strictly to our planned schedule! I'm not sure who helped keep us on schedule. The photographer probably helped some. Probably also our hosts and our parents.

I immediately put on my full wedding regalia. Everyone else waited until closer to the time of the ceremony for at least some of it, and my mother advised me that I also ought to wait to put my cape on later, so as not to get it dirty before the ceremony. I said no - I was only going to get to wear this outfit once in my entire life, and I intended to wear it for all I was worth for the whole entire day. So that's what I did. And it was just fine, and I was glad of having worn it all day long.

On the morning of our wedding, Barry made some incredibly delicious scrambled eggs with a large bar of Velveeta melted into the middle of them and served them to everyone present who wanted some. The people present at that time were our hosts, their family, my parents, me, our officiant, the best man, and the best man's girlfriend. I enjoyed the eggs very much and felt privileged to be marrying the maker of such delicious scrambled eggs.




Our hosts put the wedding tracklist we'd compiled on the house's sound system, and I pointed it out to my parents and identified the song "Sanctuary" by Madonna. My two matrons of honor (who are married to each other) and their daughters arrived and helped us finish setting up. I handed out some wedding-related pins to our immediate family and the members of our wedding party. The wedding party got the butterfly pins shown below.




We finished setting the tables together, and then the best man and officiant asked me what else they could help with, and I asked them to wipe the excess dirt off the centerpiece pots I had planted and hand them to me one at a time after they were clean so I could set them out on the tables. The tables were soon perfectly set.




Barry's family arrived around this time, and my mother took this photograph of Barry chatting with his niece while his father looked at our wedding favor/program bags.




The best man and officiant also helped set up our two signs to tell people where to park. Our friends' house where we got married has a huge driveway with space for about twelve cars, but we were expecting more than twelve cars, so Barry had lasercut a sign saying "Wedding Overflow Parking" with an arrow and then another sign saying "Wedding Parking" to direct people to park on a grassy area of our friends' property where they had advised us that guests could park. Barry had attached these signs to wooden posts with pointy ends, but actually getting pointy ends into the ground and getting the signs to remain upright was a separate issue that still remained. Our wedding party helped get the signs properly embedded in the ground. Also, I had bought and brought with us some shiny white tulle just in case it might come in handy, and they tied some of this tulle around one of the signposts to help get people's attention. It seemed to work. (I only have a picture of one of the signs, and it isn't the one with the tulle.)




We set up the rented chairs where we wanted people to sit for the wedding ceremony. I put enough chairs in the front row for all our immediate family members plus our half nieces from out of state, but the shape of the courtyard was such that putting an aisle down the center of the chairs for easier access divided the chairs into uneven numbers on each side, which confused some people, and among the confusion, our half nieces ended up sitting in the second row. (The aisle down the center wasn't for us to walk down; we walked around one side instead, because the side of the courtyard was where the main front door opened onto, where we were making our entrance from.)

We held a mini-rehearsal, with the officiant still in his sleeping clothes. The officiant recited as much of his speech as he had memorized and consulted the transcript when necessary. Barry and I had to make sure we recognized our cues for when to kiss each other – there were two of them, and they were both indirect, because I didn't want anyone outright telling us when we could or ought to kiss each other (we get to decide that for ourselves!) and I wanted one of the kisses to be before we were pronounced married yet, because hello, people should definitely not wait until after they're married to kiss each other for the first time. So we practiced the lines preceding each kiss, and practiced kissing each other on each cue, several times. Later, when my mother sent me photos she took of this rehearsal, I realized our parents had gathered behind the glass doors to watch us practice kissing, where we couldn't see them. This is a picture my mother took of the rehearsal.




And this is a picture my mother took of my father watching the rehearsal.




At around noon, Barry's parents went to get the wedding food from the barbecue place we'd ordered it from, while Barry's brother Jeremy and Jeremy's girlfriend Stephanie went to get the wedding cakes. The wedding cakes were three separate cakes in three different flavors, from a place called the Mad Batter Cakery, and we had purchased a three-tiered cake stand to display them on. Buying three separate cakes was cheaper than having the cakes stacked directly on top of each other, and once we found the perfect tiered cake display stand, it felt just as fancy to us as a traditional tiered cake. The cakes were all decorated just in the standard way that the cakery normally decorated them for other customers; they offered to customize the decoration for us using flowers from our wedding, but our wedding didn't actually have flowers (other than the ones I cut from our own gardens and stuck into two vases in lieu of handheld bouquets), and we felt that there was too much potential for miscommunication and mishaps in any effort to customize the cake decoration, so we just figured the standard cake appearances were fine. Our emphasis in cake selection was more on flavor than on appearance; traditional wedding cakes tend to taste rather bland, but ours tasted amazing beyond words.

The rest of the meal was from a place called Red Bee BBQ, where Barry and I had eaten a couple of times before the wedding (on our early planning and setup trips to the wedding venue) to verify that we liked their food. We had a bunch of hot plates set up in the dining room to keep the food warm until the reception started, and in a little built-in nook adjacent to the dining room, the wedding cakes were set up on their tiers next to a sign describing the flavors.




Somewhere in here, our hosts took the matrons of honor and their daughters, along with my parents, to meet our hosts' hairless cat, who was something of a celebrity at this event but was shut in a bedroom to keep him from eating the wedding food or otherwise causing trouble.




At 1:30 p.m., the photographer arrived. We had half an hour to do pre-wedding couple portraits.
















It was during this time, toward the end of it, that I first noticed that our guests had begun to arrive. The first guests I saw were my Uncle Ron and his wife Linda, whom I had last seen nearly two decades earlier. They wandered out onto the back patio, and while walking below then, I looked up and exclaimed at the sight of them, and we greeted each other briefly before finishing the photography session.

This is the driveway of the wedding venue, where guests were arriving.




And this is a view from the wedding venue of the surrounding countryside that all our guests drove through just before they arrived.




From 2:00 to 2:30, our schedule allowed us time to greet arriving guests at the front door. So we did some of that, and also mingled a little with guests who had already arrived. Our hosts began giving our guests tours of their property, and in some cases also introductions to their hairless cat. I remember a conversation with my two maternal uncles and their families, something about my wedding dress having pockets. I said that I only ever buy dresses with pockets these days, so it only made sense that of course my wedding dress would also have pockets, and that didn't even seem unusual or special to me anymore. Then I said that what did seem unusual or special to me just then was, "Right now I have a wedding ring in my pocket!" I remember that they seemed to find this delightful.

Everyone also seemed to have a lot of fun opening their wedding favor/program bags. We were hardly able to notice all the details at the time, but we enjoyed seeing photographs afterward of everyone excitedly looking through the contents of their bags.








After half an hour, everyone seemed to have arrived. So, right on schedule, from 2:30 to 3:00, we had formal group portraits. We brought everyone out in the backyard and had the group pose next to the covered swimming pool. This involved me screaming instructions at everyone at the top of my lungs – possibly not entirely the most "bridal" impression to make, but nobody else was doing it and I knew what needed to be done, so I did it. We took a group portrait of everyone present, and then various subsets of that group – us with our immediate families, us with each separate part of our families, us with everyone we weren't related to, us with our wedding party ad hosts, and so on. At one point I did my screaming right next to my soon-to-be-father-in-law's ear, and he mildly protested that perhaps I should be an inch or two farther away when doing that. But all in all, it went pretty smoothly. Here is the photo of the entire group.




The ceremony started at 3:00 p.m. We could have done a better job of explaining to our immediate families where they were supposed to sit. When it was clear that no one knew where to sit and no one else could or would explain it to them, I went out there myself, alone, while everyone was standing around looking vaguely confused, and shouted at the top of my lungs again: "Our immediate families including Paige and Parker should sit in the front row! The front row is for our immediate families, including Paige and Parker! Everyone else, sit wherever else you like!" Then, without waiting to see whether anyone understood, I ran back inside and out of sight. It turned out that "immediate families including Paige and Parker" was a very confusing turn of phrase, since Paige and Parker are our half nieces and thus not actually included in the definition of "immediate family." So Paige and Parker sat in the second row, and one of the front-row chairs went to my former housemate (now the wife of our best man), and the other front-row chair was left empty. So our plans didn't entirely hold up, but at least we came close.

The next thing I knew, the ceremony was starting. The music we walked down the aisle to was an instrumental song Barry chose called "A Corner of Memories," taken from the opening of the video game Persona 4 Golden. There is a short repeating piano bit at the start, and Barry told the best man when to start walking down the aisle. At the next repeat, he told our matrons of honor to start walking. At the third repeat, he and I started walking, and at this point my eyes filled up with happy tears so that I couldn't see a thing as we were walking down the aisle. After we got to the front, I struggled to regain my composure enough to see again, and I mostly managed to hold myself together after that. But I entered totally blind and relying on Barry to lead me to the correct spot.




Our officiant, Jason, said a bunch of stuff, and Barry and I answered "We do" in unison a bunch of times:

"Though you will always be two separate people, marriage joins your two lives into one shared life. Everything that affects one of your lives will affect you both. Do you pledge always to keep each other informed about the developments in your shared life?"

"Do you pledge always to listen to each other and endeavor to understand each other’s thoughts and feelings?"

"Do you pledge always to weigh one another’s well-being along with your own in your decision-making, striving both to be a source of strength for each other and also to accept each other’s strength in return?"

"Do you pledge to take one another as spouses, to love, honor, comfort, and cherish from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to remain faithfully at one another’s side until death parts you?"

We do, we do, we do, we do. We do!








Then Jason said, "Please place your rings on each other's fingers," and that was our cue not only to follow his instructions but also to kiss each other, perhaps seemingly spontaneously and maybe even against the rules. (We got to make our own rules.)






Jason asked Barry and me to sign our marriage certificate. Next, he called both our brothers to the front to act as witnesses in signing our marriage certificate. I had incorrectly instructed my brother to sign it a few hours before the wedding, so he just made the motion of pretending to sign it again. Barry's brother actually signed it during the ceremony.






Then Jason signed his own name on our marriage certificate and said, "With my own signature, by the authority vested in me by the State of California, I pronounce you married." That was the cue for Barry and me to kiss each other again.




Jason then presented us as a married couple with our new, merged last name, and people applauded.






Meanwhile, the best man and the matron of honor set up two sawhorses between us and placed a small log on them. Dramatically, Jason announced, "Barry and Cynthia have only been married for a moment, and already they find an obstacle in their path!" He explained the German wedding tradition of log sawing, and the best man presented us with a double-handled saw. Jason instructed us, "This two-person saw will not function if one of you tries to do all the work or none of the work."






Sawing the log in half was somewhat more difficult and time-consuming than we had expected, perhaps primarily because we were nervous about having an audience and kept trying to rush things. Someone shouted at us, "You should have practiced!" and I shouted back, "We did practice!" But people also seemed very amused and entertained by the ordeal. Barry stopped sawing a bit early and, with my permission, tried to break the log in half with his hands by himself - which, in retrospect, would have been symbolically sort of inappropriate. In any case, it didn't work. Close, but not quite.




So we sawed a bit farther together, and then Barry took one half of the log in his hands while I took the other half of the log, and we each twisted in a different direction until it broke and we were each left with one half of the log in our hands. Everyone applauded wildly. It was really gratifying to see everyone around us having so much fun along with us! Wedding ceremonies aren't generally known for being highly entertaining to their guests, but we definitely felt that everyone really enjoyed ours.




Then we put the two halves of the log in the outdoor fireplace we'd been standing in front of, and our matrons of honor and best man presented us with matches, and we lit the logs on fire. (They had been doused with lighter fluid in advance, but even so, this still took a slightly stressful amount of time. We each had a long match and each tried to place it under the log, but the flame on my match went out, and I said so, and relit mine from Barry's match before we both finally got our matches to catch the log on fire. It was not immediately an especially impressive-looking fire, but it continued to burn throughout the reception, and someone pointed out to us later that it had eventually become quite impressive-looking later on.








And we were all done! Officially married! Ceremony over!




Then it was time for the reception! The reception was from 4:00 to 7:30. We started by having everyone bring their chairs in from the courtyard, where the ceremony had been held, to the adjacent great room, where the tables were set up, which looked out upon the courtyard through a wall of glass doors. I think just about everyone already knew by that point which table they were going to be sitting at and with whom, because they'd had some time before the ceremony to pick up their favor bags (which told them their table numbers) and find their lasercut nameplates marking where they should sit. They brought their plates to the dining room to help themselves to the buffet of barbecue food we had set out on the hot plates. (There were vegan options because Barry's parents, among other guests, are vegetarians and sometimes at least theoretically vegans. There were also gluten-free options because at least two of our friends who were there have celiac disease. And all three layers of our wedding cake were gluten-free for that reason.) I think they may have been called to the dining room by table, but this was one case in which I was not the one doing the shouting and organizing people, so I don't remember exactly how it was organized. I just know that it got done and seemed to work out fine for everyone. I think Barry and I were among the last to get our food, though I don't remember what we were doing before then. Barry was probably more involved in getting the food served than I was, because he had done pretty much all of the food-related wedding planning.




Once we got our food, Barry and I were seated at a small table for two at the front of the room, in front of the indoor fireplace, with two vases of flowers from our yards, one on each side of us. The flowers were a couple of days old because we had left our houses a couple of days earlier, so I had removed some of the wilting ones and supplemented what remained with rosemary from our hosts' gardens. The flower arrangements were imperfect but personalized and satisfying to me. Except for the rosemary, I had grown all the flowers myself (and I also do grow rosemary - I just didn't grow these specific rosemary plants).




During dinner, we had toasts. The best man toasted us and praised me for how generously I had "opened my house to" his girlfriend, and I shouted out and interrupted him – "Maybe clarify, renting the room to her!" because most guests didn't know I had rented a room to her and were likely to be confused by his vague reference to it.




One of the matrons of honor toasted us and talked about the frustration of having had to wait so many years to get married herself, because of homophobia, and having met me while we were fighting together for the right to get married - and I was relieved that she talked about this, because it felt important to me to have somebody acknowledge at our wedding how hard I'd had to fight to be allowed to get married, not to Barry but before Barry, because of homophobia.




Barry's mom toasted us and quoted something I'd said in an email to her, about how "B and C marriages" are the best because my parents and Barry's parents and Barry and I are all in marriages between people with the initials B and C.




My father toasted us and said that Barry and I are both good human beings with good ethics and will be good to and for each other.




These are some pictures of us glowing while listening to various toasts.






Then Barry made a toast and said that I'm like the aliens in an original Star Trek episode who appear on an alien planet to one crew member at a time and tell them each, "I am for you, [Name]," except for the part about how, when those aliens touch the crew members, the crew members die. This got a laugh from our audience. I was briefly confused, wondering whether Barry had forgotten the part about the crew members dying, until I understood that he hadn't forgotten and was just doing a good job of making his toast entertaining.




Here I am watching Barry make his toast.




Then it was my turn to make a toast, and I was taken aback because Barry had just told me I should thank everyone for everything, and he had not given me any warning that his toast was going to be eloquent and say such nice things about me, so I felt inadequately prepared. I said that on this date five years earlier I had been very miserable because I had been supposed to get married that day and the wedding was called off when that relationship fell apart disastrously, but now five years later the date of misery was finally a happy day, and therefore even when life was very difficult everyone should keep in mind how amazingly better things could get only a few years later, because Barry is wonderful and I was so glad to be getting married to him, and thank you so much to everyone who helped make it happen. I thanked various people by name, but aside from that, the toast was probably not very much more eloquent than my description of it here is, because it was so off the cuff and I was so unprepared for it after having been busy focusing on absolutely everything else. It was a short toast that mostly just conveyed the fact that I was incredibly happy and hadn't always been before meeting Barry. But those seemed to be the important things to convey.

(I think I look slightly drunk in this photo, which pretty well suits how I was actually feeling, although I do not actually drink and have never actually been drunk and had not drunk a single drop of anything that evening but apple cider. I was making my toast with Martinelli's.)




As we all finished eating, Barry and I moved from table to table, talking to various groups of family and friends. Here we're talking to Barry's out-of-state family who had flown in from Texas and Arizona.




We also sat and talked for a while with my extended maternal-family relatives, some of whom had flown in from Oregon and Washington State. Since my mom and her siblings were raised Catholic but are no longer Catholic, and Barry was raised an atheist but attended a Catholic school and belonged to the (religiously oriented) Boy Scouts, we talked a little about that so they could get more of a sense of who Barry is.




And here we are with my extended paternal-family relatives, who all live in the Sacramento area. My unofficial aunt Linda (she's not married to my uncle, but they've been together since I was a fairly small child) and I talked about going shopping for plants and getting our men to hold the plants for us while we pick out more of them.




People also began to disperse across the property to take advantage of the many forms of entertainment that were available at our wedding. Some went outside to play bocce ball.






Others went to the garage to play pinball and arcade games.






Including some particularly antiquated arcade games.




My cousin's daughter, the youngest of our wedding guests, apparently threw an adorable mini-tantrum that I didn't find out about until I saw the professional photographer's pictures later.






My brand-new half niece demonstrated her remarkable juggling talents. (She also juggles knives and torches but confined herself to safer items at our wedding.)




People gathered and chatted in various locations. Here I am by the swimming pool with my mother's side of the family.




And here we are on the patio with Barry's side of the family and a couple of Barry's oldest friends.




One of the engaged couples at our wedding took some of this time for kissing! (Our hosts' daughter and her fiancée, who live here and were enjoying their own front yard.)




From 6:00 to 6:30, while the reception was still continuing, Barry and I stepped aside with the photographer to take "golden hour" portraits.














At 6:30, we came back inside for the cake cutting. Our wedding cakes were incredibly delicious! The top tier was an eight-inch, one-layer chocolate caramel coconut tarte, described as being "like a deluxe Almond Joy bar, featuring a coconut cream ganache filled with roasted almonds and vegan caramel, inside a coconut crust and topped with coconut flakes." The middle tier was a ten-inch, two-layer peanut butter chocolate porter cake, made with beer, espresso, peanut butter buttercream, whiskey chocolate glaze topping, and peanut brittle bits. The bottom tier was a twelve-inch, three-layer German chocolate cake featuring coconut, pecans, and caramel, finished off with chocolate drizzle along the sides.

First the photographer had us pose for a completely fake cake-cutting photo, looking as if we were going to slice into a different cake than we actually sliced into first. It was later pointed out that we both have a devious expression in our eyes in this photo; I think it was because we were being asked to be deceptive. But after the fake, posed photo was taken, we cut our actual first slice, which was from the middle cake since that was the one we both were most interested in tasting. (I do not drink alcohol ad also do not drink coffee, so a cake made with beer, espresso, and whiskey might sound like a strange choice for me, but I do actually eat solid foods made with all these things on the rare occasions when I come across them. All of them taste terrible to me plain, but all of them can taste quite good when mixed with sufficient quantities of sugar. So the peanut butter chocolate porter cake was what appealed most to both of us, and so it was what we ate first.)

This one is the real photo of the real cake cutting.




One of the things Barry had felt strongly about during wedding planning was that we should not smear cake on each other's faces. I agreed with this entirely. So we used forks to very considerately feed each other a first slice of cake. It was delicious! And very filling, too. I didn't taste the German chocolate cake until we got around to eating leftovers of it on our honeymoon, and I never got any of the chocolate caramel tart at all (it was already gone by the time we left the wedding), so we may order some more of our wedding cake flavors someday so as to taste them all and reminisce.

Here are all the people watching us cut the cake.



There was much serving and eating of cake.




After cake was eaten, my cousin who has two small children and was expecting dancing to follow the cake came over to me to tell me she was planning to take her children home. When I let her know that I was about to present bouquets and then we would play a board game, she convinced her kids that a board game would be fun.




In lieu of the traditionally annoying bouquet toss, which assumes that all single women should seek to be next to get married, I first explained that I had not wanted to carry a bouquet around with me since I did not feel like playing the role of a vase, and then presented my two vases of flowers to the two engaged couples attending our wedding.






Then at 7:30 p.m., we all played Tiny Towns. Barry acted as caller (remember, it was a Bingo-style game with one caller for the whole room). He taught the rules of the game to the room. Then, throughout the game, he drew cards one at a time and announced to the whole room what piece we should all add to our individual towns next. He also played, adding a piece to his own town each time. I think everyone played along except my father, who declines board games in general. At our table of two, I defeated Barry! It is rare for me or anyone to defeat Barry at any board game, so it felt important. Our copy of Tiny Towns is technically mine now, since it was supposed to belong to the winner at each table.

We had hired our photographer for six hours, starting at 1:30 and ending at 7:30, so our photographer went home a few minutes after we started the game. That was fine; it wasn't supposed to be an especially photogenic scene, and anyway, some of our friends took photos of it and sent them to me.








After the game, it was time for most people to go home! About half a dozen people helped divide all the Tiny Towns pieces to get the correct original number of pieces back into each box again so that the winners at each table could take the game home with them. This task went fairly astonishingly quickly; it seemed to be all done within less than five minutes. Barry and I started moving our remaining honeymoon luggage into my car, while also pausing to say goodbye to various people. We collected our wedding cards and wedding presents. Most of the presents had been sent through the mail, so it was mostly a box from Barry's parents (wrapped in paper printed with blue butterflies that matched my wedding dress) and some cards. There was also a candle from our hosts' daughter and fiancée, but I failed to pick up the candle along with the card, so they gave it to us again later. There was a picture frame that all our guests signed the mat of with good wishes for us; I think we left that behind intentionally for Barry's parents to bring it to us later.




The same people who had spent the night before at the venue also stayed the night after, except for Barry and me. My brother Paul had been scheduled to stay the night after, but he decided on the spur of the moment to drive back home instead, and sneaked out without notifying our hosts, so they were somewhat confused as to where he had gone and whether he was okay, but everything worked out fine. Barry and I got in my car, waved goodbye to both our sets of parents, and headed out to begin our married life! Little did we know how traumatic our honeymoon would be for that car of mine. But we were both completely overwhelmed with happiness at how fantastic our wedding had been, and our honeymoon would also be plenty fantastic in all manner of other ways. And I hope to get around to writing about that in another entry soon!

As I write this, Barry and I are in Santa Rosa for the week-long New Year's Party we've been attending every year for the last few years, at the same house of the same friends (who own multiple houses, though so do we at the moment) who hosted our wedding earlier this year. We are at our wedding venue, for the first time since our wedding. It is nice. We were the first guests to arrive, Friday afternoon, but a few more have shown up today. On Friday night Corey, the homeowner, took Barry and me to dinner at the local country club. Barry and I had hamburgers, and Barry also got a "Spanish coffee," which was alcoholic. For dessert, I had brown butter date cake (described as "warm caramelized apples, salted pecans, cinnamon tres leches sauce") and Barry had chocolate peppermint ice cream. The other guests mostly arrived on Saturday, but it's Sunday evening now and I've only played one board game with anyone other than Barry yet. I played Fog of Love (with Paranormal Romance expansion pack) with Barry, and I played And Then, We Held Hands, and I played Fuji Flush with Barry and three other people. And I played half of a PlayStation Star Trek-themed virtual reality game, Bridge Crew, but we had to stop in the middle because my arms grew twenty feet long and wouldn't bend in the right directions to push any of the buttons on my bridge console anymore and it turned out that this was because the batteries in my hand controllers were dying.

My last day of radiation was December 23. I had 21 days of it on my left breast this time, compared to 33 days on my right breast in 2014, but the total amount of radiation was the same each time, just divided among a different number of days. In 2014 I had it during March and April, so each day after work I drove to Sacramento for radiation and then got out of the cancer center while it was still light out, and I took the opportunity to go to all sorts of fun places (parks and such) after radiation, to make the many long drives to Sacramento feel more worthwhile. This time around, since I had radiation in November and December, it was always dark by the time I got out of radiation, which pretty well ruined the opportunity to go to any parks or outdoor locations. But Barry helpfully set up a game of Betrayal Legacy with three of his friends, so we played 14 installments of that until we finished the main storyline and then threw a party to celebrate the end of my radiation treatment.

Two days later, for Christmas, we and Barry's parents all went to my parents' house in one vehicle. We brought pies (pumpkin and apple) that Barry's parents bought, a half gallon of "waffle cone swirl" ice cream that Barry's parents bought, a risotto that Barry made, and some glazed carrots and onions that Barry made. Plus a chair from Barry's house because my parents were short a chair.

Here's what I received. First, the books:

• Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang (from my parents)


• Ordinary People by Judith Guest (from my brother)


• Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter (from my parents)


• Color Concrete Garden Projects by Nathan Smith and Michael Snyder (from my parents)


• Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (from my parents)


• Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera (from my parents)


• Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch (from Barry)

And then the other stuff:

• Tidy Tips (Layia platyglossa) seeds (from my parents)


• Germ Guardian 3 in 1 air cleaning system (from my parents)


• Ravensburger Escape Puzzle No. 82 473 1 (from Barry)


• Nintendo 2DS XL (from Barry)


• $30 in gift certificates for games for the Nintendo 2DS XL (from Barry)


• hot cocoa mix (from Barry's parents to both of us)


• $1,500 check (from Barry's parents to both of us)

Around the day Barry and I arrived for this New Year's party, my irradiated skin started peeling off in sheets. This is more disconcerting with irradiated skin than it would be with a sunburn, because whereas sunburn damages skin from the top layer downward, radiation damages it primarily from the bottom layer upward - preventing new layers of skin from being created to replace the old layers. So when the top layer starts peeling off, there isn't necessarily much left underneath it. I haven't been actively bleeding or anything, but I've been stressed by the fear of doing so because there's so little left of my skin right now. Particularly in a rectangle down the middle of my chest, because it seems like the right-breast radiation I had in 2014 may have overshot its mark enough to damage the rightmost inch or so of my left breast to the point of rendering that inch of my skin much less resistant to the left-breast radiation I've just finished. That one-inch by six-inch rectangle looks and feels significantly worse than all the surrounding skin, and I've been worried about it.

And because I'm a rather extreme introvert and always find it somewhat stressful and draining to talk to a bunch of strangers at big parties, it turns out that the stress of radiation depletes my energy reserves to the point that I just cannot summon the necessary energy for talking to people other than Barry hardly at all at this party. I've been hiding out in our bedroom-away-from-home almost constantly.

However, cancer is once again banished, at least theoretically. Here's to no more cancer! And to getting my skin back.

On Monday morning, December 17, we were still in our hotel room when Barry got a phone call from OdySea Aquarium in the desert. Barry had bought us tickets to go there on Sunday, but since the open hours listed on Google were not accurate, we did not arrive until after it was closed for the day. Barry had then inquired about whether we could exchange our unused Sunday tickets for Monday tickets. They called him back Monday morning to say yes, we could get in on Monday with our unused Sunday tickets.

So, after helping ourselves to another elaborate and delicious buffet breakfast at our hotel and packing all our stuff into the rental car (because we would not be coming back to this hotel the next night), we drove to Scottsdale to visit the aquarium. OdySea Aquarium in the Desert could equally well be called OdySea Aquarium in a Shopping Mall. It was an anchor store of a large mall. There were kids sitting on Santa's lap and kids playing in a pile of snow that had been manufactured for them with a snow machine or perhaps hauled down from Flagstaff. There was a candy shop that we walked through, though we didn't end up buying any candy. There was also a place called Butterfly Wonderland that I decided we should visit if or when we go back to Arizona again. We looked around its gift shop, but the full Butterfly Wonderland experience was quite expensive, and we didn't have enough free time to spend there to justify the money.

Mostly we just spent our time at the aquarium. We saw fish! We even petted a lot of the fish. Or at least I did. Barry is more fish-averse and only petted a couple of them. But here is Barry petting a fish.




And here I am petting a ray.



( Click for more pictures from our third day in Arizona! )

So, Barry and I went to Arizona! We came back a month ago already, but it's taken me this long to write up the trip. And even now, I'm only writing up one day at a time from our four-day trip. The rest is coming soon . . . I hope. Wedding planning is keeping us busy! Wedding planning is now my all-purpose excuse for all delays in all things. Possibly including delays in wedding planning itself.

Barry grew up in Gilbert, a suburb of Phoenix that was somewhat out in the middle of nowhere at the time (in the '80s and '90s), but that now blends seamlessly into the Phoenix metropolitan area. He lived there until he went away to attend college at U.C. Irvine. I grew up in the Sacramento area and had never been to Arizona in my life, so we had been vaguely talking for a long time about Barry taking me to see the area where he grew up. The trip needed to happen in winter, because it is 120 °F in the Phoenix area in the summer, and we wanted to be able to walk around outside without dying of heatstroke. We had decided sometime early in 2018 that this winter would be the time for such a trip. On Sunday, November 11, as I was leaving Barry's house after a weekend we spent there together, I mentioned to Barry that I had some vacation time to use up before the end of the calendar year and that it would therefore be convenient for me if we could take that Arizona trip before the end of the calendar year - especially so I could save my 2019 vacation time for honeymooning instead.

I mentioned that in Barry's driveway, just minutes before I left. Only one hour later, when I arrived at my own house, there was an email already awaiting me from Barry in which he had already planned out our entire Arizona trip, including plane tickets, hotels, restaurants, hikes . . . he'd already worked out a detailed schedule for everything we would see and do on each day we were there. I was extremely impressed by how quickly he'd managed to plan such a detailed itinerary. Oh, and then there was the fact that his itinerary called for visiting not one, not two, but three different used bookstores in the course of our four-day trip. "They're not just any used bookstores," he insisted. They were Bookmans Entertainment Exchanges, an apparently quite important phenomenon from Barry's childhood, and it was apparently quite important to him for us to visit not only the Phoenix one but also the Mesa one and also the Flagstaff one. Clearly there are reasons why this guy is the right person for my English-major self to marry.

Barry's itinerary also called for making two separate trips to the same botanical garden on the same day - once in daylight and once after dark. Even being as much a gardener as I am, I thought this seemed a bit much. This fiancé of mine can be rather eccentric! But if Barry wanted to spend that much time with the same set of plants, far be it from me to tell him that plants are boring and we should hurry up and go do something else already. So I just told him he was rather strange and then cheerfully agreed to go along with his strange itinerary.

So, on Saturday, December 15, we got up at 5:30 a.m. to head to the airport. It was the first time I had boarded an airplane since I was thirteen . . . 29 years ago. My first taste of the post-9/11 airport experience. And once we were finally in the air, I could see the ground for more of the flight than I remember being able to do when I was thirteen. My memory of flying to Washington, D.C., when I was thirteen, is of being able to see the ground only for a short period just after takeoff and a short period just before landing; I recall the view being obscured by clouds for virtually all the middle of the country. This time, though, the skies were clear for a larger percentage of the trip. And Barry gave me the window seat so I could see as much as possible!

Here is the view from the plane window while we were still sitting on the ground at the Sacramento International Airport.



( Click for more pictures from our first day in Arizona! )

I am now the answer to life, the universe, and everything! That started a week ago. But I've been neglecting LiveJournal for a while now, so I'm going to try to catch up a bit on the backlog before I write about birthday-related activities.

So, spring happened. I wrote about the garden tour already, but I haven't yet gotten around to posting this picture Barry took of me in his back yard in early May.




In addition to all the plant reproduction that tends to happen in spring, there also tends to be quite a bit of feline reproduction in the spring. Accordingly, Barry has lately taken in a long succession of foster kittens. The first one, in June, was a grey/brown tabby who needed to be "socialized" because he was terrified of everyone. I named him Bolt, after the brown tabby in Neko Atsume, and also because, at first, he wanted to bolt away from us at every opportunity. But we successfully socialized him in no time. Here I am with Bolt.






The next one was a gray-and-white kitten whom I named Rascal, after the similarly colored kitten in Neko Atsume. Barry took in Rascal in late June and returned him to the shelter in early July. Rascal was also on the shy side at first, but not quite as shy as Bolt. He didn't initially act like a rascal, but he kind of grew into his name during his two weeks at Barry's house.

( pictures of Rascal being a rascal and getting into fights with my hair )

The next two were littermates, two brothers whom Barry fostered together. These two were probably in the most desperate need of "socializing," because whereas Bolt and Rascal had initially just cowered from us, the first time I tried to pick up one of these two, I got my hand sliced up by the claws of a very panicked kitten. One of these two was a long-haired, mostly white kitten with a line of striped brown patches down his back and an eye infection that Barry needed to keep medicating. I named this one Garland, because the line of brown patches down his back reminded me of a garland. We also joked about calling him Merrick, for should-have-been Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland, but by the end of his stay with us, I had decided instead that his full name was Sir Garland Floofkitten.

Barry named Garland's littermate Kefka, because apparently Garland and Kefka were two villains in the Final Fantasy video game series. Kefka was the more powerful villain, and this seemed appropriate to me, since Kefka was the kitten who had sliced up my hand when we first met. Kefka was mostly a brown tabby, but with white paws and a white front/underside. Kefka's tabby bits had an unusual pattern; he was a ticked tabby rather than the more common mackerel tabby.

They were both adorable, and of all the kittens Barry has fostered, these two were the ones I've been most tempted to adopt. Alas, there are no open slots for more cats in our lives, since Barry already has three cats and I have one who is already upset enough about sharing me with Barry's three.

( pictures of Garland and Kefka )

Speaking of Barry's cats, here are a couple of pictures of Barry's oldest cat, Jazz, on my lap.

( Jazz likes laps )

And just so my own cat doesn't feel neglected . . . here is Stardust.

( The Legendary Stardust Kittycat )

We also did various other stuff during the spring. We went to a friend's college graduation party; she acquired a degree in statistics from the University of California at Davis. We went to various board-game parties and to a friend's birthday party that was held in a board-game store. My mom had a birthday too, and Barry and I walked down to a creek in my parents' neighborhood with my family. We celebrated Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day and my brother's birthday. Barry cooked a bunch of meals for my family on those occasions.

And then there was my birthday. For this occasion, Barry not only cooked dinner (a Japanese dish called oyakodon, meaning "chicken-and-egg rice bowl," which went over quite well with my family of generally rather unadventurous eaters) and supplied birthday cake; he also brought a ladder and level to my parents' house and installed lights and a longer pull-chain on one of my parents' ceiling fans, used the level to straighten a tapestry that has been hanging crookedly on my parents' wall for years, and took measurements to laser-cut a decorative windowshade for the hemicircular window in my parents' bedroom, where my mom has for years been trying to block out the light with an ugly and irregularly cut piece of cardboard because she couldn't find anything for sale in the necessary half-circle shape.

And then there were the presents! Barry and I stopped by the Marysville Peach Festival on our way out of town, and Barry bought me a bottle of peach-infused honey and a bag of orange-zest-dipped cashew nuts there. At my parents' house, I received the following:

• the YA novel Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli (from my parents)
• the novel Noonday by Pat Barker (from Barry)
• the novel Sweet and Sour Milk by Nuruddin Farah (from my parents)
• the play The Rez Sisters by Tomson Highway (from my brother)
• the novel Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant (from my parents)
• the short-story collection How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer (from my parents)
• the graphic novel My Boyfriend Is a Bear by Pamela Ribon and Cat Faris (from Barry)
• the essay collection Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia by Gore Vidal (from my parents)
• the memoir Educated by Tara Westover (from my parents)
• one pair of red and white running socks (from my parents)
• one pair of yellow and black running socks (from my parents)
• one purple, grey, and pink water bottle with attached running belt (from my parents)
• six pairs of blue and green gardening gloves (from my parents)
• the wide-brimmed blue sun hat you'll see in photographs below (from my parents)
• eight stretchy silicone airtight lids for pots, pans, and jars (from Barry)
• a valve handle for my outdoor faucet that has been missing the knob to turn the water on with ever since I bought my house six years ago (from Barry)
• a Roomba (from Barry)

So far, I've finished reading the YA novel and the graphic novel, started reading the play, drank from the water bottle, wore the hat, started up the Roomba, and eaten some of the cashews and honey. Good progress!

I scheduled a four-day weekend to celebrate my birthday. We spent Friday at the Peach Festival and my parents' house. On Saturday we packed lunches and drove to a swimming hole on Rock Creek, near the town of Storrie. This trip did not go as well as I had hoped. I had learned about the swimming hole in a book I own, which included a rock-climbing icon next to the entry for Rock Creek, but which did not say anything in the text about the swimming hole requiring difficult or dangerous climbing to get to. When we arrived, however, I was immediately intimidated. Usually I find that the easiest way to get to a swimming hole in a creek without any terribly difficult climbing is to get in upstream or downstream and wade through the creek to get to the spot I want. As long as I stay in the water, there's never any great height for me to risk falling from. But in this case, the entire width of the creek was blocked off by huge boulders, with no gaps for me to wedge between them. So the only way to cross was high up in the air. My sense of balance has never been great (I've never even learned to ride a bicycle!), and I did not have great confidence in the traction of the water shoes I was wearing.

There were three routes to choose from. The first one was a slanting rock ledge, maybe thirty feet above the ground, with some cables attached to a portion of it, and a rickety, angled wooden ladder leading down from the cables. We saw that route first. Barry looked it over and said he could probably make it but I wouldn't want to. I didn't even bother looking at that route from up very closely, but from what I saw of it, I'm pretty sure I would have felt a need for cables much sooner than the cables actually started.

A second route consisted of climbing over various boulders. Barry started to lead me along that route, but when we got to a substantial gap between boulders high over the water, he asked if I wanted to turn back, and I said yes. Again, he thought he could make it himself, but he correctly guessed that I would be more intimidated.

 The third route was another slanting, slippery rock precipice, but shorter and lower down, and without any cables. This one was about ten feet above the water, and it seemed be the favored route for six-year-olds, whose parents stood at either end or halfway along, reaching out to help them along. However much help they got, however, Barry and I both thought it was crazy to put small children at this much risk of terrible falls. And unfortunately I, being an adult, would have been much harder to catch than the six-year-olds if I fell.

Barry decided to take the cable route and see how things looked on the other side. In the meantime, I decided to stand around looking intimidated and asking people which route was the easiest. There was general agreement that the cable route was the hardest and that all of the routes were very hard. There was not much consensus about which route was the least hard.

( Rock Creek pictures )

Feeling that all three routes were too dangerous for me, I opted to try to create a fourth route. I waded across the bit of water you can see above, to skip the slanting, slippery precipice. However, that left me at the bottom of the opposite end of the slanting precipice, with my way forward blocked by boulders. If I could have just gotten up the slant at that one spot I'd have been at the swimming hole. And there were things there for other people to hold onto, so they wouldn't be precariously balanced anymore, so I thought they would be able to help me up. But even when someone did reach down to try to help me up, it was just too steep for me to get up out of the water. So I gave up. I told the man trying to help me that I was giving up, and I asked him to pass on a message to Barry on the other side, asking Barry to come back for me. Barry received the message and became convinced I had suffered broken bones. He returned via the second route, climbing over the boulders, and was relieved to find out that I had merely chickened out and not injured myself.

Then we drove a little way back downstream to a different parking area to find a spot where the water was easier to access. My book about swimming holes mentioned this place too, but it directed us to walk on a path that we ended up deciding not to attempt, for fear of more dangerous routes. Even in the spot where we ended up stopping, we still had to ask some passersby for help at one point, when I couldn't get up a certain rock and Barry's shoes didn't have enough traction on the slippery slope for him to pull me up by himself. And somewhere along the way, I ended up pulling a rib muscle and smashing one of my toenails (my toenail has been blue ever since and will probably fall off eventually; my pulled muscle hasn't healed yet either). Although Barry was more capable of handling the climb than I was, he also regarded the routes as unappealingly dangerous and would prefer to avoid such places in the future. In short, Rock Creek is not worth ever going back to!

Nevertheless, once we finally found a safe spot to hang out, we did have quite a nice little swim. We ate our lunches by the water and then stripped down to our swimsuits. I washed out my skirt and laid it out to dry on a rock, because it had been significantly muddied when I had to slide down a steep rock on my backside. Then I floated on my back, and Barry climbed down a small waterfall and back up again. The water was not as freezing as it had been at the swimming hole on Cherokee Creek where I took him last summer, and I was pleased that he was more willing to get in the water here because of that. He still has a significantly lower tolerance of cold water than me, but this may be related to the fact that he grew up in Phoenix. I advised him that he would adjust to the water temperature if he stayed in the water for sixty seconds, and he tried it and said this was accurate.

( pictures of us at Rock Creek )

That was on Saturday. On Sunday we were sore. Especially I was sore, because of my pulled muscle in my right rib area and my smashed right second toe. But Barry said he had some mildly sore muscles also. We spent Sunday at my house. Barry looked at my broken outdoor lamp and said he will install a new one for me next time he's here. Then we played the "I Know What I Want" scenario in the board game Fog of Love. We flipped cards to determine each of our genders, but I ended up female, and Barry ended up male. I worked as a florist, until I quit that job halfway through the game and moved to another city to become a pilot. I was a daredevil yet also a worrywart. I was also a workaholic. I named myself Jill. Barry named himself Anton; he was a Russian chef and hated children. He even hated having children eat at his restaurant. We met at a childfree speed-dating service, which I attended because my devotion to my florist shop did not leave me any time for having children. But my aunt became convinced that his name meant he was a follower of Anton LaVey, and she started spreading rumors on Facebook that he was a satanist. I telephoned her and screamed at her, and this upset Anton, because he wanted to have a calm conversation with her about it.

The goal we both chose to strive for was to be equal partners in the relationship, but Barry won the game with this goal, whereas I did not have quite enough relationship satisfaction to win. I could have had enough relationship satisfaction if I had chosen to cheat on Anton, but then our relationship satisfaction would have been too unequal for us to succeed at being equal partners, so then neither of us would have won. Besides, I didn't want to cheat on him. Though it did turn out, at the end of the game, that Anton was being a bit dishonest with me; he had claimed to be older than he really was, because he thought I would like him better if he were older.

Anyway, then came Monday - the final day of my four-day birthday weekend. On Monday we drove to the small town of La Porte, California (population 26), to tour the Gold Rush-era ghost towns in the area. I had already taken this tour once before, in 2013, with Susan, while she was sneaking around behind my back to flirt with someone else. But it was my idea - I found the directions and suggested it - and I wanted to go back, this time with someone emotionally and morally functional. So we went! We took my car. It was nearly 20 miles of driving on rough dirt roads; it might have been worth taking Barry's pickup truck instead. But we managed in my car. The first stop was some old mine tailings.

( Mine tailings! And Barry among mine tailings. )

Next, we stopped at the bridge over Slate Creek. We stripped down to swimsuits again and waded over to two short waterfalls. This place is amazing! The rocks are amazing swirls of color in amazingly billowy shapes.

( Pictures of us at Slate Creek )

Then we saw some ruins of old ghost towns!

( Port Wine! )

Our last stop on the dirt roads was at Cedar Creek Ravine. Here we ran into an older couple who turned out to live in my area, in Yuba City. They were camping at one of the nearby campgrounds and had come to Cedar Creek Ravine to pan for gold. They had a pickup truck, and they warned us that the road ahead had been torn up by logging trucks and was too rough for my car. We didn't have much left we were planning to see anyway, so we took their advice and returned the same way we had come. First, though, we went swimming!

( Swimming in Cedar Creek Ravine! )

There was only one thing on our Monday trip that didn't go quite perfectly, and that was my car. Just as we were almost out of the dirt roads, my car started having problems. I'd had to keep it in first gear on all the dirt roads, to get traction on unpaved hills. When we were about two miles short of returning to pavement, I found that I was having to absolutely floor the gas pedal to keep the car moving forward. And the "Check Engine Soon" warning light on my dashboard started intermittently lighting up and then shutting off again. The car kept moving, albeit slowly, but eventually the "Check Engine Soon" warning light stayed steadily lit. This worried us enough that we returned to Marysville a little sooner than we otherwise might have, opting not to explore the nearby Little Grass Valley Reservoir. We did stop for a delicious lunch on the way home though, at a cafe called One-Eyed Jack's, in the town of Clipper Mills. Barry stayed the night at my house, and when I dropped my car off for repair on Tuesday morning, he drove me back to my house in his truck. My car was diagnosed with a misfiring #3 sparkplug and repaired for $150, and then all was well again.

Whew! It's been a great birthday adventure. I have the best boyfriend! He makes my time with him amazing.

On April 3, for the second anniversary of our first date, Barry and I decided to go on a hike to Pierce Canyon Falls. Well, first we decided to go on a hike, then we each separately found our way to this page about the Pierce Canyon Falls hike and each separately thought this would be a good hike to go on. So we went on it! We took the day off work and set out with our hiking boots on, my camera around my neck, and our backpacks filled with water, sandwiches, crackers, some miner's lettuce from my home vegetable garden, and a chopped carrot from Barry's home vegetable garden.

The web page's description of the trail was not as clear as it should have been. It should have mentioned that the trail has very little shade, the falls is usually bone dry even in early spring, and when the falls is bone dry, there's no clear indicator of when you've gone past it, so you end up hiking significantly farther than the 6 miles you had planned on. We hiked 7.6 miles and did not find any waterfall. It was rather exhausting. Even so, the scenery was beautiful, and of course, I had a fantastic boyfriend with me.

My relationship with Barry has never been anything but wonderful, yet I feel as if it's somehow managed to get even better since our Yosemite trip. I mean, the Yosemite trip itself - the fun we had during it - was part of that, but then the way Barry took care of me when I came down with the flu at Yosemite was another part of that, and then ever since - while I was recovering from the flu and then preparing for the Gardens Gone Native Tour that we signed up to put Barry's house on - it's just been absolutely continually reinforced for me that Barry really goes to continually amazing lengths to support me in basically every possible way. So I've been feeling even more grateful toward him lately than usual, but I haven't necessarily been spending as much time focused on him as I could be, while busily trying to perfect his yard. So it was important to me that I should mark the beginning of our third year together by taking the day off work and also off gardening to focus more on him for the day. He made it particularly easy to do that, though, by wanting to do something so much fun as hiking through beautiful California wilderness.

We started off with a 45-minute drive through farmlands and small towns to the town of Guinda. Shortly after passing a corner store with a mural of Mickey Mouse on its outer wall exhorting customers, "Please don't pee on the building!" we arrived at the end of the road, where Barry pulled off onto the shoulder (which was basically a ditch; it was mildly difficult to get his truck back out of there when we left) and parked. On foot, we pushed our way through a couple of gates that were set up to block cars. There was some farm equipment at one point along the path that was making musical sounds as the wind blew through the pipes. That was rather charming. There was also a creek that ran alongside the trail at various points.



( Click for many more pictures! )

2017 was an exhausting year for me at work. December was the only chance I got to take many vacation days, so I took off every Friday in December and also the whole week between Christmas and New Year's. I wish I felt more recovered than I do, but I guess I am somewhat recovered.

On Friday, December 15, we started off my last three-day weekend by attending a British panto-style performance of Beowulf at a theater in West Sacramento. It did a rather amazing job of completely altering the tone of the original epic (turning the story into a farce) while still somehow remaining mostly faithful to the original plot structure. They did add a love interest for Beowulf (King Hrothgar had a daughter named Hrothmund, who incidentally had neon blue hair) and made up a second, even more unlikely romance between Grendel's mother (a monster in the original epic poem, and the dame of the panto, played by a man in drag with blue lipstick and some monstrous garb) and Beowulf's assistant, Wiglaff (a man in the original epic poem, and the boy of the panto, played by a woman in drag). In the panto version, Grendel's mother revealed that the dragon was Grendel's father. In the panto version, Beowulf was ridiculously bad at talking to women and therefore began his romance with Hrothmund by pelting her with terrible pickup lines until he eventually found some sufficiently inoffensive ones that she was inexplicably won over. And in the panto version, Beowulf only died temporarily, being soon resurrected through the power of Hrothmund's singing. Also, in the panto version, the entire cast sang a version of Prince's song "1999" with the lyrics altered: "One thousand zero zero party over, oops, out of time/So tonight we're gonna party like it's 999." Then they enlisted the audience in pelting the dragon with hollow plastic balls until we defeated it. It was a good time, and I was glad I had bought tickets.

Two days before Christmas, Barry and I helped my now-former lodger and her boyfriend move in together (and thus, helped her move out of my house). No more lodger! Barry asked me whether I'm feeling happy to be rid of her or sad to lose the rental income. I'm feeling neutral. The amount of rent I was charging her was the appropriate amount to compensate me for the amount that she inconvenienced me. She didn't inconvenience me very significantly, and the amount of rent she brought in was about equally not very significant to me, so it doesn't make a very significant difference in my life whether she lives there or not. She and I saw remarkably little of each other anyway, because she worked the night shift most of the time, and our weekends were on different days. This was the first time in my life I've ever had a platonic, non-family-member roommate, and it will probably also be the last time, but it was a pretty good experience, and I certainly don't regret having tried it.

Earlier this fall, we applied this fall to add Barry's house to the Gardens Gone Native garden tour this spring. A woman came over in mid-December to photograph the garden. I wasn't there at the time (she came on a day when I was working), but Barry showed her around. She suggested that the garden should have more paths so people will know where to step. Having attended the garden tour last year, I was very much aware already that the garden has far fewer paths than most gardens on the tour and knew that we will need to add at least a little more of a path, so I'd been thinking about what would look good. I think square exposed aggregate pavers will best pick up the pattern of the exposed-aggregate sidewalk along one side of Barry's house. So Barry and I went to Home Depot together and looked at stepping-stones for his yard. Home Depot only had round exposed-aggregate pavers and square other types of pavers, so Barry researched and located a better source for the type of pavers I want. We hope to buy some soon.

While we were at Home Depot, Barry bought some bolts he needed and two more trailing rosemary plants for me to plant in the three big planter boxes he built. I also recently mail-ordered some other non-native food plants and planted them in those planter boxes: twelve lettuce plants, six cilantro plants, two broccoli plants, and two chives plants. Barry's food garden is looking really good, although the actual harvest doesn't always amount to all that much compared to how promising the plants look.

Barry and I were also very busy preparing for Christmas this year. Barry always has a bit of a Christmas rush on his lasersmithing products. This year, he also volunteered to make Christmas dinner for my family, and he practiced making it ahead of time just for the two of us during the three-day weekend of December 15-17. It turned out exquisitely both times. He made sous vide tri-tip (which he cooked in, of all places, an ice chest), as well as corn casserole, mashed potatoes with vegetarian gravy, and glazed carrots; I made garlic bread. We invited his parents to join us at my parents' house, and his parents brought lasagna. For dessert, Barry's parents bought chocolate cake, my mother made brownies, and Barry made Bananas Foster. Both dinner and dessert ended up being a huge amount of food - all of it delicious, so I would have liked to just keep eating and eating, but I was soon stuffed.

The various dietary restrictions for the various parents were a bit complex to navigate. In the future we should remember not to buy pre-seasoned meat for family dinners, because it has too much salt in it for my mother to be allowed to eat very much of it. And the vegetarian gravy, because it used soy sauce in lieu of meat to accommodate Barry's parents' vegetarian diet, also had too much salt for my mother.

Anyway, it was a good Christmas. Barry brought a bunch of board games to play with our families, but we ended up not having any time to play any of them. We used up all the available time cooking and exchanging gifts. Barry gave me a bunch of different-colored elastic cinch belts that I'd asked for (in lavender, teal, white, and navy blue), a hori-hori knife, some non-tying alternative shoelaces for my running shoes (in neon yellow and royal purple), some cocoa and a "hug mug" for drinking hot chocolate from, some chocolate candy, some lasercut wooden dividers I'd asked him to make for my silverware drawer, and a cardboard starship Enterprise (original NCC-1701 model) from the board game Star Trek: Panic. He also gave Boston some sweet potato-wrapped dog biscuits and Stardust some cat treats. I gave him a bunch of exotic candy types I found at Grocery Outlet, some flannel-lined and fleece-lined pants for our upcoming Yosemite trip, and three dress shirts: one that's mostly white with blue floral patterns like old china on the sleeves, pocket, and other trim; one bowling shirt in sky blue and white, and one solid reddish-purple shirt.

Other presents I received included the following:

• royal blue running socks (from my parents)
• royal blue garden clogs (from my parents)
• green, blue, and purple gardening gloves (from my parents)
• dish towels with stripes and pictures of striped cats (from my Aunt Kitty)
• a scented candle and scented face lotion (from Barry's parents)
• the novel Blow Your House Down by Pat Barker (from my parents)
• the novel The Joke by Milan Kundera (from my brother)
• the novel Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (from my parents)
• the novel The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (from my parents)
• the novel The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu, translated by Cyril Birch (from my parents)
• the memoir Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood by Fatima Mernissi (from my parents)

And then we spent five days and four nights at a New Year's party in Santa Rosa. Barry's friend Corey bought a house in Santa Rosa this summer, for several million dollars - a house of more than 7,000 square feet, on six acres, adjacent to a lake in one direction and with a view of the city skyline in another direction, located behind not just one but two separate gates to keep out riffraff. All the doors in the house are about twelve feet high. The master bathroom looks like a palace, and the master bedroom's walk-in closet is an entire room and has a built-in island in the middle of it. The two shiny Porsches take up only a small portion of the six-car garage. The main kitchen contains two dishwashers, two sinks, two refrigerators, and so on, but there's a second kitchen upstairs and a third kitchen in the back yard. There's also a fireplace in the front yard and a firepit in the back yard. The back yard also features a swimming pool, a hot tub, a bocce ball court, and an outdoor TV mounted on the wall. One of the seven and a half baths in the house is located next to the pool and has an exterior door.

And it all could have burned down very shortly after Corey bought it, when so much of the rest of Santa Rosa burned down. But this house narrowly escaped the fires, and so Corey had a party. There were 27 of us at the party, so some people did end up in sleeping bags on the floor, but Barry and I got a bedroom of our own - the largest one, I think, other than of course the master bedroom suite. Barry was a sort of co-host of the party, because Barry suggested the idea and helped organize it and got to invite his entire social circle, including many people who had never met Corey before. In fact, rather more of the people at the party were from Barry's social circle and not Corey's than were from Corey's social circle and not Barry's. But a large number were in the overlapping social circles, having already met both Barry and Corey.

Anyway, it was a five-day board-gaming party, so we pretended it was a small gaming convention, and someone even created plastic photo ID cards on little lanyards for everyone. Barry created, at Corey's suggestion, a "vendor hall" to sell his lasersmithing merchandise, including some convention-related swag (engraved with the fictional convention name and the year 2018).

There was a ton of food, and much of it was interestingly unusual. Corey made a turducken dinner one night but otherwise declared the event a pot luck and asked everyone to bring food. Everyone did bring food, a whole lot of it. One of Barry's friends from grad school brought an immersion circulator and made sous vide steak several times, much like Barry had made on Christmas. Barry was planning to make Bananas Foster again, but he got caught up in playing board games and never quite got around to it. Meanwhile, one of the few guests who arrived as early as we did is a professional cake decorator and spent a long time making a huge and very fancy cake designed to look like the game board and game pieces of the board game Takenoko. I'm not familiar with the game, but the cake was very impressive, and it was interesting to watch her make it. It was made of a bunch of different hexagons of different cake flavors (white, chocolate, and strawberry) with sheets of different-colored chocolate folded over it as frosting - she said she used chocolate because it was easier to work with than fondant, but it didn't look like chocolate: it came in colors such as green, yellow, and pink. There were pictures pressed into the top surface somehow or other, and then tall stacks of edible game pieces placed on top of that.

Corey also had a fridge stocked with bizarre sodas. Over the course of the five days, I had a Peanut Butter and Jelly soda, a Bubble Gum soda, and a Sweet Corn soda. Barry had a Praline Cream soda, a Teriyaki Beef Jerky soda, a Prickly Pear soda, and a Celery soda. He tasted all of mine, and I tasted all of his except the Teriyaki Beef Jerky soda. We agreed that the Praline Cream soda tasted best. Barry said the Teriyaki Beef Jerky soda tasted worst. Someone else tried a Teriyaki Beef Jerky soda and decided that although it tasted awful by itself and didn't taste much like Teriyaki Beef Jerky, it did pair well with actual Teriyaki Beef Jerky.

One of the most popular games at the party was one called Fog of Love that Barry bought recently and started playing with me in the weeks preceding the party. It's a two-player game in which the two players to pretend to be two fictional people who are dating each other. They make up names and personalities (the personalities are based partly on cards selected at the start of the game), introduce themselves to each other under their new names, and tell each other, improv-style, about their personalities. They then have a bunch of dating conversations that are partly guided by scripts on randomly drawn cards. The players can play as any combination of genders. I've played it four times now, always with Barry. The first time, we were a gay male couple: I was a firefighter named Truman, and Barry was a fashion designer named Pat, and we were on a first date. The first date ended up including some excursions that made no sense on a first date, like spending a weekend at a cabin in the woods, but anyway, overall, the date (which seemed more like an entire relationship) went pretty well. The next time around, we played as a lesbian couple: I was a police officer named Serena, and Barry was a baker named Lisa, and we had been high school sweethearts. A card prompted us to discuss whether we had ever broken up: I said we hadn't, but Lisa said we had, although only for five minutes. She seemed, however, to have somehow had some sort of sexual experience with someone else during those five minutes, because another card informed us that I had found a sex tape showing her with someone else, and she said it was from those five minutes. Yet another card prompted me to confess that I was secretly older than I had pretended to be; I managed to avoid playing that card, though, because I would have had to have been a cop posing as a high school student and having a relationship with an actual student, and that seemed a bit much for me. Instead, I introduced Lisa to my gorgeous friend Alex and waited to see what would happen. Lisa proceeded to cheat on me with my gorgeous friend Alex. The game went seriously south for me at that point.

We played both of those Fog of Love games prior to the five-day New Year's party, but we played two more Fog of Love games during the New Year's party. In the first of those two, I was Prince William Robert, the heir to the (alternate-universe) British throne, and Barry was Quarrel (pronounced "Carol[e]"), a woman who worked as a wedding planner. We were giving our relationship a year to see how things went, but before the year was over, I suggested that we open up a joint bank account, and I put all my royal money into the joint account, giving her full access to it. Then my best friend died, and then it turned out she'd been cheating on me with my best friend, and then it turned out she was also cheating on me with a bunch of other people, and then she drained our joint bank account and ran off with all my royal money. This made a great story to tell to the other guests at the New Year's party. I was a bit miffed about being cheated on for two games in a row, though. I demanded a rematch a couple of days later. This time, I was a criminal named Moe (I named myself Moe after Corey's hairless cat) and Barry was a female florist named Bella (he named himself Bella after Corey's dog). Moe and Bella ended up having a great relationship, because Bella converted to a life of crime to be a good partner to Moe (and also because, despite being a criminal, my character was somehow a very honest, kind, and generally good-citizen type, if only because those were the cards I happened to draw). There was no cheating this time around, although Moe had one secret: he was pretending to be older than he really was. I told Barry, after the game was over, that I'd drawn a card that gave me a chance to cheat on him but I hadn't used it, and he said he'd drawn a card that gave him a chance to cheat on me also and he hadn't used it either. We were trying our best to get married in that game - it's fairly easy to propose and get engaged in the game, but considerably more difficult to actually get married. Bella proposed to Moe, and Moe accepted, and then we both tried to draw as many cards as we could from the "serious" deck because that was where the wedding ceremony was. At the end of the game, the wedding ceremony card was left on the very top of the deck; we could have drawn it and gotten married if only we could have agreed on one additional question. The additional question that tripped us up was the question of what should be done with the toilet seat. Bella was a submissive sort and encouraged Moe to do what he wanted, so Moe said the toilet seat should always be left up, but what Bella had meant was that the toilet seat should always be left however we had used it. This was enough of a difference of opinion that it prevented us from getting married.

Many other pairs of people also played this game together at the New Year's party, including at least one pair of ostensibly straight men, who played as a lesbian couple. It was entertaining to watch.

I tried to keep track of all the games I played. I think this is a complete list:

• Star Trek: Panic: Barry and I successfully completed two missions, rescuing a disabled ship and defeating an Orion vessel.
• Paradox: My recently ex-lodger and her boyfriend gave this to Barry as a Christmas present. It involves making rows of matching-colored objects. I played it with Barry, Scott, and John. John won, I was second, Barry was third, and Scott was fourth.
• Sea of Clouds: This is a pirate-themed game. I defeated Barry, 57 to 41.
• The Fox in the Forest: This is a trick-taking card game for two players. Barry defeated me.
• DropMix: This game is played with a smartphone plugged into an electronic device that senses DropMix music cards. Each card plays the vocal track or certain instruments from a given song, and the cards can be combined to make an odd combination of various songs. There are competitive and cooperative versions of the game. Barry and I played this game competitively several times (we each won at least once), and we also played a cooperative version once.
• Terraforming Mars: I had played this once before, with Barry, without using the option to play as specific corporations (you can choose whether or not to draw cards of corporations and play with the special abilities of a particular corporation) and finished in a virtual tie with him - I think he defeated me by only one point. At the New Year's party, we played it with Dave and Gabe and used the option to play as specific corporations. Barry won, followed by Dave, then me, then Gabe.
• Crokinole: This is basically a sports game for non-athletes. It's two-player fingersports: you use your fingers to try to aim disks at other disks across a circular board. I started playing it with Tim, who was also new to the game, and we both played from a farther-forward line than is usually allowed, because the instructions suggested that newbies should do this to avoid being hopelessly frustrated. I was in the lead against Tim after three rounds, but we got interrupted before finishing the game. Later I played a full game with Barry, in which Barry played from the farther-back line while I played from the farther-forward line. It started out as a fair fight in the early rounds, but I ended up winning fairly decisively. We decided that in the next game, we should both play from the farther-back line, but Barry should play by tournament rules and I shouldn't. This should give me a somewhat smaller advantage over him. We didn't play a second game at the New Year's party, but Barry informed me that he owns his own specially crafted, one-of-a-kind, designer Crokinole board. His Crokinole board is purple and is named Violetta.
• Web of Gold: This was one of Barry's favorite games during his childhood. Every player plays as two characters at once: a gold miner and a venomous spider. Your gold miner must find gold and bring the gold back home; your venomous spider can spin webs to trap, bite, and kill the other gold miners. Unfortunately, finding gold involves a lot of random rolls of the dice, so it's easy to get a string of terrible luck. I played it with Barry, John, Charlene, Charlene's husband Carlos, and Barry's grad-school friend Cheryl. Charlene and Carlos took early and commanding leads over the rest of us, and Charlene won.
• Shakespeare: This is a game about competing theater companies that are each trying to put on the best Shakespeare play. Disappointingly, putting on the best Shakespeare play seems to be measured simply by investing money wisely in expensive props and actors. Confusingly, the actors don't even have to all be playing characters from the same play. I asked Barry to play this game with me, but I ended up not liking the game that much. Barry defeated me.
• Twilight Imperium: This is Barry's favorite game. It is usually played with about six players and usually takes an entire day to finish. I started playing a scaled-down, three-player version of it with Barry and Rebecka, but we stopped after three hours and didn't finish the game. You each play as one of various alien species that all have different special abilities. I was playing the Emirates of Hacan, Barry was playing the Federation of Sol, and Rebecka was playing the Xxcha Kingdom. We each took over various planets, but the main prize to be taken was the planet of Mecatol Rex. I took Mecatol Rex first. Barry battled me for it and won but took a lot more damage in the fight than he had expected. Barry and I were about evenly matched and both had a large lead over Rebecka. I was preparing to re-invade Mecatol Rex and battle for it again when we stopped playing.

Barry played many more games than I did. He played so many that he hardly got any sleep: one night he came to bed at 5:45 a.m. and set an alarm to wake himself up at 10:00 a.m. so he wouldn't miss either the evening board games or the morning board games. This was only a little more extreme than what he did on all the other nights we were there.

We had a white elephant gift exchange in which all the gifts were board games. I didn't have any board games suitable for giving away, but Barry had three of them, so he supplied Rebecka and me with gifts to give away. When it was his turn to choose a gift for himself, he chose to steal the game Ladies and Gentlemen. When it was my turn, I stole Ladies and Gentlemen from Barry because that made it twice-stolen and therefore no longer stealable. Barry then tried for various other games and had them stolen from him before he eventually ended up with a game called Circus Flohcati.

On New Year's Eve, we all went outside and watched the ball drop on the TV mounted to an exterior wall. Some people made s'mores over the firepit. Barry and I had already made s'mores a couple of days earlier and didn't feel a need to do it again. Someone handed out tiny, celebratory "poppers" on which you pull a string to make a popping noise. Various people expressed concern that Richard was drunk. Jordan expressed an intention to go get drunk with Richard. Barry poured sips of champagne into plastic cups for various non-drunk people and himself. I poured apple cider into a plastic cup for myself. We kissed and toasted and walked around the side of the house to watch fireworks along the skyline.

Welcome, 2018.

( Pictures! )

Me with Moe the hairless cat.

Friday was scheduled to be my last day at work before being laid off, but on Friday I accepted a new job, so I headed to Barry's house in a very good mood to spend my four-day Fourth of July weekend with Barry. My lodger was also spending the four-day weekend out of town, at her boyfriend's house, so I didn't have a pet-sitter handy; therefore, I taped some pee pads into the back seat of my car for Boston (she's incontinent on most car rides these days) and brought her along with me to Barry's house. I also brought three loaves of frozen bread dough (we made two loaves over the course of the weekend, although one of the loaves we made was from the remains of an identical package already at Barry's house), a bag of barbecue potato chips, a loaf of pumpernickel bread, two bags of Muenster cheese, and a big package of thinly sliced turkey sandwich meat. The last three items, I brought simply because I happened to have recently made a sandwich out of them and mentioned it to Barry via instant message, and Barry had said it sounded good, and he did not have the ingredients on hand to make an identical sandwich, so I decided I would bring them with me and make him an identical sandwich.

Upon arrival at Barry's house, I found Barry's pickup truck parked diagonally across two spaces of his three-car driveway, and the back of his truck filled with a mix of 50% dirt/50% compost to fill up the third planter box that Barry recently built. He had parked the truck diagonally for easier wheelbarrow access. I put Boston in Barry's back yard and went inside to eat a delicious dinner of Pasta-Roni and some side dish that we both seem to have forgotten the precise identity of. We also watched some Battlestar Galactica.

On Saturday morning, Barry made waffles, and then we tied Boston to the roof rack of Barry's truck while we filled up the planter box with the soil mixture from Barry's truck. Barry did all the wheeling of the wheelbarrow over to the planter box and dumping its contents into the planter box; I stayed at the truck, where we had two shovels, and we both shoveled the soil into the wheelbarrow until we got the truck emptied out. When the truck was fully emptied out, the planter box still wasn't as full as I wanted, so I drove to Home Depot and bought a big bag of some more dirt, plus a bag of mulch to spread on top of it, and some plants to put in the new planter. I bought a variety pack of six eggplants, a variety pack of six bell peppers, one prostrate rosemary plant, and two chili peppers. After I got them planted, I showed Barry the labels from the plants. He was freaked out by the ghost pepper and showed me a YouTube video of some guy eating a tiny piece of a ghost pepper and moaning a bunch and then deciding he needed to go to the hospital. I agreed to unplant the ghost pepper. We both were kind of disturbed to discover that Home Depot would sell such things without some sort of biohazard warning label.

I chatted with Mikie for a bit, updating him on my new job, while Mikie was attending the World Pride celebration in Madrid and while I was watching Barry shoot zombies in a PlayStation game called Killing Floor 2. I also set out a loaf of frozen bread dough to thaw and rise.

Then Barry got a call from the Yolo County animal shelter about a new pair of foster kittens, and we went to pick them up together. They are about eight weeks old - old enough to be adopted - but they've contracted the cat flu and need to be in foster care until they recover. One is a medium-haired calico girl, and the other is a short-haired grey tabby boy. We immediately started calling them Fluffy and Not Fluffy, respectively, but it soon became clear that they had such starkly obvious personality differences that it seemed a shame to name them only by their appearances. Fluffy looks far sicker, appearance-wise, because the nictitating membrane on one of her eyes is constantly closed and protruding slightly (which tends to happen in response to any eye injury; it can be the feline equivalent of a black eye). However, she is very active, like any healthy kitten, and she starts purring instantly at the slightest petting. Not Fluffy, on the other hand, looks pretty healthy (he had a visibly runny nose for the first day but looks fine now), but he is the most sedate and immobile kitten I've ever seen; he spends pretty nearly 100% of his time sitting, usually in kitty loaf position, with all four paws hidden underneath him. The only movement I've seen from him has been just walking a few steps between his food dish and his cat bed, not running around pouncing on things like kittens normally do (and like his sister does). Also, we couldn't get any purr out of him for days! It took until Monday (the third day we had him) before I finally managed to coax him into purring. After that I was able to get him to purr fairly reliably; however, it always took several minutes of petting to coax him into purring, whereas his sister would always purr instantly at the first touch. So we decided that Fluffy's full name is Fluffy Active Purr Paws, and Not Fluffy's full name is Not Fluffy Not Active No Purr No Paws (because usually none of his paws are visible). I suggested just calling him Not for short.

Both of them wanted nothing to do with food for the first 24 hours or so. The animal shelter staff had told us that the kittens didn't seem to be eating, and that it might be because their noses were so stuffed up that they probably had trouble smelling the food. Barry gave them a dish full of canned food, a dish full of dry food, and some treats, in hopes that they might find something to their liking.

( Click for kitten closeups! )


Here they both are on my lap on Saturday, the day we got them. They are in characteristic positions here, with Fluffy standing up and responding to petting, and Not sitting down, largely ignoring his surroundings.




For dinner Saturday night, Barry made cacio e pepe, which he proudly assured me was authentically Italian. It was delightful. We ate it with homemade bread, while we finished watching Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica. Barry says there are board games for each season of Battlestar Galactica, and we are now at the right point to play the first of them.

On Sunday morning, we found that the kittens didn't seem to have touched any of their food. Barry placed Fluffy in front of the dish of canned food and managed to induce her to start eating some of it. Not continued to refuse food for a while longer. We had seen Fluffy drinking water even before we coaxed her into eating food, but we weren't certain whether Not had drunk any water. I started to worry that his motionlessness might mean he was more seriously ill than Fluffy and maybe even at risk of dying. I put him on my lap and started petting him, and got him to start leaning his face to one side as I petted his cheek. Then I asked Barry to pass me the water dish, and I held the water dish in front of his face and petted his cheek so that he leaned his face practically right into the water. His whiskers got wet, and then he finally started drinking. Hooray! A little later, I did the same thing with the canned food and got him to eat some of that. After that they both started eating and drinking much more regularly. Here is Not on my lap on Sunday.




On Sunday afternoon, Barry took me out for a hot date at the grand opening of the new makerspace in Barry's local library. I had told him I wanted to do something to celebrate my new job, and my narrow escape from the previously looming threat of unemployment, and we had tentatively settled upon the idea of getting some soft-serve ice cream from a food truck. But we arrived earlier than we probably should have and had time to kill before the makerspace opened, and the food trucks weren't there yet either. And it was hot! It was definitely a hot date, but not entirely the kind of hot that I was hoping for. And when we wandered around looking for somewhere to eat, all the restaurants that were open at all on Sundays had closed before 1:00.

Finally we discovered that Steve's Pizza was still open, so Barry bought us a small pizza there. Then we went on to the makerspace when it opened at 2:00. It has one laser (much smaller than both of Barry's two lasers), a woodshop with a bunch of other wood-cutting tools, some 3D printers, some metal-soldering devices, a button press, an iron-on design maker, a sewing machine, and some knitting/crocheting classes. Barry had brought a flash drive with him on which he'd designed a product in advance that he wanted to print out on one of the 3D printers, but the makerspace requires people to take classes on how to use each type of equipment before being allowed to use the equipment independently, so he just signed up for the 3D printing class. He also used the button press to make a button advertising the makerspace, and then used the sewing machine to sew a design onto a paper card and matching envelope.

Using the makerspace is free, except that people have to pay for the materials they use there. Users must have a library card, and the costs are charged to their library card account.

There was also a garden outside the makerspace, planted with tomatoes, squash, and strawberries. I may have been somewhat more interested in the garden than in the makerspace. But I can imagine that some of the makerspace might eventually be useful to me someday.

We left the library at 3:00, when the food trucks were being set up, but we found out that the food trucks wouldn't actually start serving until 4:00. We didn't want to wait that long, so instead we went to a grocery store and bought a big tub of "double chocolate" frozen yogurt, a big tub of "orange-vanilla swirl" sherbet, a smaller tub of "peanut butter chocolate chip" "healthy" alternative ice cream, a coconut-flavored non-dairy whipped cream, a "healthy" alternative chocolate sauce, and a jar of maraschino cherries. We brought this pile of loot back to Barry's house and assembled a banana split for each of us (using the three flavors we had bought rather than the traditional chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry), with a cherry on top of each. It was fantastic.

Then we took Boston for a walk to a different grocery store, where Barry bought more celebratory foods - this time for dinner rather than for our pre-dinner dessert. I stayed with Boston in the parking lot while Barry went inside and did the shopping. As soon as we finished walking back home, I put on fluorescent yellow and teal running clothes and went out for a run, leaving Boston and Barry behind this time. (Boston would be able to keep up with me, but I didn't want to have to worry about encountering off-leash dogs - although this is significantly less common in Barry's neighborhood than in mine.) I ran in various loops through Barry's neighborhood for 20 minutes; attempts to retrace my route on MapQuest later suggest that I went about two miles.

I came home just as the last of the daylight was fading away, and took a shower, and then Barry started barbecuing steaks and chicken and also pineapple on his back patio. Barry's neighbors kept setting off early fireworks, though, and Boston is terrified of fireworks, so Boston kept trying to shove her way into Barry's house anytime we opened the door a crack. We did not want her in the house, because she is incontinent and because she was dirty from being in the yard and because she is unlikely to get along well with Barry's cats. So I stationed myself in a chair on the inside of the sliding glass door with a book (To Be or Not to Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure by Ryan North, the cartoonist of Dinosaur Comics fame) while Barry was outside with the barbecue, and by coordinating, we were able to hand things through the door to one another while keeping a free hand available to wrangle Boston as needed. We made a good team.

Dinner was amazing! And over dinner, we continued our progress through the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 by starting to watch Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II. Also, Barry made a point of congratulating me several times on my new job during our celebratory dinner, and my need for a sense of celebration was fully and properly sated.

Monday was our designated day for staying in and not doing much. I did some gardening, made another loaf of homemade bread, and also made Barry a sandwich with the sandwich materials I had brought from home. We finished watching Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II (Internet connection problems had interrupted us halfway through it on Sunday night) and started watching Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica. Barry made deviled eggs in preparation for the Fourth of July party we were planning to attend the following day, and we ate leftover barbecued amazingness from the day before.

Tuesday was the party! First we stopped in at Barry's parents' house for half an hour and watched an annual hot-dog eating contest with them. Then we went a few blocks away to the house of one of Barry's friends who was throwing a party. The party was not really Fourth of July-themed in anything other than the date it took place. It was really a board-game party, and more specifically, a party for a particular group of friends (including Barry and the host) to play the next couple of installments of their ongoing game of Seafall.

We arrived at the same moment as the car containing all five of the other guests, so we all went to the front door at once. We were greeted by the host cursing and exclaiming that he and his girlfriend were still in their pajamas and had thought they had invited us for four hours later. Uh . . . the Facebook invitation said 10:00 a.m., not 2:00 p.m.? They let us in and quickly changed clothes and scrambled to do the minor grocery shopping and cleanup tasks they had planned to get done before we arrived. The party got started in earnest at about 11:00 a.m. Four of us girlfriends weren't part of the ongoing Seafall legacy game. The host's girlfriend largely vanished and removed herself from the party, but the other three of us - me, my lodger, A, and her co-worker S from the local air force base - gathered at a second table to play board games of our own. (Side note: S also could have become a lodger in my house; when I told A I was scheduled to be laid off at the end of the month, A told me that S was interested in renting another room in my house. It might have been quite financially helpful if I were to be unemployed for a very long time, but I had a feeling I wouldn't be unemployed long enough to suffer any major financial straits, and I plan to continue living in my house myself for a while longer, so I said that I thought having two lodgers at once would make my house feel excessively crowded. To me, anyway! Apparently both of them would have been fine with it. Anyway, it was kind of nice to know I had the option, even though I was also relieved to have the freedom to decline that option.)

Although the host's girlfriend did not join us for board games, she did join us for lunch. Since she hadn't originally planned to join us for that either, the host had gotten it in his head that there were only eight people at the party, rather than nine, and so he only barbecued 8 steaks for lunch at first, rather than 9. Then he discovered his mistake and went back out to barbecue the ninth. He was having a bad day with numbers. It worked out all right, though.

At our table of three, we started off by playing the storytelling game "Once Upon a Time" that Barry bought me in Fort Bragg. I was the only one of us who had played the game before. We played it twice; I won the first game by concluding our collaborative story with my designated sentence, "Although his wound healed, his heart remained broken forever." (The story was about a king who fell in love with a princess and wanted to marry her, but he was caught in a forest fire and unable to escape because of an injury he had received earlier in the story. The king's son heroically rescued the king from the fire, and the princess fell in love with the heroic prince rather than with the king.) S won the second round of "Once Upon a Time," but I don't remember what her ending sentence was. I remember that our collaborative story that time involved a witch queen who had kidnapped the child of a king in a neighboring kingdom, and my designated ending was supposed to be "Her courage had made her rich," but the witch queen's behavior did not lend itself very well to claims of either courage or becoming newly wealthy (she was presumably already wealthy to begin with, being a queen), so I could not gain enough control over the story to direct it toward my ending.

Next we played Five Tribes, which A and S had played before but I hadn't. I found their attempts at explaining the rules to me hopelessly confusing, and no one seemed to want to hand over the rules and just let me read them for myself, so I resigned myself to just trying to learn by observation as we went along. I soon figured it out, and I actually ended up winning the game by a thoroughly decisive margin. I did not like the game, though. I thought the mechanics were boring and stupid. I won it mainly because A and S kept bidding a bunch of money to get to go first in each new round of play, whereas I saved up huge stacks of money just by bidding nothing on every turn except for one single time when I saw an exceptionally good move available and bid quite a lot of money to get the first chance at it. But by simply not spending any money unless I could see a clear, guaranteed profit resulting from my expense, I became vastly wealthier than A and S, and my wealth translated at the end of the game to enough score points that I won the game quite handily.

After that we played Gloom, another storytelling game, one that only A and S had played before. We each got assigned a family of five, with cards describing the five people in the family. Our job was to make our own assigned family members die more miserable deaths than the other two families, by drawing cards describing good and bad events and assigning the bad events to our own assigned family and the good events to the other players' assigned families. I took an early lead by a small margin, but then A and S both ganged up on me and started using all their turns to make my assigned family happy all the time, rather than ever making each other's assigned families happy, and I couldn't fend them both off at once. S kept complaining through much of this game that she thought we were ganging up on her instead and this did cause me to occasionally aim my happiness cards at S rather than at A, and pretty much as a direct result of that, S won this game.

Finally, we played Tokkaido, a game that I had played once before with Barry and his parents. A and S had never played it before. The idea of the game is to compete for who can have the most fun on a vacation in Japan. The primary obstacle to having fun is a shortage of money, and although there are places to earn some money along the way, you can't get a job at those places if someone else has gotten there first and taken the job before you could. I took an early opportunity to earn money that put A at a major disadvantage, because she was particularly in need of money then and had to skip a bunch of fun tourist attractions to find somewhere else to earn money. I'm not as sure how S ended up at any disadvantage, but somehow A and S both finished the game with dramatically fewer points than me.

So in the final count, I won three games that day, and S won two, and A won none at all. (Or at least, that was the final count at the point when I left the party. A and S stayed longer than I did, so hopefully A got a chance to win a game or two at some point.) Before I left, people were joking that I am a board game shark and that being a board game shark is a requirement for dating Barry. Someone asked me whether that was a stated requirement in Barry's OKCupid profile. I said no, and if it had been, I would have assumed I didn't qualify. Someone else said that this is the definition of a shark, that they don't seem like a gaming afficionado but they somehow keep winning even when you didn't expect them to be good at the games.

Barry won the second of the two installments of the ongoing Seafall game that they played that day, and he is now ahead by one point (90 to 89) in the ongoing Seafall campaign. He says he would rather be behind by one point, though, because being behind confers advantages.

Barry and I had agreed in advance that I would leave the party before he did. I left at 5:00 and went back to Barry's house so I could defend Boston from fireworks. Barry stayed until around 8:00 or so, I think, and then went back to his parents' house. He had planned in advance to spend the night at his parents' house and have them drive him home the next morning. Alone at Barry's house, I mostly finished the job of pruning away all the dead brown remains of the spring annuals in Barry's front yard. All my efforts in the past month have left his yard still covered with dry straw, but at least now it's horizontal straw rather than vertical straw, and this makes it easier to see the remaining live green plants that were previously being blocked from view by dead annuals.

I also gave the foster kittens their eye drops and started packing to leave, but then Barry messaged me that his mother was driving him home that night rather than the following morning, so I decided to stick around for an extra half hour or so to see him again. We had some more of those celebratory dessert foods we'd bought at the grocery store two days earlier, and they were fantastic all over again. Then I loaded Boston back into my car and drove her home to Marysville, seeing some fireworks along the way (although not all that many in the middle section of the drive, because not all that many people live in most of the area between Barry's house and mine).

This morning, Barry brought the foster kittens to the animal shelter for a checkup. I was kind of expecting that Not would be put up for adoption immediately, because although he's inactive, he looks very healthy now, visually. I knew Fluffy was not in adoptable shape yet because of her eye, but the vet's diagnosis was much worse than I expected: the vet has scheduled Fluffy to have her eye removed next week. She will be a one-eyed cat forever! Unless her eye unexpectedly recovers somehow within the next week, anyway. We are wishing Fluffy's eye the best possible health outcomes, but apparently the odds are not good for her eye. Anyone within traveling distance of Yolo County, California, want an adorable one-eyed kitten? She is a very high-quality kitten, as fluffy and purry and playful as you could ever wish for. Having only one eye will damage her chances of being adopted. Hopefully she'll be okay. Anyway, she has a week to try for a miraculous recovery, and also her brother Not will remain with her for this week to keep her company.

Barry and I spent June 10-13 at Howard Creek Ranch Inn in Westport, California. We also stopped at Jackson Demonstration State Forest on the way there and back, and while there, we made side trips to Jug Handle State Natural Preserve, MacKerricher State Park, Seaside Beach, and Russian Gulch State Park. And now I'm going to show you pictures of all of it!

First, on our drive there on Saturday, we stopped in Jackson Demonstration State Forest. This is the largest of eight demonstration state forests maintained by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which uses them "for experimentation to determine the economic feasibility of artificial reforestation, and to demonstrate the productive and economic possibilities of good forest practices toward maintaining forest crop land in a productive condition." (Source.) We were trying to follow these directions that I had printed out in advance so we could go hiking on the "Chamberlain Creek Trail and Camellia Trail," which turned out when we got there to have yet a third name, the "Waterfall Grove Trail." I'm not sure why one three-mile trail needs three different names. Anyway, I had neglected to alert Barry to put the specific trailhead turnoff into his cellphone to give us directions to the trailhead rather than just to the forest as a whole, so we ended up having to double back for a few miles before we managed to find the turnoff. Then the directions neglected to mention that we needed to drive the last 5.5 miles on poor-quality dirt road, which was not entirely fun in my two-wheel-drive Nissan Sentra. And then when we finally made it, the sign seemed to indicate a different trail than the one we were looking for!



( Click for much more! )

This is my boyfriend with what I have done to his yard. His life used to lack flowers. Now he is completely inundated with flowers.

He does not know yet, as I do, how much the mass of his garden will shrink back down, by June or July, to a tamer and more traditional-looking garden. But there are enough perennials under the mass of annuals that there will still be a decent garden here in summer and winter and fall. It just won't be like this anymore. Until next spring, that is. Each spring we can do this all again.

Like last month, I'm going to cover both his yard and my own yard in this Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day post, because I'm the primary gardener at both. (Almost the only gardener, for most of this year - but lately, Barry has been starting to help me out pretty regularly with the weeding and learning to recognize more and more plants, so I may have to give him a lot more credit next year!)

I'll start with Barry's yard. It turns out that I actually took more photos of his yard than I did of my own yard this month. I can't get enough of it lately.



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