Wedding bells on the (far) horizon

It's true, I'm engaged. I asked L to marry me a couple weeks ago. We had a nice little picnic by the lake and I don't think either of us stopped smiling for a couple hours straight. I had a ring made for her by a craftswoman on Etsy. I thought I would melt right away when she put it on and told me she wanted to spend the rest of her life with me.

We decided that I needed a ring too. (I could go on and on here about gender roles in female same-sex couples, but I'll save that for another post.) L had really wanted me to surprise her with her ring (which I did), and she wanted to surprise me with mine too.

Last week we were making dinner after getting home from work - grilled cheese sandwiches, one of our favorite comfort foods - and L brought the plates over to the table. There was something non-food-like on my plate. A little black box with a familiar looking ribbon. I opened it to see that L had gotten me a ring by the same designer. It's a blue iolite stone. It looks black in the picture here, but it's really a deep, dark blue. I love having the ring on my finger - it's a constant reminder of the life together we have ahead of us.

Okay, so you probable want to know wedding details. The when, the where, all that. Well, it's all pretty tentative right now, but we're thinking summer of 2010 in the Bay Area (where we'll be living soon!).

Can't Stop the Beat

I was ever so excited when the people living in the 2nd floor apartment just below me moved out a couple weeks ago. They were, at least from my perspective as their neighbor, rather bastards. They left empty beer bottles and stubbed out cigarettes on the shared porch all the time. Even better, they repurposed an empty wine bottle as their cigarette repository, turning it into a stinking miasma of used-up nicotine and stale, festering rainwater.

What bothered me more than this infestation of the porch, though, was their habit of playing music at all hours of the day and night. I don't know what kind of music they were playing, but I do know that it always had a very repetitive, very insistent bass beat. How do I know this? Because I could hear the bass through the floor. At all hours of the day and night. Particularly when I was trying to sleep.

I was excited when they moved out. The people that moved in seem nice, more easy-going and more likely to be friendly, respectful neighbors. They put a hammock on the porch instead of beer bottles. One of them admired my vegetable garden.

But now it's after midnight, I'm trying to get to sleep and all I can hear, all I can think is this pounding bass line reverberating up through the floor and disturbing all the quietest corners of my mind. And I'm roiling with (mostly) irrational hate, hate, hate for these new bastards that have no sense of decency or neighborliness or my need to get a decent night's sleep.

No Books for Prisoners

I read an article in the Wisconsin State Journal today about a program that sends free books to Wisconsin prison inmates that was shut down by prison officials. It's hard to tell who's right and who was being an ass, but I'd think that reading books is something we'd want to encourage in anybody, not to mention those in prison with probably a lot of time on their hands. The prison officials' argument was that the books could contain contraband - sealed into bindings or secret codes created by underlining certain words. Those books are dangerous things! You never know, inmates could hit someone over the head with a particularly large book. This whole idea that books are dangerous reminds me scarily of dystopian novels like Fahrenheit 451. If we let people read, they might start thinking too.