Great big good news

I like to think that this time I have a pretty good excuse for at least some of the delay in posting to this blog. You see, there was news, and it was big enough that it didn't feel right posting about anything else, but at the same time I couldn't post it here until certain people had been told in person.

So if you haven't heard already, I'm getting married.

Let me try that again.

I'm getting married!

Sorry. Exclamation marks don't come naturally to me, but some situations warrant them.

Shortly before Easter I gave Fiancée (née Girlfriend) a ring. Some people brag about how much their engagement rings cost; we're the sort to brag that I got this ring from my mother and only had to pay to get it resized. It looks like this:

Is it weird for a guy to show off an engagement ring? I'll stop.

As it happened, we were soon to see both our sets of parents over the Easter holiday, so we naturally held off on telling the internet at large until we had told our immediate families.

But since I mentioned Easter, I'm sure what you're really wondering is whether I colored any interesting eggs. In fact, Fiancée introduced me to the use of rubber bands in egg-coloring. This allowed some stripy experiments.

Here is Fiancée's, which I'm sure everyone recognizes as the flag of Scania. (That's not actually what she was going for.) I, on the other hand, didn't have the discipline for straight lines. I did this:

It's not the flag of anywhere.

Then I did this, though:

That's actually my attempt to reproduce a sunset that Fiancée and I saw through the tree branches when we went out for a walk to discuss how hard it is to get my whole family in one room at the same time. Because we had been staying with my parents for a full day at this point and an opportunity still hadn't presented itself to tell them that we were engaged. In fairness, this was because my sister was laid out from an adult tonsilectomy and spent most of the day unconscious, and my dad was at church the whole day on account of him running the church's music program. We toyed with the idea of writing "We're getting married" on the eggs and letting my family find out that way, but decided against it because that would be bad.

We finally got the news to them the next day after everyone was home from the Easter service. Everyone was suitably excited. And a few days later, after we had told Fiancée's parents (with much less logistical difficulty), everyone was suitably excited again.

Anyway, now you know, whoever you are.

Marriage, mice, and manuscripts

There are three kinds of sequel, although for the purpose of introducing this post I'm going to ignore the correct definition of "something which follows or continues" and focus instead on the more common usage, as "a rehashing of ideas previously explored to their logical conclusion."

So, there are two kinds of sequels, generally: those which improve or expand on their originals and those which fall short. Terminator 2 on the one hand, Speed 2 on the other. In terms of the themes it addresses, this post may be considered a sequel to the previous one, and in that regard I hope it falls into the former category rather than the latter.

A week ago I came home from the wedding which had occupied my time, one way or another, for the whole week previous. The wedding was successful, and a married couple was produced. The accompanying party was perfectly lovely (and on a boat, no less), marred only by one of the groomsmen reading a rambling speech made up mostly of in-jokes.* My friends continue to show a talent for having relatively sane and enjoyable weddings, and the weather in Seattle even cooperated to the extent that it was sunny when it needed to be.*

Before leaving I had been relieved to discover no evidence of bedbugs in the house. On my return we continued to not have bedbugs, much to our relief. When I stepped into the kitchen, however, I startled a mouse who must have thought he had the place to himself.

You would think, given the geometric way that these problems expand, that exterminators would make appointments on very short notice. This does not seem to be the case, however--at least not with the exterminator who our landlord prefers. We eagerly await his arrival this Saturday, almost two full weeks after our discovery of the problem, and hope that our furry squatters are not too fecund in the mean time.

While we wait we (well, Girlfriend, primarily) have attempted to drive the creature(s) out by blocking holes and spraying liberally with peppermint oil, including placing mint-soaked cotton balls in strategic corners. The hope, if I understand correctly, is to persuade the mice that our home is the lair of a cotton-pooping peppermint beast.

I worry, though, that we have attracted a singularly worldly mouse, who knows a good thing when he sees it and has no truck with tales of peppermint beasts.

So we lock our food up more securely and wait for Saturday. Our landlord helpfully asked if he could check our mattresses while he's here, because our downstairs neighbors are worried that they have bedbugs.

Bedbugs. Thought we'd dodged a bullet there, for a minute.

We still don't have bedbugs up here, so far as we can tell, but it will be very frustrating if they manage to make their way up here between now and Saturday. Not least because we leave on Sunday to visit my ancestral lands in Massachusetts, and I don't want to bring the little buggers with me.

Perhaps this will all be sorted out with a minimum of further fuss, but I am conserving my optimism for other endeavors.

At the urging of Girlfriend, some friends, my own good sense, and the very universe itself, it seems sometimes, I have agreed to send off my novella "Nenle and Death" to a potential publisher this Friday. The length (almost 15,000 words), rules out many publications, but a few potentials remain. I may even be able to send "The Long Dance" out shortly after that.

This week it looks like I'll have my plate full, of work at least, the most interesting project of which is writing an adventure to be used in playtesting the upcoming D20 RPG Heroes' Tears. The game itself is not unlike 3rd Ed. D&D, but with an approach to classes and levels reminiscent of Shadowrun. I'm pretty excited by the chance to craft adventures for a solid system (and I don't think there's a better chassis available to the public than the SRD) that still has room to grow. (I think I will be making all my own monsters for this one, for example.)

All in all, I should probably get off my blog and get back to work.

* This was me.
** Girlfriend and I were both well reddened over the course of the ceremony and reception, though.

One definitely good thing, one possibly terrible thing

At the end of this week I'll be back to Seattle for... something or other. I dunno. I let Girlfriend handle these things.

Actually I'm more on top of my social schedule than usual at the moment (I bought a planner!) and I am well aware that my illustrious friends Bryan and Katie are getting married (to each other, no less) the Saturday after next. So I will be heading there to congratulate them, and also to catch Bryan's last performance in a universally praised The Importance of Being Earnest. It's not every week you get to see a live romantic comedy where one of the actors actually gets married at the end.

To temper the joy you are probably feeling at this moment, I choose this moment to reveal that I am currently investigating the possibility that my new house has bed bugs. I hope it proves to be otherwise, but after finding three small bug bites in a line across my stomach today, I've laid down tape at the edge of the beds in hope--no, not in hope, but fear--of catching a few as they go about their vile business. No, I do not hope to find bedbugs--and God knows the neighborhood is rife with other suspects--but if they are here my malice toward them is endless.

The good news seems to be, at least, that some of the more extreme bed bug remedies, i.e., arson and seppuku, are no longer recommended.

We shall see, and hopefully we shall sort it out quickly (as these things go).