Twenty-five years ago today (yes, a quarter of a century ago), my wife and I, accompanied by our then eight-year-old daughter, went to the local courthouse at about 4:30 in the afternoon to get married. The other people at the courthouse that day were mainly there to pay tax bills or fines. I remember one guy telling us, “You’ve got the best deal going today!” when he found out why we were there.
Indeed, we did.
The justice of the peace put on her robe over a pair of jeans and t-shirt, ushered us into an otherwise empty courtroom, and officiated as the three of us said our vows (our daughter had hers, and she was included in ours). Then we went off to dinner, enjoying steak and a novelty: fried ice cream for desert!
Since we both had to work today, we decided to set aside last weekend to celebrate. Saturday was the 25th anniversary of the day we closed on our house. (It was a busy week back in ’95. We closed on the house on Tuesday, spent that night in an air mattress in the new house, woke up Wednesday to find ourselves flat on the floor after all the air leaked out overnight, got married on Friday, and moved from our apartment into the new house on Saturday! We still marvel at the fact that we carried our washer and drier down a narrow set of stairs from the apartment by ourselves.)
On Friday evening, we ordered Mexican food from our favorite restaurant, the first time we’d done that since June. We had been out of tequila for a long time, so we went to the local liquor store for the first time since lockdown and got a bottle of mix and some tequila, along with a couple of limes. Picked up our dinner at the drive-up and headed home. Enjoyed our chips with red salsa and fajitas. Man, were those margaritas strong, though. It wasn’t until last night, when we were having leftovers, that we realized that our margarita “mix” was actually ready-made margaritas with 30 proof tequila. So when we added more mix to try to make the margaritas less strong, well, we were just charging them up a little more!
Saturday was beautiful, so we sat outside much of the day, listening to classic rock on the radio, sipping wine and, later, grilling steaks. We were in a particularly celebratory mood when we learned the election had finally been called. (I had an alert set using ResistBot, so I got a text message when Biden won.)
On Sunday, we did much the same, except we ordered seafood from Landry’s and used DoorDash to have it delivered, something else we hadn’t done since March.
We have been completely self-reliant as far as meals go for the past eight months, cooking everything “from scratch.” We’ve always made good meals, but before COVID we got lazy sometimes and went out a couple of times a week. Nowadays, we have a well-stocked small freezer that has just about anything we’d want to make and we enjoy preparing meals ourselves. Ordering out a couple of times on the weekend was our way of treating ourselves. We enjoyed some different flavors — Filé in the gumbo, for example, and salsa roja.
We watched a few movies, too. The new version of Rebecca starring Lily James, Armie Hammer and Kristin Scott Thomas (as well as Keeley Hawes and Ann Dowd) was pretty good. The documentary My Octopus Teacher details a year in the life of a man who decides to explore a kelp forest off the coast of South Africa, where he “befriends” an octopus by patiently returning every day. He free dives — no air tank and no wetsuit — which is hugely impressive. It’s quite fascinating.
For a change of pace, we watched Operation Christmas Drop, about a congressional intern sent to Guam to evaluate an airbase for possible closure. The congresswoman is played by Virginia Madsen, the only actor I was familiar with. She’s the grinch or, alternately, Scrooge. It’s a cute movie based on a real, long-term operation to bring supplies to the remote islands. Finally we watched the Apple TV+ documentary Letters to You, about the making of Springsteen’s latest album. It’s always interesting to watch songs take shape once the band gets involved, but there’s never any doubt about who’s running that show.
A few years ago, I wrote a story for the XPRIZE short fiction contest. It didn’t win, so I revamped it and started sending it out again. “Helen Wheels” found a home in the Science Fiction edition of The Binge-Watching Cure anthology, which will be out next year. It’s an interesting concept: around 20 stories starting at 100 words and increasing steadily until the final piece, a 20,000-word novella. My story occupies the 3500-word slot.
