Praises

I was going to write this rousing intellectual tour-de-force about how amazingly grateful and blessed I am that I have a future father-in-law who is nothing like this guy:

I may still write it and post it later, because there are a whole lot of great things I could write about the way my suegros make my trips to their home something to look forward to, but I got distracted by this photo and have since decided to post it instead, just because it shows another reason why Steph and I get along so well with each other:
The best part is, I didn't even know she was making that face behind me at the time...surely a woman after my own heart.

The date is set!

At long last, we have ourselves a wedding date!
It's a good feeling; Steph and I had been trying to pin this thing down since we got engaged last December, and now we all finally know for sure: Friday, May 23, 2008

So...that means I've got 10 months, four days, and 7 hours (give or take a few minutes) until I get married. Woohoo!

As for the location...I'll just leave you the picture as a hint :)

Just a little service we offer, free of charge

I think it's safe to say that I'm not much of a clothes shopper. If you ever see me playing guitar or sax on the weekend, you may or may not notice that I tend to rotate through the same five outfits; occasionally, I'll mix things up and wear a new shirt, but if you see that, it probably means that my dad outgrew something and gifted it to me.
Some people are into clothes. Not me. I'm more of a food and rent kind of guy (with the occasional Apple product thrown in just for kicks).
All that gives you some background insight into my favorite pair of jeans. The ones with the fake bleach stains that made them look so trendy and used when I paid too much for them (while somewhere in the back of my mind I quietly asked myself why I didn't just buy a new pair of pantaloons that actually looked new...). Anyway, I was putting them on sometime ago, and I was in a bit of a rush, and in my zeal to put my pants on, my big toe tore a hole clear through the left-hand thigh. Now, a quarter inch of untanned leg (which hadn't seen the light of day since middle school, when I wore shorts above the knee) was exposed for all the world to see. Horrors!
As you can imagine, I thought that this was the beginning of the end for my favorite pair of denim loafers. I started preparing myself to budget a new demins purchase into my monthly, all because of my dumb big toe, when I was pointed to a product that would mean the salvation of my britches.
Enter the Bondex iron-on patch.
Now, not only are my jeans pre-treated with bleach stains (trendy), they now have holes in fashionable places (extra trendy) and spare me the embarrassment of explaining to curious onlookers why my arms and face are latino brown and my legs are the same color as my iPod headphones.
Mad props to Pastor Brian Fuller for recommending this wonderful product to me.

Traveling mercies

I had been waiting for the chance to use the google maps feature on the iPhone on an actual road trip, and yesterday my chance finally came! Steph and I had the address for the friends we were going to visit, a car to drive in, and, most importantly, a nifty iPhone, so we were ready to rock!
Unfortunately, Murphy's law being what it is, we still managed to get lost; apparently the map was zoomed in a little too far, which made us think that that big yellow line on the map before the road we were going to turn on was US-1 instead of University Drive....etc. etc. you know the drill. Trust me, this says way more about Steph and I than it does about the iPhone. Anyway, all that just goes to show you that no piece of technology, no matter how amazing, can replace the power of actually using your brain. My Mastercard commercial for the evening would go something like this:

Full tank of gas: $30
iPhone: $600
Paying attention so that you don't arrive almost 45 minutes late: priceless

temptation: an epilogue

So yeah, it's a good thing we had that whole chat earlier about financial restraint, because I threw it out the window Friday afternoon.
Somewhere between the repeated inquiries as to why I still hadn't bought the phone from my fiancé ("Look, after we're married, disposable income's going to be harder to come by, so you may as well go buy it now so I can play with it.") all the way to my mom ("Can I play with your phone? I know you've got one. You do have one, right?"), and the email I got from Brian Thursday night (...informing me of exactly which apple stores in a 20 mile radius still had iPhones in stock) the idea lodged itself in my head that maybe I was meant to have this phone. The signs were all there. It would be wrong to miss this opportunity, right?

Ha! Yeah right!
We all know that I just really wanted it and was in a place financially where I could make it happen without messing up any major priorities, so -surprise!- I have an iPhone!

And yes, I am wayyyy happy with my purchase.
And now Brian and I have matching phones.
Kinda creepy, huh?