life regained

i feel it, folks: a semblance of a life outside of work is slowly creeping back on the scene. the bad thing is, it now feels weird to leave work before 6. i think i'll try to break that habit tonight.

newsflash: we celebrated (as in, mentioned to each other) our SEVENTEEN MONTH anniversary yesterday. however, we both thought it was our fifteen month anniversary (and who knows, he probably still does) until today. wanna hear the story? i think you do.

this weekend we went to LaCrosse, WI to see one of the siblings' show choir competitions (see photo, from Google images, above. though not a personal photo, it captures the several hours of competition we saw quite well). since he used to be in show choir, many of the parents recognized him; he was greeted at every turn with exclamations of, "oh, YOU! what are YOU doing now? look at YOU!" i quickly mastered the skill of disappearing into thin air, not that these hovery Minnesota moms noticed me anyway. however, one of them was fawning over him right over my head, so eventually an introduction became imminent (he's not always so good at introducing me to people - is he embarrassed of me? and could anybody blame him?).

this particularly hyper mom asked how long we'd been going out, and he said, "well, it's going on fifteen months now, i guess." i went along with it and was reminded that our anniversaries always fall on the last day of any given month, since our first mutually informed date was on Halloween 2006.

so yesterday came, and at some point i remembered, "oh, it's fifteen months today." well, those of you who have done the math already now realize the huge shame i am to the Asian race.

i added wrong.

when i thought about it, something didn't seem right. my thoughts turned to when we will have been together a year and a half, and i computed easily enough that 12 months (one year in October 2007) + 6 months = April 2008. but how could this be, since March = 15 months?

so i did the math backwards, too. 2 years, or 24 months (October 2008) - 6 months = what do you know, April 2008 again. but that couldn't be, because March was 15 months.

so today as a friend wished me "Happy 15 Months" via email (her husband was with my boyfriend this morning, and cute as he is, he told her husband about our anniversary), the wrongness of the calculation struck me again. i had to write it out. and that's exactly what i did. if you were here and could look at my phone log for today, you'd see these notations scribbled in the upper right hand corner:

oct - 12

nov - 13

dec - 14

jan - 15

feb - 16

mar - 17

apr - 18

SEVENTEEN! MARCH = SEVENTEEN MONTHS!

now i blame my mental blunder on him, because i heard him say it was 15 months, and i believed it. hmph! but somehow it seemed right to me . . . so my question is, when did we start miscalculating . . . where did months 14-16 go in BOTH of our brains?

i choose to find solace simply in the age-old cliche: time flies when you're having fun.

it's really all that matters. so we must be having fun. so-fun-you-forget-three-months-of-your-life-fun. i'll take it. i'm not complainin'.

so tonight, on a rare evening when a standing church meeting has been cancelled, we will celebrate seventeen months of bliss with these things:

love and smiles to you and yours this jumbled, lovely season.