BluegrassMan

• Go to the zoo
• Go to the pool
• Play a game together
• Go ice skating
• See a movie
• Go out for lunch
• Have a picnic
• Play hide-and-go-seek together
• Play outside for the whole afternoon
• Go on a bike ride
• Try to grow beards
• Rent a video game and play together (or try to play)
• Rent a mini-van! (or not)
• Go to the beach at Clinton Lake
• Solve world hunger
• Make a new source for energy
• Create a war between Canada and France
• Kick Jake in the rear end all afternoon
• Teach Laura Brooke's language
• Try to make a play (we made together) and go Broadway
• Watch the Grinch in slow-motion
• Make a sitcom
• Bake stuff

• Movies
• Pool
• Out to lunch
• Relaxing day
• Play in the sprinkler
• Comedic reasons (it doesn't count) grow a beard
• Rent a movie or fun video game for us all
• Solve the economy slump
• Create a nuclear warhead
• Throw Brooke out of the house
• Hear the colors u hate

I am driving in the minivan with the family a while ago and while accelerating from a dead stop it did on of those ehhhhhAHHHHHHehhhh things.  You know, you press on the gas and it shifts in to a gear that revs the engine and then shifts back to a normal gear.

My wife gave me a little look, kind of like “drive much?” and I follow up the look with “This thing needs a HEMI!”

This is where it get funny…My wife says back to me, “how would a battery help?”  Me now, “a battery?” her “yeah, isn’t that what a HEMI is?”.  What follows is me discussing the obvious benefits and beauty of a engine with a hemispherical head.  Of course I really do not know what I am talking about but it sounds good I am sure, I mean I hope.

Anyway I do get the fact that it is an engine not a battery.  After this my wife says, “This makes the commercials make sense, I could not figure out why those guys were so excited about a battery.”  Of course I end up laughing my tail off and put it on my memory banks as a bloggable event so I could share it with the rest of the world. 

Maybe Dodge should have another marketing campaign just talking about what a HEMI is.  There might be others out there who have no clue what they are talking about.

You have probably figured out by the title that this is a story about how I met my wife.

After graduating High School and spending one semester in college as an Agribusiness major, I decided to drop out and find myself. I could probably write another complete entry here on things to do to make your college experience successful since I did a really good job at being unsuccessful my first semester in college. The keg cooler in my apartment, among other things, was a bad idea.

I am not sure if I was trying to find myself or just figure out what I wanted to do with my life in the way of a career. Agribusiness was not cutting it for me; I really just chose it as my major because I had spent some time working with my dad at a fertilizer plant he ran. I thought that maybe I could graduate with an Agribusiness degree and then work as a sales representative for an agricultural chemical company. Working at my dad’s plant, I met many people with this job and I thought it would be an acceptable career. The problem is, I hated plant biology and also was not fond of the animal husbandry classes I had to take. I also felt like a misfit in my major, maybe it was because my shoes never had crap on them on a daily basis like the others.

 Since I dropped out, I had to find some employment to carry me over the winter months until the contractor I had a job with began building houses again. I am pretty sure that my plan at the time was to work as a carpenter or contractor for the rest of my life. In the meantime I was working as a busboy at Alexander’s Steak House, which did not pay many bills, so I had to move back in with my parents. It that wasn’t bad enough…my older sister had recently graduated from college and was back home looking for a job and living in my old bedroom…which meant that I ended up sleeping on a mattress in a back room in the basement.

Living at home with my parents meant that I was expected to attend church with them and it was here that I found another job to help me earn some money until my construction job started up again for the season. There was a woman at church who managed the H&R Block offices in our town and at church one Sunday I discovered that she might have a job for me. She asked me to come in and interview with her and a day or so later I was employed as a Tax Form Processor and fill-in Receptionist.

I know it sounds glamorous but I have to tell you that really I was just responsible for driving around the community and collecting the finished tax returns from satellite H&R Block offices, checking the math on the tax returns (yes, kids, this was before computers did it) and then making 3 copies of the returns (yes this was before copiers were outfitted with collators) and then delivering them back to all the offices. As part of this job, I was also asked to attend Receptionist training so I could help out when the young ladies who usually did it were off attending school, like good college students.

I do not know what they were thinking when they tried to make me a receptionist, even today I cannot handle the phone. Today, if someone asks me forward a phone call, it puts me in panic mode and usually involves a desperate search for the “Using Your Phone” manual. The thought of sitting in front of a multi-line phone answering the phone, putting calls on hold, and then forwarding calls to people still terrifies me.

Anyhow, it was during my H&R Block receptionist training that I met my future wife. This training involved me sitting with 2 or 3 other people of the opposite sex and the manager of the office. We watched really bad videos on topics such as “How to answer the phone” and the like. At one point my future wife walked in the room to ask the manager a question and looked right at me and said, “What are you doing in here?” I am not sure how I answered the question but I do remember much laughter from everyone else in the room.

Even though I was only 19 at the time, I had the desire to find my soul mate and settle down and there was something about this girl that did it for me. This girl seemed like someone I might be able to spend my life with and even though she had completely emasculated me in front of my coworkers, I found the courage to ask this girl out.

Things start to get a little fuzzy here…remember, this was 19 years ago and I have man memory…I remember that our first date was at a restaurant that is long gone named The Bombay Bicycle Club. We may have gone to a movie after dinner, I am not totally sure about this. But, what I do remember is that after the date I told this girl that I felt like she was the person I was going to marry and spend the rest of my life with. Of course, she thought I was completely crazy.

In an effort to keep this readable this is all I intend to write at this time. I am sure you figured out that we did get married, we are still living happily aver after, and yes she still does it for me. I plan on continuing this thread in the future. From the time in my life covered here to today there is much ground to cover. I could write a book and I probably will. Let me know if you like reading these or if I am just boring you to tears.