It's Only Stuff

I spent a leisurely morning offline, reading the newspaper over breakfast and then watching last week's Lost on Tivo while I laid out my pills for the coming week. Eventually I sent My Beautiful Wife a text message asking how her workday was going. She responded that she'd mostly been glued to Twitter following the "EQ and HI tsunami" reports. What?!?! I turned on the TV and booted up the Macbook and learned about the powerful earthquake in Chile and the tsunami warnings around the Pacific rim.

I checked in with Twitter friends in Hawaii and learned they were safely ensconced above the danger zone. Someone tweeted the URL for a CBS station on Oahu that was streaming live coverage. A Twitter friend in Santiago, Chile had posted "Terremoto en Chile" ten hours earlier. Another had messaged back to her in Spanish, "Can you phone my parents?" and later the tweet shown above, which translates as, "Now I know about my parents. Very scared but they're fine. The house is damaged but it's only stuff." Soon I was watching The Weather Channel on TV and both CNN and Hawaiian CBS coverage simultaneously on the laptop, mesmerized by the ocean's retreat in Hilo Bay.

I'd been absorbed in this for some time before I realized that this would be a perfect time to make my regular Saturday call to Mom. My mother was a Navy WAVE stationed on Oahu in World War II, which began her life-long love affair with Hawaii. She had just come in the door when I rang, and I told her to turn on the TV. We watched coverage of the earthquake damage, the aftershocks, the tsunami's advance; together, two thousand miles apart.

BayCycle Day 5: On the Fifth Day, We Rested

"Petaluma, California! What a great place to live, work, raise a family, and enjoy life!"
-- from Petaluma.org website

MBW* and I thoroughly enjoyed our day off in Petaluma. To begin with, she got a break from cycling town-to-town around San Francisco Bay. We both got to sleep in, instead of just me. We were staying with her cousin Mike and his wife Pat in their beautiful and comfortable home, much better than a hotel.

After a leisurely morning we got in the car (with MBW driving for a change) and ran some errands, then headed to the historic part of downtown Petaluma for lunch. As we walked down the street we ran into Pat and a friend on their way back from a weekly lunch date. They were coming from Cafe Zazzle, one of the places MBW had in mind, so we popped in there and had a fabulous lunch: fish tacos, Italian sodas, and a shared slice of key lime pie (sublime) for dessert. It was heavenly after some of the fast food we'd been eating on the road.

In the afternoon we did some laundry, uploaded photos and caught up on some blogging. I realized how much energy this ear infection had been sapping when I could barely blog anything and instead opted for a nap.

Pat and Mike and other friends and relations from as far south as Sausalito have been gathering for weekly Friday night dinners. In honor of our visit, the dinner was moved to Thursday and the dining room packed with 12. It was great seeing everyone since we don't get up this way very often.

* My Beautiful Wife (here's her (very brief) post on Day 5)

North America Bridal Tour 2008

"Love at first sight is easy to understand; it’s when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle."
— Amy Bloom

Our dear friend MGH paraphrased this quote when she officiated at our wedding ceremony. After 17 years together, we find it exciting to be legally wed at last. My wife (I love writing that!) and I are on vacation now, taking what we have come to call our North American Bridal Tour. It started when our dear friends Les Gals recast a planned outing one week after the wedding into a champagne tea at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco. We donned our wedding outfits and Jan made sweet wedding favors with pink and white Jordan almonds. The tea was fabulous, and afterwards we posed for a group photo in the lobby and talked about Photoshopping them into the wedding photos.

Next stop on the tour was Chicago for dinner with family and a night at the Ardmore House B&B. Then off to Mishawaka to see Mom, my sister E and niece H. We modeled our wedding outfits for them, showed the wedding ceremony video, and took a family picture, pondering the best poses for Photoshopping them in. Back to Chicago for another family dinner, and then to Aunt P's apartment. Again we donned our wedding finery and showed the video, took more family photos, and dug into a two-tier "wedding cake" that my sister F and niece G constructed from a cheesecake and a decadent chocolate affair from Whole Foods.

Now we're in Halifax for K's family reunion. We're planning to do it again (outfits, video, photo), probably before Saturday's barbecue. I'm hoping everyone will participate but won't be surprised (disappointed, yes, but not surprised) if not everyone does. I've been accepted into the family (it's been 17 years now, after all) but there are some religious beliefs that still present barriers. But I hope everyone will come. I still love hearing the ceremony, to which MGH had also added this powerful quote from the civil rights movement:

"The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which "the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one's skin or color or race" are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs."
— Hannah Arendt in Dissent, Winter 1959