A Conversation, Part I

Newark International Airport
8:55am

"Ah, nuts."
"Oh, that's too bad."
"Five second rule."
"... is changed to the zero second rule when the floor in question is the floor of an airport."
"This bagel cost me five dollars. I'm eating it."
(chew chew chew)
"Kiss me."
"No."

Christmas Time

Jennifer and I are getting our apartment all ready for Christmas. It looks pretty festive, and will likely continue to look so long after the Christmas season is over. We don't have a lot of storage space in our apartment. We don't have a lot of living space either, but less so storage space. So if you see pictures of our apartment in June next year and our tree is still up in the corner, it's not that we've forgotten about it nor are we too lazy to move it. We just don't have anywhere to keep it.

Since this is our first Christmas we're learning all about each other's family traditions. Jennifer's family opens all of their Christmas presents on Christmas Eve while my family is up at 6am opening theirs. Jennifer buys those presents 5 to 6 weeks while I'm planning on picking mine up on Monday. Her family has macaroni and cheese as a Christmas staple and mine always eats grilled cheese with pink lemonade. Some of the new traditions I already love, others... I don't know. I don't think I'll ever appreciate Nascar.

One of the other new lifestyle changes I've been adapting to since getting married is the principle of full disclosure. I work doing maintenance on a group of apartment buildings in Central Bridge, NY. Often when people move out of their apartment they leave stuff behind. Most of the time the abandoned property ends up in a storage facility under one of the apartment buildings. 

The room kind of looks like the Room of Requirement from Harry Potter, only instead of miscellaneous magical baubles it's filled with broken, moldy furniture, like an Ikea that got bit by a zombie. People rarely ever leave behind anything of value. However, last week I did find an awesome leather bomber jacket in an apartment that's been vacant for a few months.  

It's an awesome jacket and I love it. Jennifer isn't as fond of it, mostly because of where it came from. Before we were married, I could get away with just showing up for a date with a new jacket and Jennifer would just be like "cool jacket." It's different when I show up at home after work with a new jacket. Then she's all like "where did you get that jacket?" After she found out it was from the Hillside apartment building (the one that's currently condemned by the code enforcement office for mold) she was less than excited to have it in her home. I wasn't allowed to wear it until I had it cleaned. Professionally. She didn't buy it when I sprayed it with a little Frebreeze.

Later that night in bed I started scratching all over my chest and told Jennifer I itched all over. She rolled over three times, right out of the bed. I'm still allowed to mess with her occasionally, even now that we're married.  

  

The Honeymoon

The coolest part of our honeymoon for Jennifer was when we went to Harry Potter castle in Orlando. Jennifer really, really likes Harry Potter. She also really, really dislikes it when I call Hogwarts "Harry Potter Castle". I was a little skeptical initially, mostly because the line to just get into the Harry Potter section of the park had a sign by it saying "The Wait from this Point Is: 120 mins". It didn't take two hours, however, and the time we did spend waiting was well worth it because Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey is a sweat ride. It was both my and Jennifer's favorite ride at the park.

I was more excited to see the Jurassic Park rides and attractions, though given the recent entries to the franchise I probably should have kept my expectations low. Remember

 And most recently

It wasn't too bad. They only had one real ride and it featured raptors and a T-rex so it was worth going to. Also, you could walk right onto the ride and not wait at all in line. I guess enthusiasm for a ride based on a movie almost 20 years ago (holy cow, I know) has waned a little over the past two decades. 

This was on the ride. The T-rex attacks the boat right before you go down a waterfall. We couldn't get a good shot in though because, you know, lap bars. 

Orlando was one stop on our seven day cruise to the Caribbean. We had two others. The first was at Nassau. Nassau is kind of sketchy. The boat docks at this touristy trap place. We went to the beach near where they let us off intending to lay out and go swimming but when we got there the beach was covered in broken glass and homeless people so we only stayed for an hour or so. 

Daniella from Jennifer's work told us we should go to Paradise Island while we were at Nassau because that's where all the good beaches were. After a streaker guy chased us off the first beach we decided to try our luck on the other side of the island. We took a ferry to Paradise Island aka Atlantis Beach Resort We Own All the Beaches Here So Don't Think You Can Come Over Here Without a Reservation Island. We were stumped at first, but we met this Canadian couple who helped us sneak past security onto the forbidden Atlantis beach.

The beach there was way pretty. If you're ever in Nassau, don't bother going anywhere but to the beaches on Paradise Island. Oh, and when it was time to leave our boat (pictured above) totally ran into an old pier support (also pictured above- the brown thing between the white and green pole). The impact knocked a kid out of his stroller and he hit his head on the ground. Man, were his parents upset. 

We planned our wedding so it would happen the week before Thanksgiving. That way, we could take the whole following week off and not miss too much work. We thought that was pretty clever of us, and it was. The only drawback was Thanksgiving dinner. It made Jennifer cry, and not in the good way like when she sees an especially beautiful sunrise or has vanilla icing and frozen milk for breakfast. Yeah, she eats that. I'm learning all sorts of things I didn't know about Jennifer, like how she says "buggy" instead of "shopping cart" and how she leaves cups of water in the bedroom. She's also learning things about me, like how I leave cupboard doors open, all of them all the time, and how I obsessively pick up cups of water left lying around in the bedroom. 

Our last stop was Freeport. It was a lot like Nassau. Here are some more pictures.

I was in bad need of a haircut pretty much the entire time.

And that was our honeymoon. We both liked it. We intended to finish all our thank you cards during the down time, but ended up not doing any of them. We've still only finished five. To everyone who gave us anything, you have our thanks and we promise we will be sending out those cards soon. Promise. 

The Proposal

I wrote this post back on my old blog when we first got engaged. I thought it would be appropriate to include it here as well:

Aug. 7, 2011

It will only take looking at the date of my last blog post, the date of this post, and some rudimentary applied math skills to realize my blog has been sorely neglected. Since I lasted updated my blog I have been dating Jennifer. The time needed to allow a relationship to mature is significant and I've been happily investing it for the past four months. True, there haven't been a lot of comics produced during that period but I consider being currently engaged to an amazing woman I love more than anything well worth the hiatus. 

Our first date was on April 22. Since then we've spent almost every day together and have decided we'd like to continue doing so for the rest of our lives. We're to be wed in the Boston temple on November 18. I've never liked having a birthday or celebrating it, and this is probably the closest thing I can do to erasing it forever so many thanks for that Jennifer.

A lot of people have asked how I proposed so in the interest of efficiency I'll be henceforth referring them to this post. I asked Jennifer to marry me this past Friday. I'd known when and where I wanted to propose for the last month or so. By where I first asked Jennifer to be my girlfriend there is a large oak tree. I bought and hung around 600 feet of Christmas lights in its lower branches, making a kind of canopy of light. I had wanted to string lights all the way up the tree originally, but after falling out of the tree once I settled on a less potentially paralyzing plan. I had the lights hooked up to a generator two hundred feet of extension cord away and a little device that would allow me to turn everything on with a clicker I kept in my pocket. 

this tree is huge. seriously. it's like 70 feet tall and the trunk is at least 5 feet thick.

the field where the tree is located

The evening started with a trip to the Cobleskill Sunshine Fair. Friday night was demolition derby night at the fair and I was really excited to go see cars run into each other. Jennifer said she was excited as well, but I'm pretty sure she was just saying that to make me happy. I had planned on going to the fair for an hour or so in the late afternoon and then getting to the tree at dusk, but Jennifer showing up 45 minutes early forced me to find some filler time. So we ended up walking around the fairgrounds, looking at every exhibit and then reading the placard about every exhibit. It was really boring (like they had collections of Shirley Temple memorabilia and washing machines from the 19th century on display), and most of the produce and food had spoiled and began to mold (the fair is three weeks long and Friday was the second to last day).  

Gratefully it began to darken and we left and headed for the area where the tree was. I'd been lying to Jennifer for the past month, telling her about a project for the Pumpkin Patch I'd been working on in an adjacent field. I wanted the proposal to be a surprise, but I couldn't think of a good reason I'd be driving her off into an empty field alone and in the dark other than a proposal (or maybe murder) so I rigged this whole elaborate story about some satellite pumpkin stand she needed to see.

We arrived at the tree where I had Jennifer's favorite dinner waiting in a cooler by a table I had set up earlier. I clicked on the lights and we ate by the tire swing I had hung back on the date when I asked Jennifer if she would be my girlfriend. After we had finished, I took a knee and this time asked Jennifer if she would be my wife. She accepted, and we couldn't be happier together. 

The Prologue

Here is our story so far.

Jennifer Brown had just graduated from Converse College with a degree in computer scicence. She was unsure if she wanted to continue her education or if she wanted to begin a career immediately after school. An opportunity to begin a Master’s at RPI on a full scholarship convinced her to move to Troy, New York where she began going to church at the local young single adult’s branch in August of 2010.

Tyson VanDerwerken had just graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in English. After graduating and coming to terms with the bleak prospects of job opportunities for English majors, he decided to pursue a career in funeral directing. He moved back to his hometown of Schoharie, New York and enrolled at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, New York and began attending church at the local young single adult’s branch in December of 2010.

Every time Jennifer attempted to talk to Tyson, he would reply in a polite, albeit brief, manner but failed to really engage her in a conversation. Jennifer assumed this was Tyson’s way of expressing disinterest in a friendship. In actuality, Tyson truly didn’t want to be Jennifer’s friend, but only because he thought she was eighteen and he wasn’t interested in being friends with a teenager.  Because he never talked to her, he didn’t discover she was actually twenty three and working on her post graduate work until April of 2011. He asked her out the next weekend.

Thankfully, Jennifer wasn’t too frustrated as to decline the invitation. They had an amazing first date on Friday, April the 22^nd. Then they had an amazing second date the next weekend, followed by a third amazing date the next. By that point they were seeing each other five to six days a week.  It didn’t take long for either of them to determine they had met someone very special, or to realize they were falling in love.

On August 5^th, 2011 Tyson proposed to Jennifer on the same spot he asked her to be his girlfriend. She accepted and both Jennifer and Tyson are excited beyond words to be wed for time and all eternity on November 18^th, 2011 in the Boston, Massachusetts LDS temple.