Ten Years of Marriage and All I Get Is Foil?

My goodness gracious, I have been married for 10 years. Ten WHOLE years! All 520 months, a complete 3,650 days and, except for a tense five minutes several years back when I said her pants looked like a road map back to the ’60s (I blame tainted beer), I’ve made it more than 87,000 hours. Isn’t that amazing, and wonderful? Doesn’t that sound like a monumental accomplishment? Like I should be in the Guinness Book of World Records? At least deserving of a medal. The life expectancy of modern marriages is unfortunately not that long. But this woman — a wonderful, beautiful, smart and witty woman — has put up with me for that many years. Me! Little ‘ole me. A lot of people figured the whole thing wouldn’t last more than 15 minutes because I have a knack for saying really stupid things and thinking they’re funny. When we were at the altar and I was asked if I would take this woman, I think I said out loud, “Now, point out which one she is again.” I jest. I’m not that quick on my feet.

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Just a Southern Boy Braving the Chills of NYC

Boy, only in New York can you hit the events of an entire newspaper front page in just about 5-10 square blocks. I was in Manhattan for a College Media Advisers’ conference, and took Monday morning to visit a Flagler College alum who had been working with Rudy Guiliani on his ill-fated campaign. After hearing about that, I wandered outside his high-rise office building to stare in awe down the street at rescue efforts on that construction crane that crashed to Earth killing several people. Blocks later, I strolled past the homes of JP Morgan and Bear Stearns where one of the business world’s biggest news stories had just unfolded. Both were swarmed with news trucks and TV reporters. And as I trudged on, I fought my way through the gathering crowds for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade down Fifth Avenue. Wow, New York, you sure do pack a lot into just a few square blocks. What a city!

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Wind and Running: A ‘No-Fun’ Cocktail

National Weather Service’s definition of gale warnings: Sustained surface winds, or frequent gusts, in the range of 39 mph to 54 mph. What not to do during gale warnings: Parasail. Take small craft with leaky hulls out to sea. Windsurf. Change your contact lenses. Blow glass. Do your tax return. Do anything that involves tar and feathers. Juggle expensive China. Or, run a 9.3-mile race that includes a towering bridge that’s tough enough to get over in a car not to mention tall enough that you need an oxygen tank. That race was the Jacksonville River Run, and it was finished by more than 12,000 crazy lunatics just like me this past weekend. Twelve thousand crazy people who didn’t understand that if the winds were strong enough to blow down power lines and knock over trees, running across a mountainous bridge that is highly exposed to the elements isn’t the wisest of ideas.

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Procrastination and Never-ending Tile

At what point do you wise up in life? At what point does the great light bulb go off above the noggin and zap some sense into you? When do you stop becoming so naive? When does it occur to you that what you might think is only a simple weekend project — “No problem, honey. I’ll be done in a couple of hours” — will really turn into an unending, epic struggle of man versus the project where only one of you will emerge the victor (only it won’t be you.) I let a few cracks in the grout of my bathtub go over time because I’m not really that smart, don’t fully subscribe to the widely-circulated “myth” that running water can be damaging to walls, and generally don’t like to act on a problem until I’ve properly studied it over the span of about seven months. I should also note that at the end of that seven months, I discover that damage from running water is definitely NOT a myth, and that I now have to spend another three months trying to figure out what in the heck to do now. You can call it procrastination, but I like to blame household problems on a fumbling bureaucracy (even if it is my own). These didn’t look like cracks that you fear, so I waited a bit longer to deal with the problem then I should have. I’m a big enough man to admit that that was probably not […]

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