25% Done!

Right after he left, Dave, being the geek that I love and adore, made me an Excel spreadsheet Rotation Tracker. (I swear the man has sex dreams about Excel)

It takes the date from my computer and based on a worse case scenerio return date, it tells me how many days down, how many to go, how many hours past, and how many hours to go. It also tells me what percentage of this deployment is behind us and in front of us.

Today, we hit 25% done.

One quarter of the deployment is behind us.

I think this calls for a celebration!

Sisters To The End!

I have a new loyal reader. A big shout out to my middle sister, Lisa!

Hey Lisa!

I promised Lisa that I would post these pictures of us that I had, so here they are.

Love you Sister of Mine!

Never Say Good-bye....Part II

Well I have been getting requests for the rest of the story, so here goes.

Dave and I dated long distance from April of 1987. After my high school graduation in June, we exchanged senior class rings and in December he gave me a promise ring.

I didn’t go to college right away because of financial issues, but in January of 1988, I headed for East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas.

We continued to write and call and we visited each other as often as we could, but the year of long distance was putting a strain on our relationship.

I had lived in a small town for so long, and here I was suddenly in a big town with lots of guys who didn’t remember me when I was gawky and ugly. I had blossomed into a self confident and attractive young woman. I was experiencing something that I had never had before, I was popular and guys wanted to date me.

I was stupid and selfish. Right after I went down to Austin to go to Dave’s Senior Prom with him, just over a year after we started going steady, I broke up with him to date other people.

Sometimes I wish I had never done that, if for no other reason than I know that I hurt him deeply. I wish I could take that back with every fiber of my being. On the other hand, that separation was good for both of us. I got a good look at what was out there and that makes me appreciate how lucky I am to have such an amazing man. Dave also dated around a little bit and I think we both are better for seeing other people.

So after a long summer apart, we started talking again right before he went to boot camp, just as friends. We wrote a lot of letters while he was in boot camp and started to get close again. He promised to come and visit me while he was home on leave and we were both hinting around at reconciliation.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Coming straight out of boot camp, he was still very serious and dealing with all the physiological stuff that the Marine Corp throws at them. I was a theater major and president of the ETSU Theater Fraternity. The day that he drove in was the final performance of a long and grueling production. That night we were playing host to 200 theater majors from colleges and universities around the state and I was busy with the cast party details.

In short, we just didn’t click; both of us had too much on our minds that weekend and couldn’t connect emotionally. He left Sunday morning and we promised to keep in touch and to stay friends.

Dave drove back to Austin and the next day his Mom put him on a plane for his first duty station, 29 Palms, California.

He had applied for a month’s assignment at the local recruiter’s office there in Austin, but the word didn’t come through before his flight. When his Mom got back to the house after dropping him off at the airport, there was a message saying he got the assignment.

If he had made it all the way to 29 Palms, they wouldn’t have let him come back for the duty. She knew he only had a 30-minute layover in Phoenix, so she called the airport there and had him paged. Miracle of miracles, running between planes, he heard the message, called her, and she got him on a plane back to Austin.

I truly in my heart believe that if he had made it all the was to 29 Palms, we would have stayed in touch for a few months, but after the disastrous attempt at getting back together, the distance would have eventually torn us apart.

Fate was in our favor and he did make it back to Austin, and a few weeks into his month long assignment, he made another trip to ETSU and the sparks flew. It was like we had never separated and we were high school sweethearts again.

When he left that weekend and asked me to start wearing his promise ring again. He talked about long term commitments and being together forever.

I knew this was the man I was going to marry. I finished that semester, packed up my bags, and moved home to wait for the marriage proposal that I believed was coming any day now.

A month later, I was still at home, waiting.

My parents think the world of Dave, they always have. He wrapped them around his little finger that first day that we started dating. I took him home to meet them and I warned him that my parents were very conservative. After sitting on the couch talking for a little while, Dave turned to my Dad and asked if he could speak to him outside. Walking with my Dad around the front yard, Dave assured him that his intentions were honorable, and he asked my Dad for his permission to take me to my Senior Prom.

From that moment forward, he could do no wrong in their eyes. During that time that we were broken up, I would bring other boys home for Sunday dinner and my Dad always managed to bring up Dave’s name.

"Dad”, I would tell him tersely “I’m not dating Dave anymore".

So there I was, at home, waiting tables, and waiting for Dave to propose.

I didn’t find out the next part of the story until after we had been married for 5 or 6 years. Dave called the house looking for me one day, but I was at work, so my Mom decided to take matters into her own hands.

"So are you ever going to ask Wendy to marry you?"

Stammering on Dave’s part.

"You know that’s why she quit college. So are you ever going to do it?"

Two days later, the phone rang and it was Dave popping the question. It was the end of January 1989. The next time he could take any leave was in April, so we set our wedding date for April 22, 1989.

The last 17 years haven’t always been easy. There were times when we both considered throwing in the towel, but we’re both so stubborn that we just wouldn’t quit. We would keep holding on and eventually work through our problems and end up better for it.

I firmly believe that we are meant to be together. There were so many obstacles that should have kept us apart, but divine intervention stepped in each time and here we are; 17 years and going strong.

Happy Anniversary Darling!

To my Darling Husband, the love of my life, my soul-mate, my better half.

Today on our 17th wedding anniversary you will be on my mind and in my heart even more than you usually are. Even though we are over 7,000 miles apart, I know that our hearts are one.

I love you and I miss you and I would marry you all over again.

Please take care of yourself, stay safe, and come home to me!

Sold Out

So it's high season at the little hotel where I bartend and answer the phones, so I'm getting plenty of these funny calls:

"It's a beautiful day at the ::insert name here:: , this is Wendy, how may I help you?"

"Yes, I'd like to book a room for this weekend."

"I'm sorry sir, but we are completely sold out."

"You don't have even one room?"

In my head "Yes, moron, that is the definition of sold out."

"No sir, not a single room is available. In our busy season, we sell out 4 to 6 weeks in advance."

"Well I need a room, where should I call"

Like it's my responsibility to get him a room even though he waited until two days before hand to reserve.

"I don't know sir, every hotel that I have talked to here in town is sold out."

"Well what am I supposed to do?"



It goes on like that for a while. Seriously, I get at least one call like this a day!

Swamp Coolers

Well it finally got hot enough that I had to turn on the swamp cooler for the first time.

For you non-desert dwellers, an evaporative cooler, or swamp cooler, is much more efficient here in the desert than air conditioning since our air is so dry. The machine has a pan of water that is cooled, and then it blows the outside air across the water and into the house. It cools and slightly humidifies the house.

The odd thing about swamp coolers is you have to have at least one window in the house cracked to relieve the pressure. It also helps direct the air. I turn on the swamp cooler in the back bedroom, and then crack the front kitchen window and that draws the air through the house.

The only bad thing about swamp coolers, is that on the five or six days out of the year that we have humidity, they are absolutely useless. So then it's unbearably hot AND humid!

But something about the swamp cooler is annoying Salem, he is making all sorts of racket. He stands in the bedroom crying, and then he comes into the living room where I am and cries at me. Like he's saying, "Go turn it off!"

But man, is this house cooler! It's going to be a long, hot summer!

Never Say Good-bye.....Part I

Our wedding anniversary is this Saturday, the 22^nd of April. We defied a lot of odds getting here.

I heard rumors that there was pool going on during our wedding on how long we would last. Rumor has it the longest bet was 5 years.

Well here we are 17 years later, still going strong.

We met in high school. The old joke about “this one time, at band camp…” well that’s where we met.

It was August of 1986, I was seventeen and it was four weeks before the beginning of my senior year. I lived in a small town so when a new kid came to our school, it was a big deal. I remember hanging with my friends Jessica and Deanna, kind of half heartedly practicing a flag routine we were making up and waiting for band camp to start for the day when a big ugly Monte Carlo pulled up and two guys got out.

Instantly, we were paying attention. One of the guys was really young, probably an 8^th grader, we dismissed him, but the older one looked our age. We were curious. What instrument did he play? What grade was he in?

Dave says he spotted me that first day and thought I was cute, he said he thought I had a great butt, so he asked some of the other trumpet players about me.

“Oh no” the told him “forget about her, she’s a member of the God Squad (the nickname for the flag line) you won’t get anywhere with her, she’s locked together at the knees.

Dave, of course, took this as a personal challenge.

I got to know him at band camp, we flirted back and forth a lot, and on October 31^st we had our first kiss in the back seat of the band bus on the way home from an away football game.

But pretty soon after that, maybe even because he saw me hanging out with Dave, my old boyfriend started trying to get back with me. I had to make a choice; a boy I had just met and whose parents moved every year or the boy I dated pretty much all my junior year. In hindsight it was pretty dumb to go back with the boy that had dumped me the summer before our senior year, but he was safe and comfortable.

Unbeknownst to me, Dave had his eye on me and decided the best way to win me back was to get my boyfriend to get in a fight with him. He kept picking on me. He threw me in a trashcan in the middle of the cafeteria, then he tossed me out the window in journalism class and I had to walk all the way around the school to get back in. And on our journalism class field trip, he tossed me in a mud puddle. But, it didn’t work; my boyfriend wasn’t a fighter.

In the meantime, Dave started dating one of my best friends, Jessica, and on April 15, 1987, when it came time for his family to move again, she threw him a going away party.

I went to the party, without my boyfriend, not thinking much about it, not knowing that this would be the night that would be pivotal in my life.

A bunch of us were outside hanging out, when Dave picked me up and started spinning me around. We both fell to the ground laughing; our faces close to each other. He got a funny look on his face and abruptly got up and walked away.

About 30 minutes later, my friend Jessica came up to me.

“Dave is in my room and you need to go talk to him.” So I went back to talk to him.

“I broke up with Jessica,” he told me “I broke up with Jessica because I’m in love with you and it isn’t fair for me to keep dating her when I want you. I don’t expect you to do anything about this, you’re dating Heath, but I couldn’t leave town without telling you, and without doing this.”

And he kissed me, kissed me like I had never been kissed before in my 18 years of life.

At that moment, I realized I loved him. I loved him and had for a while, I had just been too stupid and too scared to admit it.

He pulled back, looked me in the eyes, smiled, and turned and walked out of the room. He walked out to where the rest of his friends were, grabbed his jacket, said good-bye, and left the party. He says that when he left, he thought he would never see me again.

But I knew what I had to do. The next day, I called my boyfriend and broke up with him. Then I called Dave and asked him if he would like to come back in a month and take me to my Senior Prom. We got together that afternoon, met each other’s parents, and had one magical day together. The next day his family moved to Austin, four hours away.

Four hours is a long time when you’re 18 years old. We wrote a lot of letters and saved our dollars for long distance phone calls, and a month later he came back to town and we went to my Senior Prom together.

The theme song to that Prom was Bon Jovi’s “Never Say Good-bye” and to this day, that is “Our Song”. Starting to date in a long distance relationship, breaking up and getting back together again, our marriage filled with long deployments…yes, Never Say Good-bye has been the theme to our entire love. But through it all we’ve made it work.

Stay tuned for Part II, a.k.a. How Fate Brought Us Together Again

Quote of the Day

I had just finished watching this week's episode of Lost I had Tivo'ed (the greatest invention ever, by the way, forget sliced bread, Tivo ROCKS) when I turned to live TV. I stopped on some program I never watch called The Evidence, just in time to hear one character say to the other:

"I am deep. Intellectual curiousity and an appreciation for a fine piece of booty are not mutually exclusive."

Don't ask me why, but that is the funniest thing I've heard in ages.

Mid 30's versus Late 30's

So I was talking to a friend who is in her early 20's and said to her "enjoy that now, when you get into your mid 30's...."

Then I thought to myself, I'm 37. When do I have to stop saying Mid 30's and start referring to myself as in my Late 30's?

Getting old sucks. I don't feel like I'm in my late 30's. I still feel and think and act like I'm in my late 20's?

Salem

I am quite ashamed to say that I have been keeping this blog for months and have yet to write about my handsome kitty, Salem.

I have always liked all black cats and back in 1997 I started talking about getting another cat. We got this fluffy Persian cat and OMG was that a mistake. It was a miserable animal, mean and nasty tempered. Plus unless you shaved the hair around it's butt, it would get poopy butt syndrome and leave brown streaks everywhere it sat. Have you ever tried to shave a cat's butt? It's not fun!

Thank goodness we were able to sell the monster for what we paid and considered that a good lesson learned. Never pay for a cat when there are so many animals out there who need a good home.

Dave was working nights then, coming home after I had gone to bed. One night I woke up to something soft nuzzling my face and there was Salem. Dave had been looking for months trying to find an all black cat for me before he finally found Salem.



It was love at first sight. That was November 1997 and he's been with us ever since.

Salem has a lot of weird habits, like his desire to sit inside of boxes, his belief that he is human and should be treated as such, and always needing to sit right smack dab on top of you, but the weirdest of all his habits is his drinking issues.

He won't drink out of a water bowl. His preferred drinking method is out of the bathtub faucet or the shower. It must be turned on so that it just barely drips. If you turn it on too hard and the water splashes up on his paws, you will get a dirty look.


But if worse comes to worse, he will drink out of a bowl...just not a water bowl.


And there's the odd thing that he'll let you bathe him without any protest if he really needs it. He once spent a cold night outside when we didn't realize he had gone exploring and came in the next morning covered in sand. I turned the water on in the shower and he just let the water run over himself and let me rinse him off. I don't think he realizes that cats are supposed to hate water?

He's a strange cat, but then Dave and I are a little on the odd side too, so he fits in with this family just fine.