I don’t know if anyone even reads this anymore, but I’m awake due to an ill-advised late infusion of caffeine, so I figured that I would surprise anyone who actually is with an update.

So let’s see, what’s happened?

• Our dining room almost flooded.
• Our dining room almost flooded again.
• We got new carpet put in the dining room.

Other than that? Well, I’ve been working, and Kelly’s been working, and…that’s really about it. Not a whole lot of excitement or anything. We’re saving for a house, so we try not to spend a lot of money right now, which means no big trips. We go to church, but due to Kelly’s getting out of work late it’s difficult to get involved in extracurricular activities right now. Weekends have been spent either visiting family or exploring Birmingham’s residential areas or just recuperating from the week.

It’s not that it’s been boring. It’s just not been anything to write home about – or write on the homepage about. In college, I would write about anything and everything – a lot of the time I’d do it to put off an assignment that was pressing. Now that I could come home and theoretically write about anything without fear of something not getting done on time, I don’t do it. Maybe I need that impetus.

Anyway, I apologize for not writing more. Maybe I can get back in the swing of things with this as a start.

Yesterday was our first anniversary.

It’s interesting…my life has changed in many ways since I’ve been married, but it’s been very similar in others. For instance:

• When I get home, I know that someone’s going to be asking me what I want to eat tonight, and I can’t get away with answering something like “a bowl of cereal” or “a pack of Ritz crackers”. That’s only when she’s been out of town.
• When considering the budget for the month, line items that I wouldn’t normally think about get added – things like “home decoration”.
• My table has place mats on it now.

And so on. But there are things that haven’t changed much. For example, I still like to play video games, and she doesn’t mind – in fact, she enjoys watching me play!

We’ve grown closer together, I think. We’ve still never fought, although we’ve had conversations where we’ve disagreed with one another. But I think that’s constructive, too. If both of you thought alike all the time, you’d be married to yourself, and in the immortal words of Seinfeld…”I can’t be with someone like me! I hate myself!”

Well, I don’t hate myself, but you get the point. (Or maybe you don’t, because I didn’t exactly make a point. But whatever.) The real point is, even though we’ve had times where we differed, we were still able to be closer to each other.

The changes in being married are very real, but I wouldn’t take my old life back now. I love being a married man, and I love the woman that I’m married to.

Happy 1st, Kelly. I love you.

My lovely wife now has a blog of her own. Odds are pretty good that it’ll be updated more frequently than mine is.

Since we moved into the apartment, we’d had local telephone service with Bellsouth. Until last night.

I finally got tired of paying the amount that we did for just local telephone service, and no long distance at all. It made no sense.

So last night, we switched to Vonage. When you can save $25 per month on your phone bill, and have long distance minutes, this is a good thing.

Last weekend, due to the graciousness of a potential client, my boss Jamie and I were treated to tickets for the Alabama-Kentucky basketball game. It was the first time I’d ever spent any real time in the state of Kentucky, so that was cool enough, but to get to go to a game in Rupp Arena just put it over the top.

Rupp Arena, for those who aren’t college basketball aficionados, is basically a mecca for the sport. Kentucky is college basketball’s winningest team. Bama only plays there once every two years. So the chance to go is a huge deal – basically a once in a blue moon opportunity.

So we got a flight to Louisville, and hotel rooms in Lexington.

It’s at this point that I both have to thank and apologize to my co-worker Paul, who was the originally intended second person on this trip. He couldn’t make it due to a previous commitment, and graciously let me go. Thanks also to Marie and Jamie for allowing me to go on my first “business trip”.

Friday afternoon was spent looking around the UK campus and Lexington itself. At night, we went to a downtown restaurant, where we had dinner with the client reps (if by any chance you read this, Brian and John – thanks again!)

During the night, there was a small accumulation of snow. Anyone from Alabama knows that if you have a camera and there is snow on the ground, it is mandatory that you take pictures (I guess to prove to yourself that the stuff exists). So Saturday morning, I made sure to do so.

The morning was spent at Keeneland Race Course, where we ate breakfast, looked around the course, and watched some horses get auctioned off. We stopped by the gift shop, where I picked up a golf ball for myself (I’ve started a collection) and a scarf for Kelly (since coming to Alabama, she’s discovered the wonder of the scarf in wintertime). We didn’t look around outside for long, as the temperature was still hovering around freezing.

Then, on to the main event! We headed downtown (Rupp is actually not on the campus proper, as it doubles as the convention center in Lexington), found parking, and headed inside.

The first interesting thing about Rupp that you notice is that it is part basketball arena, part Galleria. There is a mini-mall area, complete with food court, to explore. But we wanted to get to the good stuff, so we didn’t spend a lot of time there. Besides, it was only about 30 minutes to tip-off at that point.

We stepped inside the arena itself. The first thing that I noticed about it was that it was large, but it didn’t feel large. The seats seemed to be close to the court, even in the upper deck. This was proven later in the game, about anytime Kentucky would do something good. The fans get loud. Bama fans could learn a lesson or two from them.

John and Brian had been silent the entire time about our seat locations, only saying that one of the corporate heads had given them the tickets for the game. Well, we started down the aisle toward the court…and kept going, and going…until we stopped at the second row from the court. Right behind the Alabama bench.

The opportunity had now risen to once-in-a-lifetime.

These were not cheap tickets, to say the least. Brian and John were enjoying the experience, too; Brian was a season-ticket holder, and he said that it would be tough to go back to his old seats after this!

Of course, to make things even better (for Jamie and myself), Alabama actually won the game. And I saw myself on SportsCenter later, although you’d have to know where I was sitting to pick me out – the camera focus is on the game, after all.

So, needless to say, an unforgettable weekend. I’ll have some pictures on this posting as soon as they get back from the developer. And now pictures are online!

So, I had not gone to the dentist in quite some time when I stepped into the office last Tuesday. In fact, it had been so long that I couldn’t remember the last time that I had gone. Some of you may recoil in horror at that statement, but when you consider that I hadn’t had dental insurance until last year, and I knew what I was going to have to have done, you might understand. Ever since undergrad, I knew that one day would come that I’d have to have one of my teeth crowned, which if you’ve never paid for one is quite expensive. Add to that the fact that I could claim I didn’t know any good dentists, etc., and you had a litany of excuses for putting the whole thing off.

Don’t worry…I’ve made up for lost time in the dentist’s chair. They know me by name now.

Here’s the way I’ve always approached the dentist. You go, they poke and prod, and if you’re really lucky, they’ll shoot you with needles and drill for a while, and then they make you pay for the experience. My teeth are relatively stout. They had gotten a little temperature-sensitive, but for a long time that wasn’t a big deal. When it finally got to where I couldn’t eat ice cream on one side of my mouth, I finally figured that it was time to give in.

I was recommended a dentist from one of my co-workers. He and his staff have treated me well and are very good about making the suffering quotient stay low. However, thus far the tally stands at eight cavities, the aforementioned crown…

And a root canal. Which I went through yesterday.

To test for a root canal, apparently the standard procedure is to supercool a piece of something (I’m not sure exactly what it was) and hold it to the tooth in question. If you leap out of the dentist’s chair, you need a root canal.

Okay, so I didn’t leap out of the dentist’s chair. But my eyeballs almost leapt out of their sockets, so that was enough for him.

Let me just say as a result of all this having been done (save the other five fillings and the permanent crown, which are coming up in a couple of weeks), I don’t dread dentist’s needles anymore. I don’t even dread having a root canal done.

I dread what you feel afterward. Which is a lot of pain.

I took a Loritab last night at 9 to go to sleep, and it still wore off at 2:30 this morning, so I took another. Luckily, it doesn’t seem to make me loopy or anything (yes, Ricky, I don’t get “Comtrexed”), so I can drive myself to work today. I will be taking Advil today, 4 at a time.

Okay, I’m ending the above paragraph, because it’s starting to remind me of the spam I have to clean off of the blog.

Anyway, moral of the story, kids: see your dentist. Trust me, it’s better than the alternative. And if you do have a cavity, they’ll fill it with what appears to be a caulking gun, which is always good for a laugh.