This weekend I experienced a wedding shower for the first time.. on Saturday my aunts had a shower for us that mostly family came to (which means all of my great aunts and their daughters, which is a lot of people since many of them were born in that time period before people could have less than six children in a family).  We got lots of stuff, primarily from Bed Bath & Beyond.  The whole process wasn’t really what I was expecting (afraid of), being that I was the only guy there.  We got a set of Cutco knives.  For those of you who don’t know, they are the knives that are so sharp you can cut your finger off and not even feel it until the next morning.  Some guy once came to our house to sell them to my mom.  He cut a penny in half, then threatened to show us how it would work on a dog’s neck if we didn’t comply with his knife-purchasing agenda.  Seeing the valid points of his argument, and that he could legally sue us for the emotional trauma of being forced to decapitate a live dog (after all, we did let him bring a bunch of knives into our house), we gave him all our money and bank account numbers.  Okay so maybe a tiny bit of that was exaggeration.  We also got lots of decorating stuff.  Now my bathroom is prettier than yours (no, that’s not really my bathroom nor do I have kittens).

Then yesterday my church had a shower for us that was “man themed”; meaning, we got tools and stuff and several other men from our church came (so I wasn’t the only guy there).  I imagine anyone trying to buy something for this shower who also knew me had quite a difficult time.  If you are not sure what I mean, allow me to elaborate.  I also recieved this binary clock from my mother-in-law-to-be, and not only did I find it awesome, I knew that it said 10:36:48 without reading the instructions.  Being a math professor, I think she might have been the only other person in the room who understood binary.  Not that it’s hard--people just think “if computers use it, it must be hard”.  I submit to you that if you know what I mean when I say 10³=1000, you have all the necessary mathematical skill to read a binary number.  Furthermore, if you are capable of understanding why 9 is a one-digit number and 10 is a two-digit number, you are capable of understanding how to count in binary.  Unless you get into something complicated (like eye-triple-E seven fifty-four floating point numbers) binary is really just how computers do the same math you learned in third grade.  Back to explaining why it would have been hard to purchase tools for me.  My first reaction to the clock is “that’s awesome, but it’s really only binary coded decimal, not real binary.”  When I opened the box up, I found out that it has a true binary mode.  I think I’m gonna leave it in the BCD mode at work, just because it’s easier to read.

In other news, yesterday was six months since I gave Stephanie a rock big and shiny enough to impair her decision making skills at least long enough for her to agree to spending the rest of her life with someone like me.  And today (for lack of a February Thirty First) marks eighteen months since our courtship began (to put it in terms your grandparents would understand).

    I will not forget how this felt one year six months ago, I know
    I cannot forget
    I cannot forget
    I’m falling into memories of you and things we used to do
    Follow me there-
        A beautiful somewhere,
        A place that I can share with you

PS- Don’t bother telling me that my quote is out of context.

Well I haven’t posted anything in a while but that’s because I’ve been pretty busy.  For those of you who’ve never gotten married before, I’ll let you in on a little secret:  the planning takes a lot of time.  Of course I don’t have nearly as much planning to do as Stephanie.  I just kind of have to get things done.  And we realized the other day that we have almost everything planned now, but I still have every weekend between now and Easter reserved for some wedding-related activity.  In what time I haven’t been busy with wedding stuff, I’ve been absorbed into Quicksilver, the first of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle books.  I really like the way this guy writes.  Cryptonomicon was an amazing book that took me something like two months to finish reading, weighing in at over 900 pages.  It could be described as part techno-thriller, but half of the story was World War 2 historical fiction, and the other half really seems more like historical fiction set in the times it was written (1999 dot-com era).  It has some Tolkien-esque qualities; namely, the length, the descriptive passages, the creation of not just characters but histories to go with them.  He even touched on creating his own language: Qwghlmian, the vowel-less native language of Qwghlm, a ficticious island off the north western coast of Scotland.  Also invented is a World War 2 Pacific Theater island called Kinakuta.  The Baroque Cycle is a three-volume work that follows ancestors of the main characters of Cryptonomicon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Each of the three volumes is just as long as Cryptonomicon, and there are multiple books within each volume (the whole novel consists of eight books.. in much the same way that The Lord Of The Rings consists of six books in three volumes).  They’re great books for a geeky fantasy world (much different from Tolkien’s fantasy worlds).  The author was described to me as a huge geek who is also a great writer, and I’d say anyone who writes a LISP program to format their novel in Emacs would have to fit that description.  I guess that’s all of my rant today.  Normally I add lots of links to my posts but I’m too tired to do that right now...  maybe I’ll go back and add them later.