Eleven Years

It was on Friday the thirteenth of September some eleven years ago that Chrystal and I stood up in front of friends and family to affirm our love and intentions. The ceremony was everything we’d hoped, as was the receptions – one on this coast, one on the other coast – and the honeymoon in Ireland was fantastic, something both of us will remember forever.

Since then, we’ve had a tradition where we’ve gone camping every year for our anniversary. In 2016, we started a mead solera – every year we make a batch of mead on our trip, then around Christmas we blend it into the solera and bottle half. If I’ve done the math right, there’s about four ounces of the 2016 batch remaining in the five gallons currently in our fermentation chamber.

September 13th has fallen on a Friday again this year, for the first time since 2019. Back then we were super busy with my new job and the move so we did our usual camping trip, but this year we’re returning to Ireland. I had originally hoped to recreate the entire honeymoon adventure: drive down to Portland, make the mead at the park where we got married, fly to Boston for the weekend before heading to Ireland. Alas, that was too much complication for too little return, so instead we made the batch of mead this afternoon in our backyard (first time making mead at the new house woo) and will be flying out of Seattle tomorrow afternoon.

Last time we had everything planned out in advance, a bunch of different places to stay and bus tickets to various destinations. This time we have nothing but a single hotel reservation and a rental car. We both have international driver’s permits now so we can take turns driving, and worst case, the car sits in the hotel parking garage and we hang out in Dublin the entire time.

Tomorrow Cordelia and I will be making a “passport” for Retsy, one of her stuffed animals. We plan on taking lots of pictures of Retsy and keeping Cordelia up to date. Who knows, maybe I’ll post some here too.

Anyway, it’s time for me to go back to the family and start cooking steak for dinner. Instead of our usual red wine, we’ve got Guinness – and some fancy Greek sweets for dessert!