That's My Girl!!!

Alright, it's St. Valentine's Day... so I decided to continue what started in my last blog and tell you about another friend of mine. This one's still alive, though, thank God!!! Everyone... meet Joanie, my wife of nearly 19 years. For that alone she qualifies for sainthood.

Isn't she beautiful?

Joanie's the sweetest person you could ever know. She keeps it covered, but on her butt there's a tattoo warning diabetics to avoid her because she's too sweet. You'll have to take my word for it.

She's a really good person to be in a foxhole with. No matter what battles are raging around us, she's almost always the calm one. She's the sniper who takes out the enemy with one shot while I'm still trying to figure out what the target is. She's the medic with all the right stuff when it comes to soothing all the hurts that life sends our way.

She likes flowers and all the girly stuff, but last year for her birthday she wanted a new case for her AK-47. She loves a candle-lit dinner and a cuddle on the couch... while we're watching a 'Shoot-'em-up, Bang-bang' movie with the volume up so the whole house shakes.

She hates working on cars, but she's probably better at it than I am.

I'm the luckiest man in the world because she picked me, of all the men out there, she married ME... and that part about, "'till death do us part"... she MEANT that!

Here's the obligatory quote from Mark Twain, on marriage:

"... it makes of two fractional lives a whole; it gives to two purposeless lives a work, & doubles the strength of each whereby to perform it; it gives to two questioning natures a reason for living, & something to live for; it will give a new gladness to the sunshine, a new fragrance to the flowers, a new beauty to the earth, a new mystery to life."

Happy Valentine's day, love... thank you for being mine!!!

Wish You Were Here

This is Dusty... he died about 8 months ago, though it seems like yesterday the way it feels sometimes. Tonight I really miss him. He was a really awesome friend. I can't tell him how much I miss him so I thought I'd tell some of you people a little bit about him instead.

See that goofy smile? I only remember one time that I ever saw him that he wasn't wearing some variation of a goofy smile. Dusty loved people and it showed... even total strangers. It didn't matter who you were, once you'd met Dusty, you were one of his friends.

I've never known anyone who loved life like this guy. Even when everything was piled against him he'd just keep pushing until the pile got the hell out of his way, and if life was piled against you, he'd stand next to you and help you push too. He wasn't the kind of guy who just walked out on a friend when things got difficult. Even the friends he'd just met.

I really didn't know Dusty as well as I'd have liked to... he'd come by the house from time to time and we'd sit and talk, or we'd meet him at the Roy Bar & Grill and have a few drinks together, but when he died, it left a hole in my heart that just doesn't seem to want to close up. Like tonight when I'd just like to sit and talk with him and ask his opinion on a few things. He was a good man and a good friend.

I'll leave you with another quote from Mark Twain.

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

~Peace

Just a Stupis Quote

Today I was again reminded of a quote that I've had thrown in my face a lot lately. I thought it might be of some use to others.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
                                       
                                                                                                ~Mark Twain - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar