Busy Bees Before a Spring Wedding, and the Incredible Growing Duckie

It seems like it's only been a day or two since my last post here, but it has been ten days. I gotta watch that. Susanne Herfurth and I will be married in just ten more days. Nine days and a wake up till the wedding. if you can believe that.

I certainly didn't think it was likely that we'd end up married when I met her back in the fall of '06 in one of my graduate English classes. We were both involved with other people back then, but we did become friends. Now I can't imagine ever wanting to be married to anyone else. This is the one I have been looking for all along. Just goes to show ya that God works in mysterious ways. Hell, it wouldn't have done anybody any good If I'd met her sooner. When I was 20, she was only 10. But I'm 44 now, and she's 34, and that's a good fit.

Anyways, what with getting ready for the wedding, raising a duck who eats about 20% of his weight a day, and grows nearly that much, doing a small research project for capitol, and dealing with my new computer with Windows 8 installed crashing repeatedly, I've been a bit preoccupied.

 

The top two pictures were taken 10 days ago, the bottom two a few minutes ago. The scale is not as clear as I'd like, but the duck has doubled in size over that period. It is the same pan in all three shots. Duckie is not only eating and growing, but he's shitting up a storm as well. I hope we can move into a house before too long, so we can turn him loose in the yard as a fertilizer machine. In addition to the progress of his growth and the fluidity of his bowels, Duckie is learning to play soccer with us, though he cheats and pushes the ball around with his beak. Hmmm...I guess that's not cheating, you can use your face in soccer. The little booger also dramatically increases the number of passerby we chat with every time we take him for a walk. You'd think they'd never seen anybody walking a duck before.

I got caught up to date on that research project yesterday, and got terminally fed up with Windows crashing at about the same time. So today I installed Ubuntu in parallel with the Win 8, and I have been tuning it and downloading applications all day. Hopefully that will take care of most of the computer hassle. I'll work out of Ubuntu and only use the Windows when necessary. I hate Microsoft  in principal, and have never much liked Windows in particular. Corporate anything sucks.

For the next week, I will just cruise into the wedding, taking care of stuff as it comes up, but remembering to pray and meditate in order to keep sane. It's been more than fifteen years since I said I'd never get married again. Susanne changed my mind about that, but this is the last time. Ever. For real, so we'd better just make it work. The cool thing is, I'm pretty sure that we will be able to have fun doing it.