: ) means happy birthday

I pulled a little prank on Rubi for her birthday this year.

 

After bringing home donuts and bagels for breakfast, I brought in her “gift” in a small gift bag. The little kids saw me doing this and grabbed their homemade cards for her too. She happily read their cards, enjoying their creativity, then turned to the small gift bag I handed her. She opened it up to reveal possibly the dorkiest t-shirt I could find for her: a bright yellow shirt with a huge emoticon smiley on the front, the ever present “semicolon parenthesis” all over the internet to denote a happy face.

 

Rubi took it graciously. She didn’t cry, she didn’t act sad at all over getting a cruddy gift from me.

 

Then I took her to lunch at Red Lobster.

 

Later, at her parents’ house after dinner as we neared the time for her to open her present from them, Alexander and I snuck out to the van and brought in her real presents from us. I love surprising her like that!

 

The kiddos got her some stuff from a local kitchen supply store: a decorative candle-holder thing to set on the mantle or a shelf that she had pointed out to us recently, and a couple of kitchen gadget thingies she’s been saying she wanted.  I also ordered her a snazzy art book she’s been asking to get for a couple years.

 

I love putting a smile on my wife’s face. And she looks good in the dorky yellow shirt with a smile on that too!

 

 

 

: ) means happy birthday

Life as geeks

This is weird. My wife is almost a better geek than I am.

I'm proud to be a geek but I've never really been an active geek - participating in the culture, attending cons, etc. Mostly due to time constraints. When Rubi and I got married, she was so not a geek, and I suppressed my own inner geek a bit in order to focus more on growing a marriage and eventually a family. I still had a Star Wars poster hanging in our home, but that was about it (I still have that poster hanging in our home). Now that the kids are old enough to, well, be real people and not just crying pooping machines, I can let my geek hang out a little more.

What's cool is that apparently, over the years my inner geek has slowly influenced Rubi and turned her into an almost full-fledged geek. She's still learning some of the more esoteric aspects, but has embraced the life; playing computer games, hanging out in forums, attending cons, and writing about it for a living. 

She may argue the point about whether or not she was a geek before meeting me. She played Mario Bros on the NES when she a kid, watched Blazing Saddles with her parents (and quoted from it). Perhaps she was just repressing her own inner geek until marriage and family made her comfortable enough to embrace geekdom. Her arguing that point is kind of like arguing if Star Wars is better that Star Trek.

We need to work on her a bit more though. There are times when the kids and I are just a bit too geeky for her.  The other day at Target, Alexander and I got into a mock fight with a toy sword and battle axe.  When I later told Lizzy about it she was offended we did that without her. Had Rubi been there, depending on her geek level that day, she might have grabbed a sword and participated or she might have pretended she didn't know us and walked away. I think sometimes it's better for all of us if she pretends she doesn't know us. Someone has to be respectable in this family!

Then there are times when she'll find something on the internet that is so incredibly funny and geeky that she'll call me into the room to share it with me and we'll both just about pee ourselves from laughing so hard.  And no one else on the planet would find it anywhere near as funny as we did. Or she'll walk into a room full of quiet kids each going about their own tasks and say "Hey! You just lost the game!"

Ah, that's the life. Of geeks! And I'm glad it's my life.

Life as geeks