Bryant and Kelly in Washington

The apartment that Kelly and I live in is really just the basement of a house. We have some concrete steps going down to our basement on the side of the house, and those steps turn into a death trap for everything that dares to go down there (except for us, hopefully).

I think gravity (or witchcraft) sucks everything in the neighborhood down into the landing at the bottom of our steps. It fills up with leaves and snow and rain, and in the winter it’s basically 4 inches of icy water that protects the apartment like a castle’s moat.

Besides simple inanimate things filling up the moat, it seems like every bug in the area decides that our hole is the place it is going to crawl down in order to die. We’ve had spiders, snails, about a million (give or take 3) roly-polys, and most recently a katydid. I don’t know if they’re intentionally choosing the moat as their final resting grounds or if somehow they get trapped down there. It does seem to happen regardless if the moat is wet or dry at the time, so if they’re getting trapped then it is probably some unknown cosmic force that is doing the trapping.

I just hope that no humans coming to visit us ever wait at the bottom of those steps for too long, or I’m afraid they’ll end up like the snails and katydids.

My friend Brooke posted a link to this personality test on her blog. Kelly took the test and liked it, so she got me to take the test and I liked it too. I’m an INTJ and Kelly’s an INFJ. That’s jut a preface for the nerdy things I decided to do next.

So Brooke posted an image of a grid with all of the personality types in it. I noticed that each of the personality types has these little doors to some of the other types (but not all of them). I didn’t figure out what the little doors meant, but it made me imagine a four-dimensional cube with all of the different personality types in it, a dimension for each of the letters you get in the test results. I thought it would be fun to draw the cube (and probably more fun to look at for anyone that reads this), but I don’t know how to draw in 4-D. I know how to do math in 4-D, so that’s what I did instead.

So, the basic idea is that if I have two scores (presumably from two different people), and I consider them as points in four-dimensional space, then I can calculate the difference between the points and that will tell me how similar two personalities are. (Note that I don’t actually think this has any bearing on compatibility. That’s probably very different and more complex than similarity, which is what I’m going for.)

At first I just assigned each letter option a one or a zero, but it turns out that finding distance that way is the same as just counting how many letters are different between two people’s results. It wasn’t very interesting (and it wasn’t very fun for me because counting doesn’t require much math). So next I thought I could use the “strength of the preferences” to get a better distance. So I consider each letter to be either positive or negative, and the strength to be the value, and then calculate distance. The distance would actually be the the dissimilarity between two personalities, but since the strengths are given as a percentage I know there’s a maximum dissimilarity so I can turn that into similarity by inverting it.

I know you probably didn’t care about any of that, but here’s my little calculator to tell you how similar two personality scores are to each other. I hope it’s as fun to play with as it was to make!

I found this letter on my windshield this morning:

As homeowners, we tend to park on, or in front of, our own properties. We aren’t legally required to do so; we do it as a courtesy to each other. Obviously, there are times when this is simply not possible, but it is generally practiced. You, as renters in a residential neighborhood, may be unaware of this convention. You might also be unaware that an owner of rental properties is required to provide adequate parking for renters. Certainly you are free to park wherever you wish. Just as we are free to request that our local authorities contact your landlord regarding possible zoning violations. We feel that this is probably not necessary. You decide.

I was so mad when I got this. I can’t believe how arrogant a person must be to think that they have some terrirtorial right to the street in front of their house. After all, it is the street. Sorry, “homeowners”, but the street isn’t part of your property, and anyone can park on it just like any other city road, even us lowly “renters”.

The letter was anonymous, but I’m pretty sure which neighbor left it, based on previous comments that they’ve made and (more obviously) the house in front of which I had been parked. I wanted to go bang on their door and yell at them, but instead I took the letter (which was wet because of all of the morning rain/dew/melted snow on my windshield) and pushed it against their front window so that it stuck, letter facing in.

By the time I got to work they had brought the letter back and placed it in front of our door, with a hand-written note denying that they wrote it. (As if the location of my car and their knowledge that the letter was intended for me wasn’t enough to show otherwise.)

We used a chunk of the gift money from our wedding to buy a vacuum cleaner. At Meridith‘s suggestion, we sprung for a really nice one: the Dyson DC07. Kelly has been really excited to have such a nice vacuum, but it’s taken me a little longer to warm up to having spent so much money on the thing. Last night, however, I realized the benefit of having a nice vacuum: It’s means I’m allowed to make messes! We whittled on the carpet last night. It was awesome.

Tonight we were getting things organized in our new apartment. I had a rag that I was using to wipe the dust off some things, and Kelly asked me in a very concerned tone, “Do you think you’re going to ruin that rag?”

Kelly and I are married now.

I know that it hasn’t been that long, and it’s all still new to me, but I am surprised at how much has changed since we’ve been married: Nothing.

Ok, well, maybe “nothing” is a bit of an exaggeration, but I am surprised at how normal it feels. Every now and then we get a shock by reminding ourselves that we’re married. It’s like we need to remind ourselves that this is something new and strange for us.

The biggest change in our lives is vocabulary. I constantly catch myself referring to Kelly as my “girlfriend” (or to myself as her “boyfriend”), only to remember (or to be reminded) that we have new words that we’re supposed to use now.

Other than the words, life is going on for us the same as it had before: We were already completely committed to each other, and we were already used to spending all of our time with each other. We heard Bob Millet say at a fireside that marriage doesn’t change the internal status of the couple, but rather changes their status to others. I probably didn’t explain that well, but it makes sense to me.

People have it backwards teaching “marriage prep” classes. I think I could have used a wedding prep class. I had no idea how many things there were to do in order to get ready for a wedding. I mean, I knew it was a big event, but I had no idea about all of the little details.

I was surprised as we started planning to learn that there is a whole wedding culture. There are a billion little aspects to it that I would have never thought of, and some that, as far as I know, I’ve never even heard of.

One of these is a wedding favor. That was a mystery to me. Another is the whole wedding registry. I mean, I knew that people registered for gifts, but it seems like there are tons of unspoken rules about it, about where and when for what people are supposed to register. It’s not the same as telling Santa what you want for Christmas.

And probably the most mind-boggling is all of the traditions about who pays for what. Did you know that there’s a “rehearsal dinner” that the groom’s family puts on for the wedding party? I have no idea why it’s called that, because apparently it’s not a rehearsal of anything. Also, there’s this whole thing about how you’re supposed to split up the bill for the flowers. Who came up with this stuff?

And, as if it wasn’t confusing enough, there’s several different versions of each tradition, so everyone thinks that there’s a certain way that it’s supposed to be done, even though they might have different stories about the way it’s supposed to be (and no one has any idea about where those ideas came from.)

It’s like learning about Greek mythology all over again.

Irony [ahy-ruh-nee] -noun- an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.

My sophomore year of college, I had a German teacher who was really unconventional. He was incredibly laid back, in his mid-twenties, and since he was actually still an undergraduate himself, he became buddies with most of his students. He was this crazy ska trombone player, and I always had a lot of fun in his class. He’d do things like invite all of his students over to his house to have German-style dinners with him and his wife (who was equally as cool) and watch the nutty videos he and his brothers made when they were kids. One day after class he drove me and a couple other students home from campus. When I was the last one left in the car, he and I got into a conversation as we drove to my apartment. I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about… it must have been something like my philosophy on dating. Surely I made some comment peppered with feminism, because he laughed as he concluded decisively, “Man Kelly, you’re never going to get a guy to marry you.” We chuckled at my desperate plight as I climbed out of the car.

~~

One day after Bryant and I were engaged, he was telling me about a random road trip he took in high school with a couple of friends, including this crazy trombone player who was a ska purist. I sat amazed as the dots connected. My zany German teacher, who had pegged me as a life-long celibate, probably had no idea that I was about to marry an old high school buddy of his. Weird how these things work out, huh? ;)

I’m sorry that we haven’t put up any photos yet, but I found a few of our engagement photos on our photographer’s blog. They’re only some of the photos, but in the interest of blogging, I thought I would share them:

Our photographer’s favorites of our engagement photos