This is the magic number.

When I'm under 180 I feel light, fit, fast. When I'm over I feel slow, fat, you know.

Funny how this kind of thing can affect your mood, your confidence, pretty much everything. Sheesh, I feel like a girl.

Man, the expression, "Seniority has its privileges" does not correspond directly to your chronological age; not by a long shot.

All plain old seniority gets you is cold hands.

I've been noticing that for the last several years my hands are getting colder and colder. I used to be able to ride my bike when it was in the mid 40s with no gloves at all. Not anymore. Shoot, now I go crying for the chemical hand warmer when it dips down close to 50.

The other day (read: about one month ago) I was at one of Cameron's ultimate Frisbee games and I was DYING. I had on two shirts, two jackets, long pants, warm shoes and my hands were like blocks of ice. I had brought along the digital camera to shoot some pictures and by the end of the game I could hardly turn the thing on or off.

I know your circulation to the extremities will usually deteriorate as you age but this is ridiculous. My hands looked all waxy and pasty and there were these lines across the backs of my palms - that would not go away - from the opening in my pants pockets.

You know it's bad when you can hardly unlock the car and all you have to do is push a button on the remote... :|

After winning about this for a couple of years to Shelley she finally did some research and came up with Raynaud's disease. I doubt this is it as I did not perceive any stress watching my son play ultimate but man, I need to figure this out. Then again, since stress is not the only cause and mere contact with cold can bring this on too, maybe there is some merit to this.

I'll just ignore this condition and eventually get frostbite. Yep, that's the ticket.

That's right, you read it here first (if you read it on the Internet at all)! Today I married the woman I have been crazy about for the last three plus years.

Not to worry, I did not spend our wedding day on line writing this post... through the black box miracle that is blogging technology I am able to create a post and back-date it so what you are reading here was actually written after our wedding.

Hey, at the very least I had to wait and make sure this day was actually going to happen.

Pictures to follow once our photographer gets them to us.

Adendum

Here are the pictures.

On Saturday, 13 October I finally got an appointment with Jimmy the Saint.

This guy had been recommended to me long ago by Kempton B but it seems every time I tried to hook up he was busy or I was not free when he had an opening. So nothing happened for quite a long time.

Shelley and I were walking home from downtown that day and I decided to drop in just to Seattle Tattoo Emporium just to check and see. “How about tonight at 6:30?” Yes!

Finally. I had been wanting this for ages and have been monkeying with the picture trying to simplify it enough so that it would not bleed or blur too soon as the original was crazy detailed.

After walking Shelley home I had to leave rather quickly and hit the cash machine. It seems all tattoo parlors only accept cash. For good reason I suppose, eh? Imagine all the contested charges on credit cards on account of customer dissatisfaction.

The whole ordeal took about 3.5 hours. Almost one was Jimmy tracing the design and prepping me (he used a straight edge razor on my arm!) and about 2.5 were actual tattooing. So without further ado, here are the pictures I took with my phone.

This guy is really good. Instead of relying on the lines to give me exactly what I wanted he basically used them as rough guides. He’d kinda glance at the original art and then just draw it on my arm. I loved watching him get all the detail perfectly right when my arm was awash in ink – totally amazing.

Recommendations are worth it!