Livre d'Or

So my excellent jack turned 36 last week. Since we've been together nearly ten years, I realize we were kind of impossibly young when we started dating. And I really really could not have imagined that we'd be celebrating such a big number birthday together, as a married couple who own a house together.

I also couldn't have imagined choosing to go out for dinner in a fancy restaurant: Alimentum. ( food )

The next day I spent the evening playing with OSOs and their kids, and left a bit later than I'd planned due to getting absorbed in a game of Roll Through the Ages, and had a minor disaster getting home. I managed to jam my bike lock somehow, and broke the key off in the lock. And I didn't want to disturb partners who were pretty much going straight to bed after I left, so I hoped I could get the bike home on my own, as I'd only locked the wheel to the frame and it wasn't attached to anything. It turns out that dragging / carrying a bike over a mile or so with the wheel locked is a pretty unpleasant experience. I got the lock tangled in the spokes somehow, and my lungs were protesting at the cold damp air, and it took ages. I stumbled through the gate just before midnight, at which point a random down on his luck young man approached me and asked for money or to speak to my husband.

I was in a pretty awful state by that point, struggling to breathe and exhausted and worried about the consequences of a non-functional bike and not far off a panic attack, so I had zero spare capacity for either being compassionate to a beggar, or sufficiently assertive in telling him that midnight is too late to importune strangers. And I was scared that he would follow me into the house, and probably he wasn't aggressive but I was really out of it. Then jack showed up and fixed everything.

He dealt with the beggar, he dealt with getting my broken bike into the shed and me into the warm house. He coped with the fact that I was more or less in hysterics by this point, crying too much to speak coherently, and upset with myself for being so upset over such a minor thing as a broken bike. He didn't overreact, he gathered that there was no immediate crisis just that I was tired and upset. And he calmed me down with tea and hugs enough that we could actually get to sleep at a not too ridiculous time. And then in the morning, my amazing husband went out to the shed, poked at the bike and managed to pull the broken key out of the lock and disentangle the chain from the wheel and made my bike rideable again in time to get to work.

Ten years ago I had no idea that my boyfriend was going to turn out to be so competent, both practically and emotionally, in a crisis. I always knew I could rely on him to support me as best as he could, but he's acquired so many skills in the intervening decade and got really good at supporting me.

So yes, happy birthday to my excellent husband. Thank you for being a brilliant dinner companion and an ideal housemate and a hero when I need you and generally making my life better in so many ways.

...me and cartesiandaemon are a thing.

As of Friday, technically; he favoured the date because it would be an easy anniversary to remember, and I am thinking I'm not going to need to remember very often. If we make it to another Leap Day I shall be thirty-three (!) and the relationship will have been longer than any I've previously experienced.

I will fill in the details later, probably filtered, so if you don't want to hear new relationship squee let me know and I'll remove you from the filter. Anyway, this probably means I'll be in England a bit more often. I'm visiting the weekend of 15^th March and we're hoping to make a start on showing eachother off to our friends.

Also, since this is the first relationship I've started since I joined LJ, I've made a new icon in honour of the occasion. Bacterial sex is direct information transfer! We spent a very large proportion of our romantic weekend trying to catch eachother up on a lifetime of reading, because we have priorities.