Keith and Lacey

We went to Maui for our honeymoon and had a perfect second week of marriage.

The photos are here.

After our single, separated lives peaked at the wedding, we loaded up Lacey’s life and our wedding gifts into a little 10-foot U-Haul and headed off to Washington.  We took three days to drive the two thousand mile journey through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington.  Of course there was no cd player so it was country music on the radio all the way good thing I’ve come around to country music.

Once we got home, we had a couple days to rest up and pack for our honeymoon.  We opened a bunch of sweet wedding gifts, unloaded the U-Haul, received our marriage license, and even organized everything in the house!

A few weeks before the wedding I remembered that our flight to Maui was from Seattle, not Spokane, so I hastily searched for cheap flights to Seattle, but of course cheap didn’t work out.. so we decided to add another leg to our driving journey.  (Is leg supposed to make sense?  I think of a leg extending from a hub, not from an endpoint.  Shane, help me out with this one).  So, exactly a week after our wedding, we jumped in the car (at least not the U-Haul anymore) and drove to Seattle, while intensely listening to a book-on-tape called The Honeymoon by James Patterson.

We’re finally married after our year-long courtship of talking for hours and hours on the phone, flying back and forth between Texas and Washington, and patiently enduring all the time apart.

The wedding was beautiful!  I don’t have any real wedding photos yet.. but I have a few from the rehearsal that Marshall took.  I opened a Flickr account hoping it might be faster so from now my photos will be there.

The best part of the wedding, besides the whole getting married part, was having all our family and friends there with us.  Thanks to everyone for coming and for all your help and for enjoying it!  (Assuming you did we’ve heard good reviews though).

I worked from home this week so we’ve been together non-stop now for almost three weeks.  It’s going to be hard to leave her next week to go in to the office.  I love being with Lacey, it’s my favorite thing.

The rest of the photos are here.

I am going to put this beautiful ring on Lacey’s finger!

Spokane Valley is burning down, work has been ridiculously hectic this week, I just discovered Google StreetView, and Lacey is all the way over in Venice, Italy!  What the apocalypse is going on!  Ok, things are not that bad but good grief when it rains it pours.  Yeah, wishful thinking for the people losing their homes.  Six so far.

But let’s get back to poor me.  My fiance is so far away!  I don’t get to talk to her for two weeks!  Come on, feel sorry for me.  And she’s living it up on some fancy shmancy cruise ship where a butler (probably named Gustav) serves them whatever they want.  *Finger snap*  “Hey servant, fetch me a blueberry pie and a steak and a cool damp towel folded thrice to place abreast my febrile forehead.”  Sigh.

To dampen all these shenanigans, I decided to post a photo of Lacey with her engagement ring!

I asked Lacey to marry me on a quiet Saturday morning in my house after a beautiful and totally delish french toast with blueberries and strawberries and whip cream and syrup washed down with coffee breakfast.  To set the scene, we were sitting together in the reclining chair with Ben Harper’s album “Burn To Shine” playing on random and the ring in its box hidden in my pocket.  Ready to go.  All I have to do is wait for the right song to come on… it’s on random so it’ll come up at some point right?  Sigh, not so much.  So we sat there and talked and song after song the right one wouldn’t come up.  And then, Lacey starts getting texts… from her friend… and the song isn’t coming up… the texting stops… the song is still not up.  Fine!  So I get up and go get the controller and force the song to come on!  No more waiting!  Haha.  I didn’t prepare a contrived speech so I just started rambling about how I love her and how I know we’re supposed to be together and will you marry me and love me forever.  She said, “yeah I s’pose.”  Just kidding, she said “yes of course I will marry you and love you forever!”

In the aftermath, she called her sister and her brother and her parents and friends, and I called my parents and friends.  Then, get this, she had to text her friend back to say, “yes, he did it right after you texted me!”  Oh. My. Word.  Right?  Diana’s last text was ”did he ask you yet?”  And, guess what, I had seen the text!  I thought, you gotta be kidding me!  Apparently, Lacey had mentioned to Diana that she thought something might go down that weekend because of a few hints I’d dropped on the phone.  But Lacey had been real careful not to assume anything so if it didn’t happen she wouldn’t be let down you know.  But of course Diana had to send that text literally right before I did it!  Haha.

We had our hot engagement date in the Palm Court Grille at the Davenport Hotel that night, in a private spot I had reserved.

K, so I’m supposed to be having a conversation with you about why marriage makes you more of a man rather than less.  But I’m starting to realize something funny about maturity, that once you make a breakthrough in your maturity level, everything before that point quickly becomes moot.  Let’s see if I can explain that.  In my case, everything before the moment I knew Lacey would be my wife was preparing me for that moment.  And now that I’ve passed that moment, I’m ready to move on.  I think what I’m getting at is that once you reach each point of maturity, it soon becomes boring to discuss things in your previous realm of maturity.  Now that I hit the maturity point of feeling and acknowledging true love, I totally understand that it makes me way more of a man to get married than to stay single.  Simple as that.  If you haven’t hit that maturity level, how am I going to convince you of a feeling you haven’t felt?  If you have hit that maturity level, what is there to say except yep you get it.

It’s funny to read about maturity while looking at that photo isn’t it?  Haha.

I am the luckiest man alive.  Wait wait, I meant to say Lacey is the luckiest woman alive.  You know, because she’s going to marry ME!  Haha.  I know that sounds conceited but, but it’s true!  It’s true because she found her one true love.  It’s true because I love her unconditionally.  It’s true because I want to be married to her until death do us part.  It’s true because I want to make the best life I can with her and grow old with her.  And it’s true because flip the script and it’s all still true!  So what I’m saying is that she’s the luckiest woman alive but what I’m really saying is that I am luckiest man alive!

All serious humor aside, I am thankful to find the woman that was always destined to be my wife.  I don’t mean preordained, but destined because the course of our lives took us on journeys that collided at precisely the right moment to fuse and explode.  I always wondered, how do you not totally know when you find the right woman, the woman you are going to marry and be with forever?  Does it make me a romantic to believe that?  I think it does, but really what it comes down to is recognizing God’s guidance in your heart.  I didn’t know right at first that Lacey was the one, but when it was revealed to me I knew without a doubt.  And I’ve been impatiently waiting to marry her ever since!

I have more to share about marriage, which I will do in succeeding posts, but right now I just want to share how much I love my fiance, how thankful I am for her, and that I know true love exists through God because I’ve experienced it.  And I promised more photos so… my favorite one so far!

p.s. In sharing my thoughts on marriage I plan on making the case that being married is the most manly thing you can do, repudiating a popular cultural myth that real men ride off into the sunset either because they’re born to ramble or because they have to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of society, and that married men are whipped into femininity.  That’s naive, reckless, foolish, and just plain B.S.  Hehe.

Lacey and I have been absolutely horrible when it comes to taking photos.

One reason is that my camera liked to flip to taking video all the time when you’re trying a take a picture.. very annoying to say the least.  But I have a new camera, the Canon SD870 IS!  So now I’m taking photos in 8 megapixels instead of 4.

Another reason is because, according to Lacey, I always pick the worst possible time to take them (like in the morning at her parents house when she’s still in her pajamas (yeah it’s like noon)).

Another reason is that we’re generally so focused on loving each other and talking that we forget!

But sometimes attitude is hot, what can I say?

I know I know you all feel so ignored!  But I’m sure you’re used to it by now… the only real reason is that all of my free time is dedicated to this woman.  So far this is the only real picture we have of each other because all of our time together is spent just being together and talking and doing our best to ignore everything generally called normal life.  So, sorry if you feel left out but we both just don’t want to share one another very much right now!  Since this photo was taken during the first week of 2008, we’ve seen each other every 2 weeks but right now we’re on our longest hiatus of 2 1/2 weeks, coming off of our longest streak together, which was 5 days with her, 3 days apart, and then 8 days with me!  Good times with my baby!