This is Daisy, the new Boyinthebands.com sweetness consultant. She’s a seven-year-old Bichon mix, until yesterday at the Washington Animal Rescue League: a great place to make friends. Welcome!
42
Some of you may get the meanings here; if not, please move on with my apologies.
What I look like
People have the funniest idea of what I look like, but apparently I come off as much older and much shorter online. And these revelations take place at General Assembly.
I leave tomorrow night for G.A. and if you see me, do say hello. I’m keen to meet new people and old friends alike.
I graduated from college 20 years ago today
Legally married
As some of you know, on August 21, Jonathan Padget and I legally married at home in the company of some local friends. He and I were married at church in 2003, but now that the District of Columbia marriage law encompasses same-sex couples we wanted to “complete” our marriage. (The liturgy follows.)
The Rev. Victoria Weinstein, perhaps better known to blog readers as PeaceBang and the author of “Beauty Tips for Ministers”, conducted both the 2003 and 2010 services. And here’s the proof: a photo by Avelino Maestas.
Thanks to them and the others present — also to those who wished us well from afar. 
Where I buy clothes
I like my clothes to be hard wearing, plain cut and American made, with union made as a plus. Also, I won’t buy any more leather. After years of searching here and there, suffering poor quality or poor service, I have settled on a few vendors, including one whose parcel arrived today.
For pants, jeans, white socks, polo shirts and some t-shirts, I choose All American Clothes; I may have also gotten my last jacket there. For oxford shoes, I go with Pangea‘s “No Bull” house line, and for more fun ones (European made) I go with Vegetarian Shoes sold by MooShoes. For dress shirts, I get Canadian- and union-made Forsyths from hugestore.com, but may branch out to Pennsylvania- and union-made Gitman shirts that I can get through a men’s store in Athens, Georgia, my college town. (And yes, they’re expensive. Indeed, the only place I’ve seen them otherwise for sale in a store is in Paris.) But the as much as I think ethical sourcing is important, so to is taking care in choosing and maintaining clothes. Cheap clothes, badly chosen, are no bargain.
Goals: 41 to 42
I recently had a birthday, and am now 41 years old. That gives me a year before I reach 42, which — as I knew, and surprisingly others also volunteered — is “the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.”
But the proof that I really am in my forties is that my personal goals are much more modest. Or at the very least it means that I don’t have time for self-serving and dysfunctional causes. More about that later.
As for those goals: weight-loss is a perennial, and I hope we might refinance the mortgage, but neither of these are related to this blog. And then there’s legal marriage, but hitting the right mark between civil marriage and our Christian faith — especially since we had the church wedding seven years ago and the fact that we won’t get any more rights by marrying — means it’s more of  process than a goal.
Not having a local religious home is a sore point, but again more of a process than a goal. I have some thoughts about a nonlocal home that I’ll share as the 2010-2011 year goes on.
For skills, I want to be reasonably proficient in Esperanto, say, to read magazines without halting and carry on a non-technical conversation with infrequent circumlocution or clarifying questions, before the next Landa Kongreso. I also want to learn enough Python — as a goal — to use it to solve a problem that I would normally solve in a Rube Goldberg way.
But one goal I’m particularly proud of — writing 100 letters. Pre-email, I was an avid correspondent, and I both miss writing and receiving proper letters. So that, with dusting off some sermon and knot-tying skills, are my modest goals for the next year. No ultimate questions on display, but I hope to share of some of what I develop here.
His works go before him
I got word yesterday that the much-loved former faculty advisor of the Demosthenian Society of the University of Georgia (my collegiate debating society), the Rev. Dr. Larry Blount died May 2. (More about Professor Blount.) He was both a professor in the University’s law school, the pastor of a church in the area, and a pillar of the community. Several of the collects I’ll post today and tomorrow reflect the kind of loss as this.