Pearl beyond price

The best thing that's happened to me in my life is my lovely wife. (I had hypoed "lively" instead of "lovely" and I guess that's true too!)

Right from the start she knew what kind of nut I was and never thought to try and change me.

Her mom says she's the one in the family who inherited the adventure gene. Must be true.

We've done a lot of interesting things together. She's adapted well to living out here in the woods. Hey, if you meet a girl who agrees to go winter camping on the side of a mountain -and she still likes you after, marry her.

In over 30 years of marriage she's laid down only two hard and fast rules and one provisional rule.

#1. No starting a religion:

You would think something like that would be easy. Turns out some people take me way too seriously.

#2

No burning the house down:

There have been some close calls. That would have been embarrassing for a former Firefighter like myself. Let's just say the experimental waste vegetable oil burning heater had some problems. It worked fine in the yard. When moved to the basement, conditions changed. As the basement heated up, the oil thinned. As the oil thinned, its viscosity reduced and more oil flowed into the stove. Eventually, the stove flooded and the overflow ignited. For a while there it sounded like a freight train in the basement. Smoke detectors on three floors went off. She-who-must-be-obeyed came downstairs to see what I was doing. People from across the lake took note of the long plume of dark smoke. (They didn't do anything about it. Figured it was my business. They know I experiment with things. Gotta love rural NH) I turned the fuel valve off and eventually everything died down. Opening the windows cleared the wisps of smoke out of the house. The wife reminded me of rule #2. Waste veggie oil heater experiments came to a sudden end.

I own some large extinguishers, know how to use them, and some experiments are done with fire suppression chemicals at the ready.

*Provisional rule:

If I time travel, I must come back pretty close to the same guy who left. She understands the parallel nature of time and the difficulty inherent in coming back to your exact time line. She demands that I at least come close to the original time line. That way she'll probably get someone back from a close enough time line that she can live with him. (Yes, there are things I've done that have led her to make this provisional rule.)


All in all, not too many restrictions.

Life is good. . . and an adventure.

-Sixbears