It’s that time again! Another year of shockingly blissful marriage to the amazing Anne, another anniversary dinner to celebrate, and another completely unrelated lead image.

Longtime MCC readers may already have read the stories of how we met in 1987 in high school German class, the episodes of stunning parallels and divine timing that would keep intertwining our paths over the years, our determinedly simple wedding, and how we came to start traveling together after growing up in families and lifestyles that didn’t lend themselves to much of it. All these years later, our story continues together through ups and downs, highs and lows, lulls and gales, laughs and growls, quibbles and quiescence, offline and online, chocolates and peanut butters, great tastes and lesser fillings, halls and oats, laurels and hardiness, simians and carbuncles, seas of sorrow and streams of consciousness.

Speaking of almost none of the above: that weird pic of us is an outtake from our recent weekend trip to Columbus, Ohio, where we visited their Center of Science and Industry, crammed ourselves into a special photo booth so tiny that there was only room for one of us to do jazz hands, and paid good money to downconvert ourselves into a comic book cover in which we appear to have been sketched by a drunken Mark Buckingham. We weren’t blown away by the results and could’ve run a selfie through any number of photo-editing programs, apps, and/or filters for free, but where’s the facepalming fun in that?

As longtime MCC readers might recall, our anniversary tradition is to try a restaurant we’ve never visited before. This year’s winner was one I’ve been wanting to check out for ages, a James Beard-nominated modern farm-to-table establishment called Bluebeard. Executive Chef Abbi Merriss and her works have been covered so frequently in local media over the years since their 2012 debut that they’re among the very, very few Indianapolis eateries whose chef I can name without looking them up. We rarely venture into their neighborhood because it’s given me Bermuda Triangle issues in the past, but this time I managed to navigate their skewed ley lines and suffered only a single wrong turn. Not even the rain could hold us back, try as it might.

Now is the part where we shut up and post food pics and give thanks for surviving another year together. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.