Tag Archives: couplehood

Indiana State Fair 2017 Photos, Part 7 of 7: Random Acts of State Fairing

August 16, 2017 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
FAIR!

Fun idea for a photo op, but of course we had to wait for a wisenheimer kid to stop forming a T at the end.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians that other people love, and farm animals competing for cash prizes and herd bragging rights. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context. Usually we’re all about the food.

…but we’re not eating every minute. And now it all comes down to this: all the other usable moments we caught on screen throughout our seven hours at the Indiana State Fairgrounds this year. Technically these are outtakes in that they don’t fit into any categories we shared from the first six chapters, but they mean something to us, even if not every one of them means all that much beyond “Whee! Fun!”

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Not Put Asunder, 13 Years and Counting

July 17, 2017 By in Indiana, Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Aquarium Us!

Ho ho ho, the flimsy Photoshop dolphins think it’s hilarious that we’re miming being trapped in a giant glass tank. THAT’S NOT MIME. WE ARE DROWNING. PLEASE SAVE US, YOU HEARTLESS FLOATING HOT DOGS WITH MUDFLAPS.

Above is a teaser image from our 2017 road trip, courtesy of the National Aquarium in Baltimore, where my lovely wife Anne and I had the pleasure of spending a few days and not getting murdered despite what you hear on TV.

We’ve known each other for nearly thirty years next month. We’ve been married for thirteen years as of this very Monday. Vacation photos and jazz hands are just two of the many cornerstones of our relationship — not the most important ones, mind you, and certainly not the hardest ones to achieve. But when your never-ending process of maintaining and streamlining the critical factors is kept on track, it frees up your mental space to indulge in the happier shared whims. If the process yields fun tangible souvenirs like this one, so much the better and the merrier.

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Our Road Trips, 1999-2015: the Complete Checklist, So Far

August 3, 2015 By in Meta, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Alabama!

Teaser image from our 2015 road trip, Day 5. Coming soon!

[Hey, all! The following special presentation is the all-new Page added tonight to MCC that merges and replaces the previous individual “Our Road Trip” checklists that were taking up too much real estate in the desktop header and the mobile menu. This handy Big Picture checklist summarizes all the trips we’ve taken to date for full historical context, with links to everything that’s been exclusively posted here since 2012, a few years’ worth that have been reprinted here on special occasions, and capsule summaries of other trips and vacations we previously shared on other sites in years past that, sooner or later, Lord willing, will all be re-chronicled on MCC someday as part of the continuing story of one geek couple and their annual quests to find new things to see and do.

Or if you totally hate domestic travel, skip down to the 2013-2014 checklists and pretend this is a different new entry called “A Salute to MCC Post Titles”. I’d understand if you did, really. I do like titling stuff.]

Right this way for lists within lists, which I also really like!

Moving Away from Evergreen Terrace

April 12, 2015 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments
Simpsons DVDs!

Guess which season saw the introduction of a new box design. And guess which set I hate most for ruining everything.

Obsessive completists who collect physical media and refuse to give up on The Simpsons received heartbreaking news this week when longtime producer Al Jean revealed Season 17 would be the final DVD/Blu-ray set produced. In numerous back-and-forth discussions with fans on Twitter, Jean cited poor sales in a world where streaming media has become the preferred viewing option for a lot of former disc buyers. It’s not hard to argue the diminishing aesthetic returns on later seasons may also have contributed to America’s growing consensus as to exactly how much of the show deserves to be archived in their own homes.

For anyone with the true collector mentality, this cancellation poses a special form of anguish: a no-frills Season 20 set was rush-released in 2010 as an anniversary merchandising tie-in. Anyone who’s bought them religiously since Season 1 will now have a eternal gap between 17 and 20 that can never be filled through legal means, to say nothing of the unreleased 21 through 60. Granted, you could pay to watch those online via Amazon, or indulge in the Simpsons World app if you care to watch the show on certain devices. You could store said device on the DVD shelf between 17 and 20, and argue till your face is Homer-pants-blue that it’s close enough. You’d be wrong.

For my wife and myself, it’s another stumbling block to our once-fervent Simpsons fandom.

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Not Put Asunder, Ten Years and Counting

July 20, 2014 By in Meta, Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Us in Fargo!

This is how everyone spends their tenth wedding anniversary, right? Because my wife and I sure wouldn’t want to look out of place or anything.

Right this way for a post-vacation update!

Not Put Asunder, Nine Years and Counting

July 16, 2013 By in Meta, Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , 12 Comments

geek couple, Midlife Crisis Crossover

Taken out of context, this photo of a happily armed woman and some dork with a bowling ball could be misconstrued as a future submission to awkwardfamilyphotos.com with a caption questioning the decision to don summer wear in December.

At left in the 2012 Metropolis Superman Celebration T-shirt, my wife is holding a Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot Range Model Air Rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time. At right in the hard-to-see shirt sporting the periodic-table block for adamantium, that’s me toting the bowling ball given to Ralphie’s old man for Christmas. The backdrop is the living room from the original A Christmas Story House in Cleveland, open year-round for visitors like us.

Some vacationers might spend their time off getting drunk and sunburned on an exotic beach. That’s not who we are.

We’ve known each other for nearly twenty-six years, but Wednesday marks our ninth wedding anniversary. When the one you love is willing to pose with you without a whit of hesitation, surrounded by this much pop-culture ephemera, confident in the knowledge that we agree on the most important things in life while sharing a variety of commonalities in the Department of Ultimately Unimportant Things, you realize you’re ridiculously blessed beyond what you deserve. You also thank the Lord that He’s in charge and not Joss Whedon, or else something tragic would’ve happened five minutes after the photo was taken.

Happy Anniversary, m’lady. Can’t wait to see our vacation photos at age 70. 🙂