My Amazing Wife, part 2

I am sure that, after reading my previous entry, many of you are thinking the following: "Wowzers! Your wife is fantastic! I wish I had one just like her!" Well, my dear friends, I sadly must inform you that she is one-of-a-kind, not to be found elsewhere. Notice how I refrained from saying "one-in-a-million". The reason for this being that according to the US Census Bureau's World Population Clock, at the time of this writing there are just shy of 6.8 billion people on the planet. If I said my wife was one-in-a-million, that would mean there are 6,792 other people on the planet just like her. As this is not the case, I will stick to my original statement, but shall add a modifier: my wife is one-of-a-kind, or in other words, one-in-six-billion-seven-hundred-ninty-three-million-five-hundred-thirty-seven-thousand-two-hundred-ninety-eight.

Pictured: her

Arrested Development Button
As was mentioned earlier, my love for Arrested Development knows know bounds. Never has a show been so cleverly witty, hilariously slapstick, and amazingly amazing. It certainly changed the way I watch/judge TV shows, and to this day I still get jokes for the first time whenever I rewatch it. (I mean, the bar where Jewish lawyers go to on Friday nights is called Miss Temple's. Come on!) In one particular episode, Buster wears a pin with the following saying: "The only scary thing about a one-armed man trying to scare someone is the fact that he feels that his one arm is good for nothing but trying to scare someone." When I watched the episode with my wife, I noted that if I had my choice, the button would be probably the one piece of Arrested Development memorabilia I would ever want. In the words of GOB: "Ta-da!"

"And that's why you don't use a one-armed person to scare someone."

All Your Base Shirt
If you played video games in the late 80s, you might have come across a game called Zero Wing. In the opening cinematic, a very, very poorly-translated conversation ensues between the heroes and the villain. When the villain tries to explain that they have taken over all the military bases, he does so with the following phrase: "All your base are belong to us." Since that time, the "all your base" joke has become somewhat of a joke/meme in nerd circles and has gained worldwide notoriety. How much notoriety, you ask? Well, if you go to Google and type in "all y", the phrase shows up second in search popularity, just below "all you need is love". That being said, though I am sure my wife had no idea what the phrase meant when I first uttered it, she was only a few clicks away from finding a most excellent shirt.

Somebody set up us the bomb.

Jolly Roger Flag
While I am not into pirates as much as some people are (read: the whole pirates vs. ninjas debate), I have always enjoyed romanticizing a time that, in all actuality, was anything less than glamorous. When my wife visited an awesome store in Gardner Village called Anastasia's Attic, she brought back with her a super awesome jolly roger. And while the rest of the items on this list were presents that had an occasion (Christmas, birthday, etc.), this one was "just because". Although, in actuality, I think it was because she bought herself tons of stuff that night and wanted to lessen the blow by distracting me. Either way, it is a rad flag.

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate flag for me

Steampunk Bag
  Reader: Steampunk? What's that?
  Me: It is a genre of fiction taking place in kind of an alternate history, where Victorian-era lifestyles also included futuristic technology.
  Reader: Sounds deliciously nerdy.
  Me: It is.
  Reader: I'm glad that I, being the non-nerdy type, have steered clear of such a strange movement.
  Me: Ah, I am not sure you have. Have you ever watched Wild Wild West, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?
  Reader: No. Those are all geeky things.
  Me: Fair enough. Have you ever read anything by Jules Verne or H.G. Wells?
  Reader: Sure. I love Around the World in Eighty Days.
  Me: Well then, my friend, you love steampunk.
  Reader: Oh... drat...
This most recent gift-from-my-wife is also hands-down the best. Not to be outdone by her previous gifts, she had this bag specially made by an artist in Seattle. That means that the bag, like its giver, is one-of-a-kind.

Professor Pfefferneussen's Contraptions and Haberdashery

So when it comes down to it, I think my wife is amazing. Would I love her just as much if she never got me an awesome present again? Absolutely. Do I think that she will constantly embrace my inner-nerd and get me awesome stuff? Definitely. Are all of you super-jealous? Extremely.

My Amazing Wife, part 1

My whole life, I have been taught that buying people things is not a good way of showing them you love them. This makes sense for many reasons, as it can cause a myriad of problems in the mind of the givee:
  1) If the gifts stop or drop in quality, that means your love does is well.
  2) If you give someone else a better gift, it means you love them more.
  3) If the gift breaks, then your love is equally as fleeting.
This was told to me time and time again throughout my youth, including the Full House episode where Uncle Jesse buys DJ a drum set to apologize—presumably because sexiest men alive lack qualities in the "caring for children" department.

Pictured: the sexiest man alive

I bring this up because for the next two blog posts, I am going to share with you one particular aspect in which my wife rocks: the presents she gets me. Now, do not get me wrong: there are many ways in which she shows her love for me, and there are many ways in which I think she is amazing. However, many of those would probably rank too high on the Lovey-Dovey Scale—a scaled algorithm discovered in 1921 by Doctors Aloysius Lovey and Leopold Dovey—and would not make for good reading. And so, without further ado, allow me to present the following gifts. (Get it? Present... gifts... ah, never mind.)

Dr. Lovey and Dr. Dovey would rank this a 9.34 on the L-D Scale.

The Fifth Element: Ultimate Edition
A few years back, my girlfriend (as she was, at the time) and I were at a friend's house. As we were looking through his DVD collection—I find that you can tell the most about a person from his/her movies—I saw The Fifth Element: Ultimate Edition. Now, those who know me know I have a deep-rooted affinity for The Fifth Element; one might even say my love for it is super green. Seeing the two-disc special edition before me mustered up all sorts of feelings inside of me, and I turned to the not-quite-yet-Mrs. and told her that if she loved me, she could get me it as a present. Granted, I could not have been more overt had I had taken a cue from Monty Python and said, "Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more"; but sure enough, a few days later, she came to my house bearing a DVD-sized gift in her hands.

We were engaged just a few weeks later.

Volt for Steve Holt shirt
It took probably an hour from meeting the wife before she realized that I was and to this day am slightly obsessed with Arrested Development. And by "slightly obsessed", I mean that if I go 24 hours without referencing/quoting from the show, it is a bad day. (If you do not know what Arrested Development is, stop reading immediately and go to Hulu.com, as it will change your life.) Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened up a birthday present from the Mrs. and found a shirt featuring one of the show's most memorable puns: Volt for Holt.

Four more years! Four more years!

DuckTales Quilt
Anyone who denies that DuckTales is not only one of the most amazing cartoons ever made, but also saved/molded cartoons as we know them today is either uninformed, a hermit, or a communist. Aside from being one of the only outlets of fiction that takes place in a made up state (Calisota, but that is for another entry), DuckTales pretty much served as manna from heaven for me while I was growing up. Knowing my love for all things DuckTalean, my wife got a crew of quilters together and handmade me a DuckTales quilt, complete with fabric that has been out of production for the better part of two decades.

D-d-d-danger walks behind you...

Soylent Green shirt
**SPOILER ALERT** Soylent Green is people. To be a bit more specific, Green, the latest addition to the Soylent Corporation's food ration line—which includes other such favorites as Yellow and Red—is composed primarily of the euthanized elderly members of an overcrowded, underfed society. If none of this makes any sense to you, you just must not be a big enough nerd... or you have not seen the movie. My wife falls in both of these categories, but that did not stop her from finding me an amazing, spoiler-filled shirt.

Remember: Tuesday is Soylent Green day.

Coming up next time: the presents get even cooler...