To which she replied,
Yes.

Well, she cried a little first.

Nine years.
Is it nine years?
I can never remember.
I’m not too good with numbers anyway.
Nine years of marriage?

Is it next year that I get the gold watch?

Nine years?
Strange.
It feels more like nine and a half.

It was a garden wedding at D-Missus’ parent’s place at a sea-side suburb. She was worried how us guys were going to handle wearing a vest and a suit during the heat-wave we were experiencing.

We didn’t have to bother; it rained on our wedding day.

Which wasn’t ironic at all.
Just very, very… wet.

In Maori folklore, rain on an important occasion is seen as a good thing. It means that the Gods consider you to have great mana, or strength of spirit.

Well our spirits must be able to bench-press 300kg, because boy did it piss down that day.

D-Missus was staying with her parents that night, so she had to get up at 5am and help deal with surface flooding.

I wasn’t staying anywhere near her parent’s place, which was cool as I got to sleep in till 10am.
Then I drank beer and watched surfing on TV with my best man and groomsman. They grew goatee beards and wore Norton motorcycle boots to match me.

The part of the wedding involving the garden got moved to a small covered deck instead.
But that just meant the hundred or so guests were forced to huddle together and get to know each other.

Ha! You can see the umbrellas in most of the photos…

I think it was a bit hard for people to hear the vows over the sound of the rain on the roof.

But immediately after we were pronounced D-Man and D-Missus, these two doves came out of nowhere and flew past us and landed on the nearby lawn.
Which was cool.

D-Missus’ parents hired a, from all accounts, god awful barber-shop quartet to sing afterwards. But thankfully we weren’t around to hear that as we shot off to have photos done. The wedding vehicle was a tuk-tuk. A tuk-tuk with a near-flat tyre. Meaning we had to lean the opposite way going around corners to stop the damn thing from rolling and killing us all.
Which wouldn’t have been cool.
But it would have made a good news story.

We were headed for an inside venue in the city, but, just as we started going past the beach where we originally wanted to have photos done, it stopped raining.

And we forgot all about Alanis Morissette.

This (below) is the first song I ever wrote.
It is also the first poem I ever wrote for D-Missus.

It’s sort of about … well… you know how you go through that period where you think you might be in love with someone, but you’re not sure, maybe it’s just a Strong Like and then you realise that This Is what you’ve been looking for, but do you come out and admit it Just Yet, or is it too soon…?

I had the melody long before I ever “learned” enough guitar to make it a real song.
But I was too scared to sing it to her. But she has this habit of always falling asleep in the passenger seat on journeys longer than half an hour, so I used to sing it to her while she slumbered.

The title worked its way into my wedding vows.

Click Here to listen to the song.

Here are the lyrics:

OK, you must be sick of poetry by now. But deal.

I wrote this song for an earlier wedding anniversary.
Click Here to listen.

It was inspired by something D-Missus said. And watching her shower.
And nearly drowning in a freak wave.

The lyrics:

The song was recorded in dubbley and sounds best when listened to in the shower.

For our first wedding anniversary, D-Missus got an eternity ring. Cos it felt like we’d been married an eternity.
Ha! :)

I got a tattoo.
It’s half a yin yang.
The symbol serves as a permanent reminder of some ideals and a way of a life that I try to follow.

That tattoo cost 50 bucks and took half an hour. Her ring cost … a lot more.

I think I’m owed some more tattoos…

I got it done just before we went to lunch at the Sky Tower to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. I was wearing a white long-sleeved business shirt. Which isn’t the best thing to wear if you’re going to get a tattoo done immediately beforehand and then bleed through your shirt all through lunch.

Mmmm, nice.

I took a photo of the tattoo and used it in some artwork for a little CD I put together for D-Missus today, of songs that remind me of her.

Led Zeppelin’s unleaded version of Thank You was meant to be our wedding song. The lyrics were on our wedding invites. We had our dance moves all planned.

But that was back in the days before I owned any CDs. And the DJ couldn’t play tapes on his equipment.
So we ended up with Joe Cocker’s You Are So Beautiful instead.

Three months after I was married, my company shipped me up north to a small branch office. For two years.

D-Missus couldn’t find work there, so she stayed in Auckland.

We saw each other on the weekends. But I worked every other weekend.

Isn’t that ironic?
Don’t you think…?