The Home Stretch 2005: Unification, Families, and Holiday Cheer?

I am in the midst of a whirlwind of shuttle diplomacy. The close timing of our engagement with family holidays means we have to solve the geopolitics of the extended relationships on rather short notice.

Here are the constraints:

1. There are three sets of parents (A, B and C), and therefore three sets of planned family vacations. Due to overlap these had to undergo some rescheduling.

2. There is a traditional ceremony with extended family (three sets, A, B and C) to celebrate an engagement.

3. There are four anchor holidays: American Thanksgiving at the end of November, Christmas at the end of December, Julian Calendar New Year, and then Lunar Calendar New Year at the end of January.

4. With a two month gap between the three holidays, one parties might be put out by having to wait an entire two months after the first party has already welcomed us.

5. There should be a mixer for close family to acclimate individuals and expose issues.

6. And Jenny and I should have some fun, too.

So we plug this into the hairy constraint calculator and out pops a plan:

	Jenny & I	Family A	Family B	Family C
Vacation	France, Canada, Australia	Canada	SE Asia	New York
Holiday	Mexico Julian New Year	Los Angeles Thanksgiving	Asia Lunar New Year	New York Christmas
Ceremony	—	Los Angeles	Asia	New York
Mixer	HawaiiMexico	HawaiiMexico	HawaiiMexico	HawaiiMexico

The travel alone is daunting. Starting in home in Asia in early November we go to Aix en Provence by way of Italy and Monaco, then to Montreal, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Kona, home, New York, Singapore, Australia, Mexico, SE Asia, and back home at the end of January.

About a dozen locations in about ten weeks. As I write this I am in Hawaii.

But the travel is hardly the stressful part, given first class and private jets. No, the stress is from the family dynamics and expectations, and the desire for some level of unification and, dare we wish, holiday cheer?

Standing in the way are two major issues on my branch of the genetic tree. The first is that Jenny spent time as a hostess at a drinking establishment. Because she worked at a very high end establishment, she is known to highly-placed, rich and famous family scions (and no, not in the biblical sense!) Just imagine how others in my family never would be able to look the rich and famous straight in the eye! How terrible.

And that’s not even the biggest issue. No, the bigger one is, to quote a movie: “The doctor explained that her insides were a rocky place, where my seed could find no purchase.”

Yes, Jenny is barren. (And, yes, I have permission to write this.)

She always planned to adopt in an odd sense through her education startup. In fact her condition was a primary motivator for her to quit her professional career in favor for starting a school oriented toward underserved children. Moreover she focused on gifted children since as a child she had always hoped to have intelligent children in union with a smart and kind husband, and to give them access to all the resources they needed to reach their full potential (access that she felt she was denied by her less fortunate upbringing and culture.)

But my family is not interested in leveraged long-term positive impact on part-time adopted children, and, apparently about twenty eight generations of my ancestors are against it as well (I have to take their word for it; the ancestors have not deigned to speak to me directly.)

After all, what is the very purpose of marriage if not to genetically combine?

Indeed, the cultural imperative is so great that even Jenny has confessed that she feels that she wants me to have a child, to propagate my genes forward into the world, and that she is denying the world the joy of my genetic progeny. It’s a nice sentiment, I suppose. I think she’d draw the line on the implementation, though.

Side note: There is an appropriate scene from an old movie based on a Harlan Ellison novella called “A Boy and His Dog.” A horny young man living in a post-apocalyptic female-scarce wasteland finds his way down to an ensconced antiseptic paradise where, to avoid inbreeding, they need his genetic material to mix in with their very healthy young women. Although initially quite excited by the prospect of genetically mixing with the many nubile and arousingly-hygenic women of this arcology, he later discovers, after being strapped down to a table, that the path for his seed to their ova involves the intermediary byways of mechanized tubes, hoses, and pumps.

Infertility is not a unique issue to us. Now while a variety of biotechnological approaches come to mind, somewhat more likely to be available in Asia than in the United States, these are considerations for the future. We have gone through many thought experiments, scenarios, scenes, possibilities and permutations, but there is, in the end, nothing more than this: there are acceptable options.

Acceptable to us, that is.

As far as acceptable to my progenitors? Well, their Occam’s Razor would sever the bond that connects me to Jenny.

Ah, perhaps this is one of those issues I will understand better “when I grow up.”

Comparatively her side has few issues. Other than her father being a former chief of police. In a small town in the country, kind of an Asian hicksville. Who recently told me, “You better not make her cry. Ever.”

So such issues have been top of mind as we seek a path to unification, or redefine our goals accordingly.

My increased presence in Asia the last few years are an ironic background to this stage of our relationship. Asia is plagued by unification struggles new and old, whether between Taiwan and China, North and South Korea, the rich and poor provinces in mainland China, or many examples in Southeast Asia or the Sino-Indian area. Cultural divides can run deep, both in parallel and intersecting vectors.

Our own miniature version of these issues, a cultural divide between our approach and that of our families, between acceptable conventional marriage and a modern one, and even between the social and intellectual classes our parents represent... there is much potential for problems here. The matrices of alignment on issues — some where we have parents against us, parents against parents, and every other possible permutation including us against ourselves — is quite politically daunting. But an interesting challenge nonetheless.

And stated that way — as a challenge to us, a problem to be solved — that has been an enormous help to our mental ability to manage the emotional side effects of many of the issues.

So far, at least.

Will we have unified families? Probably not. Miracles can happen, but we’ll dial down our expectations to ‘realistic’ and try our best. Is it more likely (without creating a self-fulfilling prophesy) that we will achieve détente, a demilitarized zone, a buffer of allies, a peace-keeping organization, or a federation of policies? Unclear. But we have a strategy for feeling this out. The brutal itinerary we are on now is an example.

Again, the honesty component is crucial between us. It is easy to become defensive about ones parents and background; even if I am comfortable criticizing my parents or my background, it is different if my partner does. But during our “honeymoon period” is the best time to air out these issues, and to unify in implementing a clear and consistent policy for the new federated family. If we do not set precedents early, it is unlikely we can later on, at least not without creating even more angst and suffering.

I’ve quoted more movies than usual here. I’ll end with perhaps the most apt movie reference to the situation:

“I think you're all fucked in the head. We're ten hours from the fucking fun park and you want to bail out. Well I'll tell you something. This is no longer a vacation. It's a quest. It's a quest for fun. I'm gonna have fun and you're gonna have fun. We're all gonna have so much fucking fun we'll need plastic surgery to remove our goddamn smiles. You'll be whistling 'Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah' out of your assholes! I gotta be crazy! I'm on a pilgrimage to see a moose. Praise Marty Moose! Holy Shit!” Clark Griswold, from Vacation

Bachelor Party Planning Conflict

There will be a bachelor party of my closest friends (think three to five). It is unstoppable. I have started to receive anonymous voicemails -- one of the first said, "It is your destiny" (clixk to hear the sepulchral James Earl Jones voice).

Being the control geek that I am, I tried to wedge myself into the planning process, if only in order to gain some intelligence into the thinking processes of my so-called friends.

My first suggestions was a tame Lord of the Rings theme. My friends spent some quality time thinking about the thoughtful humiliations they endured at my hands in prior parties and then tossed my suggestion into the Cracks of Doom.

Thus forewarned, I knew my second suggestion would have to appeal them in a different manner. Perhaps it needed some marketing. My second suggestion was a relationship theme: hunt or be hunted and games people play with their lives. Here is a sample of the marketing materials that went out with my proposal:

As you can see, the attraction was that I would arrange for a bevy of beautiful and bodacious babes, a team of talented and totally titillating tatas, a group of gorgeous and glamorous gals -- to shoot or be shot on a picturesque outdoor field. Or a converted nuclear silo. Or an old oil drilling platform. Something cool and OSHA-unfriendly like that.

In reality I was betting that sooner or later the overwhelming logistical overhead of planning this party would cause my erstwhile friends to give up hope and capitulate to my agenda.

Ah, but I vastly underestimated the power of the Internet as a collaboration tool. An effective crutch for the otherwise collaboration crippled.

Within a few days, one of these people who claim themselves to be "a close friend" contacted my administrative assistant and scammed the contact information for J, Michael, and Vladimir. Two of the three were positively perverse in their pleasure to proactively partner in planning. From a fundraising perspective, convincing two out of three billionaires over email within 24 hours to contribute to the cause was a pretty good result.

Another doom-filled voicemail warned me, "We raised a quarter million by pledging videos of you at the party."

I'm sure it's just a scare tactic...

I hope.

And pray.

Meanwhile, another friend contacted my sister to obtain a notebook computer I had thoughtlessly trusted in her care (remember that I am mostly homeless). This "friend" sent it to a so-called "recovery specialist," which is a euphemism for "computer criminal turned legit" Guantanamo Bay style. Squirming helplessly under the surgical hacking of this nefarious recidivist, the poor innocent little computer eventually gave it all up.

Fortunately there were no secrets upon it. I had never blogged here from that machine, nor retained email upon it. But I suspected they were looking for something on locales and encounters with May and Kola.

All this took about a week. My friends are too competent and have way too much free time.

But what they suspect but cannot know is the following: "Of course you realize this means war!"

One path out is to be secretly married next week. But that tacitly would be admitting defeat, tucking my tail between my legs (where there is hardly any space anyhow, I must admit modestly) and running for the safety of the altar.

No, there must be something more clever to do.

If only I could think of what it is...

Why Her? End note: What Does it Mean?

When I told one woman friend of my engagement with Jenny, her first respone was, "You could get almost anybody: entrepreneur, scientist, or supermodel. Why her?"

It wasn't said in a mean or petty way nor to flatter. She truly was curious.

And it was a good question which has been addressed in Part one, which covers the time we have spent together, Part two, which describes some of her attributes in the context of my expectations, and Part three, which describes our sexual connection.

What Does it Mean?
"The important thing is not to stop questioning."

If you've come this far, you have read a lot. You might ask: are these reasons why I am engaged to Jenny, or justifications?

It is difficult to objectively assess this. Context and people change. This is why we believe it important to commit to the relationship as much as, or more than the individual.

Whatever we may believe today, the important thing is not to stop questioning. Not to stop challenging with the truth. And to make this our religion of faith.

In fact, many of these so-called shared characteristics may not be so uncommon. For example, the relationship literature, whether scientific or literary, does indicate that a child-like phase is common early on in relationships, but it does not last. It is indicative of passing a trust barrier, when the two people in a relationship become comfortable with one another. And perhaps when it comes to romance, everybody has Aspergers Disorder. In short, I could be fooling myself in the same manner that a billion other people have done. Why should I be special?

But a closer look at the nature of this feeling does indicate some differences. And the combination of characteristics does seem statistically significant.

Conversely, could it be because others have not been as analytical about their feelings? Are they the same underlying pleasant irrationalities that are doomed to pass?

The extent of my response are a few quotes:

"It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves"

"I have the rest of my life to find out."

and one I've used before on this very blog:

"...until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words: wait and hope."

Why Her? Part 3: On Sexual Connectivity

When I told one woman friend of my engagement with Jenny, her first respone was, "You could get almost anybody: entrepreneur, scientist, or supermodel. Why her?"

It wasn't said in a mean or petty way nor to flatter. She truly was curious.

And it was a good question. So this post will continue try to answer that. Part one covers the time we have spent together and Part two describes some of her attributes in the context of my expectations.

Obligatory warning: because this post is about a woman I love, it could be painfully saccharine to my dear readers. I won't mind if you move on. Really. But I will also cover some of what I have been doing over the past year, and where.

On Sexual Connectivity
"See the problem is that God has given men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time."

There is nothing wrong with sexual compatibility. I am all for it. And, not to be crude or anything, Jenny fit me like no other had before.

The scientist in me saw some geometrical and topographical contributions to this (that's topographical, not topological...she's not that exotic). There is definitely some shape difference inside Jenny has that works for me in the right positions. I mean literally certain geometric bumps, shapes and musculature in her that fits me well.

And in certain other conditions, there is a relatively unique motion that Jenny enjoys -- really enjoys -- that, in conjunction with the physical fit, really does it for my limbic system. There was one other woman I've been with who used a similar motion, a Quebecois hottie. It had similar results for herself but vastly diminished effects on me. So the combination of Jenny's fit with her motion results in an enhanced experience to say the least.

And while I am on this thread, there is also an intuitive learning component. There have been a few partners I've enjoyed who have a beautiful learning intuition with me. Sakura was one. She was considered quite good at fellatio, but at one marathon sexual session in Tokyo she became exceptionally good. No others in my recent lifetime have been like this until Jenny. Of course some of the Asian professionals also adapted well to my preferences, but in those cases it was procedure taught by their profession rather than their personal connection to me. It was done to me, not with me. My (albeit limited) experience is that this intimate sexual adaptation is most obvious in oral sex, because of the increased sensitivity, focus and control available to the partner. But in this case, this sense was shared.

Symmetry was another point. While Jenny was my first to bring me to fairly regular earth-shattering climaxes, I was actually there first for her. I was the first she lavished such attentions upon, but also I was the first she allowed to lavish such attentions upon her. She never had an orgasm from oral sex. I attibute this to my observation that originally Jenny was very insecure about her body, which is something I always find surprising with very attractive women. It took nearly months of slow, patient progress culminating in just shy of two hours of continuous oral lovemaking in a suite in Paris before it finally happened.

Side note: For whatever reason, in the right position I can flick my tongue essentially forever without tiring. I believe this to be compensation for my lack of muscles elsewhere.

And once it happened for her once, well, it just got easier and easier. So we both went from initially enjoying sex, but perhaps having an orgasm every five days, to as many as five orgasms per day (although that's an atypical peak number for her that I have yet to achieve. But I'm more than halfway there.) And the bonus: we've evolved from good orgasms (although there aren't a lot of bad ones, I admit) to ones where we are hoarse from screaming and can't remember why. From two hours or more per orgasm to ten or fifteen minutes. Mind you those aren't typical situations, but they are milestones for us. Oh, and those two very memorable simultaneous orgasms.

Yes, the sex is great. And although others may have experienced this, we both started virtually anorgasmic. So it is another shared interaction. Not the most important one, but an important one that combined with the others makes us feel particularly special.

Why Her? Part 2: Why Jenny?

When I told one woman friend of my engagement with Jenny, her first respone was, "You could get almost anybody: entrepreneur, scientist, or supermodel. Why her?"

It wasn't said in a mean or petty way nor to flatter. She truly was curious.

And it was a good question. So this post will continue try to answer that. Part one is here.

Obligatory warning: because this post is about a woman I love, it could be painfully saccharine to my dear readers. I won't mind if you move on. Really. But I will also cover some of what I have been doing over the past year, and where.

Why Jenny?
"You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."

Why Jenny? On the face of it, there was no good reason. Why not continue my free-wheeling lifestyle? There was hardly much to lose. Women remained interested, if anything, recently they were more and more interested. I wasn't about to stop traveling and meeting people. I had sufficient means to treat several mistresses well. I was considered a rational person. So was the rationale?

In the end, the philosophy I've evolved over the last two years, along with you, dear reader, forces me to acknowledge that to really sample a relationship, one must make some commitments. In the words of the wise, venerable, and entirely fictional Yoda, "Do, or do not. There is no try."

To understand "Why Jenny," it's also useful to re-examine the context in which I met her. Not only the original story, but also my expectations for an ideal woman summarized in criteria I wrote in a previous posting.

Regarding the manner of meeting, let's keep in mind I met Jenny in a hostess bar. Although it was an atypical hostess experience (and the day after a mind-reeling sexual experience) you can imagine the initial expectations for Jenny that set with regards to my idealized woman. So for kicks, let's see if I knew what I really wanted.

There are two ways to look at this. First there are the at first impressions. In which of these criteria did Jenny score highly when I first met her? Which of these did I observe versus assume (labelled with the "a" below)? This tells us what (if any) of these interested me enough to pursue her. Second there are the later impressions. Which of these criteria, if any, factored highly in my deciding to become engaged? Comparing the two can also illuminate where I was wrong in my impressions, and where Jenny changed or adapted over time. So let's collate these into a table:

Criterion	First	Later	Wrong	Change
Fluent in English
Pretty, presentable, elegant
Lithe and not "top heavy"
Comfortable in high class social settings	a
Educated or self-educated, and well-read	a
Mistress mentality, not requiring 24/7 commitment or full-on relationship	a
Willing to share city by city or similar situation	a
Entrepreneurial and goal driven
Compassionate and very giving
Positive, upbeat and fun attitude
Analytical and rational	a
Exposure to science or technology; ideally a geek	a
Excellent email and written communications, does not need a lot of "phone time"
Funny, wicked or dark humor
Creatively expressive in some way, written or otherwise	a
Organized and able to plan	a
Fiscally responsible	a
Comfortable and confident with her sexuality
Loves men	a
Compatible fantasy life, willing and able to create interesting situations and scenarios
Sexually highly skilled and open-minded
Ideally 25 to 30 years old
Ideally bisexual but preferring men	a
Ideally traveled, preferably in Asia

Okay, so I was wrong a lot. Not only about Jenny, but apparently about what I wanted from an ideal woman. Fluency in English was a big one, but perhaps even more so was my purported need for mistress-like flexibility and freedom.

For a deeper look at this, let's look at the relationship schema I defined earlier:

1. Shared abstraction of Relationship: believing and sharing a vision.
   
2. Shared abstraction of Socioeconomic investment: a commitment to a society and an economic system, such as entrepreneurship, science, social justice, social relativism, etc.
   
3. Shared abstraction of Interaction schema: example shared elements include intellectual, professional, social, sexual, exploration, sharing, friendship, romance, etc.
   
4. Shared abstraction of Symmetry: this is not bilateral symmetry, but rather balance.
   
5. Shared abstraction of Obligation: for example a social or legal contract, that is, something that has penalties.
   
6. Shared abstraction of Operating constraints: recognizing the needs, strengths and weaknesses of the individuals and relationship, and building matching pragmatic operating constraints around the relationship.

On these I did better. I have written elsewhere about our relationship as a third party, operating constraints, and obligations enforced by promises, rules, truth and pride. Socioeconomic investment, interaction schema, and symmetry bear some closer analysis, as they appear related to why I am engaged to Jenny.

With regard to socioeconomic investment, we are both strongly invested in entrepreneurship, social justice, the importance of science and education to civilization. But deeper than just these words are the risk taking and pride we have independently staked in each of these (before meeting each other). Few people have put as much personally on the line to pursue these areas.

Symmetry sounds like a certain bust since I am far wealthier and more established than Jenny. Yet the very manner by which she deviates from the "ideal woman" criteria above shows how she balances the relationship. No, this is not some kind of rational vs. intuitive pop psychology. Rather Jenny has the ability to face me down, something very few people can do. And she does it with a logic of her own. In particular she has incorporated a compassion into her rational model, which is something I have not. I do not entirely agree (or perhaps understand) her model, but it is one that balances out mine. I'll also discuss sexual symmetry below.

Finally there is interaction schema. This is a rich topic. Once again, the examples I listed (before I had even met Jenny) for the most part turn out to be the ones we achieved: professional, social, sexual, exploration, sharing, friendship, and romance. Note that the professional shared interactions were limited to Asia, where she and I collaborated on our respective businesses, whereas I am global. The big missing examples of interaction schema for us were intellectual and social. Intellectual because, frankly, we do have different intellectual interests. And social because in Asia, her background was known to several people in my business circle and was considered entirely unacceptable.

But just as important as the interaction schema I listed before, there were interaction schema that I did not. Ones that I thought were too trite, childish, weird, personal, or cultural that turned out to be shared. Some early examples that we found surprising, in no particular order:

Solitude and togetherness: We have a similar inability to form certain kinds of relationships, friendships, and social status. We dislike social activities although we are able to be charismatic. Jenny enjoyed solitude like no other woman I knew. Time alone was respected. At the same time we enjoyed time together, sometimes talking but often silent, reflecting each other's incoherent joy into coherent bliss. It's a bit difficult to explain, our strange sharing of behavioral elements of Asperger's Disorder. For example our acute focus on minutae and strange rituals. We have started building our own strange shared rituals now, in which we take great delight.

Aggressive honesty and respect for dialectic: This is covered elsewhere extensively, but we were brutally and explicitly honest with each other. We negotiated and set expectations. We fought and made up a lot. And we learned a lot about how to make our relationship stronger.

Childhood beatings and kindness to children: We were both beaten a lot as children but would try hard not to cry. Although we would never beat another person, we also were compassionate about what drove our parents to do so. It is a strange contradiction we discussed quit a bit, particularly in the context of aging/dying parents.

Faithless religion: We had both evolved a strange rational approach to religion which was tantamount to incorporating our feelings of human spirituality, while inventing our own approach that denied faith. And also made us the worst kind of heretics.

Faith in true relationships: Many people believe in True Love but few really analyze it. Few spend as much thinking, creativity, and dedication to the topic as, say, a True Religious Zealot. But we have. Whether it is this blog or a six-year old continuous hand-written journal dedicated to the topic, these artifacts are the tip of the iceberg of thought given to this topic.

Being bad in the usual way, being good in unusual ways: We have shared much in how from an early age we were considered a "bad kid," yet as we grew older, found rather unique ways to be considered very exceptionally good children. And how this shaped the way we approached work and other parts of life, and how it had become an extension of our pride and individuality.

Peter Pan syndrome: We are like little kids, although that sounds trite enough to be pathetic. But it's true.

Sexual connectivity: We fit together in a variety of new (for me) ways. This deserves an entire section later.

Certain others that can't be mentioned here because they are pretty odd. Or, like our shared views on music, media, politics, charity, and money, they are actually pretty trivial or at least more common. Maybe later.

So perhaps Jenny is an ideal in a manner I did not expect. Or perhaps I am merely too flexible. But this pattern of thinking, hopefully, does help answer the question of Why Jenny? and sets the table for part 3.

Why Her? Part 1: How I know...

I have a woman friend (not girlfriend) in England. I have written about her before and called her "N". She was always interested in how my analytic attitudes toward relationships would turn out. Maybe part of her curiousity was because I had declined to enter into a relationship with her on several past occasions, although she was smart, attractive, and in demand.

When I told N of my engagement with Jenny, her first email was, "You could get almost anybody: entrepreneur, scientist, or supermodel. Why her?"

It wasn't said in a mean or petty way nor to flatter. N is very rational: a published mathematics lecturer on logics and has even written a somewhat popular layman book on computing. She truly was curious.

And it was a good question.

So this post will try to answer that.

Obligatory warning: because this post is about a woman I love, it could be painfully saccharine to my dear readers. I won't mind if you move on. Really. But I will also cover some of what I have been doing over the past year, and where.

How I Know Her
"Wherever you go, go with all your heart."

First off, I know Jenny better than most people, despite having first met only 15 months ago. That's because I have spent about five out of the last ten months traveling with her.

Now when I say traveling with her, I mean serious travel: we spent every hour together, 24 hours per day (with only a few exceptions noted parenthetically as "non 24x7 days" in the list that follows:)

Where	# weeks	non 24x7 days	Fantasies fulfilled	Notes
Bhutan	1	0	1	It's not the cold, it's the lack of air...
Patagonia	1	0	1	That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
Henan Province	1	0	0	Spectacular sculpture garden of God
Tahiti	1	0	2	Exclusively by boat
NYC & driving New England	1	1	1	King of the hill, top of the heap...
Dubai, Barcelona, Mexico	2.5	1	1	Hottest, hotter, hot
Paris, Iceland, London, Canadian Rockies	3	2	3	A photo of us kissing at a trendy club in Paris showed up on an Internet paparazzi site!
Bintan, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur	3	2	1	Rode the Orient Express. I mean the train.
Bali, Maldives, Sri Lanka	3	0	2	Our first big outing.
Misc. Asia travel	3	~	2	Variety of scattered 2 to 3 day trips. (Macau is nearly as tacky as Vegas.)

It's a lot of vacationing. By the end of the year, I may have vacationed more in a year than I have over the previous decade.

Not all of it was luxury travel, by the way. That actually does get boring after a while. (I will try to blog on some of this extensive travel elsewhere, to be announced later.)

The list above does not include all the time we spent together at Jenny's place or mine. Even some of these were notable, for example the four-day in-city mini-vacation we just finished last week, wherein we hit a few shows, she hired a small set of fireworks over the river to celebrate our engagement, and she arranged a costume party that fulfilled a few more fantasies.

In short, we have come to know each other quite well through concentrated doses of time spent together.

In November we will visit Canada and Hawaii, and then maybe Tahiti and Australia before the end of the year, depending on family schedules.

Recently Jenny's ability to travel is being curtailed by her startup activities, but as I've mentioned before, in Asia a lot of work is done through delegates. Over the last year her startup had several delays due to things like permitting for construction, business and finance, as well as school schedules. But these delays permitted a lot of the travel listed above. Finally, I am able to profit from senseless bureaucracy! I always suspected that somebody profited from stupid government rules, but never thought it would be me!

Meanwhile, my businesses have taken off even though I have spent little time with them. Hmm... that tells me... um... well, it tells me something. Let me get back to you on exactly what.

So let's leave at this: we know each other fairly well. Not perfectly by any stretch, but more than the 15 months might otherwise indicate.

Now let's get back to the "Why her?" question in Part 2...