The Wedding

So, I got married last Saturday.

It was an awesome, awesome day, absolutely perfect - we were married at Lazaat hotel in Cottingham, which was a great venue and the staff there were really helpful.  My wife undertook a huge amount of planning for the big day, which made it run like clockwork and I just have to say really could not have gone better!  A lovely ceremony, brilliant food (the hotels' handmade profiteroles are worth a mention - generally hotels buy in ready made profiteroles, but these guys make literally hundreds of them), great guests - thank you to all the family and friends that made it on the day or sent their congratulations, I got to do a speech (I do love being the centre of attention), my wife is wonderful and looked even more amazing than she normally does, my son looked very cute in his suit, so many people came and helped doing stuff on the day too... it was just a brilliant day.

Plus, I keep discovering new bits about the evening celebrations, mainly due to the fact that I drank far too much on the night, and whenever anyone says to me "Hey Mike, do you remember when xxx happened?" only then do the memories start to come back - there was a lot of dancing going on that evening.

My mum wrote a brilliant blog about the wedding, if you want check it out at http://ravenmagical.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/a-wedding-to-remember.html

In other news, I slept with socks on.

For some reason for the last week or two the skin on my hands has been really dry, no matter how much skin cream I keep putting on, so my wife hit on the idea of literally coating my hands in cream, and put socks on to allow it to soak in.  My hands are actually healing a bit now so that's a good sign.

The good news is that the guest posts will be continuing for the near future, supplemented by the odd post by myself - we're going away on honeymoon at the start of July (a weeks cruise around the Norwegian Fjords) so fortunately the stack of guest posts people have kindly provided will keep the blog going in my absence.  Feel free to send me more! :)

And finally I heard today that one of my travelling books (#tbook18)is headed for Chicago, it's really nice to hear that they are on the move!  For more Travelling Book Project stuff go to the website - http://www.travellingbook.eu/, I might take the opportunity to distribute the last couple of travelling books I have when I go away next month.

Guest Post: Marriage

As I've got a bit of a busy summer (marriage and honeymoon awaits!) a few people have kindly volunteered to help me out with a few guest posts.  Today Tim Clark of Life, Explained, one of my favourite blogs of all time, has stepped up, and I felt it appropriate for Tim's blog to be posted as I'm getting married (unless something has hideously gone wrong!).  Thanks Tim!

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Photo:EscapesTD

Hello, Mike Raven, the owner of this blog is off on an extremely dangerous, potentially suicidal mission.  He is getting married.  Knowing the end is potentially closing in can be liberating, invigorating, and providing a sense of freedom, and fearlessness that is overwhelming.  Since Mike is feeling so cavalier about life, and living, he has agreed to let me write a blog post.  Hey, what does he have to lose?

It makes sense to write about marriage, since that is why I am writing this. Besides, I am kind of an expert, I am married after all, and have been for over twenty five years. To the same person, I can’t think of her name right now, it is right there, I can see it. Just kidding, I know her name.

Marriage is a sacred pact, a commitment, and it shouldn’t be joked about, too much, but a little sense of humor is a healthy addition to any sacred pact.  I am fairly certain the Egyptians would not have tried to conquer the world so many years ago if they had not taken everything so seriously.  A few jokes might have kept things civil enough to save a lot of lives.

Oh, sure they tried, a little.  Here is a typical joke from that time period.

“How do you stop a Nubian from charging?”

“Build a series of defensive fortress to the south, right along the border, and fill them with heavily armed soldiers.”

Obviously, the ancient Egyptians were expert builders, look at the Pyramids, and the Sphinx, but lacked the comedic timing and subtle word play to be truly successful. Marriage needs a little comedy to stay strong. A couple needs to negotiate, as well, give and take these are important skills.

Let’s look at the Star Wars trilogy, sextuplet, uncertain number of movies. If the Empire and the Rebel Alliance could have sat down over a nice breakfast, or lunch, and each side would have given just a little so much pretend tragedy could have been avoided.  Think of all the make believe lives that were lost as make believe cities, and fictional planets were destroyed across immeasurable fictional distances.  Think of all the money, trillions of whatever monetary units are used by the Empires and the Rebels, could have been used to make things better on Hoth, or Alderaan, or Kamino.  You see how important communication is to a marriage.

All kidding aside.  I raise my coffee cup and toast your successful life together.  I hope everything is sunny and wonderful for you and your family.

Mineral Water and stuff

Attribution: W.J.Pilsak at the German language Wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

The other week, I had mineral water.  Of my own volition.

That's right - I was thirsty, so I poured some from a bottle into a glass, and I drank it.

To fully explain this, I probably need to go back in time a bit.  You see, when I was a kid, I didn't like mineral water, or spring water, or soda water, or carbonated water of any kind.  It tasted nasty.  I liked lemonade and other fizzy drinks (I assume that they had some decent additives which covered up the flavour of the bubble or something) but when it came to water, I just wanted the stuff that came out of the tap.

I remember the first time having some sort of fizzy water, I was at someones house and had asked for some water, and instead of a glass of tap water, this strange liquid was presented to me.  I certainly hope that I wasn't rude enough to complain about it, but I do recall being amazed at how nasty it tasted.  I don't think a small tumbler of water ever took me so long to drink.

My gran periodically attempted to convert me to bottled water - she'd came back from shopping, clutching a new bottle of clear unpleasant effervescent water to apparently drink.  "This one is different," she'd say optimistically, "you'll like this one!"

I never did.

And yet, somewhere in the last twenty years, I've become able to drink the stuff, and beyond that, I could even say that I enjoy it.  Of course it's not the same as a pint of beer, but it's entirely acceptable.

After carrying out a minimal amount of research from here, I understand that as we age the number of taste buds we have decreases, and the ones that are left atrophy (aka they wither away like one of the potted plants in the back garden that I've forgotten to water again) so your sense of taste diminishes - this was probably aided by a large quantity of deliciously hot curries in days gone past.  So I'm pleased to think that fizzy waters are probably just as nasty as they ever was, but I just don't notice it nowadays.

In other news - early next month, I'm getting married.  I'm very much looking forward to the big day of course, I am aware however that things are likely to get very busy around the wedding day, plus we'll be going away at some point in the next month or two for a honeymoon.  So I'm after guest bloggers to help fill the gaps!

If you're familiar with my blog, I tend to ramble on about pretty much anything, in the vague hopes that some of it might be entertaining.  If you think that you could do a post, get in touch with me - my email is mike.raven@gmail.com and my Twitter is @ravenswingthog .  I did write some guidance for guest bloggers a while back if you want more info.  I can't say exactly when your post will be going up (but if it's topical I'll endeavour to slot it into an appropriate time) but I'd be very grateful for your interest, and of course you're welcome to link back to your own blogs and the like.

Finally I've noticed that this, if Blogger is counting correctly, is my 390th post, so I'm ten away from my 400th (I can do math).  I'm not one for marking big numbers - mainly because I forget to keep track - but I'm going to try to do something half decent for the 400th.  Then again, I might just forget all about it and realise in three months time that I've passed the 400 mark without a comment.  Watch this space!

Lots and lots to talk about!

I'm really tired at the minute, because I've gone to the gym?

Why have I gone to the gym, of all places, on a Friday night?  Well, I have a new video series started!  And it's basically me tracking my "journey" (sorry, it's a bit of a fluffy word to use) while I lose weight over the next year in preparation for getting married.  The videos are a bit different to my usual ones, they're a bit more serious (and the quality has gone backwards which is very annoying - got some black banners at the sides of the first couple of videos, I'll watch out for this on future ones) but hopefully it'll provide some regular stuff to watch.

 Catch the first video here.

In other news, I came across something slimy on the kitchen floor last night.  I don't know what it was, but assuming that it was a small slug, I decisively plucked it from the ground (using a kitchen towel obviously, there's no way on earth that I'd touch it with my naked flesh) and lobbed it out of the window.

It might have been a bit of a pepper now that I think about it, but at any rate I dealt with it.

And of course I have to ask, are you watching the World Cup?  As past readers of my blog may be aware, I'm not a huge fan of football, but the World Cup is a bit of a special occasion and I do try to make a bit of an effort to watch some of the games.  Plus we've got a contest going on at work to see who could predict scores most accurately, and as things stand after 3 games I've attained four points out of a possible nine, which isn't perfect but it's a start, and there's a lot of matches to go.  We're also doing a sweepstake and I got Chile, which I'm fairly happy with, I certainly think that they've got a chance of winning (although Brazil are definitely the team to beat!) and hopefully it'll make for some interesting matches over the next few weeks.  Do comment and let me know who you're hoping is going to win.

If you enjoyed this post you might like this one which features ice cream instead of creativity.