Love Thursday: 56 Reasons Why

With all the talk around the Internets about love and marriage, it seems appropriate, after lo these many years of reading Love Thursday posts at Woulda Coulda Shoulda and elsewhere, to write one of my own. I thought about saving this post for Valentine's Day or a birthday or anniversary, but today just seemed to call out for it.

Here are some reasons I love the Renaissance Woman and am grateful to be married to her:

1. She's wicked smart.
2. When you go to a show with her, she mutters under her breath about the sound cues.
3. When you watch a period movie with her, she can (and does) point out all the out-of-period instruments being shown or played.
4. She has really gorgeous hair.
5. She can get more done than anyone else I know.
6. Even when we lived in the States, she spelled words like colour and valour in the Canadian way, and also pronounced "project" "proe-ject".
7. She makes book indexing sound hot.
8. She's read children's books that I haven't read.
9. She is always up for an adventure, especially if it involves a boat or a camper van.
10. She is indefatigably optimistic when planning vacations and excursions and always thinks we can do about twice as much as it would ever occur to me to do. I probably never would've done or experienced half the things I have if she hadn't been enthusing and planning and nudging me along.
11. She has a true appreciation of ice cream.
12. She never uses electric lights on the Jul tree, only candles.
13. She has introduced me to wonderful things like the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, tall ships, the Baltimore Consort's raunchy Renaissance songs, and scrambled eggs with cream cheese in them.
14. Even though she'd never done library story times before we moved, she is now much in demand for her storytelling skills--she can even tell a felt board story/song while playing the guitar at the same time, a feat I've never heard tell of before.
15. Weird and obscure reference questions make her really happy.
16. Even when she was a kid, she never wanted to be "normal."
17. She doesn't care how they do it in New York.
18. She has a lovely singing voice.
19. For her best college friend's wedding, she composed a song and wrote out the music on special paper.
20. She composed a song for our wedding, too. A waltz.
21. But she made sure that the first dance we danced that day was to an old Danish waltz, that made her extremely unsentimental grandmother cry.
22. She encourages me to do things when I don't think I can do them.
23. When she's procrastinating, she vacuums.
24. She loves the Mermaid Girl with all her heart and soul.
25. She is always learning, and I learn from watching her live in the world with her open and curious mind.
26. She keeps her friends for a long time.
27. She volunteers.
28. She has an excellent sense of direction, except in New York City.
    
29. She is a great bluffer.
30. She replaced all the crappy doors in our old house with gorgeous old doors, mostly scavenged from various places like junkyards and hotels that were being torn down.
31. She has the spirit of a freelancer, which means she's always coming up with ideas and figuring that one out of four or five will actually happen.
32. And when it does happen, it can be amazing.
33. Without being an ostentatiously political person, she can toss off an incisive political analysis of everything from office power dynamics to health care to the lesbian s3x wars of the 1980's.
    
34. She's a little unclear on some aspects of American history, on account of growing up in Canada, but she can tell you all about the Pig War and the Plains of Abraham.
35. And she can identify more British monarchs than anyone else in a room, even a room full of Canadian librarians.
    
36. My favorite picture of her from our (first) wedding is actually from the wedding rehearsal: she has a fancy clip in her hair, and she's wearing a beautiful purple dress, and she's leaning intently over some meticulously drafted diagrams, one hand pointing to an exact spot on the paper, as she explains to all the gathered spouses of the Wedding Party exactly what they have to do in order to quickly and efficiently turn the room and set up the tables between the ceremony and the reception.
37. She and the Mermaid Girl have the exact same pointy chin.
38. Even when she is scared of things, like job interviews and dentists and the mess in the basement, she overcomes her fear and does them.
39. She invents words, like "outcluded" (when you are left out of something) and "vulch" (that thing some people do when they watch the food on your plate and then ask if you're done with it so they can have it. Also can apply to following people in parking lots so you can have their spot).
    
40. She loves diners, especially old-fashioned ones with all-day breakfast.
41. And she loves surprises.
42. She picks people up at the airport.
    
43. When, very very early in our relationship, I woke her up in the middle of the night because I couldn't figure out how the state of Oregon could maintain its infrastructure and services if it didn't have a sales tax, she did not break up with me or clomp me on the head but instead muttered helpfully, "property tax," and went back to sleep.
44. She understands the language of cats.
45. And also the language of insurance forms.
46. She appreciates talents in me that I didn't know were anything special, like the ability to assemble Ikea furniture.
47. She likes to do something different for every birthday so that she'll be sure to remember it. Once she went up in a hot-air balloon. Another time she had a croquet party. Another time she made a bunch of her friends hike through the rain and mud to a hot spring she'd read about.
48. She taught me how to henna my hair.
49. She has a deep appreciation of a lot of things about Judaism, but she doesn't want to be Jewish herself, partly because she prefers disorganized religion to organized religion.
    
50. She likes and appreciates my family.
    
51. For fun, she organizes singing groups.
52. She likes to take the Mermaid Girl on bike rides.
    
53. She believes that many different times are happening all at once, right now.
    
54. She knows how to install flooring, how to create sound effects for a storm or a subway, and how to construct a Boolean search to find anything that anyone in the whole universe might want to know.
    
55. She was nerdy before nerdy was cool.
56. She has beautiful eyes.
57. She makes me laugh.
    

Happy Love Thursday, everyone.