My wife married me…again!

After years of kicking and screaming, I finally broke down and got a Facebook page.  So far it is mostly a blur, but it is an entertaining distraction to things that I don’t want to do right now…

One of the unanticipated benefits was that my wife married me!  Katherine has been a Facebook user for a few years (and has heard all of my nearly constant complaints about what an idiotic thing Facebook seems to be).  Maybe it was payback, maybe pure love, but yesterday after I established my FB account, she changed her status, and FB declared us man and wife.  How lovely, after these nearly 30 years!  I had no idea what bliss I had been missing.

Which gets me back to my original goal of my blog: to try to document how I got from being a shoe repairman to a biochemistry professor.  It all makes perfect sense to me, and anyone who is interested in the part leading up to now should just back track in my blog (don’t worry, I don’t post much).  I left off the story as an apprentice saddle maker with Mr. Ginder.  During this period, after I dropped out of college for a second time, Katherine I and decided to move to the forest outside of Santa Fe and build a house.  We were 20 and 21 years old, blissfully ignorant, and in love (looking back, the only things that seemed to have changed over the past 30 years is our age).

We bought an acre of land in the Santa Fe National Forest, past the little village of Cañada de los Alamos.  We had no water, no electricity, no phone, no neighbors closer than ~1 mile, and absolutely no experience building anything.  I didn’t even know what a 2×4 was and had never used a power tool (still didn’t need power tools, except our chainsaw to cut wood).

One nice day, after we had lived in a tent on our land for a few months, Katherine and I were walking in the forest and were talking about lots of different things (a habit we still have to this day).  Somehow the subject of marriage came up.  Some of the factors moving us in this direction were our great, but very traditional Spanish Catholic neighbors, the Pradas.  They had 16 kids, and the family had lived up there for generations, mostly earning money by breaking and selling wild horses.  I even bought my horse, Logan (aka Psycho) from them.  But I digress…  We thought it might be easier to be accepted by the Pradas and other local families if we were legally married.  We also had already bought land together and had shared in each other’s college dropping out.  It certainly wasn’t for the tax-break!

So, on that lovely day in the forest, we decided to tie the knot.  Consistent with just about everything up to that point, we had only planned for about 5 minutes, and the only things available for an engagement ring were Ponderosa Pine needles, which we each tied to the other.  Top that, Facebook!