earth day

spent a couple of hours this afternoon breaking down cardboard boxes and sorting through the recyclables that kris stacked up during phase one -- unpacking and storing wedding gifts -- in the great reorganization/beautification project of the all-new married household.

sometimes i wonder why i break down bunches and bunches of cardboard boxes when i could just as easily trudge back and forth between the house and the jeep to load them in their original shape.

i do remember the sign at the cardboard recycling container saying put them in flat and i guess by the same logic, i do know they occupy a lot less space and are easier to handle with the air taken out of them.

i figure if i'd put every box i'd taken apart into the back of the jeep whole, they would probably take up all the space behind the back seat. as it is now, they almost all fit in the space of the box for the rachael ray saute pan we got from brad and his wife.

most people, i think, just crush them, but i don't think this makes them any easier to handle. they're deformed and still difficult to stack or carry. i prefer the order conferred by breaking the attachment points and unfolding. taking them apart is something of a marvel.

when you think about designers and engineers, you normally think about machines and buildings. but looking at the glue points and other parts of adhesion, you can see some thought and work went into creating appropriately strong storage structures that require an elegance and economy of folds, interlocking slots and a minimum of costly adhesives.

a few months ago, i took apart a box that once held an apple ipod. it was a handsome package -- very sleek, modern-looking and, most importantly, protective. but the real beauty was taking it apart.

there was this wonderful profusion of folds and tucking that, once fully disassembled, revealed a box held together by one piece of adhesive tape. from attached lid down to the cut-out in which the ipod was nestled, it was punched, cut and creased out of one piece of cardboard. it was an impressive job.

the glass bottles and plastic containers and cans were easy enough to just toss into a bag or box.

i don't feel so bad about the plastics or cans and especially the cardboard, since they all re-use the material without the amount of energy spent originally forming them; glass, though, i've heard requires as much heat to melt down as sand -- which we have plenty of on earth. not so with trees or petroleum.

i do wish the city had a better way of getting rid of styrofoam and other lesser plastics, like the clear packages for batteries. i know the postnet packing and shipping store in town takes foam peanuts and other forms of polystyrene-like materials.

plastic bags are another such iffy proposition. i toss in bread bags and zip-locks. i'm not so sure all the bags i take to the kroger store actually get recycled. kris said she saw an employee sorting out the non-kroger bags.

one thing kris tossed in for recycling was this metal cage-like cover that must have once been part of a decorative metal basket. she said she didn't need a lid and it was just going to take up space, so she decided to get rid of it. my guess is that i'm going to have to throw it into the scrap metal pile.

it's kind of a pity, you know, that the work some hireling in the developing world welded together with whatever modicum of skill the job entailed was now consigned to the scrap heap.

it may have been put together in a factory, but it seems like a lot of work to have a machine designed for. and i bet having a semi-skilled laborer would be cheaper for the manufacturer than investing in a one-use device.

mass-produced as it may have been, the thought that it started on someone's drawing board as a piece of functional art, a work of someone's imagination, and is now on its way to be melted down as a piece of unwanted clutter sort of bums me out.

but i suppose returning it to some kind of use beats having it take up space in an attic or basement where it would serve no purpose at all.

i guess that is a form of conservation, too, where uselessness is rededicated and converted back to usefulness. i suppose i'll call it this year's earth day lesson.

how we got here

this is my new bride and our sort of new cat at the first home-cooked meal of our married lives. (we'd had breakfast earlier in the day, but it wasn't a real sit-down thing; cold cereal, i think, while standing in the kitchen.)

it was last monday, which we took off from work to get settled in after our honeymoon, probably the most relaxing time off either of us has had in many years.

the house then was strewn with packing boxes from wedding and shower gifts from generous family and friends -- a great start for the nest-building project of my darling wife.

after this past weekend, though, she's pretty much done with the kitchen. mostly mopping and scrubbing and polishing left to do.

next up is the living room, which will be home to the sofa from her old apartment, as well as a new leather seat, a wedding gift from my mom.

while we'll likely take our time with the den, my study/office is in desperate need of clearing out and reorganizing to make room for kris' bookcases and the file cabinet to keep better track of our finances and documents.

and so begins the latest chapter of our lives.

the wedding was lovely. oddly, i'll say kris' and my roles were sort of reversed. she was taking her time to absorb everything that was happening; i kept anticipating the next thing to come. i think she took the wiser course.

i can remember specific moments and snippets, but i don't think i can place them in context of anything. kris had the presence of mind to burn the parts that were important to her into memory. she was savoring; i was chewing and gulping.

the reception was non-stop motion. our deejay/emcee did a great job keeping the program moving: first dance, bouquet, garter, cake cutting -- boom boom boom. it was orderly and at a reasonable clip.

the maid of honor's proxy speaker (our publisher) and my best man (my brother) both delivered memorable toasts. (my brother in particular did a spectacular dive bomb and recovery to deliver a blockbuster punchline.)

we paid for just about all our honeymoon meals through the kind indulgences of the dollar dance and pretty much danced the rest of the night away -- which ended at around 9, but factor in the start time at 3, and that's a good day's work. i didn't sleep a good portion of the night because my ankle was killing me from all the gyrations. (on the dance floor, you pervs.)

here, i give a shout out to our buddy and colleague tom, who took literally thousands of shots of us, from the rehearsal through the reception, as his own wedding gift. that, i believe, is the definition of the word "priceless" and for that, we are forever grateful.

we foolishly thought we could be on our way to honeymoon in charley south by, say, noon or 1 the next day. we had barely checked out of the reception hotel by then.

of course, one of the delaying factors was hanging out with my cousin tessie, who was waiting on our other cousin, caroline, who was ailing slightly in her hotel room. rather than sit and wait in her room, i crammed her in along with the remainder of our wedding gifts in the back of my jeep. we went to my sister's to visit my sibs and tessie's seven, new second cousins.

it was nice seeing her because she's the eldest daughter of the aunt who took care of me for almost a year when my parents left the philippines to get started in the states. before auntie fely passed away last october, my mom told her i was getting married; she said she was happy and that she'd be praying for me. it was comforting to have her presence there in her daughter.

my brother and his family was sufficiently delayed from leaving for florida that he caught up with kris and me in virginia, then we convoyed all the way to i-95, where he left and we continued on i-26. we didn't hit town until about 2:30 a.m.

thanks to an awesome gift from our dear friends on the daily mail copy desk, charleston, s.c., was a blast. we picked two foodie restaurants for "night out" dinners -- 82 queen downtown and red drum in mount pleasant -- and spent the rest of the week at some of our favorite haunts -- jestine's kitchen, with our friend chopper, and andolini's pizza among them.

the rest of the time was spent wandering the beaches near our hotel at the wild dunes resort and on sullivan's island, where we had lunch at poe's tavern, as well as downtown.

(we were a little disconcerted to learn that our beloved alternative radio station, 96 wave, had its on-air format changed to "chuck-fm," one of those horrifying, computerized "jack" radio stations. very disappointing.)

we finished the week by participating in the cooper river bridge run. kris did the 10k walk and i signed up to do the run, but walked to the halfway point with kris and ran the rest of the way. part of it was to be with my girl in her first walk across the bridge, but gaining six pounds in a week also kind of does a number to your fitness.

our penultimate meal was andolini's that night with my high school friend debbie, who lives in charleston, and another classmate, lisa and her husband, don. we visited their lovely abode and met todd, their papillion/chihuahua mix (or a "papi-huahua," as don likes to call him).

we packed our bags early the next morning and went to mass at stella maris, a small, old church across from fort moultrie out on sullivan's island. it was probably the only catholic church in charleston i hadn't been inside in the year we lived there. it possessed a proud, quaint nobility, if there can be such a thing. a pair of western omelets at alex's in mount pleasant nourished us for our journey back.

we swung through beckley on the way home to see my folks. my sister joy was there and mom gave us a grilled chicken pizza from tamarack to eat once we got to charleston. we picked up kitty from kris' parents in front of the newspaper office, then headed to the house.

which brings us here and to the rest of our lives ...