t's not really summer until you find your pores weeping their saltiness while you sit motionless in your home. I have an informal rule about picking one type of temperature to complain about, and dealing with the other silently (by dealing I mean scowling and mumbling to myself in a dark room). I choose "cold" most of the time, because winter is a sucker's game, and Illinois is filled with suckers (Rod Blagojevich was elected, you know). All of this to say that yes Virginia, summer is here, and Uncle Andrew can't complain about it... except he's going to.

Our house is hot, steamy, muggy and gross. We move the air with fans, and have a tiny AC mounted in the bedroom wall. It dumps the heat out into our sanctuary, which is a tad inefficient. Every night I threaten to go buy an ice-breathing, BTU snorting monster, and Sally contends it's fine the way it is. Some day...

Lately we've both been working in the sanctuary, not on the sanctuary, but just using it as essentially our garage to do other projects. Sally has an art & craft show in three weeks and is feverishly (thanks to the weather) building her collection of decorative industrial candlesticks, and I'm trying to finish building a dining room table. We lack the dining room, but dammit, we will have a table. Last night I stained the top of the table, and soon I'll be actually sealing it and putting the dumb thing together. It's huge, and heavy, and has been a really enjoyable "first furniture" project.

The literal sticking point has been the drawers. Unlike me, they are unsmooth. I've tried all sorts of ball-bearing based drawer slides, and they require either a lot of adjustibility in other areas, or a whole lot of precision from the get-go. I've got neither, so I'm going to build slides out of wood, and use a paste-wax to make things all slickery. Anyhow, I've got a few progress shots. We're pretty excited about the table, since we can't seem to finish much else...

Today is also, shockingly enough, my four year anniversary. Hold on a sec, because it gets even weirder - it's also Sally's four year anniversary. Presidents come and go in four years. People who are five or more years old can only celebrate that after the end of four years. College comes and goes in four years (for some it goes sooner, for some it goes on... and on and on...). If there's something I've learned in four years, it's that Sally is a procrastinator, which explains why I have yet to be served the divorce papers. The 4th year is supposed to be the "fruit & nut" year, which is great as we've spent the last four years awash in that very thing. I think we're stockpiled for fruits & nuts well into our 40th year, thankyouverymuch.

A couple other photo sets I wanted to point out; One was the wedding of our friends Steve & Despina. Steve's the brother to some friends from Sally's ISU days, Dave and Janka. All of us were together in Germany in 2007 to see Dave & Janka tie the knot, (7/7/07 - they made it very easy for even the most senile to remember). This wedding was in Chicago with a Greek Orthodox ceremony and a reception on Michigan Ave (I think? It's a big city - and it was dark). The crowd was very much a crew of Chicago natives, and everything smacked of The City. It was classy and had a very traditional vibe. It felt similar to my brother-in-law Randy's wedding in Philly. And for those who remember 4 years ago today, neither of those weddings had as attractive a bride, nor as irreverent a dark-lensed groomsman. And a totally unrelated bunch of pictures that I really liked taking - a wasp that was laying eggs, I think in my tree. It was gross and amazing. I told the wasp that I was a professional, and everything would be very tasteful.