Hi folks. Been a while. I've got a bunch of news, so here goes:

First things first, I got engaged. I'm wicked excited about it. My lady came out to visit me in upstate NY. We drove over to NH to visit my uncle who was really good to the future Mrs. Ascanius when she was in the hospital. After spending a couple of days there we decided to swing back through southern VT to see some college friends. I told her we had to go someplace really nice and we decided we could get her wheelchair to Sweet Pond. Or rather I decided, because she'd never been there.

We sat on the bank for a while watching the water bugs swim by. Then I said "Oh, I brought your birthday present." Her birthday was a month before, but we'd been on different ends of the country so I hadn't given her anything yet.
Well, what I had for her was a wooden box that I'd commissioned a friend of ours to make. He made it all from some sort of beautiful curly elm, or some such, and carved a butterfly on top. The butterfly is because when we got in the car accident that left her in the wheelchair I would sing the Magnetic Fields' song 'You are a Splendid Butterfly,' to put her to sleep.
So, she unwraps the box (it's wrapped in a scrap of old t-shirt and tied with shoelace) and looks it over and is pleased. She puts it up to her face to smell it. I say, "well, why don't you open it?" As she does I get down on one knee. The ring is on a little dowel that rests horizontally in slots in the side of the box for that purpose. I take the dowel out and remove the ring and hand it to her. "Will you marry me," I ask?
"Are you asking me to marry you?"
"Uh huh."
"Really?"
"Yeah, really."
"Oh."
"Well?
"Yes, of course."
So we sat for a while longer and watched a gentle rain roll over the pond from the cover of a pine tree.

So, I'm engaged. In other news I went to Israel and Jordan for a couple of weeks. You know what? I'll get back to that in my next post. For now friends, I'm engaged and I couldn't be happier about it. We still need to decide where we want to end up. She's really set on Oregon and I'm all bout Vermont, but we've got time to figure that out. The next two years until the wedding, to be exact.

It's official. I'm moving back to Vermont in August, and staying together with my girlfriend. I'm going home!!!!

And, this thing is freakin' crazy.

I think knitta is my new favortie thing of the day. They're graffiti-fiber artists.

I think this video is pretty great:

Maybe a little naive, but maybe that's not sucha bad thing.

I had a pretty fantastic birthday weekend. The good thing about having your birthday fall on a holiday weekend is there's always something going on. This year, as I said in an earlier post, my college was having its sixtieth anniversary. There were a lot of old friends in town, on account. We started the evening with Chinese food and scorpion bowls. I don't know the people in this photo, but the drink is all to familiar



After that we headed to the local brewery and I got drunk as hell. I saw a bunch of friends I hadn't seen since my birthday party last year, and I couldn't drink the drinks as fast as people were buying them for me. And one particularly sweet individual baked me a couple of sweet-potato pies!




We ended up drinking on a friends porch until the wee hours.

Saturday we all slept late and then went down to the river. I got a hell of a sunburn, but had a mihty fine time. There was swimming and fly fishing, but I mostly hung out on the banks and played banjo for the pretty ladies. We had a BBQ that night of meat a friend who was moving had to clear out of his fridge because he was moving. More drinking until the wee hours and camping out on the soccer field at the college.

Sunday was all about brunch at the diner (which, sadly, no longer serves bloody maries), softball at the college, and driving home with my two friends who are living in upstate NY. With a stop for garlic-cheddar burgers at Wahoo's in Wilmington.

One of my friends asked me to go to Israel with her. She's going for a wedding in August. I think I'll go. I've been planning to go to Israel for years and this girl is a lot of fun. She'd be good to travel with. I mentioned the idea to my girlfriend, and it made her a little nervous. I think it'll be alright, though. She really doesn't have anything to worry about, and I think she knows it.

So, that's it. It was a great weekend. Surrounded by old and seldom seen friends at all times. Happy birthday to me.

EDIT:

I talked to my girlfriend last night, and it turns out she wasn't nervous about the Israel thing at all. What I thought was nervous was confused. See, right after I told her about staying in town with a boy named Christian, I told her about the Israel plan with a girl named Kristen, so she was just trying to figure out which one I was talking about. I know how that sounds, but she really doesn't get jelous. She doesn't lie either. She's like a vulcan. But, you know, a hot vulcan like T'Pol.

I made it! I stayed in a cheap hotel in Minnesota, and then with my Aunt in Chicago, and then I drove all the way from Chicago to Saratoga in a day (950 miles. whoah.) and now I'm home. Not for long, though. I'm heading to Vermont with a couple of friends once they get off work. We all went to college in Vermont together, and then I moved to Oregon for law school and they moved to my hometown to sell solar panels. Anyway, we're going to Vermont for a reunion (Marlboro College is celebrating its sixtieth birthday), but it's also my birthday, and I think we've got a fair contingent together to celebrate and get drunk in Brattleboro with me. Yay. I love having people around for my birthday. Before last year, I hadn't really had a birthday party since I was eighteen. We had a big old party last year, and now we should have at least enough people to fill a Vermont bar. Things are looking up.

It's just going to be good to get back to Vermont, if only for the weekend. I've been away far, far to long.

Here's where I went to college:



Here's Bratt:



Here are some kids in Brattleboro taking advantage of the fact that Vermont law does not require you to wear clothes as long as you show no signs of arousal:



And here's some fairly hot girl I don't know posing in the ruins of a brothel I do know:

I'm in Miles City, Montana tonight. I didn't get as far as I would have liked today because I slept horribly last night. I'm up way to late again tonight. Oh well. I don't really have any set schedule except that I'd like to be home on the friday. It's my 26th birthday. That's closer to 30 than it is to 20, which makes me kind of nervous. I guess I just need to get over the fact that I'm a 'grownup' now. Yech.

Montana is a nice state. It's not rugged like Colorado to its south (I've never been to Wyoming to the immediate south, so I can't speak to that), but it's a hell of a lot greener. I'd take green over rugged any day.

I stopped for lunch at a nice truck stop. I didn't actually stop for lunch, I stopped for gas, but when I went inside to fill my various coffee receptacles I saw that there was a diner attached to the gas station. It was filled with old couples drinking coffee, but no one was eating, so I asked the lady at the gas station area cash register "are they serving lunch over there, ma'am?"
"Honey, they're serving anything you want."
I got biscuits and gravy and hashbrowns even though it was the 3:00 in the afternoon. That's one thing you can't really get in the East. Biscuits and gravy, that is. What is it with truckstops and rediculously huge portions? I'm not complaining, but the four dollar biscuits and gravy was served in a kiddy pool. Is it that truckers don't like stopping, so they eat larger and fewer meals?
The waitress was cute and shy-flirtatious. That always makes sitting at a truck stop counter more fun. We talked about the finer points of tabasco sauce and it's application to hashbrowns.

I listened to Stephen King's latest, "Lisey's Story" on audiobook. It was pretty good. Kind of a cross between Gerald's Game and the Talisman, if you read him at all. Listening to / reading Stephen King makes me want to write. I think that's because his main characters are writers as often as not. When I was reading the Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series I wanted to join the navy. I think I'm just suggestible. Maybe I should get into John Grisham, to help motivate me through law school .

I yeah, and I got my application for a Tom Waits group turned down. What the fuck? How do we not have a Tom Waits group allready?

So, I'm done with law school for the time being. Good enough for me. I couldn't get any work in the legal field for the summer, but I'm feeling kind of good about that right now. I need a break. I'm going to go back to upstate NY to throw myself on my old man's mercy. I think he's going to get me an internship with the city planner and put me to work re-roofing his cabin. As Robert Frost said, home is that place, where, when you have to go they have to take you in.

I was originally going to hit the road tomorrow. I think I'm going to put it off a day. I haven't been able to pack my car up because I've had my girlfriend staying with me, and I can't fit her wheelchair in my car wth all my stuff packed up in it. So, pack the car in the morning, clean my house in the afternoon, and spend one more night with my girlfriend at her house. She's got cats and I'm allergic, but I found a fresh inhaler when I was packing my stuff up, so I should be fine overnight. Score.

I've been trying to decide between the northern route and the southern. The northern route is a lot prettier, passing through Washington, Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota, but it sends me right smack through Chicago. The southern route, heading through Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa isn't quite as pretty, but it's flatter, thirty miles shorter (big deal), and skirts around Chicago. I'm leaning towards the northern route, mostly to avoid Nebraska.

If all goes according to plan, I'm going to arrive home just before my birthday, which is next Friday. I'm going to make my best friend drive me to Vermont and get me drunk. I haven't had a designated driver in eight months, which means I've only been drunk twice!!! Not nearly enough.