Reader, I married him.
Mr Smile and I got married on 18th May, and I must say, we did quite a good job of it. We looked quite nice, and as far as we could tell, everyone had a rather pleasant time.
It turns out that organising a wedding is quite a lot of work, particularly if you involve your mother, who transforms from someone who is vaguely pleased you're dating someone Not Too Bad, into someone who appears to have spent the days since you were born thinking up ideas for things without which your wedding will not be complete.
Anyway, we're all married now, and so far all is going reasonably well. I say 'reasonably'; there are ongoing discussions about how many teddies are allowed in the bed (I have lived my entire life being unable to have any less than 'all of them', in case the left-out ones get lonely and sad; whereas Mr Smile is happy to let them live lives of quiet despair, apparently), and this may not be resolved for a while.
On the other hand, we made a good job of merging our libraries. Between us, Mr Smile and I own all the books, so what we needed was a System. We devised the following:
We started with 5 bookcases, plus the shelves in the study. The study has traditionally been home to my Enid Blyton collection, all my Christian books, and reference manuals, so it made sense to leave them there. One bookcase was filled with DVDs, Wii games etc, so we left that as it was as well. This left 4 bookcases, which have been designated thus:
1. The one in the hall for books neither of us has read
2. The one that used to be in my bedroom but is now in the living room for books which I have read and Mr Smile has not
3. The one that used to be in Mr Smile's house but is now in the living room for books which Mr Smile has read and I have not
4. The one that was always in the living room for books we have both read
2. The one that used to be in my bedroom but is now in the living room for books which I have read and Mr Smile has not
3. The one that used to be in Mr Smile's house but is now in the living room for books which Mr Smile has read and I have not
4. The one that was always in the living room for books we have both read
Obviously, within each bookcase, books are arranged according to the standard Dewey Decimal System, in alphabetical order of author. An initial problem has been that Bookshelves 1 & 3 are full to capacity, so Mr Smile is only allowed to read books from Bookshelf 3, and I am reading from Bookshelf 1. Also, books are joining Bookshelf 1 at a rate far beyond that at which they are leaving, and we've already had to build an annex on the top.
In other news, I got sent to Methodist Conference for a week. This is the kind of thing that has potential to be incredibly dull, of course, but in this particular instance was really Rather Good, and I came back all inspired. Then I gave a talk about it in church, which now seems to have gone viral (in Irish Methodist circles, at least). So I may become famous as someone who had a good time at Methodist Conference, which would be Quite Something.
So that's you all up to date, and I'll let you know if anything else happens.
