Two Years and An I-Do Later...

Today's pretty crazy to think that two years ago I asked Hailey to marry me, and we've been married for a year and a half now. Tomorrow is also the day I asked her out, so these two days mean a lot to us. Looking back, it's great seeing how even in two years how far we've come

First stop on the date for us was the Zoo. I'm still trying to get her a meet and greet with a baby monkey (her one of many life goals).

Next up: Santa Monica Pier

Now, this is where I open up about a story I haven't posted about, and only friends we've told in-person have heard. 

Hailey really shouldn't have married me. Not after what I did to her leading up to it. The entire day went great. Spent the day at the zoo, enjoyed the pier, and enjoyed LA. I had dinner plans at Charthouse in Marina Del Rey for us that night, and it was going to be awesome. But, because of a variety of issues, mostly related to family, I was scared out of my mind to ask her. I knew I wanted to, but I let the pressure of what my family would think get into my head and I nutted up in the worst way. Everything I was going to say or do just went out the window, and it fell apart. 

Well, you're probably thinking, "Jake, it couldn't have been that bad, I mean, she still said 'yes', right?" 

YEAH. It was that bad. To me it was. 

So, walking up to Charthouse, we saw this odd couple. The dude was incredibly short, balding, sorta fat, etc. chick was incredibly tall, hairy..just a dynamic that threw off the balance, y'know? 

Hailey leans over to me and says "what I was that much taller than you?" 

I replied, with no filter to my idiotic thought: "what if I was that much more bald than you?"

STRIKE. ONE. 

You see, Hailey has alopecia. Don't know what that is? It's basically a autoimmune issue where her white blood cells get bored and attack things like hair follicles. It's not really bad for her, but occasionally she'll get a bald spot, and we go to the dermatologist and take care of it. 

So, I just called my future wife bald, and made fun of her autoimmune issue. 

I somehow made it through dinner without flubbing anything, but afterwards didn't stop me from

STRIKE. TWO. 

We're walking on the beach of the marina, she looks over to me and says "hey do I have anything in my teeth?" I go...."yeah, a fake one."

Firstly, my wife is a badass. She lost a tooth to a basketball fight in high school. Like, how many chicks do that?! Second, I'm a jerk. Like, how many dudes say that?! 

You'd think I'd be good by now. I get the jitters out of my system and I proceed with the night..

You'd think that it'd be smooth sailing by now, and it'd be all wonderful, right? 

There wouldn't be anything coming up around the corner buuuuutttt.....

STRIKE. THREE.

So, Hailey's wedding ring is actually her late-grandmothers. It was given to me to give to her by her family. I thought this would be a brilliant idea. Why? I have NO FREAKING CLUE. 

But, I ask her if she wanted a surprise. She knew it. She had every idea in the world of what was to come, and I shouldn't have said anything and just dropped a knee then and there. Nope. 

I hand her an empty ring box. Told her that the ring could be hidden at the restaurant, at another location, back at home, and she had to guess. 

I WAS SO DAFT. It never occurred to me that this was a bigger issue than I had thought, all because of her late grandmother's ring being in the possession of someone else. I was just trying to find a fun way to do this. 

I told her to close her eyes, I got behind her and dropped to a knee. Told her to open her eyes and she turned around. I asked if she wanted to marry me, she said yes and cried (I think more out of relief the ring was safe and the torture was hopefully over...). I hugged her, we kissed, and stood there for a long time. After that, we drove back home, with Hailey calling as many people as she could, elated. Why, I don't know. I just struck out, and yet I still somehow hit a home run. 

But now, because I made such a horrific mess of the proposal, I now intend to find a creative way to ask her every year to be my girl all over again. A lifetime of different proposals makes up for one bad one, hopefully. Either way, I'm the luckiest guy in the world to have a girl that puts up with some massively bad blunders. 

Trunks Mandatory

This month I'm going to post a fair amount of Jungle Cruise/Adventureland shots. I finally got around to editing my Disney shots in lightroom over photoshop, and man...it's a difference. I've totally fallen in love with that program, and just how simple it can be to batch edit photos. So, to start things off, here's a shot of the infamous Elephant Bathing Pool, and as you can see, they all have their trunks on.

Black Hole

What if I told you about a place where time stood still. Where you hear the same thing every five seconds, and you can't speak at all? What if that place was real? What if that place is where I am? Time has frozen. The words are blurred and repetitive. I can't speak at all. 

This, is Senior Seminar. 

Where the professor says 'kaaaay?' at the end of every sentence or question. 

Where the students eyes are glazed over like the donuts they had for breakfast this morning. 

Where we can't do anything to help ourselves. 

Apparently we're halfway through the class. I really don't know. I've almost given up hope. Hunger has taken over my midsection, roaring and growling, competing with every monosyllabic 'kaaaaay' coming out of the professor's dry, boring body. 

I don't know what's happening. I keep pinning food recipes in the hopes of having a celebratory feast if we ever make it out of here alive. 

Did I mention there aren't any windows? For all I know a revolution could be happening outside, and I'd miss it because I paid a man I don't know, but have to trust completely that he's smarter than me, to teach me what he knows on a topic. In fact, a revolution is happening. A presidential debate is going on as I type, which is another step towards the deciding factor of who will run this country next year. 

OH, look! We're free. Dinner time. 

Last Roar on The Mountain

I don't even know really what to say, so I'm just going to ramble. I wish I kept in touch with him more. But it sucks losing a friend. When I was in high school, Disney had re-imagineered a new animatronic for their nighttime show Fantasmic!. At first it had its issues, and at the time when I was really apart of the fan sites, it started as a joke. I created an account as the maleficent dragon in Fantasmic!. Soon followed many other animatronic twitter accounts. The Red Headed Wench from Pirates of The Caribbean, Esmerelda on Main Street, the seagulls in Nemo Bay, and Harold the Snowman...all of them were creating these stories and adventures through twitter as a fun way to create this sort of...alternate realm where the AA's had a voice. It was a blast, and quite frankly, I forgot about it after I stopped writing my part.

But, today I found out some really terrible news. Brett, the guy who wrote as Harold died in a freak accident during a flash flood while hiking.

It's insane. He was such an amazing guy. Funnier than most people I knew, had an incredible wit to him, and was so incredibly happy any time I talked to him. His writing as Harold brought so much entertainment to the Disney fan community. It was fantastic to read what this guy could write. He would weave these after-park-hour stories with his 'neighbors' the Nemo bay Seagulls about eating butter packets, or chasing off the ducks, and if I remember right, there was one time he wrote that he stole the Red headed girls' dress and had Harold run around in drag. It was just wildly off the wall, fun stuff.

Yet here I am, writing out my memories of a guy only two years older than I am, who died far sooner than he should have. I've been mulling over it since I heard about it, and I can't wrap my head around the fact that he's gone. I mean, just a few weeks ago we were chatting on Facebook about stuff, and now the conversation's ended. The roars on the mountain are fading with the breeze whistling through the caverns, and the Gulls lost their neighbor. I'm gonna miss this guy, and all the amazing things he was. Rest in Peace, Man. 

Faith Restored

My life really isn't too terribly exciting. I've got a 9-5 job, going to school, the usual stuff, y'know?
But my job is a bit different than most. I work with developmentally disabled adults at a autism facility (basically a school for these guys during the day). It's not the easiest thing to do, but it pays well, and is a good placeholder until my college classes are over.

So most days I'm on a van run that takes the clients back to their homes they live at. It's easy enough. Ride in a van, make sure no one has a temper tantrum, and go home. But, one of my clients' moms is going back to junior college to get her degree. She's had a lot to handle in life, and is doing her best. Dad's a truck driver, other siblings of this client are in and out. Mom's doing her best she can. She takes the bus cross-town to get to the campus.

She called before classes started and tried to work out a system of meeting up with us in the afternoon at one of the bus stops to drop off her kid. We worked around it, and accommodated her. That alone was enough her to give us a lot of thanks and gratitude. It wasn't a big deal to us, we were just doing business.

But, last week she missed the bus.

Now, from the campus to where we pick up/drop off, it's probably a solid 25-30 minutes on the bus route, with stops included. So when she called us in a panic, trying to figure out what she was going to do, I just told her not to worry, we'd drive cross-town and drop her kid off there.

You think we just had given her a million dollars.

I haven't felt or seen the gratitude this woman showed us in a long time. I'll get to the reason I'm even writing about this in the first place in a minute. She was in tears by the time we were done on the phone. Said things like "Thank you so much, this means so much to me" and "this is a godsend". She was ELATED, and that was just on the phone.

We get to the school, and she's still wiping tears away. She hugged me, thanked me and the driver again, and went back to her afternoon/early evening classes with her autistic son in hand.

So, think about this: she's a mom who is working, has an autistic son, takes the bus to the junior college to get her degree to then try and get a better job, while her husband is truck driving to bring in money, with older kids out of the house already. If you want a role model in perseverance and dedication to getting through life, she's number one on the list to me.

This struck me as we left the school. I didn't think about it until about halfway back to work, but she's literally the real MVP. I'm not looking for a pat on the back for helping someone out. I don't care about what I did. I care about how that lady reacted. She was genuine, she was truthfully, and legitimately grateful just for something that we would have done for anyone that was in a tight spot and couldn't pick up their kid the usual way. That's just what we do.

But what struck me, was that she didn't expect it from us. She was trying to find a way to do it on her own. She was looking for any and every option before she even asked us for help. I don't see that mentality much, nowadays. I see a lot of people whining for a handout, or complaining when they don't get the exact thing they asked for from someone. It gets old, and unfortunately becomes the norm when you hear the complaints for so long.

This woman stood out to me because she was grateful for something as simple as us driving cross-town to drop her child off, rather than us standing up and saying "nah, we'll just wait at your house, you can come here".

The point is: it feels a lot better on both ends of the story when someone is truly grateful for something you did for them, and something you did for someone that truly needed help is grateful for you doing it. There's been times I've tried to help people in the past, and then they come back at me with "well this isn't what I wanted, why did you even do this for me in the first place if you aren't going to do it right?". I feel like crap after hearing that, because all I try to do is help someone else out to the best of my ability. Where is the grace, and thankfulness from people anymore? It's such a rare occurrence by people, that this feels bad to write about. It's sad that we live in a world where expectancy trumps gratefulness in terms of lending a hand to humanity.

This lady gave me a bit of restored faith that there are still people out there who are grateful for the help, and don't expect it. I just wish there were more of her in the world.