I have received many requests to give a little more information as to where the Logan and Torrie Schultz Family lives. Well, without giving out too much information to the cyber-stalkers out there, here is a picture of our house:

We are house-sitting for a great old man who is now in an assisted living care center closer to family. They needed someone to take care of the house until they can come back in the summer, and Torrie and I are renowned house-sitters, so everything worked out really well!

There’s a few things that you will notice about the house. First of all, there is TONS of land (comparatively) around it. Remember, we aren’t out in the country, we are in Seattle. This is fun because on nice days, Torrie and I get to work around the yard, clean things up, cut up and haul away fallen branches, nice manly work around the yard chores. And, it’s great for the spontaneous games of smear the queer that always seem to happen at our house.

Second, it’s a fairly old house, and they slowly added on and changed things around, so we’ve discovered some oddities like a lot of light switches that don’t make sense, our bedroom doesn’t have heating cause it was once where the garage was…things like that.

Third, the name “Twin Oaks” comes from the two trees (they’re not actually oaks, but hemlocks, but twin oaks sounds better) that mark the driveway. You have to be pretty careful, or you’ll hit a tree. Both Torrie and I have never hit either tree, and she even drives an explorer.

Fourth, the man’s wife who recently passed away was an avid collector of spoons, the decorative kind that you can get in gift shops and gas stations? Yeah, she loved them. There are some pretty cool ones, actually, although I never thought I would be saying that about spoons…

So there it is. All in all, we really like it here, and are very grateful to have such a neat (and an opportunity to save) house to live in as we begin our married life together.

Graduation

My sister's going through finals, my wife's birthday is Sunday, and for some reason I'm in a reflective mood.

The following words are from David Brooks, a columnist from the New York Times. He's trying to figure out what to tell people as he speaks at the graduation ceremony of the high school that he graduated from 30 years ago.

"At the moment, I’m thinking of talking about the chief way our society is messed up. That is to say, it is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness.

The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s no graduate department in spouse selection studies. Institutions of higher learning devote more resources to semiotics than love.

The most important talent any person can possess is the ability to make and keep friends. And yet here too there is no curriculum for this.

The most important skill a person can possess is the ability to control one’s impulses. Here too, we’re pretty much on our own.

What young people really need is a lesson in how to choose a spouse and how to make and keep friends.

These are all things with a provable relationship to human happiness. Instead, society is busy preparing us for all the decisions that have a marginal effect on human happiness. There are guidance offices to help people in the monumental task of selecting a college. There are business schools offering lavish career placement services. There is a vast media apparatus offering minute advice on how to furnish your home or expand your deck."

Interesting comments. I would second all of his comments without reservation.

I'd also like to express my gratitude for the institutions that did teach me those important lessons: good parents, church and the other members, and a couple of very good role models at school.

While I'm still working on the ability to control all of my needless impulses, I think I'm doing a pretty good job at the friends one, and I totally hit a home run with the spouse thing.

Shoreline, WA has a great library and is part of the King County Library system. One of the adventures that Torrie and I like to do is check out movies from the library…for free!!! We just request them and when they come in, they send us an e-mail. So over the last few months we've seen a number of movies.

After watching the A&E version of Pride & Prejudice one weekend (my copy, not the library's) Torrie decided to go on a British Victorian Novel Movie Rampage, also known by it's acronym, BVMPR. As we have gone through several of these, we have had the good ones (Wives & Daughters, pretty good) and some bad ones (Bleak House).

However, even more fascinating than the actual movies themselves, is what Torrie does during the movies.

She predicts what happens with such accuracy that I swear she must have seen them before, several times. Last night was a great example.


After watching the third period of the Pens beating the Red Wings, and the last two minutes of the Magic beating the Lakers (have to prove my masculinity) we began to watch the Masterpiece Theatre version of "The Secret Life of Mrs. Beeton". Unbeknowest to me, but Mrs. Beeton wrote a very famous cookbook in the mid-to-late 1800's and EVERYONE in England knows about her. Kind of like the Victorian version of Betty Crocker.

Anyway the movie was a semi-autobiographical story of her life, meeting her husband, writing the cookbook, two babies die, blah blah. (Warning. Spoiler Alert! If you or someone you know may have or potentially could contract BVMPR, you may not want to read any further.) With about a half hour left in the movie, Torrie turns to me and says:

Torrie: "This is boring, let's turn it off."
Logan: "Are you sure? The back of the movie says that she died very young because of a 'deep, dark secret'. Don't you want to find out what it is? The suspense is killing me?"
I said this in a half-joking manner, the same that I always have when talking about Jane Austin-type movies. As a man, I have to make fun of them, but deep down I usually like most of them. I also hate not knowing what happens in the end.

Torrie: "Meh, it's boring, and I bet her husband gave her some disease from that trashy girl in his wild pre-marriage days."
Logan: "Are you saying that he gave her syphilis or something? Where did you get that from? That prediction came out of nowhere."
Torrie: "That's exactly what I'm saying. Maybe that's why their first two kids died. Let's go clean the dishes."

We went to the dishes, while I went to wikipedia to see what really happened to Mrs. Beeton. And I quote:
The TV drama seemed to imply the speculation (put forth in Kathryn Hughes' biography) that Beeton suffered from syphilis contracted from her husband, and that this may possibly have led to her death and those of her two children, although there is no firm evidence for this speculation.

Are you kidding me??? How could Torrie have possibly known???