No new stories forthcoming as of now because my wife and I have decided to remodel our kitchen before moving on with our lives.  We just decided it the other day, as easily as deciding to pick up McDonald’s on the way home.  We will probably look back for years and debate the financial merits of our decision, but sometimes you just have to go with a gut feeling, especially when you have one at exactly the same time.

That’s how Sally and I operate.  When we both have an idea at roughly the same time, or are feeling the same about handling a particular problem we are facing, you may as well write it in stone: that’s just what we’re gonna do.  And this is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which is I am a Star Wars person, while she is a Star Trek person.

I’d like to say we are both a couple of nerds, but that would fail to recognize the important differences in our quirkiness.  I, on the one hand, am a pure nerd, head full of useless information, always eager to share it, lacking in so many ill-defined social graces.  But my wife is a dork, and she knows it.  She comes from a family of dorks, strange but witty people who joke and pun all day and care not a whit what other people think of them.  They hold up signboards with their names… in airports…in front of people.  A nerd can’t help but make a fool of himself; a dork takes foolishness to an art.

Anyway, our marriage is fueled by these fine distinctions, as well as our polar opposite affinities for sci-fi humor.  She speaks to me in Trek references and I speak to her in Star Wars phrases.  And we understand one another.  The other day I was headed home from an excursion to Home Depot and I called her up.  The conversation went like this:  “Hello?” she answered.  “Hey, babe.”  “Hi honey; are you headed back?”  “I need you to move the fleet away from the Death Star,” I informed her.  “Okay, I’ll throw on some shoes in a minute.”  She knew that I meant I wanted her to move the Tahoe away from the front entrance so that I could load and unload the truck more easily.  No other explanation necessary; the woman knows me.

I still hope that she will one day acknowledge the superiority of the Star Wars saga.  She still loves William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and the whole Star Trek enterprise (a pun :-P).  So for now, she drives at warp speed while I travel in hyperspace.  She invokes logic while I use Jedi mind tricks.  She’s a dork from the Midwest and I’m a nerd from a galaxy far, far away.  And we like it like that.