The lady sure cleans up good

Our wedding photos are up! Check out our astonishing number of pictures here:

http://www.hartmanphotography.com/howie.htm

Notice how our smiles go from "Yay! We're so blissfully in love!" to "Hey, we're still smiling!" to "My god, if someone doesn't get me a goddamned drink and stop asking me to smile EVERY DAMN SECOND, I'm going to SHRED this dress and hightail it to the nearest Bavarian bar."

Actually, we had much more fun than that -- but it does tax one immensely to smile for FIVE. STRAIGHT. HOURS. It also makes me wish I'd had the foresight as a teenager to stop drinking caffeinated beverages in preparation for the glorious day when everyone and their mothers would be staring at my not-quite-white teeth, immortalized forever in a set of 4x6's.

Our photographer is amazing, by the way. I recommend him if you ever need someone to take your picture for anything (wedding, important birthday, crucial girls-only party that must be documented for future blackmailing).

We celebrated the 4th yesterday by crowding onto a friend's balcony and watching giant fireworks explode right in front of us. After the better part of a six-pack, I could swear those suckers were coming closer with every bang, to the point where the vibrations rattled my breastbone. We spent most of the show twisting the words to God Bless America ("God bless America, except for blue states") and remarking on the unfortunate similarities between firework noise and gunfire. Soon, most of us were naming each new firework pattern after a new weapon or military acronym. Only in Seattle, baby. :)

By the way, here's why I love my husband. Just now, after a period of prolonged silence, he turned to me with a spark in his eyes and said with ferocious intensity, "This variation (in patterns of linkage disequilibrium between different populations) will translate to different sets of tagging SNPs for different populations...the essential prerequisite to my algorithm!"

Oh baby, oh baby. I think I need to start force-reading him Seamus Heaney and Chaucer, just for good measure.