So today’s my 9th wedding anniversary and I’m a thousand miles away (literally) from my blushing bride. Because traveling for work sucks sometimes.

But I have the weekend off, and they actually have airplanes that actually fly into cities near Centralia, places like Seattle and Portland where they have actual airports and everything. And highways leading to them from Centralia, even. And I have a rental car I could use to drive on one of those highways to one of those airports to get on one of those planes and fly home to see my blushing bride and our beautiful daughter and spend, if not the actually anniversary date then the two days after, with them. And they have this thing called the Internet that has websites like Orbitz.com and Expedia.com and etc. and you can use these websites to book tickets on these planes so that you can drive rental cars on highways to airports and get on these planes and fly home.

So that’s what I did. And now I’m in a Shilo Inn hotel in Portland, OR and the view is fabulous:

This is actually a decent hotel. I mean, sure, the view is fabulous, but the rest of the hotel? Not bad. It’s no Four Seasons, but then I’m no Brad Pitt (who we once saw at the Four Seasons Manhattan, pardon me while I namedrop). And the best part is that it’s free-for-me since the General Manager of the radio station gave me some scrip to pay for my room. (Scrip = long story. Suffice it to say = free-for-me.

And the GM also did another nice thing for me today, assisting Beth as she tried to celebrate our anniversary with me without me. She did some detective work by calling my boss and finding out how to get in touch with someone at the station (the GM), and she called him and explained who she was and what today was and how we were apart and could he please arrange for an on-air dedication of a song to me? And then make sure I heard it? And so he did, and at about 3:30 the GM and just about every other employee at the station (who were all in on it), literally dragged me into the lobby to listen to the DJ on their country station dedicate George Strait’s I Cross My Heart to me from Beth.

You can listen to the dedication here. (Warning: it’s large, about 1 mb.)

It was my first-ever dedication and it was very sweet and very cool and I had a roomful of people watching me react to it and I had to play it cool and try not to show that I was really touched and got all verklempt and I think I played it off, but this is me letting Beth (and all y’all too, I guess) know that I really was touched and verklempt and… Well… Awwww….

So I did a little something for Beth tonight, too. I think it’s pretty clear what it is, but I’m not going to go into why it is or where it is or what it represents. Beth knows.

And now I’m off to bed. I have a 6:00 a.m. flight in the morning and I need to get some beauty sleep. It hasn’t helped so far but hope springs eternal.