Yesterday I had a bunch of friends over at my place and I was so happy to hear that not a single one of them had watched the series finale of Friends the night before.

Then again, we had come together on a Friday evening to watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, so take that for what it’s worth.

My mom is coming to town today and I’m thrilled that she’ll be here though Mother’s Day (‘cause that means there’s a good chance I won’t forget to call her this year!) Oksana and I have spent the whole week in a suitable state of mind. That is to say, we’ve been freaking out.

Oksana, as expected, has that we’ve-got-to-clean-the-house-because-oh-my-God-your-mother-is-going-to-SEE-it mentality. And I, for the most part, agree with her. If my mom and stepfather are going to be spending a few days with us, I want them to be comfortable. And by comfortable, I mean: Not preoccupied with the way we live.

You know what? Thinking back… I do believe this is the very first time my mother has ever come to stay with me since I moved out of the house (for good) ten years ago. Why is it that it can feel so natural for us offspring to return to the nest, and yet at the same time feel strange when the parent role-reverses on us?

I don’t know, but I’m sure glad my mom never stayed with me when I was living in my dorm. Or in the trailer. Man, I really should get serious about buying a nice, respectable house.

I’ll get back to that tomorrow.

Back in 2002 there was a fire that managed to wipe out everything I had in storage. That was a horrible experience that I wouldn’t wish on anyway, but there was a silver lining – the insurance check pulled me all the way out of eight years of accumulated college and credit card debt.

Oksana and I married a few months later, but it took us quite awhile before we got her INS paperwork sorted out. Eventually, she received her temporary green card and (coincidentally on the same day) was offered a decent-paying job. The intervening six months, where I was the only one working, weren’t that bad. I’d trade having a single-income family over a pile of minimum interest payments any day.

Very quickly the benefits of a dual-income, debt-free, children-absent family were realized. Around our first anniversary in August, after Oksana and I had figured out how to manage our money with (seriously) five bank accounts, we sat down to talk about creating a savings goal for the end of the year. $5,000 seemed attainable.

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Not too long ago a friend commented that I always seemed to find cool and interesting places on the Internet. He asked me why I didn’t have a section of my web page devoted to my favorite links. Honestly, the thought had never occurred to me.

I’ve rarely found the huge list of links that some people put on their web pages very useful. In theory, it sounds like a good idea to organize, categorize, and publish your bookmarks for the enlightenment of the online masses, but I never can seem to find a good implementation. One of the most annoying virtual experiences is to click on a link that someone professes to be worth your time… only to have a 404 error show up in its place.

Relishing my propensity to type, I thought I might take a different approach to sharing my favorites with you. Instead of supplying a list, I thought I would take some extra time to tell you why I link the site is worthwhile. (Apologies to those who come across this web log entry 10 years from now when all the URLs are broken.)

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Way back in junior high, I had an English class in which we were assigned a writing project. I forget the details, but I do remember that when our teacher gave us the homework, we all thought that the minimum page requirement (Five pages? Three?) was extreme. Here we were in eighth grade and we’re supposed to write high school-length papers. Was she kidding?

The topic was something along the lines of, “What you would do if you were stuck on a deserted island?” I was freaked, but once I actually began writing, I found that I enjoyed the process immensely. I thought up the situation that put me on the deserted island (a shipwreck), described the survival materials I found in the wreckage, wrote in a fellow student as another protagonist, and then had us befriend a tiger. At some point along the way I discovered that writing five pages wouldn’t be a problem… keeping the story under ten would be.

I kept that paper right up until my unfortunate storage fire last year. I don’t think I ever actually went back and read it – I’m sure it was awful – but I do recall seeing the big “A++” on the cover page. If nothing else, I probably wrote more than any other student in the class.

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Sometimes it’s not easy to purchase a trendy pet. If you happen to live in a land-locked town of 30,000 people and your pet store is fresh out spiked animals, you’ll likely find that you’ll have to fly in, say, an African Pygmy Hedgehog.

Last year, for Oksana’s birthday, I looked into doing just that. I inquired at the Wee Fishee Shoppe first and it so happened that they had just parted company with their normal hedgehog distributor and had not yet found another. We scoured the Internet for information and learned that purchasing one in Alaska was at least legal, but we’d need to find a licensed… grower of hedgehogs first.

Fortunately, there is one in Anchorage. I called them up and got the important information: They sold hedgehogs for $125 each. It’s expensive, I guess, but not unacceptable. In further conversation, though, it became much more complicated.

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Just slightly over a year ago, I had probably half of my worldly possessions go up in flames. I posted an account of it on my web site, but I always meant to follow that up with the (mostly) happy ending.

Barely two months before the fire caught us by surprise, my fiancée and I were engaged in engagement ring shopping. Throwing that whole “two month’s salary” thing right out the window, I had decided (without the DeBeer’s corporations input, thankyouverymuch) that a $1500 to $2000 ring would adequately demonstrate my love for her. We looked at Costco. We looked at over-priced jewelry stores downtown that typically cater to tourists with more money than I. Some rings were cheap, some we wanted to buy, but unfortunately, none of the ones we wanted to buy were cheap.

One day, Oksana was going through her old jewelry and pulled out a gaudy ring that could almost fit on my thumb. It had a gigantic, eight-pronged CLAW holding a diamond that was large enough and clear enough that we decided it just had to be fake. Long story short: It had been a gift her dad had given her mom way back in communist Russia and a $20 appraisal revealed that we really shouldn’t carelessly misplace it.

The choice was obvious: The ring had to go and the diamond had to stay. We laser-inscribed a single facet of the stone with her family name; created a custom, Oksana-original band; and promptly called USAA, my auto insurance company. They informed me that: 1) Yes, they’d insure the ring, 2) but it would be a “rider policy” hence we would first need to pay for renter’s insurance, and 3) we could save a lot of money by switching Oksana’s car insurance — but that’s beside the point.

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