If I Were a Child Actor, I’d be Billy Mumy

Fortunately my long absence hasn’t been due to a deep-space screw-up by Dr. Smith. Of course I don’t have a robot sidekick to hang out with either, and goodness knows there isn’t a tech geek that wouldn’t love to have one of those.

So it probably goes without saying that I’ve been busy. Busy busy busy. But it’s been a good busy, and I’ve been having very positive things happen in my life. Let me recap what has been the best thing to happen to me in a while…

In Columbus we have this great thing called Skybus. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a discount airline that sells seats for as little as $10 each way. My mom and I had scored some of those really cheap seats to go visit my brother while he was doing an internship at Microsoft last year, and so when a new block of seats went on sale last September I determined that I would grab a cheap seat for a trip to Los Angeles. In January. Yep, I booked five months in advance for a trip out west just because it was exceedingly cheap.

So fast-forward to January and I nearly cancelled my trip because I didn’t have any real plans for anything to do out there, and since the ticket had been so cheap it didn’t really matter. But something just wouldn’t let me do it. A little something in me kept saying I should take the trip, and a family that used to live in our area found out I was headed their direction and invited me to stay with them. Free room and board, so I was set.

Meanwhile, around Christmas I had joined eHarmony. It was like a switch flipped in me and I was ready to journey into the world of experimental non-singleness again. Sure, I’d dipped my toe in the water a couple times over the past few years, but with only mixed success. I liked eHarmony though, and how it handled matches and so forth. Very much more a service, rather than feeling like I was hanging out in an online bar trying to attract people with pithy comments.

So yeah, I met someone on there. Several someones actually, but one of them in particular I was being a bit more chatty with. She lived in Las Vegas, but I really wasn’t minding because retty much everyone I was matching with was in and around the Utah area. Limiting yourself to “only Latter-Day Saints” seems to do that. Then a couple days before heading out to L.A. on my little excursion I got a lesson in west coast geography and learned that L.A. and Vegas really aren’t all that far apart. So I dropped a quick note about how I was flying out there in two days and if she was interested it might be fun to get together somewhere.

Get together we did, and had a nice time, if not slightly overwhelming. The other Mormon’s in the room will be the one’s to appreciate this, but because of a previously scheduled ward outing, I wound up being invited to join in a trip up to the Vegas temple. To do sealings. For a first date. Everyone assumed we were married, which was only slightly awkward (a lot) but we both had a good sense of humor about it. Then we had dinner with her one sister and brother-in-law that also live in Vegas, whose house I then crashed at for the night. In the morning her brother-in-law invited me to help with an Elder’s quorum move, so I went. Why not? It was just all kind of surreal, so I was just going with it.

And the weird thing was that, though it all caught me a bit off guard, I like it. Most guys in that situation would have found a door as quick as they could, never looked back, and never called again. And while I did eventually excuse myself back to L.A. later that day and got my head around what an over-the-top first date it all was, I was by no means wanting to pretend it never happened and close that chapter.

We’ve talked since then. A lot. Every day or two, for hours at a time. She’s visited out here since then. My kids love her, and so does my family. I’m headed out there in a couple weeks to meet more of hers. Probably in shifts since she’s one of sixteen kids, which is nearly impossible for me to fathom. The thought of one person having that many kids makes my uterus scream in anguish, and I’m a guy. Guys don’t have a uterus after all, and yet somehow I have one in phantom form that’s just screaming at the top of its lungs. Go figure. But from what I’ve gotten to know of her family so far it obvioulsy has worked very well for them.

So I seem to be on a good path here. Someone I really get that really gets me, shares the same values, probably has more experience raising kids than me given that she’s number five of the Family von Trapp, and isn’t a closeted lesbian. Like I said, we’ve been talking a lot, which accounts for me not being around here much. Hard to type up an entry when you’re on the phone until midnight since the other person is three hours behind.

All in all I’m feeling pretty good with things. There are some other things brewing too, but I can cover those later. No midnight calls tonight, but I do need to get some catching-up sleep from the others I’ve had recently.