A Happy Valentines Day To My Bride

Today I need to point out just how lucky a person I am. Fifteen, almost sixteen years ago I met my Bride. It was a beautiful afternoon in the geographic center of the universe and I was a happy young freshman at Texas Tech University in Lubbock Texas. I had spent a busy day failing all my first semester classes but it was still all good. After all, it was steak night at my dorm's cafeteria. Steak night was always a special event at the Bledsoe Hall Cafeteria, the food was pretty much the same as always but the presentation was much better. After you moseyed through the regular serving lines to get the useless filler part of the meal (vegetables and anything not meat) the next stop was the meat trays. They pulled out the sterno and the chaffing dishes and made it look all formal, even the serving wenches (the serving wenches were also students mostly from the nearest female dorm complex Doak/Weeks Hall) were also dressed up. I sauntered up for my slab O' slightly over cooked bovine and there she was, the absolutely most beautiful serving wench in the whole wide world, all of Texas even. She was an Angel in a pink dress and she said "Would you like steak or chicken?" I was speechless. Her voice was as music and this radiant vision just asked me if I wanted good red MEAT for my supper. I was smitten from that moment forward. My heart belonged to her but she didn't yet know it. It was a long and arduous campaign. It took the better part of the semester to get here to even notice me. Luckily her friends were friends with some of my friends and I was able to weasel my way into to her social circle. I earned her friendship by our sophomore year and by the final weeks of the last semester I actually got her to agree to go out with me. We dated steadily through out the remainder of our time at Tech. Somewhere along the way she actually fell in love with me and we were married on 31 August 1991 just as I started my third semester of my senior year (Yes, I had to spend 4 years including summers to "fix" the grades I earned for myself on during my first semester). My Bride has always been singular most wonderful thing that has ever occurred in my life. Every day I give thanks that the good Lord provided her to me. In our 12 almost thirteen years of marriage she has followed me to seven states and has lived in 11 different houses. She has bore me three wonderful children (Chaos, Mayhem and Entropy), she has endured difficult duty stations, deployments, much separation and most importantly she has put up with my somewhat not so normal personality through the good and the bad. So on this Valentines Day I would like to tell my Bride:

"Thank you for making me the luckiest person in the entire world. Thank you for your patience, your understanding, and your spirit. You are the foundation of our family. Thank you for being my Bride I love you with all my soul."

No matter if I ever accomplish anything else in my life, it is enough to know that I earned her love. Everything else is just gravy

TO THE TYRANT NEVER YIELD