23 years and counting with Terry

My wife started out beautiful. And now in her mid-40's, she has moved on to "hot."

This is the mother of all mixed blessings for me. Any guy wants to be married to "hot," but it also puts pressure on you to try and match your wife's hotness, which I honestly cannot do.

So I try to make up for it by earning money to support our family and occasionally writing nice, heartfelt things about her.

This blog post, for the record, is the latter.

Tomorrow is our 23rd wedding anniversary. We're just two years away from our silver anniversary, which is funny in that:

• It feels like we got married two weeks ago. I'm not quite sure how we got here so fast.
• I remember my own parents' silver wedding anniversary, and man, they seemed a lot older to me then than I feel now.

But 23 years it has been, and every June 6th I give her credit for having stuck it out.

Terry knew I wasn't very handy when we got married, but at some point in the months after our wedding when we were living in our first house, I'm sure she thought, "Oh, you were serious about that not-being-able-to-fix-stuff thing? Like, really serious? I didn't know it was going to be this bad."

And so she has become quite the handy-woman, with occasional and greatly appreciated assistance from her father, the saint-like Tom Ross.

She is also chief cook and bottle washer, head homework helper, vice president of interior design, and director of finances, and she holds a myriad of other positions (all unpaid) around our house.

I have invested my life in her because I figured it was about the safest bet I could make, and for once it turns out I was right.

For the remainder of my days, I will go where she goes, I will essentially do whatever she tells me to do, and I will continue to stare at her sometimes with the vague expression of a guy who can't believe his own dumb luck and realizes he has most definitely outkicked his coverage (click on that link if you're unfamiliar with the expression).

Happy 23rd anniversary to my hot wife, whom I'm hoping can get around to tightening the faucet in the downstairs bathroom sometime this week because it's loose again...