Well, another year of my life has come and gone.  Looking back, I can’t say it was a good year, or a bad year… The roller coaster went in both directions so many times I lost count.  No matter how I look at it though, it was a VERY memorable time.  Ok, ’nuff said on that one.

Borg Tux

To follow up on my last post, well… I did it.  I got the tattoo, and I love the results!  I can’t say enough nice things about Chris and Lisa from Tattoo Mafia (http://www.tattoomafia.net).  From minute one they did everything to make the whole experience a great one.  I was very impressed with them, and with my new tat, and would recommend them to anyone who’s thinking about getting one.

One more wonderful birthday present to note, we got a good report back on Jonathan’s yearly checkup with the Hemotology/Oncology Doctor at A.I. DuPont Hospital.  As some of you know, we actually got Jonathan’s original diagnosis and prognosis on my 30th birthday so this time of year tends to make me twitch a little when the checkup comes around.  This year though, all is good and he’s doing just fine… <insert sigh of relief here>

Ok, now to the quotes.  As I noted last time, I’m a bit behind so I’m going to post a bunch to catch up.  Enjoy!

02/16 – “Love transforms; it simultaneously makes us larger and limits our possibilities. It changes our history even as it breaks a new path through the present.”  – Michael Dorrius

02/17 – “Love never reasons but profusely gives; gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all, and trembles lest it has done too little.”  – Hannah Moore

02/18 – “An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds, for love is measured by fullness, not by reception.”  – Harold Loukes

02/19 – “Love demands all, and has a right to all.”  – Ludwig Van Beethoven

02/20 – Phil was out of the office most of the day;  No quote.

02/23 – (Makeup for Friday) – “Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”  – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

02/23 – “And of course, the brain is not responsible for any of the sensations
at all. The correct view is that the seat and source of sensation is the region of the heart.”  – Aristotle

02/24 – “The truth of love is the truth of the universe: it is the lamp of the soul that reveals the secrets of darkness.”  – Kabir

02/25 – Phil was out running most of the day and didn’t get one out in time.

02/26 – (Makeup for Wednesday) – “A mind might ponder its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach in a day.”  – Ralph Waldo Emerson

02/26 – “The brain gives the heart its sight. The heart gives the brain its vision.”  – Rob Kall

02/27 – “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”  – ‘His Holiness 14th Dalai Lama’, Tenzin Gyatso

03/02 – (Snow Day) – “Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased.  It comes from Heaven, unasked and unsought.”  – Pearl Buck

03/03 – “Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common-sense.”  – Helen Rowland

03/04 – “Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.”  – T.S. Eliot

03/05 – “To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others.”  – Francois Mauriac

03/06 – Hectic Office Day, Phil Forgot

03/09 – (Makeup for Friday) – “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”  – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

03/09 – “The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.”  – Jiddu Krishnamurti

03/10 – “I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for their religion -
I have shudder’d at it.
I shudder no more.
I could be martyr’d for my religion
Love is my religion
And I could die for that.
I could die for you.”  – John Keats

03/11 – “Love is always in the mood of believing in miracles.”  – J.C. Powys

03/12 – “There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.”  – Francois de La Rochefoucauld

03/13 – “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. “  – Rainer Maria Rilke

03/16 – Shannon’s Phone was Dead – No Quote Sent

03/17 – “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”  – Aristotle

03/18 – “Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. “  – James A. Baldwin

03/19 – “Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.”  – Saint Thomas Aquinas

03/20 – “You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love. “  – Henry Drummond

… And she continues to inspire me.

Each year as my bithday gets closer, I tend to look back to what I’ve accomplished over the previous 12 months.  Sometimes, these recollections bring a smile to my face, sometimes not.  This year it’s an odd mix of emotions, however I think the positives greatly outweighed the negatives.

It seemed to be a period of extremes, but all in all I can honestly say that I’ve learned an amazing amount about myself, and what I’m truly capable of.  Without getting into specifics, much of my energies were spent dealing with long-held worries, fears and anxieties and while no growth comes without pain, I’m proud of how much I feel I’ve grown as a person during this time.

This week, I’m taking on one of my oldest, deepest fears;  Needles.  On Wednesday at 4:00pm I have an appointment to get a tattoo… Yes, really.  I’ve always held an appreciation for the artistc component behind tattoos, as well as the committment getting one holds.  However, between the thought of the pain involved, and more specifically of voluntarily allowing needles to pierce my skin repeatedly I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it.  Well, Wednesday that all changes.  I’ve picked a “Geeky” tatoo (go figure) and plan to get it on the back of one of my shoulders.  While the fear is still there, I’m excited to get this done and confront my anxiety head-on.  I’ll make sure to post pictures once it’s all said and done.

Ok, now on to the quotes.

I have to say one thing before I post this batch.  The growth I’ve had over this last year has gone hand in hand with support from my wonderful wife.  She’s always there for me, and after all we’ve been through and done the last twelve months, we’re stronger as a couple than I ever thought we could be.  She’s a constant reminder of how blessed I am.

Ok, and here’s this installment of SMS messages to my Love;

01/19 – “Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.”  – Plato

01/20 – “Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods or steepy mountain yields.”  – Christopher Marlowe

01/21 – “I remember well the day we wed
I can see that picture in my head
I still believe the words we said
Forever will ring true
Love is certain, love is kind
Love is yours and love is mine
But it isn’t something that we find
It’s something that we do”  – Clint Black, “Something That We Do”

01/22 – “Love has the power of making you believe what you would normally treat with the deepest suspicion.”  – Mirabeau

01/23 – “You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.”  – Sam Keen

01/26 – “Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.”  – Woody Allen

01/27 – “So we’re okay, we’re fine
Baby I’m here to stop your crying
Chase all the ghosts from your head
I’m stronger than the monster beneath your bed
Smarter than the tricks played on your heart
We’ll look at them together then we’ll take them apart
Adding up the total of a love that’s true
Multiply life by the power of two.”  – Indigo Girls, “Power of Two”

01/28 – Shannon was out for Surgery

01/29 – “Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit. “  – Peter Ustinov

01/30 – “Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that’s a real treat.”  – Joanne Woodward

02/02 – “The mind determines what is possible. The heart surpasses it.”  – Pilar Colinta

02/03 – “A loving heart is the truest wisdom.”  – Charles Dickens

02/04 – “We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.”  – Benjamin Disraeli

02/05 – “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eye.”  – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

02/06 – “To get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.”  – Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

02/09 – “Love is like a river, always changing, but always finding you again somewhere down the road.”  – Kelly Elaine

02/10 – “The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”  – Allan K. Chalmers

02/11 – “Companioned years have made them comprehend
The comradeship that lies beyond a kiss
The young ask much of life — they ask but this
To fare the road together to its end.”  – Roselle Mercier Montgomery

02/12 – Insanely Busy Day, Phil Forgot

02/13 – (Makeup for Thursday) – “A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults.”  – Charles Kingsley

02/13 – “Each moment of a happy lover’s hour is worth an age of dull and common life”  – Aphra Behn

I hope to get time to post following the tattooing experience, so I should be able to catch back up on the quotes at that time.  Wish me luck!

Well, they say to be careful what you wish for… In my case, I wished for snow.  As of now, we’ve got around 10 inches on the ground, it’s still coming down and the 40mph winds are blowing drifts all over God’s creation.  Oh well… at least when it settles down I’ll have a chance to play with the new snow thrower.

So, has it really been since the middle of December since I posted?  Wow… I can’t even blame Warcraft for the delay as I really haven’t had much time to play lately.  I am finally getting Gadrok leveled up (78 at the moment), but at the rate I’m going it’ll be a while before I hit 80.

Overall, things are good in the Malmstrom home;  Shannon’s finally recovered from some minor surgery.  The kids are doing well in school and continue to enjoy it.  Diamond has been holding fast through the country’s economic turmoil, and seems to be back in a growth mode again.  Shannon and I are still getting out as a couple once a week or so, and having lots of fun meeting new friends.  All in all, life is good.

As for the quotes… Yes, I’ve been maintaining the quotes to my Love each day.  It’s been getting more and more complicated to find new ones that I like and haven’t used, but I continue to send them.  As it’s been so long, I’m going to post some in batches to try and catch up.  So without further ado, here’s the first installment for 2009:

12/15 – “Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.”  – Germaine De Stael

12/16 – “The most wonderful of all things in life is the discovery of another human being with whom one’s relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life.”  – Sir Hugh Walpole

12/17 – “Perfect love is rare indeed – for to be a lover will require that you continually have the subtlety of the very wise, the flexibility of the child, the sensitivity of the artist, the understanding of the philosopher, the acceptance of the saint, the tolerance of the scholar and the fortitude of the certain.”  – Leo Buscaglia

12/18 – “Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.”  – Voltaire

12/19 – “When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.”  – Erich Fromm

12/22 – “I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.”  – Rabindranath Tagore

12/23 – “Only in the mysterious equations of love can any real logic be found.”  – from “A Beautiful Mind”

12/24 to 12/26 – Christmas Vacation

12/29 – “To the world you may only be one person, but to one person you may be the world”  – Heather Cortez

12/30 – “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”  – Thomas Merton

12/31 – “Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another’s heart, or its flame burns low.”  – Henry Ward Beecher

2009
01/01 – New Years Day

01/02 – “Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.”  – Felix Adler

01/05 – “You were made perfectly to be loved – and surely I have loved you, in the idea of you, my whole life long.”  – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

01/06 – “I think we dream so we don’t have to be away from one another. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we’ll always be together.”  – Hobbes

01/07 – “your slightest look easily will unclose me though I have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose”  – E.E. Cummings

01/08 – “What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined together to strengthen each other in all labour, to minister to each other in all sorrow, to share with each other in all gladness, to be one with each other in the silent unspoken memories?”  – George Eliot

01/09 – “I’ve looked around enough to know that you’re the one I want to go through time with.”  – Jim Croce

01/12 – “Love reckons hours for months, and days for years;  And every little absence is an age.”  – John Dryden

01/13 – “Love is the only freedom in the world because it so elevates the spirit that the laws of humanity and the phenomena of nature do not alter its course.”  – Kahlil Gibran

01/14 – “You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always love you. That’s where I’ll be waiting.”  – from “Hook”

01/15 – “I’m scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I feel when I’m with you.”  – Jennifer Gray in “Dirty Dancing”

01/16 – Out of the Office all Day.

I’ll try to post another batch in the next couple of days to help catch up.  Enjoy!