Jen was in the kitchen this morning cutting down a set of comps for the project she’s working on, when suddenly I heard her say, “FUCK. OK, Ow. That was not good.” Knowing she had done something Very Bad, I walked in to find her holding the two pieces of her left thumb together. Quickly my advanced Cub Scout training kicked into gear and we bundled it up in paper towels and made our way to St. Agnes Hospital, where we waited three hours to have a nice man cut her nail off and stitch up the finger. So officially, the count is now X-Actos 2, Lockardugans 0.

Wedding Monkeys. When Jen and I first started planning our wedding, it was fun; we talked about eloping and Vegas and spangled jumpsuits, then jetting somewhere international with the buckets of money we’d be saving. After the reality and obligations set in, we started researching the event locally, figuring that the house is big enough to hold the reception and that the backyard would fit everyone perfectly. It was still fun—food tastings were about eating hors d’oeuvres and getting shitty on free booze, and the cake was the first thing we put money down on.

Then, the wedding monkey started getting bigger. The tent guy told us that the backyard is too uneven for a reception, which is an understatement. (Our backyard is a sloping collection of tree roots and gopher holes waiting to capture ankles like tiger traps.) This means our tents will go on the front lawn next to Frederick Road, a situation not unlike having dinner next to a freeway overpass. The food estimate came back at roughly half our current budget, Which means that we will be poor but well-fed. Jen’s experiences with the Catholic Church resemble the movie Brazil—you have to wait three weeks for a paper to be sent to you by one diocese to prove to another diocese that you have all your shots, but it has to be a certain paper which the original diocese failed to send you. And so far dress shopping has resembled a night of WWF Smackdown Live.

We’ve been slacking for the last month while the Christmas rush sorted itself out, and now that January has arrived like a past-due gambling debt, we are scrambling to pick up where we left off. And that damn monkey has grown into a 500-lb. gorilla.

Looks like Apple released a mini iPod yesterday; 1,000 songs (4GB) for $250 is still kind of steep, but I suppose lots of people will buy one for the cool factor.