So, yeah. That whole wedding thing. Not much to talk about there. I'll post something else tomorrow.

I kid. And I'm not just kidding you with the idea of leaving you short, I'm kidding myself with the thought that you're all desperately hitting the reload button hoping to find more details. But I'm going to pretend you're all starving for the succulent nuggets in this post.

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The waiting is the hardest part.

Bullet points rule!

• We finished our second session of "wedding school." If there were actual grades given out, we'd probably have an A. Which really isn't surprising. We've been living as a married couple, more or less, for nine years. We sorted all this out long ago.

• Because we've long since mastered how to live with each other without either of us planning a murder, you'd think those two counseling sessions would take almost no time at all. There you'd be mistaken. Ben, the minister, is an Olympic champion talker. He has the magic ability to turn simple advice like "You should avoid taking a job working for relatives" into a 15 minute story about how he and his wife once managed a Dairy Queen for his daughter and son-in-law.

• I might have a short attention span. I have a really, really hard time listening to anything beyond the first two minutes of an "I once managed a Dairy Queen" story. "Oh look," I think. "Here's the cat! Here, kitty! By sheer force of will I will make you hop into my lap so I can pet you while I sort of listen."

• Bunny's favorite thing about Ben is the fact that he has quite a few, er… "non-standard" beliefs. He told us more than one story about his previous incarnations, like the one where he was a 17th century monk and the one where he was a woman fleeing the Great Flood with her children. That's the Noah's ark flood, which he survived.

• I'm not much for mushy-headed new age ideas. I mostly view them as a by-product of a people increasingly unsatisfied with old faiths and hungry for something to believe, something that still speaks to them. But I think it's amazingly cool that this minister holds some of those beliefs. That's not something you find often in a clergyman, and that's exactly why we chose him.

• Our ceremony will include a passage from the Book of Ruth and also a sonnet I suggested. Sweet.

• And in a bit completely unrelated to wedding things, The Bunny stayed home from work last night. I picked us up a copy of Pan's Labyrinth to watch together while we snuggled on the couch. What a fantastic movie! It was sad and frightening, hauntingly beautiful and… ok, I'm lying. I fell asleep and missed almost the whole thing. That's not a reflection on the movie, though. I saw the first half hour or so and really enjoyed it. Bunny tells me it was excellent. But when I'm a little tired and loafing on the couch, a foreign language film is like a lullaby. Zzzzz…

• This past weekend was a two movie weekend. Spider-Man 3 was very… meh. Sandman was by far the most compelling character, which is kind of off considering he's supposed to be the most minor character. And this whole tortured romance thing? Please stop. I'm ready for Mary Jane to get killed by a villain any time now.

• On the other hand, 28 Weeks Later was outstanding. Zombie movies don't get much better than the first five minutes of Weeks. There were a bunch of scenes that were predictable or unintentionally silly, but there were also scenes that were inventive and genuinely frightening. I challenge anyone to watch this movie in the theater and not be mesmerized by the second tube station scene. I want to see it again.

So last night the reverend who'll be marrying us stopped by for his first visit. Very nice fellow, but he's stuck in his routine a little bit. He brought with him little Newlyweds-style quizzes about what we felt each of our roles should be in marriage. W-w-w-w-wha?

I understand the guy's need to make sure our marriage has at least a reasonable chance of success, especially since that's one of the cornerstones of his faith and all that, but… seriously? We've been together for over nine years. Our roles in our family are very comfortably defined.

But at least the quizzes were interesting. Nine years together and we're still learning about each other. For example, I answered that getting a BJ while watching Star Trek is very important, yet Bunny answered that giving me a BJ while I watch Star Trek is not important at all. Who would have thought?

When the reverend, Ben, left, he left us a five page work sheet filled with compatibility questions. "In what way do you think marriage will change your lives from what they are now as single persons?" Um… new tax status, left ring finger will be a half ounce heavier… uh… yeah, that's about it.

"State what each of you believe is the role of both a mother and a father in raising a child to adulthood." The Chicken is seven. We figured these things out long ago. Basically Bunny's job is to say yes and give hugs. My job is to say no and give nuggies.

Despite the homework, I really like Ben. He's a good fella. Although I don't particularly care for the scripture he wants to use in our ceremony. He's picked out a few traditional passages for us. "Love your spouse as Christ loves you," etc, etc. Yeah, that's so not me. I don't mind a religiously oriented ceremony, after all we chose to use a minister instead of a justice of the peace, and the religious elements suit Bunny's beliefs nicely. But the scriptures? Yeah, not so much.

He's willing to compromise on that some and he asked if there were any passages I'd prefer. I suggested something from the Book of Ruth. I read the bible long ago and I remember a few elegant verses about love, particularly the companionship aspects. Ben agreed that some of those passages were very beautiful, but he couldn't remember them any more than I could. So now I'm reading the Book of Ruth, too.

Worksheets? Reading assignments? I'll be happy when wedding school is over.

• Cheesy Poofs, the retired BBW stripper, is on the local news right now. After she gave up throwing her massive panties at drunk men, she went on to found a children's charity.

• In my neighborhood, there is a magnificent hole. (But enough about Bunny.) The city is working on sewer lines or something like that around the corner. For two or three days last week our street was closed to through traffic. This was pure heaven.

• With as much hair as Mittens the kitten sheds, I don't understand how she's not bald. She was just sitting on my lap for about 30 minutes and she left behind around 200 hairs on my dark blue shirt. This cat must have an amazing ability to produce hair. Are the Rogaine people studying this?

• The nasty amount of cat hair clinging to the front of my shirt requires I get friendly with my lint brush. It's not a lint roller because it's not one of those cheap masking tape contraptions. It's heavy wood and has bristles and what not. It's not really a "lint remover" since it only works when the brush moves in one direction. If I move the brush in the other direction, it becomes a "lint adder," which makes it sound like a poisonous snake that lives in the dryer. It might be less dangerous if it was a snake. I've somehow managed to whack myself in the balls more than once while using this lint brush.

• The Chicken has pretty much mastered his bicycle. Just this weekend he learned to start himself from a full stop. The only big thing left to learn is using the brakes, which, you know, might prove useful someday.

A couple of weeks ago we bought a new bicycle for The Chicken. He's had one or two bicycles before, but this is his first big kid's bike. It has 20" wheels, a spiffy paint job, a tough sounding name like "Marauder" or some such thing… and no training wheels. So now he needs to learn to ride it.

The weather has been a little uncooperative since we bought it, so we've only had a few evenings after dinner to work on teaching him. We've spent some time on three or four separate evenings practicing in front of a neighborhood school and he's making real progress with it. But then, riding a bike isn't especially difficult. The real trick is in convincing yourself you're not going to fall on your head. After that, it's just a matter of practicing a bit. Basically Chicken had already learned how to ride, but he's still working on his confidence. He's getting really good at falling though.

Because I'm father or the year and all that, I've been experimenting with several motivational techniques.

Dog shit doesn't really work. "Chicken, you see that dog bomb over there next to the sidewalk? You're going to land right in it if you can't make it past that spot." Yeah, that doesn't work. He'll make sure he falls before it, or after it, or on the other side of the sidewalk.

Starvation doesn't work. "Chicken, you can do this. I know you can. You know you can. If you're not going to do it, we're going to have to… I dunno, stop feeding you or something." I'm pretty sure he doesn't believe me.

So far the most effective method is making myself look like an ass for him when he does particularly well. If he stays upright for the whole distance we've laid out for him, I will yell out "I love kitties" for all the world to hear. This hasn't happened yet, but if he makes it half the distance I'll yell a single word of his choosing. To Bunny's great embarrassment, this has happened several times.

We seem to be making real progress with this. It's possible, of course, the shouting has absolutely nothing to do with it, but how often do I get the chance to yell "pancakes!" in public?