Much love to tech support

You know how every year, at the Oscars, they host the Technical Awards at some crummy second rate venue in downtown LA and they get a B-list celebrity to come host it? Those people work their butts off to make the movies look good but all they get in return is some lame hotel dinner and maybe a 30 second clip shown at the Oscar telecast. Tech support never gets any love.

Sometimes I feel a little bit of similar guilt about the tech support here at pawcurious. It’s just a party of one- my husband, but he puts in a lot of time making this site work. He gamely adds buttons to sidebars and widgets to the site and takes awesome pictures of cupcakes even after he’s had a very long day and most likely would rather be reading NFL forums.

This site wouldn’t exist without him. Truly. I would have been way too daunted to set this thing up by myself. He set up the Facebook and the Twitter too, and basically forced me to utilize them. He was correct, of course, because you need those things too, but I tend to like to just stick to jabbering and pounding on the keys and let him wrestle with all that technical gobbledegook. Too much work.

That is pretty much the story of our lives, truth be told. When he met me, I was in college with no pets to speak of, wandering about aimlessly and certain I was destined to do something great but with no idea what that might be. “Maybe vet school,” I decided a year into our dating lives. “I got into Davis,” I told him. “I’m moving up there. See you in four years, hopefully.”

And he was ok with that.

A year after that, we got engaged and moved into a house so I could have pets. I promptly adopted Nuke, who is about as damaged a type of goods as one could find, then Apollo and Calypso. He was still living in San Diego in an apartment, while his fiancee was 700 miles away accruing a menagerie on his dime. He’d visit on the weekends, after taking Claritin since he was unfortunately allergic to the cats who resented his intrusion into their sleeping space so would just sleep on his face.

I’d call him regularly, half out of my mind with sleep deprivation and stress and complaining about the godawful smells we were being subjected to in anatomy lab, and he would edge himself out of his meetings and steer me back off the ledge so I could take one more day of clinical pharmacology without disintegrating. He was OK with all of that, too.

I planned a wedding in San Diego from Northern California. I had little idea what it was going to look like until I showed up. I did, however, insist on sparklers as a nod to my New England upbringing, which we had to smuggle from Chinatown down to Southern California since they are in fact illegal here. My husband met my friend Carrie at a rest stop in Fallbrook like some illicit meth dealer to get the contraband. This is the kind of stuff he does for me.

I wish I could have seen the look on the venue manager’s face when those puppies lit up, but I ran out and jumped into a getaway car before I could. We never got a bill for fire damage, so I guess it all turned out ok.

By the time I graduated vet school, we had been married a year but hadn’t actually lived in the same county, ever. That was weird. I was admittedly a little nervous that maybe he just had no idea what I was like, me with my ragtag group of animals, and when we showed up on the doorstep full time he might have a change of heart about us, but he was actually glad to have us there. Even the cats.

He still works for the same company that he was with when we started dating, while I’ve flitted from job to school to job to kids to job like Richard Simmons on a venti Americano, running and stopping and screaming and running around some more. I can’t help it. I get bored easily. I’d probably be on my fourth blog by now too if it weren’t for him.

In return for his unwavering support in whatever I choose to do in any given year, I’ve given him the unwillingness to iron a single thing, no grasp of the intricacies of football, and the steadfast assertion that it is his job to take the garbage out, even if he is 4,000 miles away on business. Oh, and one or two “Surprise!” pets when he gets home from said trip.

And he even wore this:

Only a true hero would put that thing on, on a 90 degree day, and stumble into the middle of a birthday party to make a kid smile. Or, you know, scream in abject terror- it’s hard to tell with them. Of course it was my idea. I have terrible ideas but they always seem to work out.

If he were a different sort of person, we might not be here, celebrating our tenth anniversary today. But apparently he is possessed of a great heart as well as the capacity to overlook a lot of quirks, and no one is more grateful for that than me. I’m not going to get all Bette Midler on you and warble about the wind beneath my wings or some nonsense like that, because among my many shortcomings I am also unfailingly unsentimental about anything except dogs, but yes, I picked a good one.

So thank you, tech support. You are pretty awesome. Thanks for letting me run with this whole blog thing even when it means you eat tomato soup three nights in a row.