If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you probably caught my announcement yesterday about celebrating my 10th wedding anniversary with Cami. And, if you didn’t, well… you are now!
It’s difficult for me to talk about the anniversary without sounding like I’m bragging or too proud. But, darn it… I’m proud! 10 years is a big deal and worth celebrating. I think it’s cool that I’m able to share it with so many people.
Cami and I have actually been together a lot longer than 10 years. The wedding anniversary is just the celebration of a legal document. In fact, we’ve been together for 15 years – almost half our lives. We were high school sweethearts and we married 5 years to the day of our first date. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s cool.
But, of course, I love it when dates and stuff like that line up neatly. I think it’s awesome that Cami and I got married in 2000. Not only because of symbolism of starting a new life together in a new millennium. But it means I can always do some simple math if I ever forget how many years we’ve been together when I’m old and senile. “Lessee… It’s 2056 and we were married in 2000… So that means we’ve been married… 56 YEARS!”
I’m telling you, fellas, it’s a bulletproof plan. Maybe I’m a closeted numerologist, or something. More likely, I suck at math and need all the help I can get!
To celebrate our anniversary last night, Cami and I recruited my parents to babysit Henry and Pearl and we had a very nice meal at a restaurant we love. We had the best time just talking, eating and sharing a bottle of wine. Afterwords, we ran an errand at Target and got a car wash. We joked about it. “What did you do on your 10th wedding anniversary?” “Oh, we got a car wash.”
We we were younger, we used to fantasize about our 10th wedding anniversary. We vaguely planned to go to Hawaii to celebrate. Of course, we had kids and I lost my job last summer. Then our oven crapped out on us last month, so we decided to buy a new oven and count that as our anniversary present for each other.
It sounds unglamorous on paper, but it’s not. It’s representational of how we’ve built a life together, how sometimes plans change and you go with the flow as best you can. How you grow, adjust and learn. If you’re lucky and you’ve picked the right person, hard times are never really hard. And you become a better person because you have someone to share these things with.
Cami makes me a better person and I’m having a blast being married to her.
Happy 10th anniversary, Cami. Here’s to 10 more… and 10 more after that… and 10 more after that.
I'd like to make an announcement.
My wife and I are here to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary.
So if you could refrain from talking, texting, snapping your gum or putting your feet up on the back of our chairs for just ONE evening, it would go a long way toward making this night EXTRA special for us.
BOOOOOO!
I think someone spit in my mouth...
I appreciate that you tried, honey.
Hey man, big congratulations to you and Cami! That totally is something to be proud of. And from the way you always speak about her in your blogs I know you’ll be together for a very long time. 🙂
Congrats! My #7 is next weekend, but this Valentine’s Day marked 10 years together as a couple. (As for easy to remember dates–we had our first date/kiss on Valentine’s Day 2000!) I think it is a big deal. You should be proud. Congrats!
p.s. does anyone else think it’s absurd that the panelists on that show the Marriage Ref have horrible marriage track-records themselves? The whole show concept is horrible but I think having celebs give marriage advice is ridiculous. Okay, enough talk about TV. Back to movies!
Mazel Tov, sir! I’m struggling just to get to 3 years.
Congrats, Tom! That’s a great story. My wife and I haven’t been together quite as long as you and Cami, but I hope when we reach our 10th anniversary we’re doing as well as you guys seem to be.
Congratulations to you both, Tom and Cami!
The 10th anniversary actually is tin or aluminum. I’m sure your new oven has aluminum in it somewhere. 🙂
@Nuke,
I was telling Cami yesterday how our 10th is supposed to be our “aluminum” wedding. I’m TOTALLY using your line about aluminum in the stove!
Incidentally, the 11th anniversary is “steel.” So it looks like I’ve got that one covered as well! 🙂
@Lora
I think the absurdity of having Madonna give marriage advise is part of the charm of that show, lol.
@tom
I’ve used tdo-mf for several years now and am very happy with it over at http://www.myconfinedspace.com, but that’s a primarily user submitted content site, I would imagine you want to keep control of the content on your front page. I know that the guys over at penny arcade get a fair amount of traffic on just their forums, perhaps if you set up some here and give a few trusted people moderation privileges, you can just sit back and watch the traffic roll in?
I’ve also used “addthis”: http://www.addthis.com/ on my sites before, and the users seem to like it. Also, you may want to permit hotlinking to your comic, like XKCD / Cyanide and Happiness do and HOLY CRAP. I just noticed that you don’t’ even have your strip’s name on the image! If your strip gets posted to something like 4chan there won’t be a quick/easy way for the uninformed to get informed. There’s a quick/easy way to watermark all your past images that uses htaccess I can email/post here if you’re interested.
Also, I would highly suggest that you add some form of comment subscription plugin, because I really want to see if you follow up on this, and will have to bookmark this page and check back sometime when/if I remember.
Congrats on the anniversary, I’m still trying to convince a woman to settle down with me 😉
Sorry Tom, you’re not the only one who picked 2000 to be married in 😉 My husband & I will be hitting 10 years in April – and you’re right, it does feel like a HUGE deal. Congratulations to you both!! May you have many, many more easy to remember anniversary years!
I know someone who is getting married on October 10th of this year at 10:00. 10/10/10…..easy stuff to remember.
Congrats, Tom. *raises glass* Here’s to 10 more movie, and “Iron Man”, filled years! HUZZAH!
Congrats man! 10 years is awesome. My wife and I will be celebrating our 5 year in two months. We’re going to stay the night at the hotel we spent our wedding night in. Looking forward to it.
Congrats to you and Cami. My you have many more anniversaries that end in zero!
Great comic today too, I can totally sympathize. haha.
@Joshy
Congrats on the impending 5 year anniversary!
Crazily enough, the hotel Cami and I stayed in after our wedding is just up the street from where we live now. I can literally see it from my house.
@tiki god
Some of the comic images have the site name and URL on them. I placed it on after one of my comic images was hotlinked from Digg and made the homepage. Too bad I didn’t see any traffic from it!
But, yeah. I need to go back and add that information to the comics in the archive. I need to figure out a batch process, or something. 1,000+ comics in the archive make it no small task! If you know an easy way to do that with .htaccess, please send that to me at theaterhopper@hotmail.com!
I have something like “add this” on the home page. It’s called “Share This” and it runs on the lower left side of the page under the comic. It’s not prominent, though. I can see how people are missing it.
I’m currently in the middle of a redesign for the site and I’m going to make the social media links more visible by putting their logos up on the site to the right of the comic. So when people read the punchline and scan right, they see them.
I’m also going to more specifically target the social media sites I want people to submit Theater Hopper to – Digg, Facebook, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Everything else is clutter.
Theater Hopper was doing great traffic-wise back in the day when we had a forum. But it kind of got too big to manage and was then overwhelmed by spambots. I tried to relaunch it, but it got taken down again by spambots. I used phpBB2 the first time and phpBB3 the second time. Maybe I need to find another forum package. Any suggestions?
Incidentally, I have an offer from Halforum.com to host a Theater Hopper forum that they would moderate and I could assign rules to. I kind of want to take them up on the offer because they would handle the moderation and the hosting. But, at the same time, I feel like the site should be self contained. Going off-site to a forum might confuse people.
Do you have any suggestions for a comment subscription plugin? Because that was one I was considering to draw people back to the site. I would use that.
Congrats on the 10 years Tom!
About the community, I think a forum is the best format. I’m sure you could find a few people to help you moderate it if it gets too big to manage by yourself. I would love to have a forum where I can start awesome topics like “what’s your favorite Jackie Chan movie ever?”. And yes, our local theater is having an old-school Jackie Chan festival, and it rocks!!! 🙂
Congrats Tom! My wife and I are also high school sweethearts, and married three years to the day after our first date. I know what you mean, and I think it’s cool too. Makes it easy when you have to figure out both numbers at the same time; “well, we’ve been married this long, but together for this long.” Just add three!
Your night together sounded great too. Those times at a favorite restaurant talking over a shared bottle of wine… the best! So much fun.
We and our wives are a rarity Tom (high school sweethearts) so I look forward to when all our kids are older and they can be proud of us. “My parents marriage is awesome! They love each other so much and have been together since high school. That means they’ve been married for… like… EVER!” haha.
May you guys continue to have such a blessed marriage year after year. Congratulations on the double digits!
Congrats & a cyber-toast to many more! Your an inspiration of how it can & should work.
Love the comic because I’m the person in a theater that will tell someone else to stop doing all of the aforementioned things. I actually yelled at someone to stop texting during New Moon the other day. Not sure why people can’t understand that their cell phone light is bright & very distracting.
Congrats Tom and Cami on your 10th anniversary.
Congrats on the 10 years. The BOSS and I celebrate 12 this weekend. We have nothing exciting planned except that the twins (6 years) will be with Grandma so we can attend a fundraiser for their school.
We’d love to do something fancier but all of our money goes to the dynamic duo and their school. Besides,
I’ve made it this far in life without going to Paris.
Kudos to ya Tom, here’s to another 10 happy years 😀
Happy anniversary! May you have many, many more!
Happy anniversary, buddy!
Congratulations to you both!
Happy Anniversary! My wife and I are going to celebrate our 5th anniversary next weekend! I also went through a career change during the economic turmoil and then had to replace a hot water heater…and then a stove top…ugh. Do home appliances sense our financial desperation? Any good suggestions for the “wood” anniversary for a wife who likes cats?
congrats tom, this was a real nice read for me, considering my wedding is is just 3 weeks now, and i feel i have found the right person, who i can spend the rest of my life with also, its good to hear that real love is still out there and things arent just random or going downhill, for me its inspiring, and i truly wish you two the best. i just hope the army life wont be to hard on my soon to be wife.
My best to you and Cami! And don’t worry about your tenth not quite being as you planned; I asked Susan if she remembered what we did for our anniversary that year, and damned if we could recall. Which of course means, having asked and come up with that answer, the pressure’s on for making the 15th next year something beyond picking up some Haagen Daaz on the way home from work…
Happy Anniversary Tom, This year will be my 3rd and 5 years with my wife. I love that you got hitched 5 years to the day of your first date. Hope you have many many more anniversaries.
Hope I’m not too late to say “Happy 10th Anniversary!”, Tom. 🙂 And just for the sake of it, happy 20th/30th/40th/50th/and so on anniversaries!
CHEERS TO THE BRAZELTONS!!
That’s pretty awesome, Tom. Well said and obviously heartfelt. I just got married last year (at the ripe old age of 39) and am looking forward to those milestones as well.
awww thats sweet. and pretty awesome. congrats to you both.
The comment subscription plugin that I use: http://txfx.net/wordpress-plugins/subscribe-to-comments/
as for forum software, I’m using bbpress, written by some of the same people that work on wordpress, hence the name. they’re making it so that it integrates much more tightly with wordpress, so you’ll be familiar with the administrative backend
I’m sending you an email right now with the htaccess stuff, and reminder of some commission work I asked for a week or so ago 😉
Getting married in 7 months and in the marriage groove. Very cool to hear of your 10 year anniversary. Congrats!